A/N: Hi! Welcome to Finding Home! To all new and old readers, this is a side story (from Keith's perspective) for my series featuring Mariko Shirogane and Scarlett. If you'd like to catch up or recap what's happened so far, please read the 10 stories within the main series: Rise of Voltron; Turmoil Begins; Fights and Flights; Scarlett and the Blades; What's Been Lost, What's Been Found; Beneath the Sand and Stars; Rifts and Realizations; A Fallen Star; Face the Day; and The Light at the End (in that order). I'll be posting chapters for this twice a week. I hope you enjoy!

Also, Happy New Year!

**I do not own Voltron: Legendary Defender (duh)

CHAPTER 1: ALONE

He was late. So late that the sun had set hours ago and the desert had already cooled beneath the night sky and all its softly twinkling stars. So late that Keith had caved and made dinner for himself instead of waiting for him to bring home the takeout he had promised.

Pulling out the hot plate, he'd started making himself a can of ravioli. It wasn't his favorite food, but he didn't really know how to cook anything else yet. Not that they had the appliances to do much cooking in their little shack. He couldn't wait until construction on the house began. They could take all their stuff back out of storage and he could sleep in his own room again, in his own bed.

He ate the pasta in silence, curled up on the couch by the window so he could look outside.

Why wasn't he home yet?

Then Keith saw it: the headlights of a car in the distance. It turned onto the only road leading to their property and it was quickly approaching. He frowned. His dad took the hoverbike to work this morning. If a stranger was way out here at night, they couldn't be up to anything good.

Abandoning the ravioli, Keith scrambled to shut the curtains and turn off the lights. Then grabbing the dagger his dad had given him years ago for his birthday, he crawled beneath the couch and waited. He held his breath, his heart pounding rapidly against his ribcage as he heard the car pull to a stop outside. Its doors opened and closed, and there was the crunching of grit and sand beneath two pairs of heavy, booted footsteps as whoever was here drew nearer. The wooden planks creaked as they stepped onto the porch, and Keith could just barely make out the garbled chirp and static-filled chatter of a radio from beyond the wall.

A long moment passed before there came a knock on the door. It made Keith jump with how the shack trembled. Still, he didn't move. His grip tightened around the handle of his knife, turning his knuckles white. There was another pause before the knock came again, longer and more urgent this time.

"Keith? Are you there?"

Keith stiffened. He recognized that voice. He'd met him only a few times before at the station, but it was his dad's boss.

"It's me, Captain Hutch. Open up, kiddo."

He sounded strained. Pleading. Almost sad. Why was he here?

A new knot of dread settled in Keith's heart. He emerged from his hiding spot, sheathed weapon still in hand, before unlocking the door and opening it a bit. He reluctantly peeked through the crack and scowled at the captain. A Plaht City police officer stood behind him, his expression strangely grim and pitiful as his eyes landed on Keith.

"What do you want?" Keith asked, unsure whether he was addressing the captain or the cop. "Where's my dad?"

Hutch let out a shaky sigh. He knelt to be at eye level with him, his face tight around the edges. He reached out to place a hand on Keith's shoulder, but thought better of it when he inched back.

"Keith…An electrical fire broke out downtown today," he began slowly, carefully. "It was bad. Really bad. We told your dad not to go back into the building, but he…he was trying to save someone…"

He trailed off, starting to get choked up. Keith swallowed, his mouth going dry as the knot in his chest grew tighter, larger.

"Where's my dad?" he asked again, harsher this time. Frantic. "Where is he?!"

Keith looked past Hutch and the officer, desperately searching for him. He waited for him to pop out from the back of the police cruiser and come running up the porch to scoop him up into one of his stubble-scratching hugs. They'd eat dinner together. They'd talk more about the house rebuild. They'd stargaze for a bit, and maybe he would tell Keith more about his mother – he always got nostalgic about her whenever they looked to the evening skies. And then they'd go to bed, tired but safe and warm and together.

Hutch's eyes were rimmed with red as Keith dragged his gaze back over to him, waiting for his answer.

"...He didn't make it, Keith," he said finally, voice quivering and full of remorse. "He's gone."

The funeral service and headstone were paid for in full by his father's firefighter colleagues. Even some of his EMT friends and his buddies from the police station had pitched in. They were all teary-eyed, saying nothing but regretful things as Heith Kogane's remains were lowered into the ground. Hutch stood over Keith, his hand consolingly resting on his shoulder, but he hardly felt it. His eyes were glued to the coffin adorned with flowers, his whole body oddly numb and his chest hollow as it disappeared beneath the surface. The murmured lamenting of the people, of the strangers in black surrounding them, seemed to seep into the emptiness that had been left behind in his heart.

"Oh, if only he hadn't run back into that building."

He was stubborn, Keith thought vaguely to himself. You could never tell him what to do.

"I should've tried harder to stop him."

Then why didn't you?

"He was working so hard. Too hard. He shouldn't have taken on more hours."

He was saving up for the house. He was doing it for us.

"He wouldn't have had to if he didn't have that young boy to take care of."

…

"A shame the mother left them. Who was she, anyway?"

Who cares.

"No one really knows. Heith never talked about her."

He said she was clever. Serious and strong. Unlike anyone he'd ever met before.

"He was so kind. He deserved better than her. He deserved better in life."

"Ignore them, Keith," Hutch murmured. "He was a hero. And he loved you more than anything. You were his entire world."

And his dad had been his. But now, he was gone. His light had gone out, swallowed by the merciless flames. Keith had nothing left. No mom. No house. No family. No dad. Nothing.

The family his father had saved before he'd died stepped forward to deliver their condolences. A couple and their daughter, who looked a few years older than him and had a mess of curly brown hair. Tears pooled in their eyes and they trembled as they wept. They had a few bandages covering burn marks here and there, but they were all alive. They were together. They were happy it wasn't them being buried, being cried over.

Keith didn't hear what they said. He didn't want to. For the first time since Hutch delivered the dreadful, awful news, something hot and angry burned in his chest. It wasn't fair. He was so much younger than that girl. She had both her parents while he'd had no one else but his dad. Why had his dad chosen them, complete strangers, over him? Why did they all get to stay together while everything was taken away from him? The fire in their house had killed his dad. It was their fault he died. It was their fault he was dead!

And then, before he could stop himself, before he knew what he was doing, Keith started screaming. Thrashing. He wanted to hit them. To hurt them. The daughter clutched her mother's arm, frightened, and their happy and whole family backed away. It made his rage flare even more, and Hutch had to hold him back, stopping him from pouncing on them. The other mourners shifted with unease, deadly quiet as Keith's tortured cries filled the air. No one sought to comfort him. No one knew how. No one wanted to get close to the sobbing boy, nothing more to them than their dead friend's strange, desert-born child.

Heith's will didn't say much. All his property and money would simply go to Keith when he turned eighteen. But that was a long way off, years down the road in Keith's now seemingly bleak and unpromising future. Until he was legally old enough to claim what was his and live on his own, he would be put into foster care.

Keith didn't want to leave. He wanted to stay, waiting for the house that would never be rebuilt. But there was no one willing to finish the project his dad had started. He had no relatives. And his dad's so-called buddies had their own lives to get on with, each of them claiming they simply couldn't afford to take in another kid. Not even Hutch could take him, already busy with the station and raising his own three daughters. It had absolutely nothing to do with Keith's violent little outburst at the funeral either, they all assured him.

So, left without much of a choice, Keith's belongings were packed and the social worker assigned to him, Miss Lisa, brought him to a group home closer to the city.

It was so different from their little shack in the desert. The home was large and made out of stone with plenty of windows. Trees and thriving grass were everywhere. There was even a shopping mall just a few minutes down the road. Several kids around his age were playing outside when he arrived, and as the Group Home Manager, an older woman named Miss Debbie, gathered them together to meet him, they grinned and introduced themselves.

After the first few months, Keith decided he hated it there.

It was always too loud. There were always too many people around, all strangers. Couples looking to foster and hopefully adopt often swung by for interviews. Parents and siblings of the other foster kids would come and go, visiting on a confusing mess of a schedule that Keith had yet to understand. The adolescent inhabitants of the home always seemed to be changing, and he had a terrible time connecting with them. At one point, he stopped bothering to remember their names.

Ms. Debbie was kind enough, but she was a major worry wart. Apparently, she had once worked as a nurse in a children's hospital and was extremely uncomfortable with the fact that Keith carried his dagger everywhere he went. She'd freaked out the first time he'd unsheathed it to show one of the other kids, and had ended up confiscating it. He'd almost had a panic attack, and he'd had to dig through her "No-No" junk drawer, as the other kids called it, in the dead of night to get it back. Since then, he'd carefully tucked it under his shirt, hiding it from her sight.

To make matters worse, she'd enrolled him in school. Actual school, not the homeschooling system his dad had set up where he'd teach him in the evenings and on the weekends. He loathed it all: the rigid schedules, the confusing subjects, the boring mountain-load of nightly homework, the condescending teachers who weren't afraid to call out his mistakes and unusual upbringing, and of course, the bullies who constantly liked to rag on "the foster brat's" unfortunate life and start fights just for the fun of it. The only positive thing he gleaned from any of it was that he learned how to take the bus.

It all felt wrong. So wrong to be living in a house full of strangers, with "siblings" who already had their own families and hardly gave him the time of day. So wrong to be living in a house without his father. This wasn't his home, and it would never be his home.

He didn't belong here.

He wanted to go home.

He wanted his dad.

One day after school, he took the bus as far as it could go to the edge of the city. When he asked the driver if he could take him to the desert, he informed him that their routes didn't go out that far. In other words, no.

But, he could take him to the cemetery.

The evening sky washed the gravestones in a strange golden light as Keith picked his way over the rows and rows of unfamiliar names. It took him a few minutes to find it, but he finally arrived at his dad's resting spot. He stood in front of it, panting as he took in the stone and the bouquet of dead flowers that laid before it.

Sometimes, he didn't think his dad was really buried here. He had dreamt of him coming home so often, he almost didn't believe he was actually gone. Like he had just disappeared somewhere and would be back if Keith just kept looking for him.

What if he was at the shack right now, wondering where Keith had gone? What if he was waiting for him? Keith could go back to the familiar desert and the solitude of their tiny home. Back to the warmth of his dad's hugs and teasing smirks and scratchy kisses.

Keith stared at his father's name and the still far-too-recent dates etched into the surface of the stone. He ran his fingers over the numbers, reminding himself that this was real, that this was his reality. He would never be able to see or touch his dad or hear his voice again. Would never be able to laugh at his jokes or try more of his cooking or learn from him how to ride the hoverbike. He would never get to explore the canyons with him or listen to the rest of his stories about Mom or rebuild their house and live in it together again.

"You were his entire world."

Keith's hands curled into fists, his eyes stinging. The inescapable pain he had tried to stuff down for so long gnawed mercilessly at his heart, erupting in full. A choked sound escaped his lips and he hunched over, unable to stop the tears from falling as sobs racked his small frame. His ears rang, the sounds of the city drowned out as he screamed.

His dad wasn't waiting for him. He was never coming back.

For the first time in his life, Keith was truly and utterly alone.

A/N: So I've been thinking about something recently and I have a question for you all: would any of you be interested if I make a Patr(e)on page for the upcoming side/short stories and artwork for this series? I'll still be uploading them here, but the Patr(e)on page would be for anyone interested in reading ahead with these new side stories. If any of you would like or use the Patr(e)on page, please let me know (via DM, comment/review here, or on tumblr) and I'll get the page set up as soon as I can!

**Check out my tumblr to see some cool art: pufftheninja