...Um. Really sorry it took so long. Hope you enjoy the next chapter! And thanks to everyone who reviewed; you're all amazing! :D
To Guest: Sorry, but I'm not entirely sure which character tags you're talking about? Unfortunately, doesn't have tags for Thace or Keith's mother yet. And the story is pretty Keith-centric, with Shiro as the person who probably gets the second-most screen time, so I have it tagged with them... is there someone else you'd like me to tag?
To AshesGleamandGlow: Don't worry, you don't sound desperate. I'm so flattered that you like it so much! ^.^
Hope you guys enjoy reading, and feel free to find me on AO3 as DarkScales and Tumblr as darkscaleswriter!
Also: I regret nothing. Please be warned for character (or is she technically an OC?) death and canonical fake character death in this chapter.
Edit: oh no I completely forgot about this earlier, but universally-trichster-lexicona on Tumblr drew some amazing fanart for this story! You can find it on my Tumblr under the tag "One Who Fights". :D
The next few years were… difficult, to say the least.
After several long and harrowing days trekking through the desert, during which it was discovered that spiky plants on sticks made for excellent (if short-lived) weapons and that some of them even had water on the inside, Keithek and his mother reached civilization. By that point, they were hungry, exhausted, and dehydrated. Integrating themselves into the town's homeless population as they tried to figure out what to do next, they came to a grim conclusion.
The planet, called Earth by its inhabitants, just wasn't advanced enough to get them home.
"I'm sorry, but… we might be staying here forever," Keithek's mother sighed. She carded her fingers through Keithek's hair, jet-black to match Earth's dominant native species– humans. Incidentally, it also matched her own hair, making parent and child look more alike than ever. For Gracea, the main differences from her Altean form were monochrome blue-black eyes rather than her usual dual-toned magenta and dark blue, along with oddly shaped ears that were blunt and rounded at the tips instead of pointed.
Keithek had patterned his own human disguise after a smaller version of her, dark eyes and rounded ears and no eye-markings at all. Having pupils took some getting used to in particular, and weren't nearly as light-sensitive as he was accustomed to. It was weird.
(At least humans shared the same body type as Alteans and Galra. Keithek didn't know what they would've done if humans had three arms or multiple heads or something.)
Still, things could have been worse. They were still alive, after all.
It took a single Earth year for the two of them to understand human life and society enough to blend in. Keithek's mother figured out how to hack Earth's systems ("Rather primitive, compared to ours, but we don't complain about easy marks, eh?" she said to Keithek– no, Keith, who grinned in agreement, and now she was Grace, not Gracea) and fake their records, allowing them to truly integrate. They even changed their names to better fit with human language, only using their true identities in secret with each other. It was different, certainly, but… well, they managed.
Keith's mother got a job, and over time they managed to save up enough to get their own apartment. It was small, with dubious lighting and faulty heating, but it was good enough. After living homeless, almost anything else was an improvement. And, most important of all, it was theirs.
Keith was homeschooled, his education a mixture of continuing lessons from the resistance base and of what Grace had figured out of human schooling. Unconventional, to be sure, patchwork and incomplete and Grace studied half the lessons with him, but like everything else in this strange world, they made it work.
Moon cycles crawled by, then entire rotations of the planet, and the two refugees adjusted to life on Earth. Both of them missed Thace in their own ways, and showed it differently. Keith was determined to continue practicing his combat skills, those and his dagger being the only real things he had left of his father. Grace told Keith stories of Altea, of the old days of Galra, and ensured that he kept in touch with his heritage. Both sides of it, no matter that one of them now had a legacy of terror and fear and brutality.
(Besides, it wasn't as if Altean history was all nice and good, either. They were warriors before they were diplomats, and with the destruction of their planet they had become warriors once again.)
Earth wasn't home, and perhaps it never would be, but that was fine. They were making do, and that was what counted.
"Keithek," his mother said, "come with me. We're going to go on a little trip."
Keith looked up from where he had been sulking, split lip puffy from a fight he'd gotten into earlier that day. Some other kids had been making fun of him because it was well known in the neighborhood that his father wasn't around, and he'd lost his temper at them.
"Am I in more trouble?" he asked. He knew that he wasn't supposed to give in to the bullies and fight them because he wasn't like the other kids; he could really hurt someone if he lost control. And it only gave them what they wanted, besides.
His mother pursed her lips. "No, because you've already been punished." He was grounded for the next three days in addition to receiving a stern lecture on when it was and wasn't appropriate to fight. "This is something… different."
Well. It wasn't as if he had a choice, anyway.
They ended up driving a ways out of town, back to the surrounding desert that they'd first landed in. They skirted around the Garrison, an Earth military space academy that still wasn't advanced enough to be worth stealing from (Grace had checked) and finally stopped at what appeared to be yet another stretch of barren desert.
"Come on," Keith's mother told him as she got out of the car. "We have to walk a bit to get there."
Keith, by that point, had forgotten his unhappiness and was all curiosity instead. "Where are we going?"
His mother grinned at him, and, in that moment, looked decades younger. "You'll see, little warrior."
...That sort of response only piqued his interest further. And, considering that his mother seemed almost playful, it was sure to be good.
After maybe ten minutes of walking, Keith's mother stopped. She turned, gesturing to the surrounding area. Without preamble, she announced, "This land, starting from where we left the car and the square mile around us, is now ours. I was planning to build a cabin or something; someplace where we can be ourselves without worrying about the neighbors seeing. What do you think?"
Keith gaped, blindsided. "What– really?"
"Of course. I was actually saving this for your birthday next week, but this is as good a time as any. Now, are you going to help me or not?" Grace asked, still grinning.
Keith grinned back, disguise slipping a bit to reveal tiny fangs in his excitement. "When do we start?"
The structure they built was small, a cabin with a tiny closet of a bathroom and the bare bones of a kitchenette crammed into one corner. It had generators for electricity and such, all solar-powered, and probably strongest satellite link in the country. They would get their supplies from town, which, though it was a bit far, wasn't such a distance as to be unreasonable. Besides, the cabin was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible.
It wasn't much, but they were used to that by now, and it provided a sorely-needed safe haven for both Keith and Grace. They couldn't live there; Grace still had her job and they had to keep up a normal appearance for the neighbors, but they went on enough "camping trips" to gain a reputation as quite the nature-lovers. Grace found this highly amusing, because if she had a passion for anything, it was flight and mechanics, not nature. Keith didn't care either way.
("I like being able to see in the dark again," Keith told his mother as they looked up at the night sky. "It makes the stars so much brighter.")
In a rare bout of kindness from the universe, life… was actually going pretty well. They were happy, and it showed.
Except, because Fate was cruel and the universe never stayed kind for long, things only went downhill from there.
It started, as many such things did, with an ordinary beginning.
The family of two woke, ate breakfast, and went through their morning routine without incident. Grace was allowed to bring Keith to work with her given that he didn't disturb anyone, which meant that both of them got into the car to start their regular commute.
But this time–
There was a traffic-heavy intersection. A drunk driver. The next thing Keith knew, he was waking up in the hospital.
(Keith survived. His mother… didn't.)
His total list of injuries came out to cracked ribs, multiple lacerations, and a concussion on top of his trauma and other head injuries. The doctors said he was lucky. Keith wanted to punch them because he sure didn't feel lucky. Not with his mother gone, the only one of his family that he had left, it just wasn't fair why had she left him?
As if that wasn't bad enough, the combination of a concussion and trauma from the accident gave Keith minor amnesia. His memories were… scrambled. Some things stayed, but others didn't. He knew his name wasn't always Keith, but he didn't know what it used to be. He knew he wasn't human, but he didn't know what species he really was. He knew he was an alien, but all the memories he had of space were flashes, impressions, hazy images that faded even further as the years passed.
It didn't help that he was immersed in Earth culture, living amongst humans who treated him as one of them, with nothing left to keep him in touch with his heritage. Nothing except a dagger, hilt beneath its wrappings inscribed with two symbols that he understood meant family but couldn't remember why. Nothing except a dagger and the tattered fragments of his memories, but even those were slipping away, and that terrified him.
I don't want to forget, he whispered to himself, clinging to the sound of his mother's voice. He saved what he could, held them close to his heart, but sometimes the little things slipped through the cracks.
I can't remember what Dad's smile looks like, he realizes, and had to try very hard not to cry.
Without his memories, without his mother, Keith felt very much like the loneliest person in the world.
Keith grew older, moved from foster home to foster home, but never quite managed to fit in. Only one of them was of any particular note. That was Keith's last and his longest, the reason for which capable of being summed up by a single person: Takashi Shirogane, Shiro for short, Keith's neighbor and best (only) friend.
(They met on a cold winter's afternoon, the sky overcast and grey with looming clouds. Breath billowed out as frost, exposed skin grew red and numb from biting wind. Shiro was a few years older than Keith, popular and admired by practically the entire school. Keith heard of Shiro before he met him, saw the older teen in passing before they ever talked.
"Hey," Shiro began, at his shoulder because they walked the same route back from school, "you're… Keith, right?"
Keith glanced at him, surprised and more than a bit wary. "Yeah. Why?"
Shiro grinned. "We're neighbors, aren't we? I thought maybe we could be friends."
Keith stared. "Why?"
Shiro shrugged. "I dunno, you seem cool."
Keith stared some more. "What, just because of that?"
Shiro laughed. "What other reason do I need?"
To that, Keith had no response.
And that set the tone for the rest of their friendship.)
Even after Shiro went off to the Garrison and became a pilot, they kept in touch. Emails, texts, phone calls, and sometimes even meeting up in person to hang out. Keith got himself emancipated, moving into a small apartment in the town where he and his mother had first settled. Shiro supported the decision as much as he could, even coming over to help Keith move. Keith, in return, was always ready to lend a hand or an open ear if Shiro had any problems.
For a time, life was… not great, not when Keith still dreamed of nebulas and stardust and fragmented images of war, but… better.
Things were looking up.
"You're joining the Garrison?" Shiro asked, surprise evident even over the phone. "Why?"
"I want to be a pilot," Keith replied. Like you, he didn't say, but it hung in the silence between them all the same. "And– I want to go to space."
He had always intended to fly someday, drawn to the darkness of what was beyond Earth, beyond even their solar system. He had always longed for it, somehow, and he knew that somewhere out there was his birthplace. Somewhere out there was the place where he had come from, and maybe it was the alien blood that ran through his veins but he had always known that he was never meant to stay grounded. Not forever.
Shiro made an amused sort of huffing noise, fond with a tinge of exasperation. "You know, Keith," he chuckled, "ever since day one, you've always managed to surprise me."
Miles away, Keith blinked, demanded, "What's that supposed to mean?" and only became more confused as Shiro just laughed.
Keith followed Shiro to the Garrison, though they only overlapped for a year. He found that he was good at piloting, that he knew this, and the first time he got behind the controls of a ship he had a sudden image of longer hands wrapped around his, a gentle voice guiding him through the sky, and it was Keith's father who taught him how to fight but it was his mother who taught him how to fly.
Shiro graduated, going on to become one of the youngest and most accomplished pilots in the program. Keith excelled in some of his classes and was less than stellar in others, his temper and somewhat prickly personality not earning him any friends. Shiro helped, though, coached him through difficult to understand concepts in classwork and encouraged him when it felt as if he could never measure up to what he wanted to be. Without Shiro, Keith didn't think he would have ever made it as far as he had.
"Hey, Keith!" Shiro greeted one day as they met for lunch, sitting at a small cafe in the small town by the Garrison. It wasn't too far from where Keith and his mother used to live, though the neighborhood had definitely changed over the years.
"Hey, Shiro." Keith smiled, feeling himself relax as Shiro grinned at him. "How've you been?"
Shiro leaned back in his seat, looking immensely pleased with himself. "Well, you'll never guess what happened yesterday…"
The Kerberos mission was one of exploration and research, taking its crew the farthest into space that any human had ever gone. The crewmembers would be trailblazers, the first to set foot on the icy planet. For them to ask Shiro to be the mission's pilot was an honor of the highest degree.
The downside would that he would be away from Earth for over half a year, and, once they passed a certain point, contact with Earth would be minimal.
Keith was there to see Shiro off before the launch, and watched the ship as it blasted off into the sky. He stood there until it was out of sight, watching them with something very much like longing tight in his chest.
(As he left, he caught a glimpse of a girl, with long brown hair and amber-brown eyes. She walked beside a woman who was probably her mother, judging by their resemblance, and she seemed as enthusiastic as the crew had been themselves.
They must be the other half of the Holt family, Keith thought, and continued on. He paid no more mind to the girl, which, in retrospect… was probably a mistake.
In his defense, he hadn't anticipated ever seeing her again. Especially not in space.)
The universe just couldn't give Keith a break, and those on the Kerberos mission never came home.
Shiro's family– they practically adopted him, and the Garrison hadn't even had the decency to let them know before it was national news –called him when they found out.
("Keith–" Shiro's mother started, a hitch in her breath like she was on the edge of tears, "did you hear–?"
"Yeah," he whispered, hoarse. "I heard.")
Losing Shiro… it broke something loose in him, something that he'd never even realized had been repaired. The gaping hole where his parents had been, where his lost memories had been, all that pain and emptiness and grief roared back to life with a vengeance. For a time, Keith was in a daze. His grades dropped as he stopped caring, his record grew stained with black marks. He became too wild to obey the Garrison's rules, too reckless and disobedient and despite his talent they forced him out.
(It probably didn't help that he got into a fight right in front of Iverson when another cadet tried to provoke him by badmouthing Shiro. Keith didn't even remember throwing the first punch, only the red-bubbling rage and hurt and how dare you say that about Shiro–!
Okay, yeah. Looking back, that had been a pretty stupid move.
But, to him, it had been more than worth it.)
He ended up wandering after that, but was soon drawn back to the desert. Back to the little cabin his mother built, following a strange pull he couldn't explain, and then–
The lion cave.
Keith had stumbled across the cave after he'd wandered too far and gotten caught in a storm, bolting into the rocks for shelter. Carvings lined the walls, stories that told of hunts and battles and an enormous robotic lion that was central to it all. He searched for the lion, too, venturing deep into twisting tunnels so dark it seemed he'd never see light again. The night vision of his native form was instrumental, then, helping him navigate without having to waste power on flashlights or lamps.
No matter how far he explored, the caves never ended. He never found the lion that the carvings spoke of, either, though some instinct deep inside him said that it was there, that he was so close, that if he only went a little farther–!
The pull almost drove him mad, some days. That, and the solitude. There were still people in the only town around for miles who remembered him, who remembered the lost little boy and his mother who'd stumbled in from the desert all those years ago. Who still remembered seeing him grow, remembered the accident and the tragedy and he hadn't encountered them for a long, long time but they still remembered.
Keith avoided the town. He couldn't stand the mix of pity and suspicion that some of the townspeople regarded him with, couldn't stand how rumors of how he'd gone feral out there in the desert– because he and his mother had always been a little strange, never quite been normal, and wasn't it par for the course that he'd only grown more eccentric as he'd grown older. Those who hadn't known him back then, who only knew of Keith the loner and not Grace's son were the worst. Others were different. They looked at him with sympathy instead of pity, were kind to him on the rare occasions he came in for supplies, but they were so much fewer than the rest.
(He and his mother had never been particularly social, after all. He never thought that might come back to bite him.)
Keith did have something to work towards, however. Some of the carvings in the cave heralded a pivotal event, a coming, a meteor that would descend from the sky and bring with it an awakening. It wasn't clear on exactly when, but Keith had a feeling it would be soon.
The universe is a strange yet wonderful place, his mother had told him once. It has a magic all its own, you know. Perhaps, someday, you'll even learn to see it. Things have a way of working out in the end, and that is not simply chance. But remember, my son. You can't rely on something fickle like Fate to make your life work for you. We were born with free will for a reason, and though the universe might push you in a certain direction, it's up to you to take it the rest of the way.
And then an alien ship crash-landed in the desert, and Keith knew.
The universe had spoken. Whatever happened next would change everything.