What Shiro doesn't know—what no one has told him—is that it didn't take five months and news from Kerberos for Keith to go down in flames.
Three months into the Kerberos mission, the cadets at the Garrison start a pool, because everyone likes to watch a wreck and Keith is nose-diving from thirty thousand feet, headed for bare earth, engines blazing. They're not malicious about it, but there's blood in the water and no one suffers through six years of the Galaxy Garrison to become a cargo pilot.
It's an exam day, and he comes out of the simulator breathing hard, sweat beading on his brow, blinking away the remnants of the explosion projected in the cockpit. His scores are slipping, daily. He's still at the top, but his best performance is months gone, and everyone knows it.
"What was that, cadet?" The instructor asks when he steps out of the simulator. It's harsh but there's a thread of honest concern in it. You don't waste six years and a scholarship on a washout. You don't lose your most promising pilot to—this.
"Sorry, sir," he says to her, and it falls flat, even to him.
The rest of the cadets watch in silence; not sympathetic, not cruel. As impartial as buzzards circling, he thinks for a dizzying moment, and he's been spending too much time in the desert.
He misses Shiro like it's a living thing gnawing at his gut, stronger every day, and—this is what happens, he thinks.
This is what happens when you build your world on someone else's shoulders.
—
Keith comes to the Garrison because he has nowhere else to go.
He's got no money, no home that's tied to any place, and no family left that he knows of. It's an old wound, almost healed over; he's learned not to pick at it.
So he looks to the sky, sixteen and aimless, and remembers everything his father ever taught him, and the wonder in his voice when he spoke about the stars. He talked about them like he knew what was up there, like there was more over the edge of that horizon than he could ever find on Earth. Like the only thing holding him back was Keith, and love.
Keith knows constellations and the distances between stars like he was born to it. I could make a home there, he thinks, and unlike his dad, there's nothing and no one tying him to the ground.
The idea grows from whim to obsession in the span of a month, and he feels—good. Like there's a future ahead of him, finally, full of dark skies studded with stars. There are tests and hoops to jump through and more tests, but he wants it more than he's wanted anything in a long time. At the end of it all he's got a chance and an invitation to try out for a spot in the Galaxy Garrison.
They accept him sight unseen, on scores alone, and put him on the fast track. As far as he can tell, it's just a fancy way to say they want a fighter pilot with reflexes like his so bad that they'll let him transfer in halfway through the year instead of waiting his turn.
It's good, as far as he's concerned. The sooner he's in, the sooner he's out.
As if anything is that simple.
—
His early (late) arrival is a double edged blade, and it bites deep.
The cliques and rhythms of the other cadets are already set in stone, as are the teams they train in. They have him float between the teams or train alone, and all it does is spread around the resentment. He's younger, he's better, and the more time he spends alone, the more time he trains and the better he gets.
Don't be less than you are just to make other people comfortable, his Dad used to say, so he gives it his all, doesn't bother pretending he's not as good as he is.
And he's good.
He's so good he beats the star cadet in the class ahead of him and gets a commendation for it, and that's when resentment starts bleeding into something a little darker. The first time he hears Shirogane's name, it's being spit at him by another cadet who's offended on his behalf, and he's never even seen a photo of the guy at that point.
(He does later, and well—he'd be offended on behalf of that jawline, too.)
The bigger problem is Keith himself, and he knows it.
There's something off in him, something twisted around—there has to be, for interacting with people to be so difficult. The few cadets that do try to make inroads lose interest when they discover he can hold up one side of a conversation about as well as anyone raised on the road, in backwater shacks and two AM road-side diners and the blank expanse of the desert can—which is to say, not at all.
Fighting and bullying are grounds for expulsion, but no one can force them to be nice to each other. And he's used to being alone—likes it, even—but when you're living in close quarters with twenty other people and still alone—
It's something new to him, in the worst way. He feels alone like it's a physical thing, like it's a weight on his back, dragging him down and down, until he feels trapped by it. But he still has the hover-bike, and it's nothing to sneak out after hours and head for the open nothing beyond the Galaxy Garrison.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, his reasons for staying are eroding and falling away, one by one, in the face of the daily slog.
He gets caught on three separate occasions, and third times the charm. The only reason they don't kick him out for it is because he's the best they've got, but it's his last chance, and you know you're pushing it when he's sitting pretty on the other side of a public reprimand from Iverson.
He keeps leaving.
—
That's where he's at when he meets Shiro. When he walks into the room with the small, after-hours use training simulator, he doesn't realize someone's already in there until it's too late to turn around and back out.
And then he sees who it is.
Takashi Shirogane is the cadet in the pilot class ahead of him, and he knows about him because everyone does, because Shiro is a legend, the best pilot the Garrison has ever seen—until Keith.
All he sees is the back of Shiro's head as he walks in—the undercut, the wide shoulders, that posture—and it says a lot that that's all he needs to see to know who it is beyond a doubt—and stops cold.
Shiro hears him come in, turns from the display on the side of the simulator, brushing his hair back from where it's started to fall in his eyes, and then he sees Keith.
Keith doesn't run, only because there's no point, and he wants to hold on to as much of his dignity as possible. He waits for Shiro realize who he's looking at, waits for his gaze to shutter and pass over Keith, as is the standard, but instead—
Shiro sees him and smiles. It's an expression that lights up his whole face, in an act of sheer, blinding overkill. Even the corners of his eyes wrinkle with it.
He's so beautiful it takes Keith's breath away, like a punch to his gut.
"You're Keith, right?" Shiro says and steps closer, holding out a hand.
Keith nods dumbly and takes it, trying to remember the concept of air. And maybe all his time alone has broken something in him, damaged his ability to read people at all, because Shiro looks—ecstatic.
Shiro holds the handshake for a moment longer than is strictly necessary, and then does his level best to end Keith with words alone.
"I've heard about you." He scrubs a hand through his hair, sheepish. "Actually, I was just watching a recording of one of your sim tests." His smile turns down from megawatt to something a little softer, but no less genuine.
"You're incredible," he says.
It's not real, Keith thinks distantly. This is a fever dream.
But if it is, it never really ends.
Shiro asks him about the recording, picks his brain on maneuvers and tactics and where did you learn that turn? Before he knows it, they're sitting in the mess hall and he's meeting Matt, who also seems actually happy to meet him—almost smug about it, even. Afterward, he's halfway to the training room before he realizes Shiro is still with him, and it's there in the middle of a best-two-out-of-three round, sweating and grinning and sizing up Shiro as they both try to catch their breath that he realizes he's happy. His face hurts with it.
"I'm really glad you're here," Shiro says, and then he laughs, low and wild, and—
There's his life before that moment and his life after, and the only difference is Shiro—and everything.
The spin of Keith's orbit tilts and expands to accommodate Shiro and everything he drags in with him. Instead of eating alone, he eats with Shiro and Matt. Instead of spending his spare hours training on his own, he trains with Shiro. Instead of getting his scores back and hiding them in the bottom of his footlocker, Shiro asks to see them, and when he's done reading them over he gives a breathless laugh and look at Keith like he's in awe.
It's easy, for the first time in his life.
He doesn't see it then. It takes a distance of months and years to see the full picture, to understand where he was and what Shiro did for him, what Shiro meant.
By that time it's too late to do anything about it.
—
"Is he asleep?"
"I think so. He had a big day."
The words are quiet, but enough to pull him to the edge of sleep; he almost gives up the game by startling awake, but then he registers Shiro and Matt's low voices and remembers he'd come fresh off a six hour endurance test in the training center, straight to Shiro's room and passed out. The Galaxy Garrison isn't generous, but Shiro's earned a private room and no bunk. It's perfect, compared to Keith's—twenty cadets in his class, and he gets to share a room with half of them.
"But he still comes back here. It's cute."
Shiro is silent for a long moment. Keith feels fingers trace his forehead lightly, moving the hair out of his face. "I think—it's the only place he feels like he can be himself. It's hard for him." He sighs. "Anyway, at least he's not running off still."
"I can't believe you actually yelled at Iverson about that," Matt chuckles. "Careful—your crush is showing."
The bed jostles, and there's the muffled whoomph of a pillow hitting home.
"Hey, who had to suffer through months of this?" Matt pitches his voice into a whispered falsetto."Oh, Matt... Did you see him sparring today? He's so beautiful and strong and smart... Oh, Matt, I just want him to gather me in his arms and..."
There's rustling cloth, and what might be kissing sounds as Matt pretends to make out with himself.
"Well, he is." Shiro sounds defiant, but weary, like this is an argument he's so used to losing he doesn't bother trying to win anymore.
"Who changed our training schedule so you could get meals with him?"
"Thank you." Shiro says it with that painful sincerity he might as well trademark.
"You're welcome."
"I still can't believe—you spent a month trying to find him and he caught you stalking his recordings in the sim room. You know, I'm going to hold this over for the rest of your life, right?"
Shiro sighs. "Yes."
They're quiet for so long Keith almost falls back to sleep, and he's still not sure he's not dreaming this, most of the words barely registering at all.
"For real though, have you unlocked his tragic backstory?"
"No... Just that he was raised by his Dad, and that his Dad is gone."
"Dead?" There's a moment of silence, where Shiro must shake his head. "Wow, Takashi. He maybe has a Dad. That's some deep detective work. You've got the kid's head in your lap and you—"
"If he doesn't want to talk about it... I'm not going to make him." Fingers card through his hair again, a touch so light it's barely there.
"Wow Shirogane," Matt chuckles softly. "You're so gone on him."
—
"Hey," Shiro says when Keith steps into his room; uninvited, no knock, still welcome.
"Heard you got the mission," Keith says, and he feels a grin split his face.
Shiro returns it, almost bashful, but just for show. "Yeah. Matt too."
"Big surprise there," Keith says and rolls his eyes, settling on the bed in the space Shiro left for him. "Excited?"
Shiro nods, and the smile on his face is so honest it's infectious. Keith returns it and nudges Shiro's shoulder, instigating a little war of shoves that ends in Shiro burying his face in Keith's shoulder and laughing. They're both a little giddy with it. Kerberos is the mission of a lifetime, everything they've ever wanted, everything he's wanted. Shiro, and the endless expanse of space.
Shiro's still smiling at him, and their hands are resting close enough to touch. He moves the extra distance, tangling their fingers. This level of affection, of intimacy—it's new, but it's easy.
It's easy, because everything with Shiro is easy.
Even letting Shiro go is easy, because Shiro is a fixed point, a universal constant. He's built a home on those shoulders, and it doesn't matter where he goes—it's still home, even if it's temporarily four point six billion miles distant on some edge-of-the-solar-system moon.
They sneak out that evening, after three hours of him blowing every weapon in his arsenal to convince Shiro they need to and come on, and no, he won't get in trouble for it, not if Shiro's there.
That's what finally does it. They sneak down into the vehicle bay and change out of the itchy Garrison uniforms into something approaching civilian clothes.
When he turns around, Shiro is staring at him. "That's—an interesting jacket." He coughs and looks away, and Keith can't figure out what the hell that means.
He settles on rolling his eyes. "Thanks. Nice vest." And it is—nice. Shiro's arms are weapons-grade material and when they finally get on the hover-bike, he takes a long moment for himself, just to enjoy how they feel wrapped around his waist. And then shows Shiro the back road out of the Garrison—the one that avoids the sentries—and as soon as they're out of sight, he punches it just to hear Shiro curse.
"Don't worry." He pats the arms crushing his ribs. "I've got this," he says, and takes them over a cliff.
After he's had his fun, he finds them a quiet spot—all the spots are quiet—away from the lights of the Garrison, where they can see Milky Way spread across the sky like a banner, and they stay there for hours, trading constellations until they've made a game out of it.
They fall asleep like that, his head on Shiro's shoulder, Shiro's arm around his back, and when they get back to the Garrison in the morning Shiro leaves the clothes with him—for next time, he says, and Keith has to look away to hide the blush creeping up his neck.
They make a habit out of it, Keith dragging him out of the Garrison at odd hours on the excuse that if he doesn't have Shiro there, he'll get in trouble.
All those weeks, all those nights under the stars, it doesn't occur to him to worry for Shiro. Not even once.
It doesn't occur to him to worry for himself, either.
—
Kerberos launches.
It takes a few weeks, but somewhere along the way, something in him unhinges. He tries to go back later, tries to retrace his steps, tries to find the break and mend it, but it's imperceptible. It's a collection of tiny sorrows that grow and grow, like cracks that split across the foundation of what Shiro helped him build.
It's his feet taking him to Shiro's room after hours, and the momentary shock of a door that won't open.
It's realizing he doesn't know anyone else at the Garrison—at all.
It's looking around the mess hall and realizing he can't pick out a single name.
It's taking his bike out after hours again and finding some quiet place in the desert where he can stare at the stars and miss.
That's when it starts to sink its teeth in—this longing, like a living thing in his gut. He eats alone and loses his appetite. He gets his sim scores back and hides them, because there's no one to show them to, and they're bad.
This is what happens, he thinks. This is what happens when you plan your life on someone else's map.
It's a slow and constant decline, over the course of months, until he's right there on the edge of walking out the door. He can't pull it back together, can't imagine what Shiro would say, what Shiro will say.
And then word comes about Kerberos.
—
Iverson calls him in at noon, pulls him out of another simulation that's going—poorly, to say the least. He comes in person, and Keith spends the whole walk to his office gearing up for a fight. He's not leaving the Galaxy Garrison before Shiro gets back; there's still time to pull out of this dive.
But that's not why Iverson calls him in.
He gets seated in the ugly, high tech metal chair that's positioned on the cadet side of the desk, wondering absently if they're designed specifically to make whoever's sitting there feel uncomfortable. Iverson gives him a long look, and the expression in his single eye is impossible to read, but it's almost—sympathetic, or something approaching kind.
It's not a look Keith wants to be on the other end of.
Iverson clears his throat, finally. "The mission to Kerberos has failed," he says, and lets the full weight of that statement settle over the room like a shroud.
It's a courtesy, Keith realizes distantly, while his heart skips and skitters in his chest. This—bringing him in here, giving him a moment of privacy while he hears this for the first time—is a courtesy. It's a tacit acknowledgement of the bare fact that the two people who mean the most to him, the only two people that mean anything to him are—gone.
You've lost everything, cadet, but here's your hour to mourn before it's all anyone can talk about.
There are a hundred questions he needs to ask, but none of them can make it out of his throat. He blinks and swallows and blinks again, until Iverson's face comes back into focus.
"How?" he asks, finally, dispensing with formality. As if the answer will help, as if the answer will mean anything, as if anything of it matters—
"Pilot error," Iverson says, voice flat, not meeting his eyes.
The words tear right through him, and it's like he can feel the hole they make right below his sternum. Shiro's face plays behind his eyes like an afterimage he can't shake, and the only thought that he can give form to and make stick long enough to get a good look at it is:
You're going to remember this moment until the day you die.
—
His grief is like a collapsing star. It pulls in—everything. Everything he is, everything he was going to be.
It takes and takes, until all he can focus on is what it leaves behind—a hundred little desires stacking up in his mind, one after the other. Things he didn't know to hold on to; things he didn't know he'd miss. Shiro, sitting next to him in the mess, leaning in to steal a bite, nudging his shoulder. His full body laugh, and the way every smile reached his eyes first. The play of sunlight in his hair. It's all simple, all devastating, his hundred little quirks, and perfections.
All of this is gone, he realizes by degrees. This collection of tiny moments—he's lost them all. He's lost everything.
When he finds himself at Shiro's door, he doesn't think about it—punches in the security override code that Shiro gave him without hesitating. In case there's an emergency, he'd said, the words translating seamlessly in Keith's mind.
Come if I'm here, come if I'm not, but don't run away.
It's the first time he's used it. It works, and he's not sure what he would have done if it didn't. The door slides open on the empty, dark room, and if he thought it would feel familiar, it doesn't. It's alien in its silence.
He stands there, staring at nothing, until he hears hushed voices down the hallway and—he doesn't want to hear what they're saying, if it's about Kerberos. Not yet.
The door closes behind him as he steps inside, shutting him in with—nothing. They're not allowed personal effects, and they'll have washed the sheets as soon as the mission left. There's nothing to cling to, except the rising grief he brought in with him.
This is what happens, he thinks, and folds.
His back slides against the door and he buries his face in his hands, shoulders shaking, but he doesn't make a sound. He can't breathe under the physical weight of that loss—it's crushing, and he can't begin to imagine how he's going to climb out from under it. There's no amount of time that can heal this; no amount of distance.
One memory plays on repeat in his mind, like a mantra. The morning the Kerberos Mission left, the morning they'd said good bye—the last time he saw Shiro, he realizes, and the last time he's ever going to—Shiro had grabbed him up in an air-tight hug and whispered something against his hair.
That's what his mind seizes on. The feel of arms wrapped tight around him in a hug that stole his breath, lips and words against his hair, and he would give anything to know what they were—what Shiro was thinking in that moment. But he doesn't know, and now he never will, and that spot at the edge of his forehead burns.
He brushes his fingers over it, digs them in, trying to get his mind to focus on something else—anything else, because this will destroy him.
But he never makes it past that place.
—
In the morning, he wakes up on the floor of Shiro's room, back still against the door, sleeves still damp.
News has reached the rest of the cadets. The halls outside are buzzing with it, like a low mechanical hum that sinks its way into the back of his mind, so constant he forgets its there. Pilot error. The words distort and warp under the weight of their own overuse.
He skips class but goes to lunch, because it's what Shiro would want and for some reason he can't bear the thought of disappointing him at that moment.
When enter the mess hall, all sound stops. He avoids their eyes, doesn't want to see what he looks like reflected in them. There's a boy with brown hair—cargo pilot, his mind supplies helpfully—whose gaze is unavoidable. It takes Keith a moment to puzzle out his expression, to realize it looks sympathetic, and he can't process how bad he must look for that to be possible.
He sits as far from the boy as possible. The plate of Garrison food—not exactly mouthwatering on the best of days—turns his stomach. He's working up the courage to take a bite or throw it out when he hears the cadets at the table behind him talking.
Pilot error, he hears again, but this time it sets his blood boiling.
They're talking about Kerberos, because of course they're talking about Kerberos. Because they're going to keep talking about Kerberos until the day he leaves the Garrison. It's going to be on the news, and in history books, and that's Shiro's legacy now—a cautionary tale. Those two words, erasing everything he was.
He pushes away the plate.
"But what does that even mean?" a girl asks. "It's suspicious, right?"
"I'll tell you exactly what it means. It means sim scores mean shit. If you can't hack it up there, you can't hack it."
Keith feels his heart speed until the sound of his own blood rushing is so loud it makes his ears ring.
"It means Shiro wasn't ready."
He stands, and he's so angry he's shaking with it. The boy is still talking, but he shuts up the moment he sees Keith turn to him. The whole room is dead silent.
"Look, Keith—I only meant that—"
Keith takes a deep breath, and another, until he can speak. "Only meant what?" The boy starts to answer and he cuts him off. "No, you— how can you even talk about him? Do you think you're better than him? Do you think any of you are?"
The boy's face twists. "Oh yeah? You're one to talk. What would Shiro say if he could see you—"
He realizes his mistake the moment Keith's fist connects with his face.
The hit sends him soaring into the table behind him with an audible crack, and Keith's on him again in an instant. Keith's smaller, but he's wicked fast and all lean muscle—there's a reason no one but Shiro ever took him on in the training room. The boy gets his bearings long enough to get in one solid punch that Keith can feel split right across his cheekbone, but it's nothing.
In the end, it takes three other cadets and an instructor to pull him off. He stands there, both arms restrained behind his back, chest heaving, knuckles bleeding, and the question comes to mind unbidden.
Yeah. What would Shiro say?
—
He takes a seat. Iverson doesn't speak. He looks tired, fingers rubbing at his temple, right above his bad eye. It's the same expression he wore when he called Keith in to tell him about Kerberos, and this—this is the logical continuation of that day. It's like he never left the room at all.
The silence stretches. Iverson is looking over a stack of papers on his desk—his file, Keith realizes. He flips the page, eyes scanning over it, and then closes the file, meeting Keith's gaze.
He looks—disappointed. Three of their best recruits, two of their best pilots, gone in the same breath.
"Do you have anything to say for yourself, cadet?" he asks, as if anything Keith says will make a difference at this point. It's almost laughable. And just like that, his mood flips. It is laughable, and he's angry, he realizes. He's furious. At the Garrison for taking them away and calling it pilot error when there's no way that can be true, at Iverson for calling him in here again, at himself for sitting here while Shiro is—
He stands up, and the sound the metal chair makes as it scrapes along the floor is hideous. Heat rises in his face, but he can't tell if it's anger or embarrassment. Both. Iverson sits up, puts both hands on the desk, but his expression doesn't change.
"You know it wasn't pilot error. You all know it. So why are you lying?" He's shouting, by the end of it, voice ragged, but finally Iverson is looking at him with something other than barely concealed pity.
"Cadet—"
"No—stop lying to me." He punctuates it, both hands slamming on the table, jostling the file out of place. Iverson twitches, imperceptibly, and stands, pushing an envelope across the mess of papers. Keith doesn't move to pick it up; he already knows what's inside.
"You've been discharged. I don't want to see you on these premises again."
—
It's evening, and the bunk room is full of cadets killing time until dinner. A few look up when he walks in, but aside from the black eye, he's not much to look at.
He ignores them, stripping out of the Garrison uniform is a relief. Itchy, cloying—even Shiro couldn't find a kind word to say about them. He replaces it with the synthetic grey t-shirt and black pants that are standard issue for training days— the Garrison owes him that much, at least—and then he pulls everything out of his foot locker, makes a small pile on his bed of all the detritus he's gathered in his days at the Garrison. It's not much.
His acceptance letter, other official documents—garbage. Test scores he'd saved to share with Shiro and Matt, once upon a time. The jacket and boots he'd come to the Garrison in, an old knife wrapped in a long strip of dirt-worn cloth, and the keys to the bike.
He puts on the clothes, pockets the keys, hooks the knife under his belt, and trashes the rest. He feels eyes on him as he stands up and walks to the door.
"You're leaving?" someone asks, and they sound shocked, like it hasn't been written on the wall for months now. He pauses, turns enough to see whoever spoke. It's a boy with brown hair again—he should know his name, but he doesn't.
Say something, say anything, he thinks. Anyone else would. Shiro would.
"...Yeah. You can have my bunk," he says, over his shoulder. There's a gasp, but he steps out and closes the door behind him before he can hear whatever's on the other end of it.
—
He steps out of the Garrison with nothing more and nothing less than he arrived with.
His life is a net gain of zero, and it's true only because of what he's lost—who he's lost. He pulls the knife out of the hilt on his belt, unwraps it, turning it over in the evening light. The marking on the hilt winks purple, the weight of it familiar and dear, and he would give it up in a breath to get Shiro back.
He'd give up the bike, give up the jacket, give up everything he is, but nothing's that easy, and even all of that and all that he is aren't worth a tenth what Shiro is—what Shiro was.
The sunset is vivid, painting the cliffs in neon technicolor. It looks like the cover of one of the worn paperback sci-fi novels his Dad used to thumb through. A familiar pang of longing hits him, right below his ribs, and there's nothing—no one—to stop him this time.
He tears off toward it, hover-bike sending up trails of dust that catch gold in the light, and he doesn't look back.
—
It takes a couple days, but he finds the old single-room cabin he half-remembers from his childhood.
It's not much to look at, outside or in. There's a tower of outdated radio tech still propped in one corner, a map board pinned to one wall, and the old hover-bike posters he'd admired as a kid. It's full of memories, but they're hazy and twisted, like a star he can see out of the corner of his eye that disappears when he tries to focus on it. He keeps expecting to turn around and see his Dad materialize out of nothing, like he never left at all.
Another ghost is the last thing he needs, but he pushes that thought away with the rest and gets to work.
The first thing he does is get the clothes that Shiro left with him in the compartment on the back of the bike, and finds a box to stick them in. They're too precious to throw away, but they're too precious to keep with him, too. The grief is still new and ragged and it bites at his heels, trips him up, sneaks up from behind and covers his eyes. Knowing that reminder is sitting in the back of his bike every time he goes out, that's—too much.
So he distracts himself, and sets about fixing up the cabin to at least the bare standards of livable.
It takes a couple weeks, and a few trips to town. There's an old woman running a mechanic shop that lets him work piece-meal and it's enough money to buy supplies.
When he's done, it's not a home, but it's enough. Especially once he decides he's better off ignoring the box of plastic explosives sitting in once corner—there's a lot he doesn't remember about his childhood, a lot he doesn't want to.
When he's not cleaning, he wanders the desert, aimless and drawn.
That's how he finds the first lion. It's a petroglyph on a canyon wall he catches as he's speeding by and it takes him a minute to believe he didn't imagine it and another thirty to backtrack and find it again, and when he does—
It's massive. Taller than him, taller than the bike, stretching toward the sky in intricate, alien lines.
He walks to the base of it, puts out a hand to assure himself it's not some heat and grief induced figment, but the rent in the rock is real and so old there's a patina of black desert-varnish lining the edges of it.
Something giddy kicks up in his chest, and it's been so long since anything could make him feel like that. He tears through his pack, but there's nothing to write with or write on and he'll kill himself if he forgets.
He doesn't.
On his next trip to town he blows a horrifying amount of money on crafts. Pencils, pens, post-it notes, a notebook, pins, yarn, and two posters to spice up the walls. Maybe he went a bit overboard, he thinks when the lady in the checkout line gives him a look.
"Aren't you a little old for back to school shopping?" she jokes.
He tries to make himself smile, surprised when it comes easy. "It's a personal project."
She gives him a once-over, and he realizes what he must look like. Younger than his nineteen years, old clothes, knife strapped to his back—it's been a few days since he had a proper bath, and the desert isn't very forgiving. He blushes, but she chuckles and hands him his bag.
"You one of those Garrison kids?" she asks.
"Not anymore."
She frowns at that, and it's been so long since someone showed concern for him it takes him a minute to pick out the expression on her face. "Well, try and get some sleep, you hear?"
He nods and waves bye, awkward at the best of times, wondering if the insomnia is that obvious. There aren't any mirrors in the cabin, and it's a fact he's grateful for.
Night is the worst. There's nothing to distract him, and everything to remind him. The stars, the clothes in the box he won't open, his own dreams—he avoids it all the only way he knows how.
—
The first note is an accident.
His eyes are gritty with fatigue and desert dust, but he found a cave that day, carved wall to wall in lions and if he doesn't write it all down now, it might slip away. They were beautiful, stylized in geometric lines. It's the kind of thing he would have snuck Shiro out of the Garrison at midnight to see—the kind of thing Shiro would have loved.
He wipes at his stinging eyes, imagining it, Shiro's face playing behind them. That smile, happy to see Keith, always, even on the wrong side of midnight to be dragged off into the desert on a whim.
It's been almost a year. The image is starting to warp, and there's something off about the voice he gives Shiro in his mind, but he can't figure out what.
The mass of grief rises like a wave again, threatening to overwhelm him. He shoves it away, but when he looks down, the words on the note he was scribbling have changed. It begins as a jumble of observations, and ends as something completely alien, a thought he didn't even know how to put to words.
It's killing me—
He stops there, doesn't want to read the rest. He crumples it up, clenching his fist around it so hard he can feel his bones grind.
And then he pauses and thinks about it, rips off a new post-it note and writes it all down again, exactly like he wrote it the first time. He pins it on the board, right next to a photo of the first lion he found.
It's killing me when you're away.
He stares it down, and thinks: No, it's not.
For the first time, he lets himself face it all head-on, because this isn't going to kill him. It can't kill him. What would Shiro say? What would he say to Shiro? How could he begin to explain any of this? It would break his heart.
The picture of the petroglyph captures his gaze.
There are only two things he has that are of any value now, only two things that are his and his alone and worth holding on to. One is a memory, and one is this.
And whatever this is? He's going to find it.
—
Something is coming.
The radio chatter he picks up from the Garrison is going off about something approaching Earth, but more than that he can feel it in his gut in that weird way he's learned not to question anymore. Whatever it is, the Garrison will be on it before he can even hope to get close enough to see what it is.
He looks at the box of explosives is still sitting in the corner and thinks, yeah, that could work.
What's he got to lose?
—
In retrospect, a red scarf isn't the best disguise, but it's all he has on hand at the time and he's throwing all his eggs in this one basket—all his explosives at least. He covers up the poster board as he leaves, because there's a good chance he won't be coming back, and because this is it—the culmination of everything he's worked on for the past seven months.
Setting the explosives is another matter entirely. He doesn't blow himself up, so it counts as a success.
He's almost shocked when the Garrison troops fall for it, but he doesn't waste any time before he kicks his bike in gear and rushes inside the make-shift field hospital.
It only takes an instant to assess the situation—the doctors, the masks, the person on the table.
Whoever it is, they've got him strapped down. It doesn't matter who it is—Keith's burnt all his bridges with the Galaxy Garrison, and they owe him a body. He's already trying to figure out how he's going to get them on the bike when he gets close enough to see the face clearly, and when he does—
"Shiro?"
He reaches out, to get a better look, to see if he's even real. The white hair and scar throw him for a moment, and the arm—
His stomach flips, but it's him. Alive, alive, alive—it beats through him like a second heartbeat, and he's got his knife in his hand before he even registers what he's going to do.
That beat doesn't stop, not when the trio from the Garrison show up, not when he's maneuvering them over a cliff, not when he's helping them lift Shiro off the back of the bike.
Alive, alive, alive.
—
The big one looks Shiro over, skeptical. "What's so special about this guy, anyway?"
Keith doesn't have to answer, because the cargo pilot—Lance, evidently—starts ranting and listing off Shiro's accolades like he recites them every night before he goes to bed. It's too much and he tunes it out, focusing on getting Shiro off the bike. It's unwieldy with four people also trying to get off the bike at the same time—
"Careful," he snaps at the big man, who's bearing the brunt of Shiro's weight. He immediately feels guilty for it, but he doesn't know how to do this in front of three strangers.
"Geez, we're just trying to help."
"I know, I know—sorry." He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to gather his scattered pieces while they settle Shiro onto the couch Keith's been using as a bed. Lance starts poking around, and he has to resist the urge to snap at him, too.
Shiro. Shiro is the priority. Everything else comes second.
Like clockwork, there's a groan from the couch. Keith kneels next to him, feeling like his heart is about to beat out of his chest. What if he's hurt, what if something's wrong with him, what if he's going to lose him again—
"What—where am I?" Shiro jerks up and puts a hand to his head. Keith has to stop himself from startling all over again at the sight of the robotic limb.
"Uh, you crashed in an alien ship and we rescued you," Lance butts in. "It was incredible, except for the part where fly-boy here drove us of a cliff."
"Who...?" Shiro looks up. "Keith?" His voice is unsure, like he doesn't know if what he's seeing is real, but he remembers.
Something tight starts to unwind from around Keith's chest, painful and slow, leaving indents of itself as it goes. "Hey," he says, and it's almost a whisper. Shiro still looks disoriented, like he can't make Keith's face come into full focus, and Keith tries to tell himself it's the drugs the Garrison gave him and nothing more serious.
It's still difficult to watch. Shiro looks—lost. Keith can feel three sets of eyes laser focused on his back, and no, he really can't do this in front of them.
"Come on. Can you stand? We should get you—cleaned up." He puts an arm under Shiro's, around his back. Shiro tries, and Keith ends up taking most of his weight, but he flashes a glare at Lance when he moves to take Shiro's other side again.
"There's a set of his clothes in that box." He jerks his head toward it. "Can you grab them?"
"Wait, why do you have his clothes?"
"Please," Keith says, and it comes out more of an honest plea than the dismissal he meant it as. Shiro is a line of heat down his side and that shared warmth is the only thing holding him together.
"Fine," Lance mutters and turns away.
The bathroom is bigger than it has any right to be for a abandoned shack, but it's still too small for two people. He maneuvers them inside and gets the door shut. It's not much privacy, but it's all they're getting, and it's enough. He props Shiro against the counter and fishes out a med kit from under the sink, trying to tally up everything that needs doing, what comes first—
And then he looks up and sees Shiro's face.
The barest hint of morning light is starting to filter over the horizon and into the bathroom. Shiro's eyes are shadowed, the new scar across the bridge of his nose barely visible, but the white hair—that stands out like a brand. Keith raises a hand to it before he realizes what he's doing, and—
Shiro flinches back. It's a full body jerk, like he's woken from a trance, and Keith's heart seizes up for a moment at the unexpected reaction. It takes a second, Shiro's eyes going wide and wild, searching the room before they land on Keith again—but this time, there's no confusion.
Recognition fills his eyes, and then relief, and—Shiro collapses into him.
Keith feels the prosthetic limb wrap around his back like a band of steel, and there's a hand fisted in the black shirt under his jacket, another in his hair, pulling him in so close he can feel the heat of it through the worn fabric and there isn't a breath of air between them.
Shiro buries his face in the nape of Keith's neck and takes a shuddering breath, and then another, like he's remembering how to breathe.
Where were you?
Keith closes his eyes and returns the embrace with everything he's got—a years worth of grief and regret, at least. Shiro tenses again for a moment and then makes a sound against his skin that's half gasp, half sob. There are tears, he realizes, hot against his neck, already starting to soak through the collar of his shirt.
Shiro's weight pulls them to floor eventually, but his hold doesn't loosen, leaving Keith half on his lap, arched against him in the tiny space between the counter and the bath. He moves one hand up and down Shiro's back, feeling the tatters in the alien fabric, and the corded muscle beneath it.
And he still can't convince himself he's real.
He searched the desert for a year, wrote notes and regretted and longed so much for this one thing—it's easier to believe he's passed out from heat-stroke in the sand somewhere, and this is the last good dream he gets before it's all over.
But then the arms around him start to loosen, and the tears against his neck taper off. Shiro doesn't move away or let go, but he lets his hands fall to the small of Keith's back and settle there. It's—different. Touch has always been easy between them, but this is more.
His lips are an inch from the place on side of Shiro's neck where the black cloth gives way to skin, and suddenly the need to erase that distance and prove he's real is overwhelming—
There's a knock, and the door opens. "Hey. Did you want clothes, or—" Lance sneaks his head in an inch. Keith turns his head, realizes in that moment that his face is wet. Lance's eyes go wide.
"Oh. I'll just—" He sets the clothes on the counter and slams the door shut.
They pull apart by degrees. There's no graceful way to stand, and the bathroom really is too small for two people, especially if one of them is going to try to get dressed. Shiro isn't exactly petite.
Keith turns to the door. "I'll be outside," he says, but before he can take another step there's a hand on his, like a vice.
It loosens almost immediately. "Stay, please," Shiro says, voice painfully unsure.
It's a simple request, and if Shiro asked for the stars in that moment, he'd have found a way to give them. He nods, and Shiro turns away from him entirely. It's an almost shy gesture, and at first Keith doesn't understand, but then Shiro pulls off the tattered top, and starts to unzip and pull away the skin-tight black cloth, and Keith sees—
His back, his arm, his body is a map of scars, revealed inch by inch.
Keith hears his breath catch before he can stop it. Shiro doesn't turn, but he pauses, back ramrod straight, head bent to the floor.
He's close enough to touch. Keith reaches out a hand, sets it against one of the scars. It's like a star over the dip of his spine, and it dwarfs Keith's hand. It looks old—older it must be, and what kind of weapon does that? How do you survive a wound like that?
He's suddenly conscious of how much Shiro's changed; this close the difference in their sizes is overwhelming. Shiro's always been taller, wider, but Keith's lost weight in the ensuing months, while Shiro's gained muscle enough that it defines his body in dips and slopes—all of it covered in scars.
He should be saying something comforting. He should be welcoming Shiro back, should be saying the scars aren't that bad, should be asking him how he's alive—
But no words seem adequate. Instead, he pushes his forehead against Shiro's shoulder, the one above the prosthetic, and tangles his fingers with Shiro's robotic ones, hearing the faint click and whir as they accommodate him. Shiro turns to face him, but doesn't move away or let go of his hand. He lays the other on Keith's back like Keith's the one that needs reassuring, and—maybe he is.
"It's not as bad as it looks," Shiro says, almost wry, because how can it not be? But his words send that beat kicking through Keith's chest again, a mile a minute.
Alive, alive, alive.
He looks up and gives Shiro a weak smile that he knows doesn't reach his eyes in the way he wants it to. "Cool arm," he says, and the pain around Shiro's eyes softens a little.
It's enough.