Dear Katie,
It got worse. It got so much worse.
Everything is peachy-keen for a solid two days.
Shiro washes the bloody tank top and starts to regain some of Matt's respect and trust. They don't see any sign of Parkour Boy. Not in the mess, not in the halls, not in the library. It's a double edged blade, but if Shiro spends double the usual amount of time haunting the gym and an abnormal and disquieting share of his spare time staring out windows, that's fine. Everyone has their cross to bear.
Matt only catches him watching parkour videos on his phone once. The tinny dubstep is a dead give away, but maybe it'll help him figure out that real parkour doesn't actually involve that much tripping or blood or soulful gazing. (It doesn't involve... any of that.)
And then, two days after the Incident, Shiro gets a new fixation. They both do, because on Tuesday someone destroys the simulator.
Like, they didn't literally destroy it, but you know how Dad is always going off about Shiro's scores? Obliterated. Total fatality.
"You messed up the coding," Montgomery sighs.
No, Matt did not. And Katie checked it, so he's double, triple sure. They tweaked it to make it harder. Whoever this kid is, they're either a world class programmer with a lot of extra time and tech on their hands or they're not fully human.
"I'm sorry Sir, and I hope you don't think this is out of line, but we really did check it. I had Shiro test it four times. It should..." Matt lets his eyebrows quirk up in a look of gentle, innocent assurance. "It should check out."
Montgomery sighs again. "Fine, Holt. We'll bring the cadet back in and retest him."
We'll bRing the caDet back in and reTeSt hiM, Matt mocks in his head.
"Sir, if you don't mind me asking—and I understand if you can't tell me—who was the cadet?"
"He's new," Montgomery says, and nothing else. Which is ominous at best, because new recruits aren't exactly popping up like daisies in the desert here. There's only one mid-year transfer Matt knows about.
No fucking way.
And instead of being like "...i'm gonna fuck this bitch up" Shiro was like "...i'm gonna straight up fuck this bitch become good friends with this person whom I admire in a professional and respectful manner" (sorry, I forget you're thirteen sometimes).
"Wait—really?" Shiro should be heart broken, or at least mildly peeved that someone dethroned him. No—not just dethroned him, but exiled him and his pathetic scores to any icy abyss. The whole fighter class, the whole pilot class—hell, the entire Garrison is in disgrace, lost and wandering the wasteland this unnamed cadet has sent them to.
"Yeah. It was probably a fluke. They're going to retest him."
"Him?" Shiro asks, just a touch too canny.
Matt closes his eyes. That's right. Shiro isn't dumb. Shiro has very specific parkour-related blinders which are making it very hard to take him seriously right now, but he's not dumb.
"I don't know the details," Matt hedges.
Shiro grins. It's the Shiro Grin that means, specifically, I am Iverson's favorite student and the Garrison's darling and you are weak like a baby, watch this. "No problem."
Yeah, well, guess what. It was a big fucking problem.
Whatever Shiro does to get the file from Iverson, he spends the next forty-eight hours married to it.
It's one of those grey and orange file-folders that the Garrison had specially made to order. They probably cot $10 a pop, and god speed soldier—there's no way they're going to be able to salvage this one once Shiro's done with it. He keeps poring over it like it's the key to uncovering the meaning of life. He even falls asleep with it once, to Matt's utter disgust.
That second day Matt's had enough. He snatches it out of Shiro's hands over dinner in the mess, so at least he can get a look at it before Shiro's grubby ketchup fingerprints make it totally illegible.
It's not at all what he expects it to be.
It's—blank. The file is almost completely bare but for three lines of script, one of which is partially redacted:
Keith
FPC 125-67-876
DOB: 2096-10-23
There's no photo, no last name, no scores except for the recent total annihilation of the simulator. Almost every other slot on the page is blank—not redacted, but never filled in at all.
"What is this?"
"I know," Shiro says, bright eyes on the edge of mania. "It's a mystery—"
"No," corrects Matt. "Have you seriously been making out with a three line file for the past two days? What have you been doing with it?"
Shiro puts on a look of delicate confusion. "I was—considering the possibilities."
This is maybe the only time in either of their lives—in any one's life, ever, in the history of man, that considering the possibilities has been used as an innuendo for delicately caressing a sheet of paper.
Matt flips it over—nothing on the back either—and hands it back. Shiro takes it with loving care, staring down at it like he hasn't memorized every pixel and stray ink blot. This isn't healthy.
"Look," Matt tries to sound gentle, "there's a chance this isn't who you think it is. Just don't get your hopes up, ok?" (If it is, Matt will set himself on fire, end it on his own terms, go out with some dignity.)
But the light in Shiro's eyes dims at that, and suddenly Matt feels like a dick. Takashi Shirogane has been his best friend through three years of the Garrison. He put up with Matt crying through two weeks of comms practicals last year. This is baby's first crush. Matt can afford to put up with him making moon eyes at a file folder.
"Hey... do you want to play some Samurai Cat Six? I got the new DLC," Matt tries for a distraction.
It works, and they make it a whole twenty minutes before he hears Shiro mutter to himself, "Is October Scorpio or Libra?"
Three guesses who showed up to the retest, and the first two don't count. None of them count. Nothing matters anymore.
The day of the retest dawns like every day before it, and there's no indication it's going to be the first day of the dumbest and worst part of Matt's life until he's neck deep in it, standing with Shiro and Montgomery outside the simulator, waiting for their mystery cadet to show.
Iverson opens the door and turns aside, letting the cadet behind him step into view. An aura of overwhelming darkness falls across the room, but only Matt senses it. For Shiro, it probably translates as a soft breeze, a rain of flower petals, and soft piano music.
It's Parkour Boy.
He's not immediately recognizable, because he's not covered in blood and haloed in his own regret and embarrassment. He's got his Galaxy Garrison cadet uniform on, complete with the boots, belt, and the jaunty beret no one actually wears. It's a devastating combination; Matt doesn't have to look at Shiro to know what expression he's making, but he does anyway.
The stars and moon are hanging in his eyes. His grin is sitting in the uncomfortable no-man's land between wild and sweet. It's the look of a man who has received everything he ever wanted in one small, blue-eyed, uniform-wrapped package.
Anyway, Shiro has a uniform kink, so jot that down. Don't Google it. Just absorb that knowledge and judge him for it the next time you see him.
Introductions are... horrible.
They stutter over their own names, and then each other's, and by the end of it even Iverson and Montgomery are looking askance. Not because relationships between students are banned, but because the second hand embarrassment is—once again—crippling.
It gets worse after the test, which goes horrifyingly well. Shiro sits copilot, ostensibly to double check his flying, though Matt figures it's hard for Shiro to do that while he's busy mentally recasting himself as Jasmine and Keith as Aladdin in their own private A Whole New World sequence.
But it goes well. Montgomery watches the feed rapt, the score climbing and climbing. It tests reflexes, spatial awareness, how well a pilot can adapt, how well they can analyze a situation and react—it's brutal.
There's nothing wrong with the programming. The kid is flat-out incredible.
When it's over the two of them come out of the simulator breathing hard. Keith has a reason—Shiro doesn't. Matt gives him a look that says, he hopes, I see you, and were it not for the laws of this land and your three years of service in this friendship, I would drag you right here and now.
Shiro meets his eyes and has the good grace to look chagrined, at least. It's almost sweet. Cool, competent Shiro, brought low by this.
This is... Matt tries to look at it objectively. A wunderkind pilot who's transferred mid-year with a blank file, who hasn't been spotted in the mess for lunch in three days and whose first meeting with what he must have learned is the top pilot at the Garrison involved him tripping twice and bleeding all over said pilot's shirt. This kid has had a tough week; none of this is his fault.
Except for the shirt sniffing. That's inexcusable.
They're all fawning over him now, and he's visibly uncomfortable with the attention. Matt makes eye contact-and yeah. He's on the verge of panic. Matt opens his mouth to say something, anything, to get the focus off this impending train wreck of a boy, but Shiro beats him to the punch.
"You know, Keith does sports, too. We met in the gym the other day..."
If I could have, I would have stopped time.
It's the worst possible thing he could have said. Matt sees the writing on the wall and shoots Shiro a panicked look, waving his hands in the universal gesture of NO NO STOP NO. He sees the kid come to same realization and go shock-white, but it's too late. Shiro is a single-minded, inexorable force of nature and bad decision making.
"...He does parkour," Shiro says with pride, somehow.
"Oh?" Iverson says, with the bare minimum of required interest. He wants pilots, not parkourists.
No one wants parkourists, Matt thinks faintly. Shiro is unique among mankind.
Every eye in the room turns on the kid and the kid... isn't breathing. That's the color skin goes after three days in the morgue. He honestly looks like he might pass out.
"Well. Maybe he can show us a thing or two," Iverson says lamely, in the voice of someone who doesn't want to talk about something any longer than is strictly required by social norms.
Shiro's smile falters when he catches the look on Keith's face. It's heartbreaking, and exactly what he deserves. Matt prays he'll be fast enough to catch him if he falls over—no one deserves to have that happen in front of their crush twice—but he takes a breath, finally, and seems to get some color back in his cheeks.
And then Montgomery ruins everything.
"We need another peer tutor for the physical agility classes. I'll have you come in and test for it next week," Montgomery says off-hand. "Can you do a back flip?"
It's the last nail in the coffin lid, the cumulative result of the manufactured G forces from the simulation, Shiro's constant close presence, and his utter terror. He goes white again and lists dangerously.
"Keith?" Shiro asks, in the least professional way possible, putting out a hand like he might have to catch him, too eager by half.
But he doesn't fall. He steadies himself, takes a deep breath, and glances up at Shiro through his lashes. "S-Sorry. I'm fine, Sir."
Shiro isn't a Sir, but he goes bright red anyway.
Absolutely everyone notices, and there's no way to misinterpret that. It's suddenly intolerable to be in the same room with this. This isn't even a train wreck—it's a three alarm fire, it's the Enterprise crashing into the San Francisco Bay, it's galaxies of embarrassment colliding and birthing new stars.
Iverson and Montgomery clear their throats in tandem, and then Iverson is dragging the Cadet off to "get some fresh air" and Montgomery doesn't say a word before he follows them. Fresh air. Right.
God, I wish that were me.
"I'll be in the mess, whenever you're done with... whatever this is," Matt says, when he can muster the courage to look at Shiro.
Shiro nods, imperceptibly, still staring after Keith, and still blushing.
Anyway. It's the worst thing I've ever seen happen to a person. I never thought I'd say this, but poor Parkour Boy. Do you think we could send him flowers or something?
No. Never mind. Shiro would get jealous.
Thanks again for helping with that program. Tell everyone I miss them. Tell Dad Shiro is permanently uninvited from all family functions.
- Matt
PS. I'm joking, please don't tell Dad that.