Dear Katie,
My life is me, sitting at a table, while an anguished teen rock band plays their full catalog right in front of my salad.
The eyes are the worst part. Their pain is palpable and they've perfected the subtle art of watching each other on the down low.
A week into Shiro's gallant and questionable decision to stay Just Friends, it's going about as well as could be expected. At lunch, Keith bends over the side of the table to grab a book out of his bag and Shiro's gaze leaps up from his plate, following the progress of Keith's tee shirt where it's riding up over his back and side. Shiro eyes the strip of pale skin with a degree of attention that suggests he's mentally filing it away for future use.
Matt mentally files that away to the corner of his mind he's quarantined for this sort of thing and sworn never to return to.
That night, ten minutes after lights out, Shiro says gently to the dark, "His eyes are violet." Matt doesn't throw a pillow at him because he's only got the one and because that would mean acknowledging that he heard Shiro speak and that now Shiro's Disney fantasy vision will be with him for the rest of his life.
But there's progress. Slow, like the movement of glaciers, lumbering like the gentle whale shark, but there nonetheless. They're almost to the point of being able to look at each other without a distant and anguished guitar rift spinning through Matt's head—almost.
As he watches them the next morning at breakfast, Keith mutters something witty about Harris's class and Shiro laughs and returns something approximating a normal human response.
Matt has to do a double-take. Shiro's still a little red around the ears the way he always is when Keith's paying attention to him and Keith's still a little doe-eyed, but there's nothing intolerably weird about it. It's the first glimmer of hope they've had in days. Matt clings to it with both hands. In the back of his mind, a vision starts to play like a warm summer breeze, limned in light: Shiro and Keith as friends.
Millions of people have conversations every day. There, right before his eyes, Keith and Shiro join their hallowed ranks.
I just want to get through this year. I thought: good. They're going to talk. Whole sentences. I know they can do it—they nerd out about piloting all the time, but in any regular, traditionally human scenario, it all falls apart.
Someone should study them.
His hope lasts right up until the moment Shiro goes to take a sip of water at the exact instant Keith smiles and laughs. Shiro ends up spilling most of it down his front where his uniform is unzipped, exposing his thin white shirt and pectorals to the air and cold water. His face goes red, his shirt goes see-through, and Matt decides he's eaten as much as he's going to—if he stays any longer, he's going to end up throwing most of it up in the back of his mouth.
That sets the mood for the day in ways he can't fully comprehend until later.
Matt doesn't have class with Shiro before lunch, so he doesn't walk with him to the cafeteria. By the time he gets there they're both already seated and Keith is halfway through eating what's unmistakably, tragically, a banana.
To his credit, Shiro is surviving. His eyes aren't fastened on Keith but somewhere on the grey wall over Keith's shoulder. The way they're talking looks like something approximating normal, but up close it's like watching two people try to communicate over a satellite delay.
Matt grabs a plate of something that's hopefully fried rice—a personal favorite, the only bright spot—and pulls up a seat next to Shiro where he'll be in easy kicking distance. Shiro's leg is already jogging up and down under the table in nervous repetition. He's a man on the edge.
"How's class?" Matt asks, trying to set a good example for them.
Keith picks at his banana peel like he's never seen one before in his life and mutters something incomprehensible and a little glum. Under the table, Shiro's leg stops its incessant movement.
"Are people—" Shiro lowers his voice, "—are you being bullied again?"
Two hours since our last nonsense, Matt clocks mentally, trying to shove as much rice as possible into his mouth as quickly as possible. As if Keith couldn't take on his entire class one-handed. Matt overheard a couple of cadets talking about him in the hallway like he was the disciple in one of those terrible old action films, fresh off a childhood of wrestling bears and meditating under waterfalls. Ridiculous, but if he didn't know Keith, if he hadn't watched Keith throw himself at a wall to impress a boy for an amount of time that could be described as dedicated at best, he would be terrified, too.
"No, nothing like that." Keith smiles down at his banana with a look of fondness he probably means for Shiro and picks off a minuscule chunk of it to nibble on.
That's—different. That's not how one traditionally eats a banana, but no judgment. At least that explains why Shiro isn't lying in a pool of his own blood and shattered dignity.
"You know, I've never seen anyone eat it like that," Matt says off-hand.
Keith frowns. "Well—I've never had one before."
It takes a moment for that to process. Keith appears, in rare moments, to be human only in the strictest definition of the word. There are moments when Matt wonders if he's some creation of the Garrison's R and D department, but they'd know. Besides—he's so painfully human the rest of the time. Not knowing what a banana is or how to use a tablet, or repeatedly insisting on some esoteric athletic prowess… None of it really matters when he's laughing at one of Matt's bad jokes or making goo-goo eyes at Shiro. He's doing fine. Still—
"You've never had a banana ?" Shiro asks, aghast. The situation doesn't really call for that level of drama.
Across the table, Keith seems to realize he's entered lizard-person territory for his own personal level of weirdness and clams up. Matt feels that little sympathetic pang behind his breastbone that's usually reserved for the wet, crunchy sound Keith's body makes when he hits the ground face-first.
Matt kicks Shiro under the table and leans forward a little, trying to catch Keith's eye. "Hey, man, that's cool. They're pretty rare, right?"
Shiro backs him up with a pathetically enthusiastic, "Yeah! Really rare."
They aren't. You could walk into any gas station within a two hundred mile radius of the Garrison and pick one up for a buck at most. By the sour edge to Keith's frown, he knows it.
"Well, how are you supposed to eat it?" he asks, a little tetchy, eyeing the fork next to his plate.
No. No, no. Matt raises an eyebrow and mimes through the proper banana-eating procedure—and realizes his mistake instantly.
There's at least one other gesture that shares that category of hand-to-mouth movement, and even Keith isn't that oblivious.
He laughs. "Really? Isn't that kind of…" He trails off and Matt watches his expression shift as he realizes yes, it is a little lewd—maybe even a lot lewd—but instead of laughing it off, Keith's gaze jerks to Shiro.
No. Not oblivious at all.
Matt sees the moment he decides to ruin everyone's life. It's hard to remember sometimes that Keith is a teenage boy and as capable of bad, thirst-related decisions as any other teenage boy. Matt shakes his head, glaring, trying to convey how bad this will be and how little Matt personally deserves it.
Keith ignores him. "I guess," he says softly, "if that's how you're supposed to eat it." In slow motion, Keith picks up the banana and raises it to his lips. Shiro's leg jerks hard enough to jostle the entire table and Matt can't even be mad.
"Keith, wait—"
He doesn't. He makes dead eye contact with Shiro and shoves the last half of the banana in his mouth.
"Oh god," Matt mutters.
Two things happen. First, Shiro chokes on thin air and starts coughing loud enough to draw attention from the rest of the cafeteria. Second, Keith seems to realize that while a little bit of banana is fine, a lot of banana at once isn't. Shiro is too consumed with his coughing fit to notice, but Matt can't look away. Keith's eyes turn bright and his face goes shock-white.
He's not breathing.
Matt sits up in his chair and flails out a hand at Shiro, trying to get him to shut up—it manages to clock him on the side of the head which is close enough. "Keith? Buddy? You good?"
He doesn't answer but his big eyes are impossibly wide, in full panic—and they're blue, not violet. They're a deep, arresting blue, at best. Maybe with a hint of something like deep, lurid not-quite-blue.
Shiro finally realizes there's a more dire situation at hand than his own life-ruining fantasy spot and stands up, rounding the table with the reflexes of an acrobat—unnecessary, completely unnecessary—and kneels down next to Keith where he's going a little blue. Matt can't decide if his own concern outweighs the inevitability of his impending embarrassment. People are already watching; it's probably a wash.
"Do you need help?" Shiro asks, pressing a hand against Keith's shoulder. Keith shakes his head rapid fire—a no by any metric—but he's still not breathing. "Ok," Shiro says. "Ok, I'm going to—"
Keith shakes his head harder, but Shiro already has his arms around Keith's chest, pulling him up out of the chair. Someone gasps.
Out the window of the cafeteria, a small crowd is gathering in the hallway. It's good they chose to sit next to the windows, Matt thinks bleakly. So many good decisions were made.
He puts his head face down on the table. Distantly, he realizes it was always going to come to this: Keith or Shiro at death's door over their three-alarm fire of a non-relationship they've been tending.
You know how you think you've imagined the worst case scenario? Like, you've visualized true fear and nothing can ever really hurt you again? But then you see it manifest and it's so much worse.
It was so much worse, Katie.
"Look." Shiro's voice is anguished.
Matt sighs, rubs his temples, and tries to remember when he thought Shiro was cool.
"I thought he was choking."
Shiro is sitting on a desk in one of the unused classrooms, feet up, hiding his face against his hands—the same position he's been in since he pulled Matt into the room directly post Heimlich Gate. "He looked like he was choking," Shiro moans.
There's no consoling him. The gym at least was private. The simulator was… contained. This was the cafeteria at lunch.
"Do you think—"
"Do I think anyone saw? Yeah. Everyone saw."
"No." Shiro peeks between his fingers. "Do you think he'll forgive me?"
Again, the scene plays before his eyes. Keith's panic and Shiro's noble and desperately misguided attempts at first aid. The—the motion of it.
Abdominal thrusts. That's what they're called. It's rare he has cause to curse his near-perfect memory, but he knows that unwelcome bit of trivia will never leave him now. He'll look at a banana and think abdominal thrusts. He'll see Keith bend over and think abdominal thrusts. It'll be with him until he dies.
Do I think Keith will forgive you for administering a life saving medical procedure on him in front of the entire Garrison? The sad, inexorable truth they're all hurtling toward is that no, Keith won't forgive him—because he was never mad in the first place. If pining, if thirst was an Olympic sport, Shiro would have gold, but silver and bronze would go to Keith, hands down.
Matt takes a deep breath and massages his temples for an indulgent moment. "Shiro… I don't think this is gonna work out."
Shiro's head jerks up. All his boyish charm is transformed into something tragic and crestfallen. His hair has always been ridiculous, but suddenly the way it hangs in front of his eyes is inexcusable. Baby's first crush, he reminds himself desperately.
"No, I mean—this just being friends thing. You can't—" keep your hands off him, "—keep this up forever. Do you feel like you like him less? Do you feel like it's working?"
There's a beat while Shiro stares out the window, wistful.
"I have to make it work."
That evening, when they get back to their room, someone's left a banana leaning against the door.
Where's my cute cadet, Katie? Where's my winsome, long-haired beauty with big eyes and a killer smile? I deserve good things. I've worked hard. I've sacrificed so much. Is god real? Does he hate me?
Shiro's a dead end. The deadest of ends. He'll admit he has a crush when he's on his deathbed and not a minute sooner. If there's any hope, it lies in Keith's unfailing honesty—or totally shit lying skills, depending on how charitable he's feeling.
Matt's feeling plenty charitable right up until the moment he sees Keith on the roof. He's surrounded by a halo of wistfulness. It's getting darker earlier, so parkour fun hour has been slowly transitioning into limned in sunset pining hour.
Matt decides it's worth it, waving away the miasma of sparkles and bubbles as he sits down next to Keith.
"No practice today?"
Keith picks at the concrete for a moment and then sighs, and fuck, in this light his eyes really are violet. He finally pries a tiny grey pebble loose from the ground and holds it up to the light, considering it like maybe he thinks it resembles the shade of Shiro's eyes. "No," he sighs and lets the stray breeze pull the crumb of rock from his fingers. "I miss him."
There's no question who he means, but the admission takes him aback. Matt can't even pretend he didn't hear, but— "You saw him two hours ago." Keith is the kind of person that wears his heart and most of his other organs on his sleeve, but he doesn't talk about it—he certainly doesn't wax poetic, not even to Matt.
But Keith isn't in the building.
"Do you think... Do you think if he laid down on the ground and flexed his abs he could move like a snake?"
Matt hasn't considered Shiro's abs to any degree, at any point. He's aware of them like he's aware there are probably scorpions out in the desert. You don't go looking, and you hope you'll never see one that close. "Keith... Deeply, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, what the fuck."
"No, just..." Keith picks at the concrete again, trying to pry up another pebble, and now the cloud of whimsy rolling off of him has a manic, dizzy vibe to it. "I mean, if he—if he put a marble on one ab—"
"Keith, I swear to god."
"—could he bounce it? How far? Do you think he could get it to the ceiling?"
Keith smiles at him, bright-eyed, like everything he's just said made perfect sense and was something Matt or any other human on Earth would want to hear. There's something off about it in addition to the words—his eyes aren't focused, and the cast of his skin is pale in the wrong way.
"Are you feeling ok?"
Keith looks him dead in the eye, smiles wider, and then leans over the side of the roof and throws up.
Matt screams, with grace and dignity and valid terror. He doesn't get sick, as a rule; one scratchy throat and he's neck deep in vitamin c and cough syrup. There's absolutely nothing worse than throwing up, and getting sick during exams isn't an option. Getting sick isn't an option.
You're being neurotic, Katie says, but six years of health don't lie.
He inches close enough to lean over and hover a comforting hand in the vicinity of Keith's back—it doesn't have to touch, right? "You—you good, man?"
In lieu of a response, Keith throws up again. All of Matt retracts into an impermeable psychological snail shell as he goes through the mental gymnastics of assessing how long Keith has been contagious and whether any of the banana he coughed up all over their table at lunch got close enough to be a viable disease vector
"Keith, I'm gonna go get someone to—help, ok?"
Matt leaves before Keith can answer.
So I just kind of eased him down and gave him my jacket and went to get help. It was the right thing to do.
Running into Shiro is, for once, a blessing in disguise.
"Have you seen Keith?" Shiro asks, which is convenient at least. For a moment Matt balks at the prospect of giving him what he wants, just on principle, but… His fingers itch for the sweet release of hand sanitizer, and Shiro is possibly the only person in the Garrison that would willingly and delightedly handle Keith in his current state.
"Yeah, he's—" Matt tries to put on a concerned face, because he is concerned and deeply, but this is really Shiro's province, "—he's really sick. I was going to get the medics."
Shiro's eyes go wide and then narrow, and he does a thing Matt has never seen him or any human do before in his life. He grits his teeth, visibly, in a next-best approximation of a snarl. Matt physically jerks back. It's like Shiro is in physical pain at the prospect of Keith in danger. God.
"The roof?" Matt offers, like red meat to the tiger Shiro is trying to impersonate.
It's like I got dragged into one of those dramas Mom used to be obsessed with. You know? Like the ones that were just slightly classed up soap operas but the whole time you're going, no one would actually act that way.
Well.
By the time Matt gets to the stairs, Shiro is already halfway down with Keith gathered in his arms, swaddled in Shiro's oversize uniform jacket. Matt thinks he's going to put him down once they get to the bottom, but no such luck.
"He can walk," Matt says two hallways down because Shiro is visibly struggling.
Shiro shoots him a glare and hefts Keith higher in his arms. Fine, Matt thinks, but Shiro's entire uniform is contaminated now—Shiro is contaminated—and he's not that strong, either. Even sad and sick, Keith is upwards of 150 pounds of parkour-honed boy flesh and Shiro might be closer to 200 but of the two of them, Matt's pretty sure Keith would have an easier time deadlifting Shiro in the name of love.
There's sweat on Shiro's brow. Matt decides to forget he noticed and subtly slows a pace so he's a safe distance from patient zero and Shiro's walking daytime-television reenactment.
"You're gonna be fine," Shiro says to Keith, voice tight, arms glistening. There's no reason to sound like that. He literally will be fine, but it's not worth incurring Shiro's tiger wrath, so Matt rolls his eyes and adds it to the tally. Keith isn't complaining.
By the time they get to the infirmary, Shiro is out of breath and Keith looks a little like he regrets keeping up with the facade for so long—but not enough to actually walk and lose their full body contact. The problem, Matt's beginning to see, is that Keith has cunning. He's can't lie outright worth a damn, but he can edge and obfuscate toward his desires with enough deftness to ruin a life or two.
Or three.
In the infirmary, Shiro lays him down on a bed with the utmost care, going so far as to push Keith's hair off his forehead and check his temperature with the back of his hand, and then the front for good measure. Keith's eyes don't quite flutter shut, but they do go suspiciously half-lidded.
The medic watches them both with a look Matt feels in his soul. They make briefest eye contact and the medic shakes his head. "Shirogane. I can handle it from here."
Shiro squeezes Keith's hand and steps away. "You're gonna be fine," he says again, voice still tight. The medic raises an eyebrow, and it feels good to be validated like that. In the end, Shiro leaves willingly, but he lingers in the hallway, worry rolling off of him still.
Matt takes pity on him. "Dude, he really is going to be fine. He's young and strong and—you know, all that stuff."
"What if it's flu?" Shiro asks, but he says flu like it's synonymous with consumption and he's the dashing lord in a period drama whose fiance has been hospitalized for a mysterious cough. He says it like he thinks Keith won't live out the season.
Matt shakes his head. Give him an inch, and he takes a mile.
"If it's flu then you better burn your clothes before you get back to our room," Matt says and leaves him in the hallway.
It wasn't flu.
Did you know that a person can be allergic to bananas? I didn't. I didn't know that was a thing. I still don't know that that's a thing.
It goes without saying, but I'm taking the first offworld assignment I can get when I graduate. The only upshot is that they'll both be gone by the time you get here. I guess you'll have to trace their legacy in the faint scent of banana on the wind when the AC in the cafeteria blows just right.
I'm so sorry.
— Matt