wrecking_yard ([personal profile] wrecking_yard) wrote2017-03-06 11:28 pm
Entry tags:

The Truce 1 - Behold - the Depths of your Innermost Soul

Canon: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Summary: Part of a longer thing I'm still messing with, playing with the implications of the psychic relay involved in the lions and everything, using Keith for a PoV. (Because obviously the best person to explore suddenly having a psychic connection to a bunch of mostly-strangers is the guy with abandonment issues, trust issues, and a shitload of things to hide!)

This part set around the pilot/second-third episode period, with one section of "I am attached to a circus why am I attached to a circus I did not ask for this circus", and one scene of chicken-brooding and confronting Shiro over his own pile of PTSD and issues.

Because Keith DOES brood, but it's the way a chicken does - with overprotective fussy instincts and a tendency to be loud and confrontational about it. (Spoilers through late second season)




"A minotaur walking in endless despair"

Red made a very pointed lesson when Keith finally found the lion.

Commands and just assuming Red would follow, trying to get through the barrier by force of will, were all ignored. He’d spent two years with strange dreams of fire, flashing claws, and distant roars, being called to weird corners of the desert, but once he found the lion, trying to walk up and command it was soundly rejected, earning him nothing more than a cold sense of disdain in the sudden silence.

It wasn’t out loud, but he was still calling out when debris knocked him out into space - only it had changed to a plea for help in sudden awareness of how small and vulnerable he really was.

The lion was bigger, the lion was older, the lion would not be commanded by something smaller that assumed authority, but the moment he’d set aside the idea that he was commanding a machine, the cold distance had bloomed into a warm blaze with enough size and power to envelop him, a very distinct presence with a rumbling purr of approval. It was impossible to ignore and weirdly easy to all but lean into the brief feeling that after an entire lifetime spent displaced and never fitting anywhere, he’d finally found where he belonged.

Then he noticed that he could feel the other lions through Red - three bright, active beings joining him in making the escape, with one more dim still-asleep one below.

And what had to be everyone else except Shiro, all focused the same direction, a realization that jarred him out of the moment. Getting tied mentally to a giant mechanical god-beast was one thing, getting tied mentally to a bunch of people he didn’t really know or even necessarily get along with was another and was something he flinched away from when he realized it was a thing, even if it did get a sense of a tiredly exasperated rumble and a warm pressure.

For a while Keith wasn’t even sure who else had realized it was going on. It was easy to second-guess most of the impressions, nobody was really that used to working with a giant demigod-machine in their heads communicating in ways that humans weren’t exactly built for, some of it was pretty subtle or hard to put words and normal concepts to. He wasn’t even sure sometimes if something he realized about one of the others was a thing he’d noticed normally or something where edges had blurred somewhere enough for it to leak across the relay.

And that, in and of itself, was terrifying, because it meant the others had the potential to do the same to him.

Keith had plenty to hide. He had a knife made of an unknown metal with an alien rune on the hilt that glowed when he held it, the legacy of a father he’d barely known and a mother he didn't remember at all. He had medical records where anything beyond a cursory physical could be summed up with “fuck if we know”, and had figured out “I might not be entirely human” early enough that chasing conspiracy theories and space exploration had been a mad quest to make sense of who and what he was - that somewhere there’d be answers among the stars that he couldn’t find on Earth. He’d wandered the castle once looking at various signs and inscriptions, passing it off as restless exploration; none of the Altaean writing resembled whatever was on the knife.

There was a lot he didn’t want to admit to himself either, that he was probably less good at burying. Unknown to him it usually made a smokescreen on the relay covering “I don’t think I’m entirely human”, even though if he acknowledged it he’d be unsure what he wanted overheard less. There was the isolation of having only ever had one person as a stable presence he could trust or get attached to, paranoid instincts that expected anyone that interacted with him enough to turn on him or want nothing to do with him or to otherwise vanish, fear of letting people close enough for them to be able to hurt him when they proved him right, wanting someone to prove him wrong but not knowing how to handle it if someone besides Shiro did, fear of screwing up if he did let someone in and driving them off because he didn’t know what he was doing. He’d done a damn good job convincing himself he was content being alone, but it was one of those internal lies more for his dubious benefit than anyone else’s.

He thought - hoped - that he and Red had done well enough at filtering to not share things he didn’t want to talk about. It didn’t seem that hard to let everything else fall away and just exist in the cockpit anyway, focus on what was going on around them and what the goal was; it was a good getaway from everything.

But the others came through painfully loud anyway, even if much of it didn't sink in until after Sendak's ship crashed and they were safe.



Pidge was channeling a sort of single-minded obsession into everything she did. “Worry” didn’t seem like the right word for it since it was more like a determination to tear the entire galaxy apart to find the family she was missing. She didn’t really hide that part, either, even if she wasn't talking about it much. It was, however, wrapped up in a ball of paranoia she was trying to hide, that she was there under a fake identity, that everyone else would realize she wasn’t who she said she was and would turn on her, and that part was a present enough twitch that it was like she was broadcasting a demand to not look at the pink elephants.

Not saying anything about knowing that “Pidge Gunderson, the guy” was a fake construct felt like survival; if he pretended he didn’t notice, then hopefully if she overheard anything of his she’d pretend she didn’t notice.




Lance was fine when he was too preoccupied to be insecure, perfectly observant and tuned to minding other people and adjusting for them… unfortunately even live fire wasn’t always enough to keep him preoccupied enough to not be insecure. There were image issues and fears about keeping up an appearance and a persona, imposter syndrome issues and fears that anything he did right was setting himself up to fail, fear of failure and circling it as an inevitability, always being the one passed over or not as good as someone else, an ego made up of overcompensation and trying to “prove” he was “good enough” where Keith wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince harder that he was capable, everyone else or himself. Adding that Lance was keenly aware that while he’d been in fighter pilot training, the Garrison was still focused on more civilian exploration and research than military action like what they were getting into, and it just added another layer of “I don’t want anyone to realize I don’t know what I’m doing but Oh God I Don’t Know What I’m Doing”. Keith wasn’t sure how he’d become the embodiment of “Everything Lance wanted to be but wasn’t good enough to pull off”, either, but he was tempted to try to find a way to reach through the relay, grab Lance by the mental shoulders, and shake him until that fell out.

Lance didn’t trust himself enough to recognize when he was picking up on something over the relay. He definitely didn’t realize how much of his reactions and impressions leaked onto it, and there were a few times Keith didn’t even realize he was bristling at it until there was a warm sort of weight like Red was putting a mental paw on his head with a not-actually-audible rumble to settle.

He? She? They? It? was very aware of Keith's issues and had silent fond commiseration with Blue over their new Paladins, the relative children both growling at what was essentially seeing mirrors for their insecurities in each other and then growling at the growling to avoid admitting they’d seen themselves in it. Neither Lion was sharing this with their Paladin beyond exasperated fondness and quiet nudging when it got too loud in the cockpit. The new Paladins weren’t the highly trained, skilled, experienced and established heroes the old ones had been, and that might be for the better after what had happened before - the lions had the chance to mold something growing so that it learned to be flexible and survive, instead of being handed something already settled and brittle enough to break unexpectedly.



Hunk was the one that was the easiest for Keith to just exist in the area of for the most part; no identity issues, no image issues, no potential for a revenge rampage any minute or overcompensating ego.

Hunk also didn’t have the insecurity about his own image to care if it was noticeable that military action in a giant alien god-mecha wasn’t what he was trained for, and was prone to weaving in between “what am I doing here I have no idea why I’m here what am I even doing I want to go home” and worrying about everyone else. There wasn’t really anything he seemed to care to hide.



When the Black Lion awakened and brought Shiro into the relay, Keith gained a renewed appreciation for just what a mess his old friend had become. Some of it wasn’t even new; Shiro had always been exceptionally good at handling people, observant, with good judgment and a sense of practicality, all of which he took for granted as ‘I’m just doing what anyone would do’.

Shiro had also always been the sort of person who would actually try to deflect and downplay anything positive said about him if he had the chance; getting on the relay with him had just confirmed Keith’s long-running suspicion that it wasn’t just “trying to be polite and show humility”, but that Shiro honestly believed that he was mostly just someone average without any real skills that was only doing the basic minimum out of responsibility to others. No concept of his own value, and no concept of how important he was to others, either, but perfectly willing to throw himself in between others and danger at the drop of a pin. One of Shiro's worst and loudest fears was for everyone else - one of the others getting hurt would be a tragedy, him getting hurt would just be a thing that happened.

The PTSD was a new factor, a running undercurrent of panic and fight-or-flight that never actually went away; always in some corner of Shiro’s mind he was on edge for something to go wrong or a threat to appear, always partly exhausted from never feeling like it was safe to honestly rest, torn between relief and elation over being able to do simple everyday things again and “this won’t last, it can’t last, something horrible will happen, they’ll catch up, this will all be taken away again”, with a bonus thread of fear of what he’d become.



*********************


That was my father and brother on the Kerberos mission.

He’d always been bad at paying attention to some of the people around Shiro. Shiro had known half the Garrison, and Keith had been his shadow that mostly stayed a backdrop element when other people were around unless someone was raising alarm flags or threatening Shiro. He had the nagging realization after Pidge had said that, that he’d met Matt a few times, and just hadn’t paid much attention because there wasn’t anything grab his attention.

He’d been at the Kerberos launch to see Shiro off. He was trying to remember if he’d paid enough attention to the rest of the family and friends to have seen Pidge there.

Or whoever Pidge really was.

The obsessive focus and everyone else being means to an end should have bothered him, maybe, but he’d been doing something similar since Kerberos, and probably still would be if it hadn’t been Shiro in that pod.

And that was why he’d restlessly found his tablet, fished through it to make sure he had his own research on the Kerberos disappearance, and dug out the couple server drives he’d stolen from the Garrison on his way out from the bottom of his duffel bag, and walked off to find Pidge.

Pidge’s room was locked and unoccupied, the kitchen was empty, and Red finally nudged a direction which he followed - to the cryobay in the lower levels. There were voices, and he flattened against the wall to wait.

One was definitely Corran, but he couldn’t quite make out what the man was saying; the Altaean was too far inside the room. Then there was Shiro’s voice from by the door - “They’re safe now, so we can afford to wait.”

“I know but - we could be so close, and what if something happens? What if something’s already happened?”

Corran’s muffled voice again.

“…yeah, I know. It’s just hard not to worry, you know?”

“If we’re careless about this, we’ll just end up caught ourselves, and I’m sure your father and brother don’t want that. All we can do is trust them to hold out until we can find them.” There was a tired edge to Shiro’s calm confidence, and Keith was pretty sure it was less real confidence and more grim necessity.

There was silence, but whatever went on must not have put things more on edge, because Shiro continued a minute later - “We should all get some rest - you too, Pidge. You can’t help anyone if you’re passing out.”

Shiro walked out and Keith froze, stiffening by the wall awkwardly. Shiro definitely noticed him, but stuck with a quiet wave and an acknowledging nod as he walked by back toward the elevator.

Corran passed by a minute later, raising a questioning eyebrow at him. He held up the stack of devices in his arm and pointed back toward the room Pidge was still in; Corran nodded and continued on.

Once the elevator left, he ducked around the corner into the cryobay.

All of the tubes were occupied by a range of ragged looking aliens; Pidge was sitting next to one of the tubes with a box of Altaean parts and her own backpack, going still and watching him warily as he came in.

He waved, awkwardly shifting the few pieces of tech in his arm. “..hey. How’s your laptop battery holding out?”

“Kinda shitty, but I’ve almost got an adapter to charge it off the Castle.” She gestured to the box of Altaean parts.

He sat cross legged in front of where she was working, trying not to be too conscious of the suspicious glare he was getting. He shifted the server drives out, setting the five cards on the crate she was using as a workspace; she squinted at them, mouthing something to herself as she studied them.

“…those are from the Garrison’s server room.”

“Yeah. Two of them should have information on the Kerberos mission, the other three I just grabbed randomly so they’d have a harder time telling what I was after.” He rubbed the back of his head. “…I was in a bit too much of a hurry to label which was which when I grabbed them.”

She looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. “And here I’d heard your ‘disciplinary issue’ was getting in too many fights or something.”

He shrugged with a lopsided grin. “Yeah, figures they wouldn’t want to talk about it, after the mess I made covering my exit.” With one hand he nudged the drives closer. “I don’t know how useful these will be now that we’re here, but you can probably get more out of them than I ever could.”

She picked them up one at a time, sliding them into her laptop’s bag with cursory inspections. “How did you even get these?”

“EMP grenades on the doors and a couple command offices, some glue bombs in other places for diversions, then fireworks and some other small explosions to draw attention the wrong way when I went over the wall.” It had taken him a few weeks to collect parts and setup for after they’d announced the Kerberos mission ‘lost to pilot error’, and he was still proud of it.

Pidge finally cracked a smile. “Oh man, I just missed it - I got back in a few weeks after and people were still complaining!”

“Got back in?”

There was a brief beat as she realized she’d slipped, but she recovered fast, lacing fingers behind her head and leaning back. “Yeah, Iverson tried to kick me out for asking too many questions about the Kerberos mission. It didn't work.”

And that probably explained the entire fake identity thing right there. “Fucking Iverson. I think he expected me to try to deck him when he fed me that ‘pilot error’ line, and man I wanted to. We hated each other.”

“Really? To hear him talk you were his favorite pet.”

“…that figures somehow. Asshole hated to admit when he didn’t have control over something.”

“You were the top of the class. Nearly model cadet, too, besides getting into fights.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t have a lot else going on before the Kerberos mission disappeared.”

She gave him an odd look, there was a brief shift staring at the door speculatively, and then she opted for turning her attention to the tablet still in his lap. “Any reason you brought that?”

He shifted it to his hands. “…I have copies of my own research on here, but I’d rather just copy the files to your laptop - there’s a lot of other things on here.”

She nodded, looking slightly disappointed. “I’ve almost got something to power our stuff. It’s whatever you’d been digging up when you found the Blue Lion’s cave?”

He nodded. “Going a little further back, but it’s everything I managed to find that didn’t sound like crackpot raving or modernist supremacist bullshit, plus my own documentation of a few other places with paintings and carvings that stood out.”

“I saw some of your books around the shack.” She leaned her chin on one hand. “I didn’t realize it went back before Kerberos, though - most people too involved in conspiracy theories don’t last long around serious research places like the Garrison.”

“It’s just always been a thing.” He tucked the tablet back under one arm; that was straying dangerously close to things he didn’t want to talk about. “Anyway hopefully there’ll be something on their server drives with some clue to help find your family. Just let me know when you’ve got the charger working and I’ll pass you the rest of it.”

Keith stood up; Pidge was giving him an almost unreadable gauging look, but wasn’t mustering enough interest to chase it. “Sure thing. Thanks for the help.”

He just nodded and headed out, back toward his room for the night.


**************


The relay drew attention to how bad off Shiro was, but it wasn’t hard to catch via mundane observation. The first few days he’d gone to check on Shiro and caught moments of startle when the door to Shiro’s room opened - a brief beat where there was a faint high-pitched whine followed by a flicker of glowing violet along Shiro’s arm and in his eyes that left Keith freezing in the door, waiting the couple breaths for recognition to sink in. He hadn’t been around Shiro in a fight to see the alterations in action yet, but he could read the stance Shiro’d snapped into enough to guess that the prosthetic had been weaponized.

And then there was Shiro’s face and posture falling into a mix of worry and guilt as he realized he’d almost reacted violently.

Keith stepped into the room, tapping the panel on the wall to bring the lights up, all the more determined to act normal; Shiro was a mess, but Shiro was still Shiro, and he opted for acting as if nothing had happened in the hopes it would distract Shiro from his own snarls. “Hey, you’re late for breakfast. I thought I’d come check on you.” He held his right hand down to help Shiro up; it looked like the other pilot had fallen asleep half-dressed on the bed.

“I guess I slept in.” He sat up, starting to reach over to accept Keith’s hand with the prosthetic, then flinched; Keith leaned forward just enough to catch his cold metal wrist anyway. Shiro froze, then swallowed the flinch, accepting the help but trying to keep as much weight away from it as he could. As soon as he was standing and Keith had let his wrist go, he frowned, flexing the mechanical hand and staring down at it.

Keith frowned, eyes flickering between Shiro’s face and the metal hand. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

Shiro cringed, shooting Keith a flat, irritated look.

Keith just straightened, completely ignoring being noticeably shorter, and returned it; he was still making sense of how to approach interactions that weren’t confrontations sometimes, but that didn’t stop him from trying to kludge holding ground and daring the other party to argue with him into a weapon against Shiro's insecurities. “No really. I know it’s been a while and a lot happened, but you’re still you. I’d love to take pieces out of them for whatever they did to you, and I know you didn’t ask for it, but that’s your arm now.”

Shiro’s expression fell, and his voice dropped quieter, the agitation settling toward a worried frown at his own mechanical hand. “That doesn’t mean you should be so careless about it.”

Keith tipped his head to the hand, hanging onto his challenge. “You didn’t seem to be that worried about it back on Earth.”

The hand clenched with the faint sound of moving mechanisms and Shiro snapped, “That was before I remembered what it was.”

Keith raised his eyebrow, giving a defiant shrug. Shiro made a frustrated noise, grimacing and not finding words. He stood to start walking past Keith, pointedly keeping Keith on his good side to grab the younger Paladin’s shoulder with his good hand and tug. “Come on.”

Shiro led out of the dorms toward the training deck in a tense stalk, silent and only glancing sideways occasionally to make sure he was keeping Keith on his good side; Keith followed, stubbornly keeping close and not bothering to put any effort into minding which side he was walking on.

“Stay by the door so it doesn’t think you’re volunteering.” Shiro pointed, tone firm; Keith leaned against the wall, arms folded. He wasn’t unarmed exactly, but his knife didn’t have the reach of his bayard and Shiro was apparently trying to make a point. The lights had come on as they entered, the computer clearly waiting. “Single opponent simulation, training level four.”

It was a low growl of a tone he’d never heard from Shiro before Kerberos, but one that had crept in a few times since the escape, usually when Shiro was talking about his former captors.

The faint whine came a half-second before the violet light did, engulfing Shiro’s hand and most of the prosthetic, with a few streaks that went past it. The training robot was fast and at a setting to be exceptionally vicious, but the bout didn’t last long anyway. Shiro more than matched its efficient ferocity to carve it into pieces with the prosthetic, the edges of the broken machine faintly melted.

Keith caught Shiro making a cautious glance up to the empty control room, a brief reflex as he turned, the light flickering out of the prosthetic with a lower sound that lingered a couple beats after the weapon augmentation had deactivated. His expression was a grim scowl, raising the metal hand up in front of him as if it’d be its own point. “It’s activated on its own before, and I don’t know how to control it.”

Keith tilted his head, studying the metal hand. Shiro had barely seemed to think about having a prosthetic before the mission to get Red; he’d acted completely normal about it except for flexing it and studying it in perturbed confusion when he thought nobody was looking, as if he’d been trying to avoid thinking about it most of the time. Afterwards, he still tried to act normal about it, but Keith had caught little moments of him being more delicate about it, shifting to keep it away from people when he wasn’t being watched, holding it away as much as he could without drawing attention.

Which meant it must’ve activated during the mission while they were on the Galra ship, in a combat situation; it’d seemed to be under control for the training bot, and the brief flickers of activation Keith had seen were when Shiro was startled and not expecting another person. It was a Hell of a powerful weapon to give a prisoner, which meant they must’ve thought they had control over him, and if they thought they owned him, they wouldn’t want him randomly wrecking his surroundings or being a source of friendly fire - so it was probably reacting to whether or not Shiro felt threatened or had an enemy target, as an extension of Shiro’s will and emotional state.

The last thing Shiro wanted was to hurt him or anyone else that wasn’t a threat, and that was something he was willing to gamble on.

He walked across the deck, to stand in front of Shiro, studying the prosthetic; he really would love to take pieces off them for what they’d done to Shiro. Shiro seemed to be waiting for his reaction, although the firm set of his stance gave the impression he thought he had control over the situation, or at least had made the point he’d intended - that the prosthetic was something to be afraid of.

That Keith should be afraid of what he'd become.

Keith reached up fast to grab the hand, folding his inside the fingers and hanging on with a grip he could only get away with on metal; Shiro blanched and flinched, pulling back as he’d expected, but he’d at least guessed right that there wouldn’t be heat beyond “noticeably warm” now that it was deactivated. The mechanical strength mixed with how much Shiro had on him in height and weight was enough to pull him half off balance as his old friend tried to pull away, the grim scowl quickly replaced with confused panic. He seemed to realize he’d pulled Keith off balance, and froze, almost turning paler and looking faintly queasy.

Keith leaned in, not giving any room for Shiro to break eye contact, glaring right back. “You are not a monster. I’ve known you for too long to not trust you, and whatever this is, it’s still your hand now - you do control it.”

Shiro blanched, mouth forming empty words for a minute, then wilted, turning his head to look away; the tension went out, and Keith found himself holding up the extra weight of the metal hand gone limp in his own as Shiro gave up on trying to pull away. “You don’t know that.” Then, with a sideways glance back and enough weariness for ten years, “I wish you weren’t so careless about it.”

“Give me some credit.” He relaxed some of his own posture at least to be less in Shiro’s face, shifting his grip on the metal hand to be a little easier to support instead of fighting against it getting pulled away, and his own expression softened. “You remember where I lived, right? I’ve had rattlesnakes come in during monsoon to sleep under the wood stove in that shack and I never got bit. I can take care of myself.”

“Rattlesnakes give warning.” It was delivered with the kind of lopsided weak smile Shiro did when he was trying to pass something off as a joke that really wasn’t. It only got an unimpressed eyebrow raise.

“It comes on when you’re expecting a fight. I’m not going to sneak up on you.” He ran his thumb over the back of the metal, tracing the shape of the metal - it didn’t quite match the shape of a human hand anymore. “You’re not a monster, Shiro.”

Shiro gave a weak, broken laugh. “Well I’m definitely not all human anymore.”

For a moment, Keith just opted for a pointed, offended eyebrow raise - Shiro had been the only person he’d ever talked to about his own confusing mess. Shiro went confused, the kind of uncertain ‘did I do something wrong’ expression Keith hadn’t seen cross his face since before Kerberos; it drug up a weird ache, something he’d never thought he’d be relieved to see after all the time he’d spent trying to get Shiro to stop trying to go hyper-responsible guilt over things. “You don’t remember, do you.”

Shiro shook his head, still teetering on being a mess of guilt and worry.

“…I’ll catch you back up later.” It wasn’t really something he wanted to talk about in the training bay, where there were almost definitely records kept and cameras going, nevermind the risk of someone else walking in. “Will you trust me that I know how to take care of myself?”

There was finally a tired, sad, worried return to eye contact, and a faint nod. Keith gave a faint smile and reached up with his other hand, very carefully and deliberately moving the metal hand to rest on his collarbone where it could’ve easily gone around his throat. Shiro stiffened, but didn’t fight it, although he did seem close to freezing again. Keith kept one hand over the back of the metal one, holding it in place while Shiro was very carefully keeping it open.

“See? It’s still your hand. You’re not going to hurt any of us. And…you could use to relax a little more.” He gave the back of the metal hand a gentle pat.

Shiro sighed. “I’ll try.” He gave the metal hand an uncomfortable glance. “…Can I have it back now?”

Keith pulled his hands off, holding them both up and open. Shiro gave him a wary look for a few long beats before he finally slowly pulled the prosthetic hand back, rubbing the wrist of it with his good hand and flexing the mechanical fingers with a frown. It was harder for him to keep arguing when Keith was actually smiling, even if there was that streak of smug to it; he awkwardly gave the younger man a pat on the shoulder with the mechanical hand. “Let’s…just go get something to eat, alright?”

As they left the training bay, Keith felt a faint flicker from the flame that now seemed to always occupy the back of his mind, warmth with an approving purr.

*********************

After the first monster, there was no way the rest of the team hadn’t noticed it; Shiro using his own flashback to plan around was something Black couldn’t really filter out very well, not when they were getting traced through a partial re-enactment. The weight of it to everyone else was blunted a little by the lions, but it was still too-real of a shared memory; the smell of blood, ozone, and metal, the shifting give of sand underfoot. It would’ve been impossible to second-guess or filter through as a subconscious awareness.

It crystallized Shiro’s nagging fear of himself. Keith wasn’t sure if anyone else caught the bits of Shiro seeing a mirror in the monster, the sudden much more personal horror of applying it to himself and to his own alterations, but he’d certainly noticed it, tearing up any progress he might have made in trying to get Shiro to settle. The “monster” Shiro was afraid of being - afraid he’d almost been - had a face and form now, a reality and gravity that hadn’t existed before.

Keith considered calling Shiro out on what he'd heard over the relay a few times, just to shake the man and yell that he wasn’t the monster the Galra had apparently wanted, he was important, he was really that capable, but that would prove to be surprisingly difficult to manage. Red stayed mostly silent but did seem to approve of his intent to continue fumbling through how to help someone who he’d never had to think of before as that kind of wounded.

The flashback had another effect on the entire group. Nobody wanted to admit to the very real likelihood they were all losing the privacy of their own minds with people they mostly barely knew, whether they were aware of how much it was already happening passively or not. That was when it crystallized into the unspoken truce - don’t bring up anything about someone else they’re not talking about themselves, don’t draw attention to it.

Keep the lid on Pandora's box, if you pretend you can't see anyone else then they'll pretend they don't see you.