"Are you coming, or not?" asked Lance, turning back to fire on the Galra goons that were chasing them. Keith sprinted past him as he fired a few shots backward, catching one of them in the chest and knocking it to the ground.

"I am. Are you?" Lance turned back just in time to see the corner of that smirk—the one that he wished he could slap off of Keith's face, every time. Lance pushed his legs just a bit faster, locking his eyes on the hangar doors. They would have to be through it and into the escape pods before the Galra could get to the doors and open them. He narrowed his eyes and tried to push faster, the laser blasts from the Galras' guns ricocheting off of the metal walls around them.

Keith reached the doors first, punching the "open" button with a fist and ducking inside as they slid open. Lance stopped between the doors and fired some shots back into the hallway, knocking another Galra back as he did.

"Get out of the way of the doors!" shouted Keith, and Lance fired once more before he moved—he could take at least one more of them out before they evacuated. Lance turned to make a quip at Keith, since obviously he was going to be the hero of this day, taking more Galra out before they made their escape, but Keith's eyes were wide, and facing the group chasing them down the hallway. In an instant, Keith summoned the sword from his bayard and slashed it across the control panel, sending the doors shut, and leapt at Lance.

Lance began to put his hands up to stop Keith, and was halfway through saying, "What the hell?" when he saw the laser gatling gun one of the larger Galra had begun to fire in their direction. And he watched as the doors slammed shut against them, Keith pinning him down to the ground, out of the way of the firing.

The thick hangar-bay doors shut, they were surrounded by silence. All of the commotion from the hallway, the shooting and footsteps, the shouts of the Galra, trying to slow them down, were all gone, and they were left alone. Lance exhaled deeply and shoved Keith. "Get offa me."

Keith didn't reply with some sort of insult or jibe—instead, he just moaned, and Lance sat up a little straighter. He knew that the Galra were just on the other side of the door, probably working on some way to bust through it. Keith knew that just as well as he did, and Keith wasn't moving…

"Keith, what's going on?" He shook his teammate's shoulder, eliciting another moan, but no other response. He grabbed ahold of Keith's arm and twisted his body so that he was facing upward in his lap, and Lance realized why Keith hadn't been moving from his position.

Keith's entire left side was gouged open from the laser bullets from the gatling gun, torn apart as if ripped at by a hundred tiny claws, and glued back together haphazardly at the same time. When he had tackled Lance out of the way, he had taken the hits that were meant for him. That left him with semi-cauterized wounds up and down his side and arm, a swatch of dark red blood against his white armor.

Lance's heart started to beat faster, and he forced himself to stop, to keep his hands from shaking. It was Hunk who panicked and got sick in bad situations, not him. He was fearless. He thought.

He lifted Keith's head up a bit, resting it in the crook of his arm. "Keith," he said, quiet. Keith's mouth fell slightly open, and he was breathing weakly—Lance could feel that—but there was no indication that he had heard Lance. "Keith!" Lance tried again, louder this time, but this time he only received a low moan in reply.

Lance took his hand from Keith's side and pressed the button on the side of his helmet to open the comm link. "Pidge, we need an extraction. I don't know if we're going to be able to—Keith is down."

"We can't get you from in there," said Pidge though Lance's helmet. Lance gritted his teeth, feeling how warm the wound was against his hand as he held Keith in his lap. "I need you to eject in the escape pod before we retrieve you—we just can't take on a Galra ship's defenses without you both, without Voltron." They paused. "Is he okay?"

Lance looked down to Keith, whose face had lost a lot of its color. "He'll—he'll have to be. We'll get out." Lance shut down the communication link before Pidge could push any further, and pulled Keith up a little further.

He didn't know anything about medicine—that wasn't his line of work. He knew flying. But Keith needed some medical attention, and he needed it soon. And if he didn't get him back to the castle, to where he could get medical attention, soon he…

Lance put his hand over the wounds, the ripped-up and singed flesh, and could feel the heat coming off of them. He pulled Keith upward, and taking a deep breath before doing so to prepare himself, slapped Keith across the face. Keith's eyes shot open, and the silence of the hangar was broken by a gasping scream. The scream ceased almost immediately when it caught in Keith's throat, and he gasped for air.

"Keith, Keith…" Lance placed his hand on his teammate's cheek for a moment before withdrawing it to hold his body, to give him more support. "Don't move. Don't—I had to get you awake."

"Aah…" He winced, but when his eyes opened, they were locked on Lance. Lance could tell that his jaw was set, in an effort to deal with what could only be a colossal amount of pain.

"I'm sorry, I mean, this was my—if you hadn't jumped in to save me—I mean, if I had…" He broke off as he felt tears in his own eyes, and he turned away. Keith didn't say anything, but the puddle of blood on the floor around them was fed by a semi-steady dripping from Keith's side. "I-I'm going to get you out of here."

Keith coughed, and he wheezed something out. Lance's eyebrows raised, and he turned back to him. "What was that?"

Keith's voice was less than a whisper, just a suggestion at a noise, but Lance could understand him when he said, "It's about time." Keith's face twitched between a tight line and a grimace before working its way into that smirk, the one that was just Keith, and dug into Lance like nothing else. But this time, it was okay, because it meant that Keith was still there, and there was still hope for him.

Lance cast his gaze around the room and saw the escape pod, prepped and ready for launch, less than twenty feet away. It would only be a matter of transporting his wounded comrade to the ship and getting out, and Pidge could pick them up from there. He carefully moved his legs out from under Keith and began to prop him up into a standing position.

"I'm…" Keith muttered only a word before his eyes fluttered and shut. He wavered on his legs and began to fall forward, but Lance grabbed ahold of his good arm and around his side, unintentionally digging into the wounds, causing blood to spill down over his arm and pain to jolt into Keith, who cried out.

Lance released his grip on Keith's side, and carefully lowered him back down onto his back, supporting him under the shoulders the whole time. He hooked Keith's good arm around his shoulders, but his injured arm could do nothing but hang back. Lance realized that Keith was not going to be able to stand, and that was going to make getting him onto the escape pod much more difficult. He would need to try a different approach.

A klang filled the hangar, and Lance's head whipped around to the doors, which were just a moment ago seemingly impenetrable. Something had struck them with enough force to make a dent, at least, and make some noise. It was only a matter of time before they got through. He turned from the door back to Keith, whose face was contorted into a grimace of agony.

"We need to go," he muttered to no one, and placed the arm not supporting Keith's shoulders under his knees. He tried to ignore the smear of blood on his own arm, and breathed a sharp exhale as he stood up, Keith in his arms, princess-style.

He wavered. He was not as strong as he liked to boast, and Keith was at least a hundred eighty pounds of dead weight, even if he had lost blood. Lance could already feel his arms beginning to burn, and—

He noticed the puddle of blood on the floor, and it seemed even bigger than it had before. How much blood had Keith lost? Sure, the lasers cauterized the wounds to an extent, but they were messy and ragged, and still oozing blood. His arm and side were mangled, and he knew that even now, holding him in his arms, he was causing him both pain and damage. He hoped that it wasn't bad that Keith had fallen unconscious again, because there was no way that Lance would be able to do this with his fellow paladin trying not to react to the pain he was inflicting on him, that he had caused.

He wavered again, but countered and balanced himself by taking a step forward. He took in a deep breath and braced himself even as another klang rang out through the hangar. He took another shaky step forward. They were getting through the door he had tried to make a heroic stand in, and instead of just getting out of there with Keith, he had needed to stop and show off, outclass his friend, and that had gotten him here. Holding his friend, bleeding out, and there was nothing he could do…

Yes, he thought, there is something I can do. He needed to get Keith to the escape pod. Get him to medical attention. And he wasn't making that happen by feeling sorry for himself. He took another stagger forward, and another, trying to connect his strides like he was walking normally, but the weight of his teammate in his arms prohibited this. A small, dripping trail of blood followed them as he walked.

And what had he done that would even make Keith want to do that for him, sacrifice himself? Put himself in danger for him? Lance had done nothing but antagonize him, and there was no way that he should have felt indebted to Lance. He had done it because—

Because he cares about me. Lance closed his eyes tight against tears, but wasn't able to stop them as they welled up in his eyes. Keith cared enough about him to put himself in danger, to literally throw his body between the enemy and Lance, and Lance did nothing but annoy him. And now?

Now he was doing his best to save him, but—klang—he wasn't sure he was going to be able to get to the escape pod on time, get out of the Galra ship in time, get back to the castle in time to keep Keith alive. And his blood was literally on his hands.

He took another step forward, and he could hear the klang again—this time, however, it was different. It had made it through, and Lance's heart stopped. He turned his head just enough to see some metal pole—a javelin, or staff, or some sort of apparatus they Galra guard might have on hand for bludgeoning, rammed through the doors like a giant pry bar. And it was working the doors steadily more open.

Lance took another step, his arms shaking as he realized even more the weight of his injured friend. Keith's head rolled from its position to rest against Lance's upper arm, and Lance felt another pang of guilt. I should've been the one to take the shots… He didn't have long to dwell on this, however, because there was another klang from the door, and a screeching as the large bar was shifted back in forth in an effort to pry open the doors. Lance forced himself not to look back, for Keith's sake, and focused on the escape pod ahead of them. He could see the tattered side of Keith's body in the bottom of his vision, and he tried to think only of the task at hand, rather than what he must be feeling and what the damage could be to his long-term wellbeing.

Behind him, the screech turned into a longer, more sustained creak as the doors were jarred open just a bit wider, and a few laser blasts found their way through, bouncing off of and burying in the walls around them. Lance clenched his jaw against this, trudging a bit more forward, just a few steps away from the escape pod…

His legs burned. His arms burned. His mind swirled with guilt and blame and pain, and he could hear as the Galra got a better angle on the doors and started to pry again. Lance took another step, felt his knee wobble, and took a deep breath, forcing it to stay in position, keep him upright. Another step, and he was almost there. Another—

He knelt down, lowering himself as slowly as he could on his shaking legs, and placed Keith on the ground. He did his best, as he withdrew his arms from beneath his teammate, to not agitate his wounds, but that didn't stop his arms from being slicked red with Keith's blood when he finished lying him on the ground. He looked pale, he looked beaten, he looked—dead. Lance shook his head, trying to push that thought away, and felt the tears in his eyes. He choked them back, catching in his throat, and pressed the button to open the door the escape pod, averting his eyes from Keith's form below him.

The door slid open, and Keith squatted down, slipping his arms as carefully as he could under Keith's body. He was even heavier now, nothing but dead weight, and he groaned as Lance lifted him up from a squat. Lance took those last few steps into the escape pod to set Keith precariously down in one of the seats, buckling him into the harness. The strap pinched against Keith's mangled arm, and Lance wished there was some sort of alternative way to secure him. However, he didn't have the time to search for one, because with one final wrenching push, the Galra opened the hangar doors and began to open fire on the escape pod in earnest.

Lance cast a last glance back at Keith and brushed the tears out of his eyes with the back of his hand. He had forgotten, however, about the blood on his hands, and left a streak of Keith's blood across his face. He opened his mouth to scream, but it hung open, silent, for a moment before he closed it again and slammed his hand down on the button that opened the airlock. The Galra around the escape pod were instantly whipped off of their feet and hurled into the void of outer space through the hangar's bay doors. "Pidge, I'm in the pod," said Lance, his voice almost cracking in the comms. "Come get us."

He grabbed the controls with shaking, bloody hands, and pushed the pod forward, out of the hangar. He could only hope that he had gotten Keith out in time, so that he could face him—oh God, how was he going to face him?—and thank him for what he had done. He could only hope that Keith would be okay.