nothing can breathe in space
Author: idrilka
Date: 2016-08-01T04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Completed; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD; Unresolved Tension; Original Characters; Pre-Canon; Mutual Pining; Voltron: Legendary Defender; Shiro (Voltron); FanFiction; Backstory; Keith (Voltron); Canon Era; Friends to Lovers; Slow Burn; Keith/Shiro (Voltron); M/M; First Time; Voltron: Legendary Defender Ensemble
Description: The truth is: what Keith wants or doesn’t want won’t bring Shiro back. The truth is: nothing can breathe in space. (Or: the story of how Keith and Shiro come together, come apart, and come together again.)
Publisher: archiveofourown.org

nothing can breathe in space by idrilka

Fandoms: Voltron: Legendary Defender
AO3 Categories: M/M
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Characters: Keith (Voltron), Original Characters, Shiro (Voltron), Voltron: Legendary Defender Ensemble
Freeform Tags: Backstory, Canon Era, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Slow Burn, Unresolved Tension
Status: Completed
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2022-03-30 16:47:11
Summary:

The truth is: what Keith wants or doesn’t want won’t bring Shiro back.

The truth is: nothing can breathe in space.

(Or: the story of how Keith and Shiro come together, come apart, and come together again.)

I Bookmarked Story: True
My Bookmark Tags: Fave, Wordcount: 30.000-50.000
My Bookmark Summary: oh GOD the pining. it hurts.

a pre-kerberos feels-fest. the first 2/3rds of this story especially were everything to my sad, ust-loving heart.

1. Chapter 1

Author's Note:

This is one of those stories that just wouldn't leave me alone, one of those that you just need to exorcise from your head and get out of your system. So, less than three weeks later and still only halfway finished, here it is.
Huge thanks to everyone who listened to me ramble about this story over these past few weeks and cheered me on. Also, huge thanks to lanyon for beta-reading. You're the best, guys. ♥

Here’s an incomplete list of things Keith knows:

You can pull up to six Gs in a fighter jet without a G-suit.

You can pull ten in a suit if you need to and live.

The will to survive is the strongest of human instincts.

A human body cannot withstand more than ninety seconds of exposure to the conditions of the outer space outside of Earth’s atmosphere before dying.

The loss of consciousness comes after ten to fifteen seconds.

Your lungs will explode if you try to hold your breath in.

The Kerberos mission wasn’t a pilot error.

.

He first sees Shiro long before Shiro ever sees him.

At fifteen, Keith is new to the Garrison, fresh out of St. Ursula’s Boys’ Home, all his belongings stuffed into a single duffel bag, the too-big jacket that he hasn’t yet grown into hanging off his shoulders, no tearful goodbyes left behind.

(They were relieved when he decided to leave, Keith thinks. The sisters never quite knew what to do with all the anger and bitterness inside of him, the strange child they took in and raised as best they could, but sometimes even that is not enough.)

He’s assigned sleeping quarters with three other cadets who never had to sleep in bunk beds before, and what for Keith has been a reality his entire life, for them is just a rude awakening. They complain about the noise, about the snoring and the tossing and turning, the rustling of the sheets in the middle of the night that doesn’t let them sleep.

Children, Keith thinks.

They mostly give him a wide berth, and they get along as well as four complete strangers can—keeping mostly civil but reserved. They don’t like it that Keith is a boy from nowhere, a little nobody who got lucky enough to get into a prestigious institution such as the Galaxy Garrison, but they don’t make his life a living hell either, and Keith has seen how cruel teenagers can be often enough to be grateful for that.

Small graces.

About a week after Keith comes to the Garrison, before their first training in the simulator, they take his group down to the training facility to observe a demonstration.

“Senior Flight Cadet Shirogane is our best pilot,” their instructor says, a stern-looking man in his forties, with a regulation crew cut and a neatly trimmed mustache. “Watch and learn.”

The guy who’s standing next to the simulator in textbook parade rest looks to be older than seventeen, and from the way they talk about him, they make it seem like he’s just days away from graduating. Still, Keith knows it’s bullshit, because they don’t let you out into the field until you’re eighteen, and besides, according to the file they gave them, the guy just turned seventeen about a month ago.

Keith can see the way the instructors are salivating over him, though—the pride of the Garrison, the prodigy, the one in a thousand shot. He looks like a good little soldier.

He can fly, though. Even Keith has to admit that.

Next to him, one of the guys who will probably be downgraded to cargo class as soon as they step into the sim leans towards one of Keith’s bunkmates and whispers, “I heard Shiro’s score in the simulator has been undefeated for the last two years. The guy is freaking amazing. My brother said they literally made him fly with his eyes closed once, and he aced it, can you believe it?”

Keith does his best not to roll his eyes.

The simulation ends at sixteen hundred hours on the dot; they have about thirty minutes to change and dump their books back in their bunks before the mess hall starts serving dinner, but Keith drags his feet a little, just to see Shiro emerge from the simulator. When he does, he looks calm and collected, and he salutes the training instructor before marching off to do whatever the hell prodigy pilots do before dinner.

In the mess hall, Keith takes a seat off to the side, at an unoccupied table with the view of the main entrance, and when Shiro walks in a couple minutes later, Keith accidentally makes eye contact with him for a split second before ducking his head like he’s been burned. The guy has enough people fawning over him already; no need to make it seem like Keith is one of them.

.

Two days later, Keith ties Shiro’s score in the simulator.

When he walks out, his legs feel like they’re about to give out under him, his pulse is racing like he’s just run ten miles, and he feels faintly sick, but the instructor just pats him on the back and congratulates him on a job well done.

The rest of his group watches him in stunned silence, but Keith can see the looks some of them exchange behind the instructor’s back.

Nobody likes a show-off, and Keith has never been graceful in triumph or defeat—too brash, too abrasive to be someone to look up to, too cocky to make him into a poster boy for the military.

“That was impressive,” he hears behind his back as he exits the training facility, one of the last to leave once training is over.

“Thanks,” Keith says impatiently, glancing over his shoulder, expecting to see one of the people in his group.

Instead, a few paces behind him, Shiro is leaning against the wall with his shoulder, his arms crossed on his chest.

“I failed my first simulator test, you know,” Shiro says after a moment of silence where Keith has no idea what to say or what to do with his hands, so he just stands there awkwardly, face to face with the guy whose record he came this close to beating just a few minutes ago. “Almost everyone fails on their first try. But not you. Where did you learn to fly like that?”

Keith shrugs.

“Around,” he says.

He expects Shiro to leave it at that and leave, because it’s not like he has any business talking to some rookie cadet when he’s already practically half a step away from being an officer, but instead, Shiro holds out his hand for Keith to shake.

“Sorry, I should’ve probably introduced myself,” he says. “I’m Shiro.”

“I know,” Keith says as he takes Shiro’s hand, a beat too late. “Keith.”

.

To say that they stay in each other’s orbit after that would be an overstatement. That would imply something more than the way they pass each other in the corridors of the Garrison from time to time, not even touching shoulders, even if Shiro always nods when Keith brushes right past him; something more than the way they sometimes bump into each other in the mess hall or in the commissary.

The only thing Keith really notices is that even though Shiro is friendly with so many people, he doesn’t exactly seem to have a lot of friends. Pedestals are very lonely places, after all.

In truth, the life at the Garrison doesn’t really differ that much from the life at the orphanage. There’s a strict schedule, there are rules to follow, and the food sucks. For Keith, that’s just part of the routine, the daily grind, and the monotony of it all is more familiar than anything else. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t sometimes feel like he wants to claw his way out of his skin, trapped in the concrete walls of the Garrison, but he just mostly takes it out on a punching bag at the gym, working up a sweat until he forgets about everything else.

He barely notices when he turns sixteen about four months into his stay at the Garrison.

About a week later, he’s sitting at a table in the mess hall with Marc, one of his bunkmates, eating something that’s supposed be beef stroganoff but tastes more like the soles of Keith’s shoes, when Shiro walks in and makes brief eye contact with Keith as he passes by, then gives him a nod and a smile.

Marc turns to Keith immediately.

“How the hell do you know Shiro?” he asks, his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Keith shrugs. “The Garrison is not that big,” he says, and he knows it’s the smartass answer, one that’s bound to piss Marc off, but he couldn’t give a shit if he tried.

Keith knows that people usually don’t like him. The instructors are in awe of his abilities; the brass want to see him succeed for their own sakes; the other cadets are either jealous or downright resentful. There’s not much space left for being liked.

He mostly keeps to himself, here and everywhere else he goes. It’s not that hard—he’s had years to perfect the art of being alone.

“Yeah, sure,” Marc says, hunched over his meal. He looks annoyed, the way many people do in Keith’s company. It’s not something that he can help, and he doesn’t exactly care, except when he does. It’s a maddening thing sometimes, living inside your own head.

Keith pushes his tray away and stands up, gets a few annoyed stares when his chair screeches against the tile.

“Whatever,” he says to Marc, grabbing his tray as he goes to trash the leftovers. “I’ll be at the gym.”

.

He’s been at it with the punching bag for about twenty minutes when the door to the gym opens and closes behind Keith’s back.

When the other person, whoever they are, doesn’t say anything, Keith just shrugs it off, flexes his shoulders and rolls his neck before landing another punch. He can feel the tingling in his knuckles, the way the tape gets a little too loose around his palm.

“You shouldn’t go back to training directly after a meal,” a voice says behind Keith, and when he turns back, Shiro is standing a few steps away, in a white tank top and loose pants, a roll of tape in his hands.

It feels like a déjà vu.

“If you want to call that a meal,” Keith bites back, then steadies the bag with his hands, stops to inspect the tape where it’s come loose.

Shiro, to his surprise, laughs. It’s low and warm, and it catches Keith completely off-guard.

“Fair enough,” he says. “But still. You should wait at least a bit, unless you want to make yourself sick. And believe me when I say I’m speaking from experience here.”

He takes a seat on the low bench by the entrance to the gym and starts to methodically tape his hands, completely unbothered by Keith’s silence or lack of any other response. After a moment of deliberation, Keith moves to fix his own tape, only to realize he left it in the locker room.

“Here, you can use mine,” Shiro says, handing the roll of tape to Keith, who hesitates for a moment before grabbing it. Slowly, he leans against the wall and unwraps the old tape, then re-tapes his hands, starting with the wrist.

Shiro looks up at him from the bench where he’s leaning on his elbows propped against his knees. “You can sit down,” he says. “I don’t bite.”

Keith tries for a polite smile.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

When Shiro returns the smile, it looks completely genuine.

“Not one for talking, huh?” he says, but it doesn’t sound mean. “How about sparring?”

The truth is, Keith has no idea why Shiro even bothers talking to him in the first place, other than the simple fact of sharing the same space. By his estimations, Keith should be less than a blip on his radar. And yet.

“Sparring?” Keith says, then secures the wrapping and hands Shiro the roll. “Thanks for the tape, by the way.”

Shiro gets up from the bench and takes a step in the direction of Keith, his shoulders loose and relaxed.

“Unless, of course, you’re not done beating the living hell out of that bag,” he says. “But otherwise…I’m game if you are.”

Keith thinks about it for a moment. He knows he’s scrappy in hand-to-hand more than anything else, and he also knows that Shiro is great at hand-to-hand combat, because Shiro is apparently great at everything, but if this means that Keith can maybe learn something, he probably shouldn’t say no.

“Sure, if you want to,” he says cautiously in the end. “We can spar.”

“Great.”

Next to him, Shiro stretches until Keith can hear his joints pop.

When they step onto the mat, Keith expects Shiro to lunge at him almost immediately, but Shiro keeps his distance, just out of arm’s reach, patient in a way Keith isn’t.

When Keith moves towards him, a fraction of a second later, he manages to get one punch in before Shiro twists his arm and pins him to the wall, momentum knocking the wind out of him as he feels Shiro increase the pressure just enough to ride the edge of pain. Keith shoves him off and turns around to face him.

“Patience,” Shiro says, once again staying just out of reach, his hands at his sides, but his eyes follow Keith’s every move. “Patience yields focus. Take your time, study your opponent’s moves. Don’t show your hand too early.”

The truth is, Keith fights the way he always has—scrappy and dirty, and to win, because that’s what you do when you’re eleven and the other guys are pushing fifteen, and there’s three of them, and they don’t like that you have a smart mouth on you.

He doesn’t know how to train himself out of it, because, by now, it’s survival instinct more than anything else. Shiro may have the impeccable technique, but Keith would bet he’s never been in an actual, real fight.

The next time Shiro comes in close enough to grab, Keith yanks him by the front of his tank top, trying to trip him.

“Nice try,” Shiro says, laughing, once he manages to get out of Keith’s grasp. His hair is falling into his eyes and Keith wonders if his haircut is even regulation.

This time, Keith waits for Shiro to make the first move, trying to find an opening in his stance. He manages to land two clean hits, one to the sternum, one to the ribs, before he ends up on his back with Shiro pinning him to the ground.

Keith pretends to go lax in his grip.

He can feel the exact moment Shiro loosens his hold on Keith’s wrists. It takes half a heartbeat to flip them around, and then Keith is sitting on Shiro’s thighs, holding him down.

“Well done,” Shiro says from the floor, glancing up at Keith, whose chest is now heaving with effort.

He’s not stupid, though.

“Yeah, nice try,” he says, then presses harder on Shiro’s wrists. Beneath him, Shiro laughs.

“I yield, okay,” he says, his voice breathy from exertion and laughter. “You can let me go now, you won fair and square. No funny business, I promise.”

After a moment of hesitation, Keith lets him go. He clambers to his feet, but before he can give Shiro a hand to pull him up, he’s already standing next to Keith.

“Good job,” Shiro says and pats Keith on the shoulder.

They’re leaving the showers together ten minutes later, both dripping water on the way to the locker room, when Shiro turns to Keith and asks, “So…Friday, same time?”

.

It becomes a thing after that.

Twice a week, they meet at the gym after hours, when no one else is there, to practice hand-to-hand, and what do you know, it turns out that Shiro is pretty great at teaching, too. Keith shouldn’t be surprised, really.

About six weeks into this arrangement, at the end of their training session, Shiro throws a bottle of water at Keith before reaching for his towel and asking, “What are you doing this weekend?”

Keith tenses almost immediately. It’s a tricky question that Shiro doesn’t even realize is tricky, and even though he must know by now that Keith is not exactly the most well-liked cadet at the Garrison, he probably doesn’t realize the true extent of it.

The rest of the cadets usually go into the town on weekends, descending on the locals who know that as much as they might dislike the Garrison for the noise and the restricted access to certain areas, there’s money to be made from that partnership, and money is a universal language.

Keith, though—Keith usually books more hours in the sim on the weekends and stays in his bunk the rest of the time, reading up on aerodynamics, leafing through flight manuals or just enjoying the silence in the barracks.

“I don’t know,” he says in the end with a shrug. “Not much, probably. Why?”

Shiro wipes his face and the nape of his neck with his towel, and once he’s done, his hair is sticking up every which way. It’s almost endearing. Senior Flight Cadet Shirogane, for once not entirely put together.

“A few of us are going out into town on Saturday,” he says, then runs his hand through his hair. “I think we’re all fed up with commissary food. Want to tag along?”

It’s not a good idea. For one, Keith has no idea who Shiro means by us, and it could be any number of people, including some who despise Keith to the core of their being for one reason or another. And two—he can’t help but feel like he’s bound to end up as the third wheel, despite the fact that nobody is even going on a date to begin with.

“And your friends won’t mind?” he asks instead.

Shiro shakes his head like he’s surprised at the very suggestion.

“No, they’re cool,” he says. “In any case, we’re leaving at thirteen hundred hours, so if you wanted to tag along, we could meet at the main entrance to the barracks?”

Keith looks at Shiro for a moment, and there’s nothing but earnestness and openness in his face. It’s unbearable, sometimes, the way Shiro just is, without any pretence, without holding anything back.

“Okay,” he says in the end. “I’ll think about it.”

.

Shiro’s friends turn out to be three other Senior Flight Cadets whom Keith has seen around the Garrison but never interacted with in any way. The two guys are called Noah and Elias, the girl’s name is Zoe.

Keith is not good at making new friends; he’s known that for a long time, so when they all meet in front of the entrance to the barracks, there’s a moment of awkward silence before Shiro introduces them, and Keith can swear that he sees the two guys look at him with suspicion. Maybe they know him by reputation; they wouldn’t be the first ones.

The ride to town is short and mostly quiet on Keith’s part. The other three seem to know Shiro a lot better than Keith does, so he just lets them talk among themselves, without trying to include himself in the conversation.

On the other side of the glass, the red, red desert is passing them by.

Sometimes Keith wonders what it would be like to just take a hoverbike and fly out into the vast expanse of rock and dust in the middle of the night, with just the stars for company. There has always been something that’s been calling him from beyond the safe walls of the Garrison. He used to think it was the cosmos. Now—he’s not so sure. Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s something more.

It used to scare him—thinking about the never-ending stretch of black emptiness above them. Now that he knows space isn’t empty at all, he doesn’t know if it comforts him or terrifies him more.

“We’re here.” Shiro briefly puts his hand on Keith’s shoulder, just to get his attention, then pulls back. “C’mon, you must be hungry.”

They choose a little hole-in-the-wall joint that either Shiro or one of the others must have been to before, because there’s no way they would just know where to look otherwise. It serves local food, which Keith is more than fine with, and is almost empty when they come in, save for an elderly couple seated at a table in the corner.

“So, Shiro tells us you’re some whiz kid pilot, huh?” one of the guys, Noah, says once they sit down at their table. Keith can hear the thinly-veiled condescension in his voice. “What’s your sim score, then?”

Better than yours, Keith wants to say, but he just shrugs instead.

“I’m doing okay for myself, I think,” he says.

Shiro, who sits at the head of the table to Keith’s right, puts his hand on Keith’s shoulder and squeezes. This time, the touch lingers.

“He tied my score on his first try,” he says as Keith watches the way the three other cadets go from patronizing to shocked in two seconds flat.

Zoe whistles quietly under her breath.

“Well, shit,” she says. “We have a little genius over here.”

The lunch is a strange experience. Shiro tries to include Keith in the conversation as much as he can, but with Keith’s innate aloofness and the other cadets’ apparent lack of interest, there’s only so much he can do. For the most part, Keith is almost content to let them ignore him; it’s not like he really cares. It stings, maybe, a little, to be treated like air half of the time and like a kid the other half, but he’s learned to live with the disappointment a long time ago.

It’s not even that they’re being intentionally mean; it’s just that Keith rarely engenders warm feelings in people in general.

Shiro must be still hanging around Keith out of sheer stubbornness. Maybe that’s it—maybe Keith has finally found a flaw.

A while later, once they’ve all eaten, someone suggests a change of venue—Zoe is craving a melon milkshake and Elias wants ice cream, so they relocate to a cozy little place that serves ice cream, milkshakes, smoothies and a few other things Keith isn’t really in the mood for, but he still tags along.

“Hey, do you want anything?” Shiro asks him when he’s the last one to not have placed an order.

Keith just shakes his head. “No, I’m good,” he says.

Shiro looks at him for a long moment. “You sure?”

Keith swallows and forces himself to meet his eyes.

“Positive.”

After that, Keith loses track of him for a longer while as they wait for their orders—he has no idea if Shiro has just gone to use the washroom, or if he had to step away for a moment for some other reason, but once he’s left alone with the other three cadets, it’s like they forget he’s there.

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna bail,” Keith says when it becomes clear that he should’ve listened to his instincts and just said no when Shiro invited him to tag along. “Tell Shiro I went back to the Garrison. Or don’t, whatever, I don’t care.”

He takes a bus back to the Garrison and walks the entire distance from the main gate back to the barracks. It’s slowly getting dark by the time he gets there.

For a moment, he considers heading straight for his bunk to spend the rest of the evening reading, but after short deliberation, he decides to sneak out onto the roof instead.

Theoretically, they’re not allowed up there, but in practice, nobody really cares, as long as no one is barring the door to fuck under the stars in peace.

It’s still warm, but there’s a faint chill in the air now, coming from the desert, and Keith has spent enough time up here, breaking curfew whenever he thought he could get away with it, to know exactly how cold desert nights can be. He doesn’t really mind the cold that much, even if it still sends a shiver down his spine, turning his skin to gooseflesh for a moment before he shakes it off. It helps him clear his thoughts, even as his breath turns to mist.

But now the heat of the day still lingers, trapped in the concrete under his body as he stretches out on the rough floor with his jacket balled up beneath his head.

In the distance, he can still feel the faint pull of the red, red rock and dust.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been there, just looking up at the sky, when the door behind him opens and closes, and for once, he knows exactly who it is.

“Hey, everything okay?” Shiro asks as he comes closer to sit beside Keith. “I came back and you disappeared.”

“Sure, everything’s fine.” Keith sits up, still looking out into the starry night sky above the Garrison. “Just thought I’d leave you guys to it. But thanks for inviting me.”

They sit in silence for a while as Keith waits for Shiro to get up and leave, but he just leans back, propped up on his hands, palms splayed against the warm concrete on the flat roof of the building. For a long, long moment, Shiro says nothing.

“Did something happen while I was gone?” he asks then, not turning his head to look at Keith.

Keith swallows, his mouth suddenly dry. There’s no way to explain to someone who’s always welcome everywhere what it means to know they don’t want you around.

“I just don’t get why you’re being so nice to me,” he says, and it comes out angry, bitter. Beside him, Keith could swear that Shiro almost flinches. “What am I, your little project on the side?”

He knows he’s lashing out because of something that wasn’t even Shiro’s fault to begin with, but he has no idea how to stop himself once he gets going. It’s a character flaw.

“I thought we were friends,” Shiro says, quiet. “Was I wrong?”

Keith finally, finally turns to face him.

“I just don’t understand why you would want to be friends with me,” he says. “Look, I know I’m a fuck-up, okay. I don’t need reminding. Everyone knows that. So I just don’t get why you’re so hell-bent on being my friend. Even your buddies know what people are saying about me, maybe you should listen to them.”

When Shiro looks back, his face is open and earnest, and something in Keith tugs at his insides painfully at the sight.

“You’re not a fuck-up, Keith,” he says, and he sounds like he believes it. “No matter how hard you try to convince yourself that you are. So I’m gonna be around, okay? And you can decide what to do with it.”

Just as he moves to leave, Keith catches him by the sleeve of his shirt. It’s weird, seeing him back at the Garrison without his uniform on.

“Thanks,” Keith manages to get out, his throat tight. “I just— Thanks.”

Shiro smiles, a little sad.

“Don’t mention it.”

Once Shiro leaves and the door closes behind him with the familiar thud, Keith falls back onto the still-warm concrete and closes his eyes, breathing shallowly until he stops shaking.

It’s just the cold, he tells himself.

.

He gives it a week.

He misses their Tuesday training session on purpose, and then his class is scheduled for survival training on the weekend, which means he’ll be missing the Friday session as well. If Shiro even shows.

They return late on Sunday, tired and dirty, and hungry, dragging their feet to the showers before hitting the mess hall, because the scuttlebutt has it that the cooks are in a good mood today and there might be something for them to eat before lights out.

Keith feels like there’s desert dust in places he didn’t even think possible, and when he runs his hand through his hair, it comes away looking red.

When he walks into the communal showers as one of the first, he finds Shiro in one of the stalls, rinsing himself off.

He hesitates for a moment, because as much as he’s unashamed of being naked around other people after years of using communal bathrooms, it’s not the best place to follow up on difficult discussions about friendship. Still, he steps into the stall next to Shiro’s and turns the shower on.

As Keith waits for the water to go from ice-cold to pleasantly warm, Shiro glances at him for a second before going back to washing the soap off his skin.

“How was survival?” he asks in a conversational tone. One stall over, Keith steps under the spray and the water instantaneously turns clay red. “Did you get Iverson?”

Keith scrubs at his hair ineffectually for a moment before giving up in favor of just soaking his skin for a brief while.

“Danvers,” he replies.

Beside him, Shiro nods. “She’s tough but fair,” he says. “You could’ve done a lot worse.”

Keith reaches for his soap and starts scrubbing.

“I know,” he says, turning his face away from the spray. He’s silent for a moment before he adds, “It was good. I don’t mind the desert.”

Shiro laughs. “That makes one of you.”

Keith knows that most of the cadets hate the desert, its vast emptiness and the feeling of isolation it brings, but Keith likes it that way. He doesn’t like big cities and he doesn’t like crowds, and out here, he can be alone with himself and the rest of the unknown universe.

“But I’m glad you liked it,” Shiro adds quietly and gives Keith a small smile. The weirdo is implied.

When Keith’s skin turns lobster-red from scrubbing himself raw and he moves on to the mess that is his hair, Shiro finally turns the water off and steps outside the stall to grab a towel, then asks, “Are we still on for Tuesday?”

Keith keeps his back to him, tension slowly seeping out of him, when he replies, “Yeah, if you still want to.” He pauses for a moment. “Same time as always?”

“Yeah, I’ll be there.”

He doesn’t need to turn around to know that Shiro smiles when he says that.

.

Shiro comes by Keith’s bunk on Tuesday before training. It has never happened before and Keith isn’t entirely sure what to think or what it means. Maybe Shiro wants to make sure Keith really shows up. Maybe he wants to tell him not to bother. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

They have a new bunkmate now, since one of the guys Keith used to share sleeping quarters with washed out.

(Couldn’t take the pressure, they said. Nobody ever asked Keith what he thought.)

Her name is Zara.

It’s still an adjustment, after years of living exclusively around boys, but Zara doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that she’s bunking with three guys. She’s not around very often, spending most of her free time in the common areas, at the library or in the sim (she’s fighter class, too, and good).

She’s there, though, reading a magazine in her bunk and digging into her hidden stash of gummy worms, when Shiro raps his knuckles against the door before crossing the threshold.

Before Keith can say anything, she asks, “Whatcha looking for, hotshot?” and Keith watches Shiro hesitate for a moment as he looks between the two of them.

“Sorry,” he says and his eyes turn to Keith, then back to Zara. “I thought we were— But I clearly misunderstood.”

When he moves to leave, Keith finally springs into action.

“Wait!” he yells after Shiro and gets to him in four quick strides, then, once the ridiculousness of the situation fully hits him, he doubles over with laughter. “Oh my god, Shiro. You’re not interrupting anything. Zara got assigned to our bunk after Erwin flunked out. C’mon, let’s go.”

Back at the gym, Shiro tosses him a wooden training stick and says, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed back there.”

Keith licks his lips.

“It’s fine,” he says, feels the weight of the stick in his hands. “Let’s do this.”

Twenty minutes later, they’re both sweating and breathing rapidly as Shiro finally gets past Keith’s defenses and aims a kick to his chest that has Keith staggering backwards, the wind knocked out of him as he trips and lands on his back, coughing. Shiro immediately drops the stick and kneels next to Keith, looking over him with worry.

“I’m okay,” Keith manages between bouts of coughing. His sternum feels like somebody lit it on fire and he presses a hand to the center of his chest, trying to make it stop.

“Are you sure?” Shiro’s hand covers his for a moment, trying to feel for any fractures to his sternum or ribs, and suddenly Keith can’t breathe for an entirely different reason.

“I’m fine, really,” Keith insists and moves to pick himself off the floor. Shiro goes with him in one fluid movement. “You just caught me off guard.”

“Maybe we should call it a day,” Shiro says then, moving to pick up the discarded sticks. “You did really well, Keith. Your technique has improved a lot since we started.”

Keith wipes his face with the hem of his shirt. “Thanks,” he says.

They don’t talk about it on their way to the showers, or after—about their last talk on the roof, and about what Shiro said back there. Maybe he just assumed that the fact that Keith stopped avoiding him answered the question he never openly asked. Maybe he just assumed that Keith wanted to be friends with him, after all.

In truth, the reality of it is more complicated than that; it’s always been that way, and now—now Keith can’t even begin to find the words to express what he really wants.

It is, at the same time, the simplest and the most difficult thing in the world.

.

He probably shouldn’t say yes when Shiro suggests going up onto the roof before lights out a few weeks later. He probably shouldn’t say yes, but he spent most of the afternoon outside, running drills with Iverson for the past four hours, and he’s too tired and too hungry to care.

They narrowly missed dinner, too, because the entire group got punished with laps at the end of training, so when they finally dragged themselves into the mess hall, the only things left were the disgusting mashed potatoes that didn’t even come from actual potatoes and a sad, tiny pile of steamed green peas.

So when Shiro comes by his bunk a while later, with an offer of junk food and some company, Keith drags himself out of his bed despite himself, saying goodbye to Zara on his way out, even though she’s probably already asleep. But, out of all the cadets who aren’t Shiro, Keith likes her the most, so he tries to make an effort, from time to time.

Outside, on the roof, the air is still warm despite the late hour. It’s almost summer, Keith tells himself, even though this place doesn’t really have seasons.

They both sit down with their backs against the elevated wall, and Shiro passes him a clif bar without a word.

“I thought you said junk food,” Keith says sullenly.

He doesn’t have much money left for this month, and the prices the commissary charges are ridiculous, so he’s been living on mess hall food for the most part, except for when Zara decides to be nice and share something from her stash, which doesn’t happen often.

Shiro laughs. “I just thought you might want to eat something more substantial first.”

Keith looks away as he bites into the bar, just in case his body decides to do something stupid, like kiss Shiro. Shiro, who’s sitting right next to him, radiating heat, open, honest and approachable, and completely, completely unattainable.

“They’re letting me graduate early,” Shiro says after the silence stretches between them for a long while.

Now that Keith is all too aware of the lack of distance between them, he wants to know if Shiro can hear the way his heart jumps in his chest.

“How early?”

“As soon as I turn eighteen,” Shiro admits, looking out into the desert stretching in front of them, beyond the Garrison fence.

Keith swallows down the last of the clif bar, but he might just as well be eating sandpaper.

“That’s in two months,” he says.

Beside him, Shiro nods.

“I probably won’t get my assignment right away,” he says, sounding almost guilty, like Keith matters more than the universe. It’s nice to pretend. “But I won’t be a cadet anymore. Hey, you never know, it might be nice.” Shiro nudges Keith in the side with his elbow. “I might get private quarters, and then we won’t have to come up here for some peace and quiet.”

Keith shrugs, and forces himself to look at Shiro. Forces himself to smile.

“I don’t know, I kinda like it here,” he says, aiming for teasing. “But I’m really glad for you, Shiro. I really am.”

It’s naïve and childish to think that things won’t change when Shiro goes from Senior Flight Cadet to Flight Officer, and Keith is neither naïve nor childish. He knows the rules. He also knows that Shiro follows the rules, so whatever it is that they’re skirting now—or whatever Keith is imagining they’re skirting—will have to disappear once Shiro graduates.

“You don’t sound glad,” Shiro remarks after a beat, and Keith instantly turns his head to the side, away from him. For all that he tries to keep his cards close to his chest, Shiro can read him too easily sometimes.

“Maybe not,” Keith says. “But I am.”

Slowly, the exhaustion catches up to him. He doesn’t want to leave like that, though, and have Shiro think that he’s mad at him.

He’s not. He’s mad at himself, for allowing himself to think too many things that were just too good to be true. He should’ve known better. He should’ve known to stay away, but now it’s too late. He got too close, and Shiro got under his skin while he wasn’t looking.

“I hear they’re letting your group into the training vehicles soon?” Shiro says after a moment of silence, a peace offering. “It’s amazing, the first time they let you out of the hangar.”

“Yeah,” Keith admits, and this time, when he smiles, the smile is genuine, even though there’s now an insistent buzzing under his skin, and he feels too big for his own body, the way he sometimes does, restless and riding the edge of frustration. “I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing. But I should probably hit the sack now, I’m beat.”

Shiro places a hand on Keith’s shoulder and squeezes.

“Of course,” he says, easy and relaxed, the words rolling off his tongue. He looks at his watch. “It’s almost lights out anyway.”

They part at the foot of the staircase, their sleeping quarters in two completely different parts of the barracks.

“Goodnight, Keith,” Shiro says, and Keith wants to kiss him.

“Goodnight,” he says instead.

.

When he walks into his bunk, the first thing he sees is Marc desperately jerking off under the covers, a dirty magazine splayed on top of the sheets. Justin is nowhere to be seen, but Zara is snoring softly in her own bunk. Keith feels like he’s about to lose it.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he half-shouts, half-whispers. “Zara is sleeping right there.”

“Yeah? But it’s not like I’m jerking it to her?” Marc whispers back, incredulous. “Dude, unclench.”

Keith leaves. He turns around on his heel and leaves his quarters, even though it’s lights out in ten minutes. He’s upset and horny, and in love with Shiro, and right now, he really doesn’t need reminding that he has a libido.

He ends up pacing along the length of an empty corridor for five minutes, trying to get himself under control.

There’s not much privacy at the Garrison, but then again, Keith has been used to having next to no privacy for a long time. Usually, it doesn’t really bother him, and he can be fast and completely quiet when he needs to, but sometimes—sometimes it’s just like this, when he’s restless and worked up, and there’s nowhere for him to go.

“What are you still doing here, cadet?” he hears behind his back, and when he turns around, one of the officers Keith doesn’t really know is standing at the other end of the hallway. “It’s lights out in five minutes, so scoot.”

“Yes, sir.”

Keith gives him a perfunctory salute and books it out of the corridor, past the officer and into the toilets, then locks himself in one of the stalls, hoping that whoever is on patrol tonight doesn’t come here to check.

He waits for a long, long time, listening for the sound of footsteps, before he finally ventures outside. At night, the Garrison is dark and quiet.

He waits a few more minutes, tucked into a small nook by the door, then moves quietly through the deserted corridors and up the staircase that leads to the roof.

His entire body is still brimming with nervous energy, his fingers itching to do something—wrap themselves around the handlebars of a hoverbike, wrap themselves around his own dick.

He does neither.

Instead, he just sits with his head between his knees, looking at the rough concrete instead of the starry sky, letting the cool air wash over him as the desert calls out to him in the night.

Much later, when he’s sure everyone else is already asleep, he sneaks back inside. When he dreams, he dreams in purple and black.

2. Chapter 2

Notes for the Chapter:

First of all: huge thanks to everyone for the lovely feedback! I'm beyond thrilled with the reaction this story has received so far, and incredibly grateful to everyone who read and commented.
Also, huge thanks to all my friends cheerleading behind the scenes, and to lanyon for the quick and effective beta! ♡

Shiro graduates two months later, on the anniversary of the death of Keith’s parents.

It suits him—the authority, the responsibility, and he wears the uniform with ease. Like there could ever be any doubt.

On his first night as an officer, he begs off the celebrations early and finds Keith instead. It’s probably not easy, since Keith doesn’t exactly want to be found, but when he sees Shiro, relaxed and flushed from the smuggled booze they’ve been plying him with, he can’t just tell him no.

It’s becoming a dangerous habit.

“Congratulations,” Keith says and slowly, gingerly wraps his arms around Shiro, pulling him into a hug. It feels awkward and stilted, and Keith can’t really remember the last time he hugged someone, or the last time he was hugged, but Shiro just melts into it, warm and pliant from the alcohol.

If he’s being completely honest with himself, Keith thinks he could use a drink, too.

“You’re gonna get there one day, too, you know,” Shiro says once he lets Keith go. “Sooner than you think, if all goes well. You just need to be patient.”

Eventually, they stumble out onto the roof and Keith shivers in the cold night air, despite the jacket. Above them, the sky is clear, abundant with stars.

It’s moments like these when he almost considers saying something, considers admitting out loud that maybe he likes Shiro a little more than he should.

He imagines Shiro would let him down gently.

“My parents died thirteen years ago today,” he says instead, and regrets the words as soon as they’re out of his mouth. “I was too little to really remember them.”

Next to him, Shiro tenses. “I’m so sorry,” he says.

Keith just shrugs.

“Don’t be,” he says. “It’s ancient history anyway.”

He knows that Shiro has a family—parents, a younger sister. When he goes to space, out to some distant planet far away from Earth, he’ll have someone back home missing him. He doesn’t talk about them often, but Keith knows they’re there. It’s more than he can say for himself.

“Your folks must be proud,” he says then.

Shiro laughs quietly, a small huff of breath more than anything else.

“I think they’re mostly scared I’m gonna get whisked away to some galaxy far, far away,” he says. “But yeah, they’re proud, too.”

Keith gives it a moment, then another.

“We should probably stop, right?” he says, because he’s always been a fan of ripping off the band-aid. “Now that you’re an officer and I’m still a cadet.”

In the faint light of the moon, Shiro looks at him with surprise.

“Stop what?” he asks.

“This.” Keith gestures awkwardly between the two of them. “It’s, you know, the rules.”

Shiro looks at him for a moment like he has no idea what to say to that, like whatever he thought would come out of Keith’s mouth couldn’t have prepared him for this.

“I didn’t know you liked the rules so much,” he says eventually with a breathy laugh. Keith laughs, too, despite himself. “But we’re not doing anything, Keith. It’s not against the Garrison rules to have friends.”

Right.

Right.

Friends.

That’s what they are, nothing more and nothing less. And Keith can do that—he can be Shiro’s friend until they send him somewhere far away, to the fringes of the known universe, and then he will be able to forget about Keith. Or they send him somewhere and Keith becomes a Flight Officer in the meantime, and when Shiro comes back— When Shiro comes back, they go back to being friends, because that’s what they are, nothing more and nothing less. Keith can do that, too.

“Yeah, I know that,” Keith says eventually, because he has to say something, and it comes out more defensive than he intended.

Instead of answering, Shiro knocks into Keith’s arm with his shoulder and smiles.

“So we’re still on for Friday, right?” he asks.

.

Shiro doesn’t get his assignment directly after being promoted to Flight Officer. Instead, he stays at the Garrison to train new cadets.

They have a bunch of young kids at the Garrison now, barely fifteen and fresh out of home, who look at Shiro like he hung the moon—and Keith knows that Shiro is a good teacher, but he has a way with those kids that Iverson never had, in a way that really shouldn’t surprise Keith as much as it does.

A few weeks into the training, the day before his group is due for their first sim demonstration, Shiro takes a seat in the mess hall right next to Keith at dinner and instead of digging in, just looks at Keith for a moment. It’s become a custom long ago, the two of them eating together, even after Shiro got promoted to Flight Officer and could, theoretically, sit at the commissioned officers table. Some people are still whispering about it behind Keith’s back, but it’s not like he cares what they have to say about him. Shiro—Shiro is a different matter entirely, and it sets Keith’s teeth on edge, every time people try to question Shiro’s judgment when it comes to his friendship with Keith.

“Are you free tomorrow at fifteen hundred hours?” Shiro asks eventually, then reaches for his drink.

Keith chews his chicken methodically for a moment, swallows, then says, “Yeah, I should be done by then. Why?”

“I want you to conduct a demonstration in the sim for my students,” he says, and it hits Keith right in the center of the chest, that Shiro trusts him enough to ask that.

Keith knows he’s a good pilot—hell, he’s one of the best, but his instructors say volatile and unpredictable, and hotheaded, and he knows Iverson or any of the others would never really consider him a role model. Good enough to send out into space or let him get himself blown to pieces in a fighter jet—oh, Keith is good enough for that, for sure, but not much else.

Still, he knows what his value is. That’s how he earns his keep.

“Sure,” he says, keeping his eyes on his tray for a moment before turning his head to the side to look at Shiro. “Why aren’t you doing it yourself, though? You’re the best pilot around.”

“I don’t know about that… You did eventually beat my score in the sim,” Shiro says, teasing. “And I want to be able to talk them through this, step by step. So thanks for saying yes.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Keith sees as Shiro pushes the peach he got with his dinner towards Keith, like he’s hoping Keith won’t notice until it’s too late.

“You don’t have to bribe me,” he says, laughing.

Next to him, Shiro is trying to look as innocent as possible.

“I’m not trying to bribe you,” he says with this sort of earnest honesty that makes something in Keith’s stomach clench. He’s laughing a little, too. “I just know you like peaches.”

If anyone ever thought to ask Keith why—it would be this.

.

When he walks out of the sim the following afternoon, Shiro gives him a solid clap on the shoulder and a quiet, “Well done.”

Keith just smiles to himself as he goes to lean against the wall, a few paces away, hands in his pockets.

When he passes a group of four students, he hears one of them ask in a snotty tone he knows all too well, “Why doesn’t he have to stand at attention and salute all the time?”

Keith is resigned to let this one go, because they’re just a bunch of stupid kids and he doesn’t have to prove anything to them, but, to his surprise, he hears Shiro’s voice behind his back, unusually stern, carrying across the room.

“That would be because he can pull off the toughest maneuvers in the flight manual with his eyes closed, Cadet Conaghan,” he says. “So I would advise a little more respect.”

Keith hangs around as Shiro walks the cadets through the simulation once again, this time in smaller groups, showing them around the cockpit and explaining the technical side of it, talking about procedurally generated environments and zero-G training. Keith knows all of this like the back of his hand, and there’s really no reason for him to be here anymore, but it’s also not like he has anything better to do.

So he stays.

Once class is over, the cadets slowly trickle out of the training facility, leaving the two of them alone. Shiro is going around making sure that everything is switched off and properly secured while Keith loiters by the door.

“You did well today, Keith.” Shiro walks over to him once he’s done being a good teacher and a good Garrison officer, and, briefly, he touches his hand to Keith’s shoulder. “It was a good demonstration. They can learn a lot from you.”

Keith almost laughs, because what could they possibly learn from a boy who sleeps with a knife under his pillow? (What could they possibly learn from him that they couldn’t learn from anyone else? That they couldn’t learn from Shiro?)

“Thanks,” he says instead.

They’re leaving the facility and Keith turns right, as usual, to get to the common areas and then back to the barracks, when Shiro catches him by the wrist and tugs him to the left.

“Come on,” he says, grinning, and Keith’s heart almost skips a beat. “I want to show you something.”

.

The hoverbike is red and shiny, and new. For a moment, Keith doesn’t say anything, content to just look at the thing without even touching it. Next to him, Shiro stands with his hands behind his back, clearly waiting for a reaction.

“Do you like it?” he asks when Keith continues to just stare. “I bought it with my first pay.”

Keith turns back to him, incredulous. “How much do they pay you?”

Shiro shrugs, looking like he’s stubbornly refusing to be embarrassed about this.

“I might have dipped into my savings a little bit,” he says. “But it was totally worth it. So? Do you like it?”

Keith swallows, then takes a step forward to touch the smooth, shiny surface of the bike.

“It’s amazing,” he manages eventually.

There’s a moment of pause after that, then Shiro says, “So…want to take it out for a spin?”

What Keith doesn’t expect when he says yes is that Shiro just hands him the holo-key like it’s nothing.

“Come on,” he says when Keith doesn’t move. “Hop on. We need to be back before dinner.”

.

If there’s one thing Keith could do forever, it’s this—just him and the wide, open space in front of him, and the sound of the wind in his ears.

They say that you go into the desert to lose yourself, but that’s not really true. Sometimes, you go into the desert because it’s the only place you can find yourself. Sometimes it’s the only place you can look for yourself to begin with.

It’s the first time Keith has been this far outside of the Garrison fence. There’s the town, but the road that leads there is man-made and belongs to civilization. Out here, on the other side of that fence, everything remains untouched. There’s something in looking at all this that makes Keith’s heart sing and his throat close up with something other than the red desert dust.

Maybe space is the same—open and wide, and untouched. Maybe that’s why it’s calling to him, too. Maybe, if he went out there, he could find even more of himself.

Eventually, they stop to take a break near a small outcropping of rocks, hidden from the desert wind. Keith tries to pretend that he doesn’t miss Shiro’s hands around his waist when they get off the bike.

In the distance, the sun is slowly setting, and Keith wonders how much time they have before Shiro looks at his watch and tells him they need to get back. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t come back at all.

He could kiss Shiro here, in the orange light of the setting sun, and nobody would ever have to know. They could just leave these two nameless people behind them in the desert dust, then go back to being Keith and Shiro once they reach the Garrison fence. He’s not sure Shiro could do this, though, even if he wanted to, because Shiro knows too much about himself and has too strong of a sense of self to just leave that part of him—that part of him that maybe wants to kiss Keith, too—behind like it’s nothing.

“What are you thinking about?” Shiro asks, knocking into Keith’s side, and Keith realizes that he’s been staring off into the distance for the past few minutes.

“Just…this,” he says, gesturing with his head to the vista stretching in front of them, the shadow of the deep canyon in the distance. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like, to just take a bike and go, and never come back?”

Shiro looks at him for a moment, then leans against the rock.

“What, should I be worried that maybe one day I’ll come back to the Garrison and you’ll be gone?”

The worst thing is, Keith has no idea if he’s joking or being completely serious. Even worse—he has no idea how to answer this question. The honest answer would be: maybe, because if there’s a place that feels like home to Keith, he hasn’t found it yet, and sometimes it feels like he’s just biding his time here at the Garrison, waiting for something to change, for something to propel him in whichever direction he should go, because, he thinks, this can’t be all there is. The other answer would be: no, because you’re still here, but Keith couldn’t promise that would be always true, so he just stays silent.

“No, just wondering,” he says eventually, and it feels like a compromise. “Besides, the Garrison might just as well do that for me once I graduate. Who knows where they’ll send me. Who knows where they’ll send you.”

“Yeah. I—” Shiro sighs. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Then: “We should go back.”

Keith looks over his shoulder at the sun slowly disappearing beyond the horizon, at the impossible stillness of the desert in that one brief moment between day and night.

“Let’s go,” he says.

.

Keith turns seventeen while everyone looks the other way.

It’s just a day like any other—he gets up at six, showers, eats breakfast at the mess hall, then spends most of the day in the sim, running offensive scenarios until he can’t feel his fingers, gets to the hangar just in time for engineer training.

A sandstorm hits just as they’re walking back to the base, and then it’s just a frantic sprint back to the barracks, trying to make it inside before the storm catches up to them. Keith knows that in reality, the only thing you can do is hide or let it carry you, but there’s no outrunning the storm.

He’s washing the grease and red dust off his hands and forearms, almost ready to leave for the mess hall before they start serving dinner, when Shiro walks into the washroom and leans against the wall. The two younger cadets who have been there since Keith walked in, mostly getting in the way rather than anything else, look between the two of them with curiosity.

It’s one of those things about having a reputation—you might not know people, but people do know you, or they think they do. The truth is, they don’t know shit.

They don’t know shit about Keith, but they don’t really know shit about Shiro, either. They don’t know how he laughs when Keith says something weird that he finds amusing, they don’t know that he hates cutting his hair but doesn’t mind clipping his undercut, and that chicken wings are his least favorite of the food they serve the mess hall. They have no idea he can do push-ups with another person sitting on his back, and they have no idea that he thinks sour Skittles are better than original, or that he dog-ears the pages of the books he reads.

They might just as well be reading a recruitment poster, for all it’s worth.

“I was hoping I would find you here,” Shiro says, completely disregarding the two cadets who don’t even have enough decency to stand at attention in the presence of an officer. “I need to go take care of a few things and I’ll be missing dinner, but I want to talk to you later, so come by my quarters once you’re done.”

“Yes, sir,” Keith says without missing a beat, just to see the look on the two other guys’ faces.

The cadets immediately stand a little bit straighter and actually salute Shiro when he walks out of the washroom. Keith smothers a smile.

He sits with Zara at dinner, slowly chewing the slightly bland chicken served with the mashed potatoes he hates and steamed corn he actually doesn’t mind, trying to think of a reason why Shiro would need to talk to him somewhere more private than the gym or the mess hall.

He figures that if it weren’t for the sandstorm, they would probably go up to the roof.

He’s almost done with his meal, finishing the last of his drink, when Zara turns to him.

“Hey, Kogane, see you at the gym in a few?” she asks. “I could use a spotter and Zucker is fucking terrible at it, so I’m not even gonna ask. And I’ve seen you spotting for Shirogane.”

Keith puts the cup down and shakes his head. “Can’t,” he says. “I have a thing to take care of. Another time, though?”

Zara eats the last of her corn and washes it down with water. “Sure,” she says then. “If Zucker doesn’t fucking kill me at the bench first.”

Keith stands up and collects his tray. “Hey, you could always bench-press Zucker,” he suggests.

Zara just laughs.

.

When he knocks on Shiro’s door, it’s pushing eighteen hundred hours already, and for a moment, there’s no answer. Then, just as Keith raises his hand to knock again, the door opens and Shiro is there, dressed in fatigues instead of the dress uniform, his hair mussed and one cheek slightly creased, like he was sleeping and Keith’s knocking woke him up.

“Sorry, I must’ve dozed off,” Shiro says, running down his face with his hand, then moves to the side to let Keith in.

It’s the first time Keith has been here. The room is small (but at least Shiro doesn’t have to share with three other people) and sparsely furnished—a single bed, a closet, a desk and two chairs. There are posters on the walls—a few old-school movies Keith barely recognizes, one with a strange egg at the center of the black poster and another one with an owl that seems to follow Keith’s movements with its eyes, even though he knows that’s impossible; a Garrison recruitment poster. Above the desk, pinned to the wall, there’s a workout regimen scribbled on a piece of paper and class schedule. On the desk, in the corner, is a framed photo of four people; the other three must be Shiro’s parents and his sister.

Out of the corner of his eye, Keith sees as Shiro stifles a yawn.

“Rough day?” he asks, and Shiro huffs in amusement.

“Rough day and a rough night,” he says. “They kept us up until zero two hundred going over night maneuver plans, and then I was teaching a class at zero eight hundred.”

He pauses for a moment and turns to the nightstand next to his bed, reaches for something, then turns back to Keith.

“But most importantly,” he says and takes a step towards Keith, and another, until they’re standing face to face, “happy birthday, Keith.”

Keith just stands there for a few seconds after Shiro pulls him into a hug, too surprised to do anything else, then slowly moves his arms up to wrap them around Shiro’s back. His heart is going a mile a minute.

When Shiro finally pulls away after a brief moment, Keith looks up at him instinctually, and his eyes linger on Shiro’s mouth for just a second too long. His throat feels tight.

“Here,” Shiro says then, taking one of Keith’s hands to stretch it out in front of him, palm up, and when Keith looks down, there’s what looks like a holo-key. “I wanted you to have this.”

The realization of what it is hits him like a punch to the solar plexus.

“Shiro,” he says, his voice quiet. The key is still lying in his outstretched hand, and Keith can feel the weight of it bearing down on him. “I can’t take this.”

Shiro shakes his head and closes Keith’s palm around the key.

“It’s just a copy, and it’s not much, but at least now you can use it when I’m not around.”

He can’t not know, Keith thinks in that moment. He can’t not know, and yet he’s still not running the other way.

“Thank you,” Keith says, then takes half a step back. The key is at the same time almost weightless and incredibly heavy in the palm of his hand. Slowly, he puts it in the pocket of his uniform.

Shiro is quiet for a moment, and he sits down on his bed with a sigh, then rubs his eyes, drags his fingers through his hair.

“I’m probably not the best company for celebrating anything right now,” he says with a laugh. “So I want to apologize in advance if I suddenly fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. It’s not you, it’s me, I promise.”

Keith laughs.

“I’ll make it up to you this weekend,” Shiro adds, and the laughter dies on Keith’s lips. “Unless this damn storm doesn’t let up.”

“They never last long,” Keith says.

The sandstorms are a bit like his anger that comes and goes in waves, there one second and gone the next, leaving just the residue of dust behind it.

“You’re probably right,” Shiro says, leaning against the wall as he pulls his knees up to his chest. His feet are bare now, and he looks strangely vulnerable. His toes are long and graceful; it’s such a strange detail to notice about someone, but once Keith does, he can’t help but stare. Shiro, though, doesn’t seem to mind.

After a moment of hesitation, Keith sits down next to him, the mattress giving slightly under his weight. He toes off his shoes, then pulls his legs up as well, wrapping his arms around his own knees. Next to him, Shiro’s arm is a warm point of contact, burning through the fabric of Keith’s uniform.

He wonders, for a moment, if Shiro knows how much this means to Keith, who has never been good at expressing what he’s feeling, but he wants Shiro to understand.

“I really appreciate it, you know,” he says. “What you’ve done. You should know that I—” I really like you. “It means a lot.”

If he were a little bit braver, he would turn his head and kiss Shiro on the cheek. It wouldn’t even have to mean anything. As it is, he just sits next to him, with their arms and thighs touching, and says nothing, content to just breathe in sync with Shiro in the silence of the room.

It’s still the best birthday he’s ever had.

.

On Saturday, they take the hoverbike into the town, just the two of them.

There’s a burger place that Keith has heard of but never really tried, and Shiro swears by it, so at lunchtime, they go there for burgers and fries.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but on the inside, it’s really nice in a way that brings to mind the classic Americana look Keith sees in movies sometimes. The walls are partially tiled with white tile and painted light blue, and the booths are in a nice shade of red, the tables made out of reclaimed wood, the menu written out above the counter in chalk, on a wall that’s been painted black. The bell above the door chimes when they come in.

The place is air-conditioned, and the hairs on Keith’s forearms rise a little as his body adjusts to the temperature inside.

The girl standing behind the counter greets them with a smile, then, once she recognizes Shiro, her smile turns from polite to completely genuine.

“Hi, it’s great to see you back,” she says. “Can I get you guys a table?”

Shiro smiles back and shakes his head. “No, thanks, we’ll be fine,” he says. “I’ll come by in just a moment to order, okay?”

The girl nods, still seemingly delighted to see Shiro again. “Of course,” she says. “If you need anything, just let me know.”

I get it, Keith wants to say to her. It only gets worse when you get closer.

The thing is, Keith isn’t charismatic or charming like Shiro. He’s just pissed off and more bitter than he should be at seventeen, and unsure, hiding it behind a façade of anger.

But Shiro—Shiro is like a sun that you can’t help but stare into until it blinds you, a center of gravity pulling you in.

It’s impossible, resisting this pull.

Shiro finds them a table at the back of the room, by the window, and they sit down to look through the menu that looks like an article pulled from an old newspaper. It’s kind of cool, Keith thinks.

“Pick whatever you want,” Shiro says. “My treat.”

In the end, Keith orders a double cheeseburger with mango chutney and fries, a serving of onion rings and a vanilla milkshake, trying not to feel too guilty about the price. Shiro orders a burger with caramelized onions and curry sauce with fries on the side and a coke.

“We can share the onion rings,” Keith says magnanimously once Shiro comes back to the table, then makes an exaggerated face. “I guess.”

Shiro laughs. Under the table, their ankles knock together for a moment and Keith moves to pull back, but when Shiro just relaxes into the touch, he stays put.

It feels like a date.

It feels like a date, even though Keith knows it’s not a date, because Shiro isn’t— He wouldn’t— It’s not like that.

There’s no use dwelling on what can’t be.

Still, the way he wants to kiss Shiro is like a vice around his chest, tight and painful, and there to stay.

The food is amazing—made all the more amazing by nothing but weeks and weeks of mess hall food—and Keith inhales his portion as soon as he arrives, leaving only a few fries—thick and golden, and fluffy on the inside—and the onion rings he shares with Shiro.

“The girl at the counter is really into you,” he says then, before he can stop himself. Part of him just wants to see Shiro react. Another part of him wants to get it over with, force the other shoe to drop, so to speak. He would say it’s just like poking a bruise to see if it still hurts, but it’s really more like slamming yourself into the corner of the table repeatedly to give yourself the bruise in the first place. “You should leave her your number or something.”

For a moment, Shiro says nothing, just studies Keith’s face with more scrutiny that Keith thinks he can bear.

“That’s really nice of her,” Shiro offers in return eventually. “But I’m here with you.”

It shouldn’t hurt like a punch to the solar plexus. And yet, like with so many things about Shiro, it does.

Keith excuses himself to use the restroom. It’s single stall, so he just locks himself inside and washes his face, dries it with a paper towel and presses his forehead to the cold tile of the wall. It doesn’t really help.

When he returns after a moment, he smiles at Shiro when he looks up to meet Keith’s eyes.

“Want to go and take the bike for a spin around the canyon before we need to head back?” Shiro asks, handing him the key to the hoverbike.

They go.

When they fly above the red, red desert, Keith tries to stop thinking about the way Shiro’s arms are wrapped around his waist, their thighs touching.

Like much of Keith’s life, that, too, is a fool’s errand.

.

On Monday, Keith is on his way to class when Zara catches up to him in the hallway.

“Tell your boy Shirogane congratulations when you see him, will you?” she says, elbowing Keith in the side.

Keith looks at her, confused. “Congratulations on what?”

“Getting to pilot the Kerberos mission, duh.” She eyes Keith like she’s trying to figure out if he’s playing a prank on her. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know. The entire Garrison has been talking about this all morning. And apparently it was decided on Thursday, so there’s no fucking way you didn’t know.”

Keith doesn’t just stop in the middle of the busy hallway only because his body takes over like he’s on autopilot, so he keeps moving forward, pushed by the momentum. He has no frame of reference for the cold, heavy feeling in his gut. Maybe he felt that way back when they told him his parents were dead, but he can’t know for sure. Too young to remember.

It was his birthday on Thursday.

It was his birthday on Thursday, and Shiro asked him to visit him in his quarters, and pressed the holo-key to the hoverbike into his palm, and said, at least now you can use it when I’m not around.

In retrospect, a horrifying number of things make sense.

He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he takes off down the hallway, takes the first left and then the second right, dodging between the students milling around in the corridors.

Sure enough, he finds Shiro at the entrance to the sim training facility.

“So you were planning night maneuvers, huh?” he says, his voice carrying across the open space. “On my birthday.”

Shiro turns around and looks at him. Keith has no idea what it is that he sees, exactly, but whatever it is, it makes Shiro’s eyes widen.

“And there was no way you could’ve mentioned, oh, by the way, they’re sending me across the fucking Solar System for a year or two, right?” Keith continues, feeling the edge of hysteria rise up and up in his throat. “Because that’s fair.”

Shiro takes a few steps towards him, then another one.

“Keith,” he says. It’s so quiet Keith almost misses it.

“Were you even going to tell me, or was I supposed to learn from the news like everyone else?” he spits, his voice on the verge of a scream.

He doesn’t care that there are people in the hallway, staring at the two of them. They can all go to hell, as far as he’s concerned.

Shiro doesn’t have that luxury.

“Get a grip, cadet,” he says in a commanding, authoritative tone, the kind he uses when his students start to get out of hand. The poster boy for the military.

The rank burns Keith’s face like a slap on the cheek.

“Yes, sir,” he grits out through clenched teeth. “Permission to be dismissed?”

Shiro just looks at him.

“Keith…”

“Permission to be dismissed? Sir?” Keith repeats with emphasis.

“Permission granted,” he says. He sounds tired, so tired that Keith almost wants to take it all back.

Instead, he turns on his heel and leaves.

.

He skips class, even though he knows he’s going to be written up for that, but he can’t bring himself to care.

At this hour, there’s no one up on the roof, and no one will think to look for Keith there—no one apart from Shiro, but he’s teaching classes until sixteen hundred hours, with only a short break for lunch.

By Keith’s estimations, he has at least a few hours of peace and quiet to slowly stew in his anger.

It’s not that he thought Shiro would stay at the Garrison forever—no, it’s not about that. What really stings, what really burns down to the core is the knowledge that Shiro has known about it for the past few days and still let it blindside Keith completely.

For a moment, he considers running back to the hangar to take the hoverbike and fly until he reaches the very edge of the desert. Maybe, by the time he came back, this irrational anger would die down, leaving behind only dust.

The thing is, he knows he has no right to demand anything of Shiro, but it still feels like a betrayal.

He spends most of his time reading one of the advanced flight manuals he’s had stuffed into his bag for ages, almost falling apart from use. It’s interesting enough to keep him distracted and occupied, but he still glances at his watch every now and then, counting down.

Shiro comes up earlier than Keith expected. Must’ve skipped lunch, he thinks.

“You shouldn’t skip class,” Shiro says behind Keith’s back, and it’s like no time has passed since that moment in the hallway, Keith’s anger so bright and hot it almost blinds him for a second.

He gets to his feet, turns to face Shiro, who still looks tired and mostly resigned, but for a moment, the observation doesn’t really register, replaced instead by hot, white fury.

“Or what, you’re gonna write me up?” he spits out. “Put me in the brig?”

“Keith. Enough.”

Keith observes the tight set of Shiro’s jaw, the way the muscles of his neck work as he stands a few paces away from Keith. Immovable object.

The thing is, Keith knows for a fact that he’s not an unstoppable force; it’s easy to guess how this ends.

“Can you at least tell me why?” Shiro asks.

“You know why,” Keith says stubbornly, his jaw tight. He’s not going to cry. “You can’t not know.”

Shiro says nothing to that, but when he looks away briefly before looking straight back at Keith—that fraction of a second, a blink and you miss it moment, is enough to give him away.

“Shiro, come on,” Keith says, and takes a step forward. Shiro, at least, doesn’t take a step back.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” Shiro says then, and god, he sounds so sorry. It breaks Keith’s heart a little—just a small crack, but he has an entire collection of them by now, and who knows which one will be the one to finally do it. “I didn’t mean for you to find out like that, but I didn’t want to tell you on your birthday either.”

Keith looks straight at Shiro, stubbornly quiet.

“But you can’t do these things,” Shiro says then, voice firm. “And I understand why you’re upset, but this needs to stop now. If you want to disagree with me, disagree with me in private, but when you do this in public, it’s not fair to either of us, and I’m obligated to react. I can’t just let it go. Do you understand?”

Keith grits his teeth.

“Yes, sir,” he says, his jaw still tight.

He can see Shiro’s shoulders sag under the weight of everything Keith has put there.

“Keith…” He takes another step forward, and suddenly they’re less than two feet apart.

“What.” Keith still eyes him warily, but at least the anger from before recedes in his mind, and when the tension finally leaves his body, he slumps against the wall. The thing is, Shiro has no idea what it’s really like, to be left behind again and again, and again. What it’s like when home is not a place but a person. “I get to be pissed about this, okay? I’m sorry about earlier, but I’m not sorry for being angry.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“Good,” Keith says, crossing his arms on his chest. “Because I’m still mad. But we’re still on for tomorrow, after dinner, if you want.”

Shiro nods and looks like he wants to say something else, then thinks better of it. He’s halfway to the door when Keith says, “And congratulations on getting the assignment.”

The words almost don’t taste bitter on his tongue. Almost.

.

The next day, Keith gets down to the gym just in time to see Shiro already on the mat, stretching. For a moment, Keith just stands there in the doorway, watching, observing the way Shiro moves, the way his muscles shift under the skin, graceful and powerful at the same time.

Over the months he’s lived with the knowledge that he’s in love with Shiro, he has never really let himself just look, afraid of what might happen if he did. But now Shiro is leaving in a matter of months, and before he leaves, Keith needs to commit him to memory.

A year is a long, long time when there’s an entire Solar System separating you.

“Hey,” Keith says eventually, coming inside and closing the door behind him.

Shiro turns at the sound of Keith’s voice, looking up from where he’s sitting on the mat, legs outstretched.

“Hey. I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

Keith removes his shoes and joins Shiro on the mat.

“I said I’d be here, didn’t I?”

He stretches for a long moment while Shiro says nothing, even after he finishes his own warm-up. Instead, he just sits next to Keith as he continues to methodically tape his hands, watching Keith, like he’s trying to figure him out. It’s almost funny, the way Shiro thinks Keith is a riddle to decipher, while Keith can’t shake the feeling like he’s just an open book to Shiro, everything splayed out in the bright light of the day for everyone to see, including his heart.

This—this is how you get hurt.

After a while, Keith tosses the roll of tape to the side and gets to his feet, and Shiro follows suit, then tosses him a staff, propped against the wall up until now. Keith catches it with one hand.

“Best of three?” Shiro asks, and Keith nods without a word.

They’ve done it before. It’s half-fight, half-dance, the rhythm of it familiar and easy as they circle each other on the mat. It’s almost muscle memory, just letting your body take over until you lose yourself in the fight, but there’s also that other part to it, the part where you never take your eyes off your opponent, studying his every move. It’s constant push and pull, and it’s adrenaline rush, endorphins flooding your brain, and Keith can’t help but grin.

Shiro moves a fraction of a second later, and Keith sidesteps the blow easily, moves to the side to strike Shiro from the left, and when Shiro keeps his side wide open for a moment, Keith moves in without hesitation, the staff connecting with wood instead of flesh as Shiro turns around at the last moment. Keith parries immediately, a flurry of strikes as he moves forward, trying to leave Shiro no place to run. Instead, Shiro feints, then hooks his staff under Keith’s chin and sends him sprawling for just a second, long enough to get out of the corner, but not long enough to pin Keith down.

When Keith gets to his feet, his throat feels like he’s been punched. Coughing, he takes two steps back, but he never loses his stance, the staff raised in front of him to protect his chest. A few feet away, Shiro is waiting.

“Come on,” Keith forces out, his voice shot to hell.

This time, when Shiro moves, Keith parries the first two blows, then strikes Shiro in the center of his chest. Shiro stumbles, or pretends to stumble, and when Keith drops his guard for less than half a heartbeat, he moves in to strike a blow to Keith’s ribs. It hurts when it lands against an old bruise, the pain so vivid for a moment that Keith almost drops his staff. A second later, and he’s down on his stomach, his face pressed against the floor. Above him, Shiro touches his forehead to the sweaty nape of Keith’s neck, breathing heavily as he maintains a strong grip on Keith’s arms, pushing him down.

Keith runs hot all over, bites into his lip to keep himself from making a sound.

“One,” Shiro whispers into Keith’s hair. His breath is hot against Keith’s skin.

The second he loosens his grip on Keith’s arms, Keith pushes him off, pushes his hair away from his face.

“You should get a haircut,” Shiro jokes, reaching out to smooth back the hair that’s still falling into Keith’s eyes. “You’re getting all shaggy.”

Keith swallows, trying not to lean into the touch.

“Come on,” he says. “Round two.”

This time, Shiro doesn’t make it easy on him as they trade blow after blow, the sticks hitting against each other with a loud noise that carries in the big, open space of the gym, but then Keith finds an opening and pushes Shiro back, and again, and again, until he finally stumbles. Keith is on him in an instant as they struggle for a moment on the ground, with Keith straddling Shiro’s lap, pushing him into the mat. Shiro tries to push him off, but Keith pins his arms above his head and holds, breathing heavily for a moment as he recovers, not relaxing his muscles even for a fraction of a second, his whole body tense like a bowstring about to snap.

“One,” Keith breathes out with a grin.

He gets him the next time, too, getting down and dirty as the staffs land on the floor with a loud clatter, forgotten as they wrestle with each other for a moment before Keith puts Shiro in a chokehold, kneeling with Shiro’s back plastered against Keith’s chest, and they breathe for a long while in sync, trying to get their bearings.

“Two,” Keith whispers into the shell of Shiro’s ear, and he could swear he can feel Shiro shudder against him.

When he releases him, Shiro slumps forward for a second, still breathing heavily, and as Keith moves to stand up, Shiro catches his staff and turns around, swinging at Keith. Keith has less than a second to get to his staff and get into a defensive position, and he almost, almost makes it, but Shiro trips him up before he can reach it, pushes Keith against the wall and holds him in place for a moment, Keith’s cheek against concrete.

“Two,” Shiro says, and now Keith can hear the adrenaline high in his voice.

They both get up and retrieve the staffs, put some distance between them as they try to catch their breath. They move cautiously, each staying in his own space for a moment, trying to wait the other out. Keith knows he stands no chance like this—between the two of them, it’s Shiro who has patience down to an art, so if he wants to make this one count, he needs to make a move on his own terms.

He waits a moment longer, then another, sees the way Shiro eyes him from across the mat, like he’s trying to gauge if Keith’s patience is already wearing thin. He wants a moment longer, looks for the slight shift in Shiro’s stance and attacks, trying to strike in the center of Shiro’s chest.

Shiro blocks at the last moment, braces himself and strikes back.

It’s one, two, a step to the side and two steps back; a block and a parry when Shiro strikes a blow to Keith’s arm, the sound of wood hitting wood, another step back, and another, a moment of tension as Shiro moves away, then shifts, strikes from the right. They trade blows for a while, neither willing to give any ground, until Keith is sweating, his vision blurry and his hair falling into his eyes. He can feel his muscles screaming in pain as Shiro strikes again, and again, and again, until he finally hooks his staff with Keith’s and throws him to the ground, then holds him down as Keith tries to struggle, pinning him in place.

“Three,” Shiro says, his voice barely audible over the sound of his heavy breathing.

They should get up—they should get up and get some distance between them, clear their heads, but instead they just stay like this for a while, breathing rapidly, their faces almost close enough to touch. They’re not fighting anymore, but the adrenaline is still buzzing in Keith’s veins, makes him run hot all over—or maybe that’s just Shiro, who is still straddling Keith’s hips, pressing him into the ground with his weight.

After a moment that feels like a hundred years, Shiro slowly inclines his head until his face rests in the crook of Keith’s neck as they both continue to breathe, Shiro’s lips brushing against Keith’s skin with every shuddery exhale.

Before he can think about it, Keith’s hips jerk up, pressing harder into Shiro, and this time, he can’t stop the sound that escapes.

Above him, Shiro stills.

Keith feels overheated and shivery at the same time, like he’s running a high fever, and what escapes his lips is a quiet, choked-off groan. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, his face burning, as he waits for Shiro to get off him instantly. Instead, Shiro pulls himself up on his elbows and pushes Keith’s hair away from his face.

Keith can hear the way he swallows, and it’s impossible not to notice that Shiro is half-hard against him. It’s not like Keith is any better, though, and he has no idea what they’re doing anymore; if it’s just fighting or if it’s fucking, or if it’s something in between, something they can’t even begin to name. Whatever it is, though, Keith needs it to stop before he loses it completely, because Shiro leaves in a few months, and he’ll be gone for a year, if not more, and neither of them can afford to start something they won’t be able to finish.

“Shiro, come on,” he says, his voice rough and breathy at the same time. He sounds desperate even to his own ears.

For a moment, Shiro touches the underside of Keith’s jaw, the curve of his palm matching the curve of the bone. Then he pushes his upper body off Keith’s chest and stands up, offering Keith a hand.

“Want to hit the showers?” Shiro asks then as he puts the staffs away.

Keith understands this question for what it is—a friendly suggestion and nothing else—but there’s no way he could get naked in front of Shiro right now, not with his dick still stubbornly half-hard in his pants.

“I think I’m gonna stay back a moment, do some stretches to wind down,” he says and almost doesn’t recognize his own voice. “But you go ahead.”

Shiro gets as far as the entrance to the gym, then pauses with his hand on the panel, about to open the door, and looks back, opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, then shakes his head almost imperceptibly.

Keith doesn’t look away the entire time.

Once Shiro is gone, Keith slumps against the wall and slides down until he’s sitting on the cold floor, his feet planted wide, his knees open, the unbearable tension low in his abdomen. He feels like he’s burning up.

Stop, he repeats in his head over and over again, like a mantra. Stop, stop, stop.

He waits for a long, long time, just to make sure he doesn’t run into Shiro in the showers or in the corridor. Then, slowly, he clambers up to his feet and leaves, heading straight for the showers.

Inside, it’s dark and empty.

The lights turn on by themselves as soon as Keith steps inside the room, and he chooses a stall away from the door, just in case, then sets the temperature to so hot it’s almost scorching and steps under the spray.

For a moment, he just stands there, letting the hot water wash over him, then wraps his hand around his dick, stroking himself hard and fast, more to relieve the tension rather than for any real, actual pleasure, and he comes embarrassingly fast with a muffled groan and the image of Shiro under his eyelids, his eyes screwed tightly shut and his other hand braced against the wet tile of the shower.

He quickly washes the evidence away, face burning with shame.

Once he gets out of the shower and towels off, he thinks for a moment that he could just go to Shiro and no one would have to know. He could just knock on Shiro’s door, and come in, and then—then maybe he would finally be brave enough to kiss him, sneak his hand under the elastic of his pants and wrap his fingers around Shiro’s cock, jerk him off with his mouth slack against Shiro’s lips as they breathe the same air. Maybe Shiro would come with a choked-off moan. Maybe he would be completely silent. Whatever the answer, though, he would be there, and that’s what would matter.

But Shiro was the one who moved away first, and that—that’s answer enough, too.

.

They’re running a crash-landing scenario in the sim the next day, and Keith spends all of the morning and most of the afternoon in the training facility, either participating or observing.

He hasn’t seen Shiro since he left the gym yesterday evening, leaving Keith hot under the collar.

By the time they’re done with the scenario and are allowed to leave the sim, Keith has been hungry for so long that he almost stopped actually feeling it—it’s that strange sensation when you’ve been going without food for so long your body almost convinces you you’re not even hungry anymore, like you’ve flipped a coin and suddenly found yourself on the other side.

Still, he drags himself to the mess hall just in time for dinner, and he looks around as he fills his tray with chow (corn on the cob with potato mash and some mystery meat that Keith doesn’t even try to identify), but Shiro is nowhere to be seen.

He sits down at a table in the corner and starts to diligently chew on the mystery meat, which might or might not be either beef or pork—hard to say, really—when Zara comes to sit by him. She’s been gone the past couple of days, out for survival training. They must’ve come back while Keith was slowly dying of boredom at the sim training facility.

“Why the long face, Kogane?” she asks, elbowing him in the side. “Missing your boy Shirogane? I heard he got called in by the brass earlier, something to do with the Kerberos mission.” She chews her food thoughtfully for a moment. “So how’s it been, got it all out of your system? I heard about your little meltdown. I honestly thought you knew, man.”

Keith bristles at that.

“He’s not my boy,” he says.

Zara looks at him for a long moment, a little stunned.

“Dude, it’s a figure of speech.”

Keith shoves more of the disgusting mashed potatoes into his mouth in lieu of answering.

“We’re fine,” he says in the end under his breath, so quiet that for a moment he thinks Zara couldn’t hear him over the low hum of the mess hall.

“Whatever you say, flyboy.”

Zara shrugs eventually, then goes back to eating. It’s one of those things Keith appreciates about Zara—the way she just goes with the flow of things. Sometimes Keith thinks he’s almost envious of her.

He leaves the mess hall as one of the last, long after they stopped serving actual food, long after Zara had returned to their quarters. When he gets up to return the tray and leave, Keith has every intention of going straight to his bunk and reading until he falls asleep. Instead, as soon as he reaches the door, he turns left and heads for Shiro’s quarters.

There are still people milling around the hallways, and Keith has to push through a group of young officers blocking one of the corridors, but when he reaches Shiro’s quarters, it’s almost quiet, no one in sight.

Keith knocks once, twice, and when there’s no response, he tries the panel. Surprisingly, it opens under his touch.

The light inside the room is dim, and it takes Keith a moment to adjust, but when he does, he finds Shiro curled in on himself on the bed, sleeping on his side with his face to the door, dressed only in a white tank top and fatigues. One of his arms is tucked under his head, while his other arm rests on the mattress, his hand flat on the pillow a few inches away from his face.

Keith turns away to leave, and he manages two steps in the direction of the exit, his palm already hovering above the panel, ready to open the door, when Shiro stirs.

“Keith?” he says, his voice rough and gravelly.

Keith turns around and watches as Shiro pushes himself up on the bed until he’s propped up on his elbow, looking straight at Keith. His hair is a mess.

“Hey,” Keith says and swallows thickly, once, twice. “I didn’t realize the door would even open for me. I didn’t mean to wake you up, sorry, I’m gonna go now.”

He turns to the door, but before he has a chance to press the panel, Shiro says, “Wait. Stay.” A pause. “We should…we should probably talk. About yesterday.”

Keith wants to run.

“Yeah,” he says instead. “We probably should.”

Slowly, he walks over to sit down next to Shiro on the bed. When he takes a seat, the mattress is still warm from Shiro’s body heat, the sheets crumpled. Usually, the corners of the sheet and the blanket are neatly tucked under the mattress, according to regulations.

“I’m not just imagining this, am I?” Shiro asks after a moment of silence. “This…whatever it is. Tension.”

From his place on Shiro’s bed, knees tucked under his chin, Keith stubbornly looks straight ahead.

“When you asked me why, and I said that you couldn’t not know why, that’s what I meant,” he admits.

In the dim light of the room, so dim it’s almost completely dark, it’s easier to say all these things Keith would never have the nerve to say in broad daylight. He waits it out—a moment, then another.

“It’s been there for a while, at least for me,” he adds.

When he slightly turns his head to the side, just enough to look at Shiro out of the corner of his eye, he sees that he’s sitting with his head tipped back, resting against the wall, his eyes closed.

“Me too,” Shiro says, and for a few seconds, Keith can’t hear anything other than the frantic beating of his own heart. Shiro pauses for a moment, then continues, “But you’re not going to like what I have to say.”

Keith swings his feet down to the floor and turns to face Shiro, hands gripping the edge of the mattress.

“Shiro…”

“I’m leaving in five months,” he says, his voice firm. “For a year, maybe more. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us. But especially to you.”

Keith swallows.

“I know.”

Shiro looks at him, tension visible in his body.

“But?”

Keith presses his lips into a thin line.

“But nothing. I know.”

It’s just like he always knew it would happen—Shiro lets him down gently.

Keith wants to go, wants to not be in this room—to not be around any people at all—but he forces himself to stay, because it wouldn’t be fair to Shiro, to just leave like that without another word, like he doesn’t care. He does. That’s the entire problem.

“Keith.” Shiro reaches out and gently touches Keith’s shoulder, slides his hand down until it rests against Keith’s forearm, warm and slightly calloused. “I’m not saying not ever, okay? Just…not now.”

Keith nods, his eyes fixed on the fraying seams of his sneakers, the scuffed tops. A moment later, Shiro shifts his hand to touch the side of Keith’s neck, the curve of his jaw. And that—that’s not fair to Keith.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says, quiet.

Keith keeps his mouth a thin line.

“It’s fine,” he says. Another crack, and this one actually does it, he can feel it in his chest. The whole left side of his body hurts. “It’s all fine, Shiro. You don’t need to worry about this.”

.

He sneaks out right before lights out, gripping the holo-key tightly in the palm of his hand. He’s never really taken the hoverbike anywhere without Shiro, but he guesses there’s a first time for everything. The guard at the gate is busy replaying something on the video feed, and Keith uses that moment to press his identification badge against the scanner and book it out of the Garrison grounds as soon as the gate opens.

In front of him, the desert is wide and open, and red. In the distance, on the horizon, there’s still a sliver of deep, crimson sun setting visible just above the line of rock and dust. Keith flies straight toward it.

He stops after minutes—maybe hours—have passed; he’s not really sure. All he knows is that now there’s just a tinge of a purple aura to where the sun was just a while ago, and that he’s ventured far, far beyond the walls of the Garrison. He doesn’t really recognize the place where he stops for a moment to rest, but he should be able to navigate back to the barracks with no problem anyway. In the distance, he sees something big and dark, and angular that looks nothing like rock. It looks like a house, but there are no lights in the windows. Whoever lived there must have left a long, long time ago.

He sits on the rapidly cooling ground, with his back propped against a rock jutting out of the dust and his eyes closed. At this hour, the desert seems to be completely silent and still.

It doesn’t bother him, the stillness and the silence; it’s what he wanted, after all—not to be around any people, at least for a moment. Not to be around Shiro.

By the time he hops onto the hoverbike and turns in the direction of the Garrison, it’s already pitch black, and when he arrives at the main gate, the guard chews him out for being out this late. Keith invents some fairly unconvincing story about the hoverbike malfunctioning, fully expecting to be written up for being outside his bunk—hell, outside of the Garrison grounds—after lights out, but the guard just grumbles for a moment and lets him go.

When he walks through the deserted corridors back to his quarters, everything is quiet and dark.

.

The next time Keith sees Shiro in the hallway on his way to class, he smiles.

The next time Shiro slams him onto the ground at the gym, Keith controls his breathing and pushes him off his hips as soon as he finally concedes defeat after a moment of struggle.

The next time they shower side by side after a workout, Keith keeps his eyes on the wall the entire time.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Keith never really understood what that meant, but now—now he thinks he finally knows.

.

Two days before they’re scheduled to depart, instead of joining him at the gym, Shiro leads Keith up the staircase going up to the roof. Outside, the air is just beginning to cool down before it settles into the night desert chill. Above them, the sky is clear.

Keith looks up, and up, and up, until his eyes stop stinging.

Next to him, Shiro leans into Keith’s arm, radiating warmth.

If Keith could ask for one thing—just one thing before Shiro leaves, it would be to let Keith not go back to his bunk tonight. They could sleep—nothing more, just sleep—and in the morning Keith would slip out quietly before they sound reveille.

But he understands why he can’t ask that of Shiro.

(He’s a boy who sleeps with nothing more but a knife under his pillow, and that’s the way it needs to stay, at least for now.)

“You’re gonna be okay, right?” Shiro asks after a long while, breaking the silence.

Keith swallows.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m always okay.”

.

Shiro leaves twenty-one days before Keith turns eighteen.

He’s leaving early in the morning, at sunrise, but before that happens, Keith slips into his quarters the evening of the day before, just after lights out.

“Keith,” Shiro says when he sees him enter. “You should be in bed.”

“I know, I know, I’ll go in a moment,” Keith reassures him quickly, then looks between the neatly-made bed and the rest of the room, now stripped completely bare.

The movie posters are nowhere to be seen, the training regimen balled up in the trashcan next to the desk, and the framed photo of his family must be either tucked somewhere in Shiro’s bag or put away in storage.

It hits him right then and there—that Shiro is actually leaving in the morning, that all of this is for real. It’s not a drill, a sim scenario; no, it’s real life this time, and no amount of time in the simulator could’ve prepared Keith for this eventuality.

They sit down on the pristine bed, facing each other. It feels heavy, saying goodbye like this, and Keith wants nothing more than to lean in and kiss Shiro, just this once before they leave.

“I’m going to miss you,” he says instead, reaching out and burying his face in the crook of Shiro’s neck, breathing wetly against his skin. He smells like citrus and clean sweat.

Shiro’s hands come to rest on Keith’s back as he pulls him closer into a hug, his palms warm and big, and comforting, rubbing small circles against the fabric of Keith’s uniform.

They stay like this for a while, breathing together.

Then Keith pulls back a little, looks at Shiro for a few seconds, completely at a loss.

“I—” he starts, then stops. His entire chest aches.

Shiro presses his forehead against Keith’s and closes his eyes, exhaling.

“When I come back, okay?” he says as his hand touches the nape of Keith’s neck.

Keith swallows and nods.

“When you come back.”

3. Chapter 3

Notes for the Chapter:

Guys, thank you so much for the amazing feedback! I'm absolutely floored at the incredible response this story has been getting, so just know that I'm really, really grateful for all your comments and messages.
As usual, huge thanks to all the people who have been tirelessly cheering me on as I'm trying to finish what is quickly becoming a little monster of a story, and huge, huge thanks to lanyon for the amazing beta!

The desert feels infinitely more vast when you traverse it alone.

Keith learns that slowly, with every passing day. It’s a strange feeling—living at the Garrison without Shiro, who has been a constant presence in Keith’s life over the past few years. He would say it’s lonely, too, except loneliness is not exactly the word to describe that strange feeling that has lodged itself inside of Keith’s chest, just beneath his sternum.

It’s part loneliness, part longing, part something else that he is unable to give a name to.

He mostly keeps to himself, the way he had before he let Shiro in, before he let him get too close. It’s not the worst thing in the world.

“Where the hell do you sneak off to all the time?” Zara asks him one day when he returns to the barracks after an afternoon spent flying around aimlessly around the canyon until his hands started to freeze in the evening chill of the desert, gloves or no gloves.

Keith shrugs and throws himself down on his mattress, not even taking off his jacket.

“Come on, Kogane, drop the I’m a lone wolf shtick.” There’s irritation in Zara’s voice that doesn’t surface very often. Usually, she’s just content to let things go. “It’s not cute. And you can’t just go through life brushing off everyone who even tries to get close to you. Or, you know, almost everyone.”

Keith gets up so abruptly the entire bunk bed shakes.

“You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” he says through clenched teeth.

When he leaves, he almost regrets that you can’t just slam an electronic door. He knows it’s childish and he hates himself for it a little, for giving in to his bad habits that he thought he’d shaken a long time ago.

The gym, when he enters, is empty and quiet. The lights come on as soon as the motion sensors pick up Keith’s movements, and he walks around the room for a while, trying to clear his mind before he settles on anything in particular.

What he wants to do is just beat the shit out of a punching bag, but he brought no tape with him, so he would just fuck up his knuckles until they bled, and sure, he might be a hothead, but he’s not actively trying to sabotage himself.

Instead, he settles for a light blade, long and thin, the edges of it dulled to make it safe to practice with.

Keith’s always had an affinity for sharp things that cut to the core—maybe that’s why his own edges never really dulled for anyone except Shiro, and even then it was hard-earned.

In training, they don’t really pay much attention to the use of blades in close quarters combat—knives, sometimes, and Keith likes knives, the grip of his fingers around the handle sure and familiar, but he read a fencing manual at some point when he was too bored and had nothing else to read, and he’s never really had the chance to really apply all that knowledge in practice.

He’s been at it for a while, sparring against a mannequin and going through the various stances he still remembers, when the door to the gym opens behind him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, cadet?” The voice is unfamiliar, and when Keith whips around, still gripping the blade in his hands, there’s an officer he doesn’t recognize standing in the doorway. He looks angry. “It’s been lights out as of ten minutes ago. Name and rank, cadet. And drop the weapon.”

Keith drops the blade, which falls to the ground with a loud clatter that echoes in the room.

“Name and rank, cadet,” the officer says again as he comes into the room to stand face to face with Keith. “And don’t make me repeat myself.”

Everything in Keith bristles at the thought of saluting this asshole, but he knows that if he doesn’t, the officer is just going to write him up, and if Keith wants to graduate as soon as possible, he can’t allow himself to have that in his file. So he snaps to attention, gritting his teeth.

“Senior Cadet Keith Kogane, sir,” he recites, eyes fixed on a point on the wall somewhere above the officer’s shoulder. “I must have lost track of time.”

“This is going into your permanent record, Cadet Kogane,” the officer says. “Just because you’re some hotshot pilot prodigy doesn’t mean you should get preferential treatment.”

Keith swallows a curse, hands clenched into fists at his side.

“With all due respect, sir, I don’t think—” he starts, but he can’t even finish the sentence before the officer interrupts him abruptly.

“Cadet, with all due respect,” he says mockingly, “I don’t care what you think. Go to your bunk, and if I ever catch you past your curfew again, you’re going to be put in front of a disciplinary board, understood? Not all officers at this institution are willing to turn a blind eye to your illicit exploits.”

For a moment, Keith freezes, thinking that they must know. They must know about Shiro, about the way they kept toeing the line for so long they almost forgot at times the line even existed in the first place, about all those moments that could be construed as something more than they actually were. Then he remembers that night just before Shiro left, when he returned to the Garrison late at night, long after lights out. They must’ve learned about it somehow.

When he walks into his quarters, he’s trying to move as quietly as he can to avoid waking the others, but Zara still shifts on her mattress and whispers, “What, you done trying to get your ass busted?”

Keith unlaces his boots and drops them to the floor with a little more force than necessary.

“Just…go to sleep, Zara,” he says. “I’m all squared away.”

.

Outside of flight training and a few other classes, Keith doesn’t really bother to study that much other than to pass. He likes to learn, but he hates being told what he should be learning.

Before he enrolled at the Garrison, his teachers tended to describe him as talented but incapable of applying himself, which mystified the sisters, who were used to seeing him with his nose in a book most of the time, when he had nothing more urgent to do. But what interested Keith and what interested his teachers were usually two completely different things.

Books, though—yeah, he’s always loved books.

.

When he’s eleven, a man comes to visit him at the orphanage. He’s tall and dark-haired, and looks a little bit like the photo of Keith’s dad that he keeps locked away in his drawer in the nightstand. He’s carrying a box of old books, printed on paper that looks a little yellow and almost crumbles under Keith’s touch.

“These belonged to your father,” he says, putting the box on the table at the refectory while Sister Martha quietly supervises from a distance.

Keith just stares at the box for a moment, then reaches inside and pulls out one of the books, touching it carefully as it almost falls apart under his touch. On the cover, there is a barren desert stretching as far as the horizon and two moons hanging in a blue sky without a single cloud.

“Thank you,” Keith says politely, even though his head is buzzing with a million questions. Who is he? How did he know Keith’s father? Why did he wait eight years to come visit him at the orphanage, if he’s known where Keith was all along?

But Sister Martha is watching, and he doesn’t want to be sent to his room without dinner for being rude to a guest.

“There’s also this,” the man says, handing him a white and red jacket.

It’s far too big for Keith, and heavy, short but long-sleeved, and Keith wants to say that it smells like the memory of home, but mostly it just smells like leather. He puts the jacket away next to the books.

The man then looks at Keith for a long while without a word, just staring at him from across the refectory table. Keith stares back.

“He wanted you to have these, when you were older,” the man says eventually, pausing for a moment before adding quickly, like he’s afraid he would lose the courage, “I’m sorry, Keith. I’m really, really sorry that it all turned out like this.”

Then he walks away, leaving Keith with the too-big jacket, a box of old books, and a million unanswered questions.

Later, when Sister Martha gives him permission to go back to his room instead of joining the rest of the children outside, Keith takes the box and the jacket up to his bunk, thanking his luck that the dorms are empty at this time of day, and there would be no-one to disturb him as he looks through the books.

He’s just about to set the box and the jacket down on his bed when he catches a glimpse of something in the pocket sewn into the jacket’s lining. He expects a forgotten lighter, maybe, or a cigarette box, hell, even a hip flask—the jacket did belong to his father, after all, and his father was an adult. What he finds instead is a knife.

He almost drops it, scared that someone would come in and see him holding it; then, with his heart pounding in his ears, he sits down on his bed to examine it, shielding it from the view with his body, back turned towards the door.

It’s long and heavy enough that he can’t help but wonder how he hasn’t noticed it before.

Keith doesn’t know a lot about knives, but the one he’s holding—the one which must have belonged to his father, too—looks well-made, long, slightly curved inward in the middle, with the handle wrapped in leather.

He stares at it for a long while before putting it away for a moment as he kneels in front of the bunk bed and reaches under it. The floor beneath the bed is slightly dusty, and Keith coughs a few times into the sleeve of his shirt, then feels for the loose floorboard and pulls it to the side, revealing the small box in which Keith keeps all his belongings he doesn’t want anyone to find. He discovered it completely by accident when, at age five, he crawled under the bed in a game of hide and seek, and accidentally knocked the floorboard over.

Quickly, he puts the knife in the box and puts the floorboard back in its place, then dusts off his knees as he gets up.

He hangs the jacket in the closet, hidden under a sweater just in case.

The books he reads.

He goes through them slowly, trying to pace himself as he attempts to piece together the puzzle that was his father, reading between the lines.

The books are mostly old science fiction that is not fiction anymore, for the most part, but there are also some books on physics and a few flight manuals, a few dozen ancient issues of some magazine called National Geographic.

He reads all of them.

Sometimes he skips class just to read, hidden away in his favorite spot on the top floor of the school building, where no one ever really comes to look. There’s a big window and a wide windowsill, where Keith can just curl up for an hour and be left in peace.

The sisters hate it when he does that, and his teachers just shake their heads, like they’re powerless to stop it. Well, maybe if their classes were a little more interesting. Maybe then Keith would bother to care.

As it is, he just reads the books, and doesn’t wear the too-big jacket, and doesn’t forget about the knife.

.

Two months after Shiro leaves for Kerberos, Keith gets into a fight.

He doesn’t go looking for it, but the trouble finds him anyway.

He’s walking back from the hangars, where he spent the majority of the day, elbows-deep in grease, and now wants nothing more than just to take a shower, eat something, and sleep until they sound reveille the next morning.

When he takes a left into one of the less-frequented hallways that lead from the maintenance area to the barracks, there’s a group of some snotty Senior Cadets—a bit older than Keith and ready to graduate any day now—who are taking up the entire the hallway, obstructing the way. He says excuse me a few times, quieter, then louder, but they don’t seem to be paying any attention to him.

When Keith tries to push past them, one of them blocks the way with his arm.

“So tell me, Kogane,” he starts in a conversational tone, even though Keith has no idea who he is or even what his name is, “how many sexual favors did your golden boy Shirogane perform on the brass to get the Kerberos gig? I mean, he was just out of flight school. Somehow I can’t believe he was that good.”

Keith grits his teeth and pushes the guy’s arm out of the way, just for that asshole to block him again half a second later.

“Let me go,” he says.

“No, but seriously,” the guy says, smiling a little obnoxiously. “You were always hanging around the guy like some kicked puppy, you must know something.”

Keith grips the guy’s arm and forcefully shoves it out of the way.

“I said, let me go,” he repeats through clenched teeth. “What the hell would you know, anyway.”

The guy steps into Keith’s path. “I don’t know, you tell me,” he says. “We all know Shirogane was playing favorites, so how often did you—”

Keith throws the first punch. He’s not proud of it, but he also doesn’t really care. The punch catches the guy in the jaw, and he staggers a little, then punches back. Keith dodges at the last moment, but the guy’s little pals are there to finish the job. One of them trips Keith, and when he lands on the ground, face first, his palms stinging, he can almost hear the sickening crunch of his cartilage. He tastes blood.

He’s scrambling to his feet while there’s blood dripping from his nose and chin, when he hears a quiet, “Fuck,” then: “This fucking psycho has a knife.”

For a moment, it doesn’t really register, but then Keith remembers the knife he tucked behind the belt of his uniform earlier that day, before he went down to the hangar for mechanic training. He gets up, with his back still turned towards the other cadets, and wipes the blood pooling under his nose with the back of his hand. He makes sure the sheath attached at the belt stays visible, if that’s what’s keeping them away, the fear that Keith will actually draw the knife on them. He wouldn’t, but they don’t know that.

When he finally turns around, the other cadets are long gone.

There’s a smear of blood on the floor where he fell, but he doesn’t have the time or presence of mind to deal with that. Instead, he stumbles into the first bathroom he sees and looks at himself in the mirror. It doesn’t look broken, just seriously bruised, and he’s still bleeding, the entire lower half of his face coated in slowly drying blood. He tries to wash it off, then presses a paper towel to his nose and sits down against the wall with his knees up against his chest, waiting until he stops dripping blood all over the place.

Once he’s pretty sure he’s going to be fine, he drags himself back to his quarters.

Zara is there when he comes in.

“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?” she says as soon as he enters her field of vision.

Keith slowly pulls away the wad of paper towels away from his nose.

“I fell,” he says flatly.

Zara looks at him with disbelief.

“You fell.”

“Yeah,” Keith says, exasperated.

He’s hungry and dirty, and hurting, and he wants nothing more than to just take a quick shower and hit the sack. Who knows, maybe he’ll even get a few hours of sleep, despite the throbbing in his nose.

“I tripped and I fell,” he repeats stubbornly as he moves to his locker to get his towel and a clean change of clothes. “It happens to everyone once in a while.”

In response, Zara says something that sounds like a very terse, “Sure,” then hits the light switch above her bunk and moves to lie on her side, her back facing the room.

Keith can read between the lines.

.

As it turns out, the cadets report him to the brass like the little rats they are.

Sure, he threw the first punch, but they deserved it, and they knew they deserved it, talking shit about Shiro like that. The guy Keith managed to land the first and only punch on doesn’t even have that much of a bruise, while the circles under Keith’s eyes are black and blue, his nose still tender to the touch.

In the end, Iverson chews him out in his office for half an hour; Keith gets a second strike on his record and bathroom duty for a month.

It could’ve been worse.

“You look like hell,” Zara tells him when he comes into his quarters long after they stopped serving dinner, tired and hungry.

When she tosses him an apple a moment later, he knows it’s an olive branch.

“Thanks,” he says and bites into the apple with a loud crunch. He devours the apple in a few large bites, then starts rummaging through his dwindling stash of junk food, looking for something that would tide him over until morning.

“Yo, Kogane, catch,” Zara says after he’s been going through the small pile for a moment.

Keith turns around almost immediately and snatches the packet out of the air. It’s a chocolate croissant that doesn’t have a lot in common with actual croissants, but it’s food and Keith will gladly take it, considering his choice has been between a slightly stale pack of gummy worms and a half-eaten chocolate bar.

Zara gives him a stern look. “And don’t say I don’t have your back.”

.

When you live at the base, it’s impossible to escape the news of the Kerberos mission progress. It’s the most important undertaking in the history of the Galaxy Garrison, and there’s a lot riding on its success, so the monitors in the common hall display mission reports once a day, at eighteen hundred hours on the dot, and everyone has at least one friend who’s involved in the project somehow, so it’s a constant conversation topic in the mess hall.

It’s going well, by the looks of it—the two scientists are collecting samples and doing preliminary data analysis. There’s no word on Shiro; he’s done his part, got them to Kerberos safely, so there’s really no need to mention him in any official reports. He’s just the pilot.

On Saturday, Keith books three hours in the sim to practice rescue scenarios—they are, at the same time, his most and least favorite, in a way, because they demand creativity and fast reactions, but they also introduce conditions and factors completely beyond his control.

For Shiro, these have always been his favorite.

When he walks into the training facility, there’s still someone in the sim, and doing miserably, from the looks of it. A moment later, simulation failed blares on the screen.

“Motherfu— Oh, hi,” the sad excuse for a wannabe pilot says, as soon as he emerges from the sim and sees Keith.

He’s a young guy Keith doesn’t recognize—he can’t be older than fifteen, maybe sixteen, and looks like he’s just come to the Garrison with the newest bunch of recruits; they all either have the same, slightly skittish look to them, or they parade around the Garrison like they think they own the place. The guy looks like the former, which is fine by Keith, because the cocky little assholes are always a pain in the ass. A little humility never hurt anyone.

“Hi,” Keith says in return. “Are you done with this thing? I had it booked as of—” he looks at his watch, “—ten minutes ago, so…”

“Yeah, yeah, totally done,” the guy says and takes a step to the side to let Keith pass. “Crashed this thing like fifteen times, I have no idea what I’m doing wrong.”

Keith does have a few ideas, but he keeps quiet as he walks up the ramp that leads into the sim. Behind him, the guy takes a few steps, then stops.

“You’re Keith Kogane, right?” he asks, and Keith turns around. “There’s a lot of talk about you around the Garrison.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Keith says, his voice cutting like ice, because he still has the bruises under his eyes to remind him what, exactly, people are saying about him behind his back. Now, after three weeks, they have finally faded into a dull yellowish-green color, but they’re still there.

The guy shakes his head. “No, no, I mean good talk. They’re saying you’re the best pilot at the Garrison.”

Keith laughs, short and ugly.

“Yeah, right,” he says, right before he closes the door to the sim behind him.

He spends the next three hours running different scenarios, in different climate conditions, and at different levels of difficulty. He has a close call in an icy environment with extreme sub-zero temperatures when one of his imaginary engines fails, but he pulls through at the last moment.

As soon as he walks out of the sim, he hears the sound of frantic footsteps behind him, and then someone shouts, “Wait!”

When Keith turns around, it’s the guy from earlier.

“You were amazing,” he says, and he looks genuinely impressed. “I mean, I heard people say you were, like, really good, but I had no idea. Seriously, wow. Could you maybe show me a few things? Or just let me watch you pilot inside the sim? I think I could learn so much from you.”

He remembers what Shiro told him, back when he first asked him to conduct a demonstration for his students—how they could learn a lot from him, even if Keith himself didn’t really believe that.

But Keith isn’t Shiro, and he doesn’t know what Shiro saw in Keith that day when they first met face to face, whether it was some reflection of himself or the polar opposite of that, but Keith sees nothing of himself in this guy, there’s no reflection, no flicker of recognition, nothing. And, at the end of the day, Keith is not Shiro. He doesn’t have his patience, his way with people. It’s one thing to conduct a demonstration in the sim for a group of Junior Cadets, still green around the gills, and let someone else do the actual explaining, the actual teaching, and it’s another thing entirely to take someone under your wing.

And Keith—Keith is not made for this.

He’s not.

“Sorry, kid,” he says before he leaves. “I’m not that great a teacher.”

If that makes him an asshole, so be it.

.

Keith meets Nathaniel two months after he turns thirteen. Nathaniel is the guy who delivers groceries to the orphanage—produce, mostly, but sometimes dairy, too. Keith doesn’t really remember him, but a few of the older guys say he grew up here, at the St. Ursula’s Boys’ Home, before he went on to a foster family and then started to work for the local shop owner who was a friend of the institution.

It’s late summer when he walks outside one day and there, parked on the grass, he sees a bright yellow hoverbike. It’s not the latest model, and when Keith comes closer, he can see that the paint is slowly starting to chip off in places, but it still looks amazing.

He’s read enough flight manuals and articles about hovercrafts that he found in the box of books inherited from his father to know that he wants to see what it’s like to ride the real thing. It must be an amazing feeling—to be able to fly. If Keith could fly, he would leave this place and never come back, as long as he lived. He would go somewhere he could be alone with his bike and his books, and he would be happy.

Slowly, he walks around the hoverbike a few times, fingers itching to touch, but hell if he knows what kind of security system this thing has, and the last thing he needs is to be caught touching stuff that doesn’t belong to him. Especially when it’s this expensive.

Eventually, he kneels next to it, not paying attention to the way grass stains his jeans, and looks at the exposed parts, trying to make sense of the way they connect together.

“You a fan of bikes?” someone asks behind Keith, and he moves away quickly, hands up in the air. When he turns around, there’s a young guy coming his way, wearing a leather jacket and high combat boots. He looks effortlessly cool.

“Sorry, I was just taking a look,” Keith says. “I didn’t even touch it or anything.”

“No, that’s fine,” the guy says, then gestures towards the bike with his hand. “Go on, you can touch it. It’s pretty sweet, huh?”

Keith runs his hand along the surface of the metal, warm to the touch from standing in the sun and a little dusty.

“Yeah, pretty sweet,” he says wistfully.

The guy comes to stand next to him and reaches out his hand for Keith to shake.

“I’m Nathaniel, but everyone calls me Nate,” he says. “You?”

“Keith,” he says, then, after a moment of hesitation, he shakes Nathaniel’s—Nate’s—hand.

Nate looks between Keith and the bike a few times, then back to the building.

“You could ask one of the sisters to let me take you out for a ride if you want,” he offers. “I have nowhere to be for the next half an hour, so I could fly you around a little bit, huh? What do you say?”

Keith hesitates. He knows that if he asks one of the sisters, she will say no.

He takes another longing look at the bike.

“Maybe another time,” he says.

When Nate comes by a week later, late in the afternoon, long after Keith’s classes have ended, Keith is hanging out on the back porch, going through a new, glossy magazine he bought with his allowance. They have pictures of the new models of racing hoverbikes and features on some of the best pilots in the league.

He hears the low hum of the hoverbike before he sees it, and he jumps down two steps, nearly tripping over his own laces, to peek around the corner.

“Hey there,” Nate says, pulling the helmet off. His hair sticks out in all directions. “Keith, right?”

Keith nods, surprised that he even remembered.

“So how about that raincheck, huh?” Nate says then, and Keith frowns. “This is my last delivery today, so if you still wanted to check that baby out, I’m totally free for the next hour or so. If you have permission, of course. We wouldn’t want to give poor Sister Martha a heart attack.”

Keith swallows, his heart hammering in his chest as he says, “Yeah, they told me it’s okay, as long as we don’t stay out too late.”

He spends the next fifteen minutes biting the cuticles around his thumb until they bleed and nervously bouncing his knee. If Nate says anything about this to any of the sisters, Keith is toast and will probably get grounded until his eighteenth birthday. But if he doesn’t—well, if he doesn’t, then Keith gets to see what it’s like to fly.

“Okay, we’re all done here,” Nate says a few minutes later, dusting off his hands on the back pockets of his jeans. “Hop on, kid, and remember about the helmet.”

Keith climbs onto the hoverbike and can’t help the feeling like he’s shaking all over, finally being this close to what he wants more than anything.

The feeling of being up in the air, with the sound of wind in his ears, is nothing like he has ever experienced. It’s everything he thought it would be, and more, and Keith wants to never stop, never go back. If there’s one thing he knows he was born to do, it’s this. It’s like suddenly everything around him makes sense.

His throat is tight the entire time, his eyes closed as he loses himself in the sensation.

They stop on the outskirts of the town, and Nate turns off the engine, then slides off the seat and takes his helmet off.

“Wanna give it a spin?” he asks, easy and relaxed, and something catches in Keith’s throat. “It’s a hell of a thing, to know how to fly, and a chick magnet, too.”

The thing is—Keith is slowly beginning to suspect that he’s not exactly a chicks kind of guy, but it’s not like Nate needs to know that.

“Can I?” he asks, turning to lean awkwardly over the handlebars, half-off, half-on the bike.

“Yeah, sure,” Nate says. “Just be careful. There’s nothing around here but fields, so you should be fine if you don’t go too fast. You ever ridden a bike like this?”

Keith shakes his head after a moment of hesitation, but Nate doesn’t tell him to get off. Instead, he gestures with his chin to the ignition.

“The key is there, you just need to switch it on,” he explains. “You know how to ride this thing, in theory?”

Keith nods at that. “Yeah, I read a lot of different manuals. And I go to the arcade sometimes, play in the simulators.”

There are three different flying sims at the only arcade in town—two of them are pretty old, but there’s also the new one they installed a few months back, and Keith sometimes skips class to go there, because it’s mostly free at that time of day. But now he knows what he suspected all along—it’s nothing like the real thing.

Nate sits down on an old log, covered in moss, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, lights one.

“I’d offer you one, but I don’t think the sisters would appreciate me corrupting the youth,” he jokes.

Keith laughs, a little too loud, to cover the nerves, then gets himself comfortable in the seat and turns on the engine, feels the vibration of it under his fingers, wrapped around the handlebars in a tight grip.

The machine sputters a few times and almost chokes when he pushes a little too hard, too fast, but he manages to save it at the last moment. For the first few seconds, he feels a little wobbly, his balance a little uneven, like a glass half-full of water that someone accidentally knocked over, before he straightens his back and feels the way the bike becomes more stable under him. Then, he leans forward and goes.

If he thought flying seated behind the pilot, clutching his waist, was amazing, then this—this is indescribable. Now he can feel the way the wind smacks against his face, thundering in his ears, and he can see the open space in front of him, and it’s the best feeling in the entire world.

He does a few fairly slow circles around the field, grows bolder when the bike responds to his touch so, so easily, like he’s been doing it forever.

When he maneuvers back to where Nate is still sitting on the overturned log, he gets a little too cocky, a little too sure, and almost falls, but pulls up at the last second, then slows to a stop in front of Nate.

His legs and arms feel like jelly.

“So?” Nate asks, smiling. “How was it?”

Keith finds out he needs to take a few deep breaths before he’s able to answer.

“Amazing,” he says eventually, grinning so hard his entire face hurts.

It’s late enough that they need to go back, and Keith gets progressively more worried the closer they get to the orphanage. When they arrive, Sister Mary is waiting for them by the gate. Keith’s stomach feels like he swallowed a stone.

“Keith, inside,” she says in a stern voice, then turns to Nate. “Nathaniel, what were you thinking? Taking him with you like that, without telling anyone? You know you’re always welcome here, but we’ve been worrying ourselves sick.”

Nate looks at Keith, who’s still standing there, unable to move, then back to Sister Mary.

“He just wanted to go for a ride,” he tries to explain. “He said he had permission.”

Keith can see the way Sister Mary’s posture changes in a second.

“He’s a thirteen-year-old boy, Nathaniel!” she says, her voice raised. She sounds livid. “Of course he told you he had permission. But honestly, you should’ve known better.”

Nate looks like he’s fifteen again, and back here as a foster kid, being scolded for breaking the rules again. Maybe it’s one of those things that never really leave you.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I had no idea he wasn’t allowed to go out. But he’s…he’s something else. He really has incredible talent, if that means anything. I’ve never seen anyone get this good this fast.”

“All right, I heard enough.” She sighs. “I just…I need to talk to Keith. Thank you for bringing him back in one piece, Nathaniel.”

Back at her office, Sister Mary is silent for a very, very long time.

“I cannot believe you did this, Keith,” she says eventually, her words cutting through the air. Keith is standing in front of her desk, head down and hands clasped together behind his back. “How could you do this? You can’t just take off whenever it strikes your fancy. There are rules in this place, young man, and you’re not above those rules. So I’m revoking all of your privileges, indefinitely. Until you show me that you can follow the rules. That means no movies in the common room, no leaving these gates, with or without permission, unless under strict supervision, and no allowance.”

Keith’s throat tightens painfully.

“That’s not fair,” he says, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. His eyes are stinging. “We weren’t doing anything wrong, we just went for a ride.”

“You lied, to us and to Nathaniel, and then you left the grounds without telling anyone where you were going, and then piloted a hovercraft by yourself without a permit. You are thirteen, Keith. You’re still a child,” she continues while Keith stews in his anger. “So, no, I don’t think it’s particularly unfair. You can go to your room now, that will be all.”

So Keith goes, silent, angry tears rolling down his face as he desperately tries to stop them, his chin trembling.

He didn’t really mean for any of this to happen. All he wanted was to be able to fly.

.

He finds out the way everyone else does—he hears it on the news.

He’s coming back to his quarters after dinner when suddenly the huge screen in the main hall comes to life. He sees the archive footage from five months ago, sees the words written on the bottom of the screen in huge block letters. None of it really registers.

Then he hears the words: presumed dead.

Then: pilot error.

For a moment, he just stands there, stunned like he’s just taken a blow to the head.

Then he takes off at a sprint.

He manages to wrench open the door to the nearest bathroom and find an unoccupied stall before he vomits violently until he starts heaving, the taste of bile acrid on his tongue.

He flushes and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then sits down with his back against the stall door, curled in on himself, his eyes closed.

He doesn’t cry.

.

Grief is an ugly thing, Keith knows. It’s an ugly little thing that keeps pulling at your insides until everything is just salt and vinegar, and horrible bitterness at the back of your throat, filling your mouth.

He knows. He already went through this once.

He’s not sure if he can go through this again.

The truth is: what Keith wants or doesn’t want won’t bring Shiro back.

The truth is: nothing can breathe in space.

.

Keith disappears for three days after Shiro goes missing.

When he comes back to the Garrison, he finds two MPs waiting for him.

“Pack your things and get out, cadet,” Iverson says once they bring Keith to his office. “You’re done here.”

The file on the desk reads: dishonorable discharge.

Keith doesn’t even try to protest, still too numb on the inside to care about anything.

He leaves the Garrison with little more than what he came here with: a duffel bag of clothes, a few books, his jacket, the knife. Shiro’s bike.

They don’t try to stop him when he takes off with it into the desert. They don’t try to stop him at all.

He doesn’t have time to say goodbye to Zara. It’s the one thing he regrets when he leaves the Garrison behind in a cloud of desert dust.

.

When he was younger, he read a book about a distant planet without water, a never-ending desert that slowly devoured everything. In that book, the young prince went into that endless desert a fugitive and returned a messiah.

Keith is no prince, and he is no messiah, but maybe, he thinks, if he goes into the desert, he will discover who he really is.

Once he’s out in the open, he heads towards the abandoned house in the heart of the desert, the one he found on his own before Shiro left for Kerberos. It’s still there, silent and empty, but standing.

When he walks inside after wrestling with the door for a few minutes, everything is covered with a layer of red dust, all nooks and crannies taken over by the desert, subtly but unmistakably. The roof is mostly in one piece, easy to patch where there are small holes, and besides, Keith doesn’t remember the last time it rained here. The windows are in good shape, except for the slightly cracked glass in one of the panes in the kitchen area. The floors are sturdy, washed with lime paint. The furniture is sparse and dusty, but it will do.

The interior of the shack looks untouched, except by time, like someone just left for a moment and never returned.

Keith has no idea what happened to the person who lived here before him. He’s not sure if he would be better off knowing.

It’s dark by the time he finishes settling in, his meager belongings taken out of the duffle bags and put where they belong: clothes in the closet, books on the shelves, what little food he had left in the kitchen.

It has nothing to do with making the place feel more like a home, because it’s not. It’s just…a dwelling. A roof over his head. For Keith, home has never been a place.

He has a little money still, and he knows he’ll need go to into town soon, to buy supplies—buy food—and look for a job, but for now, he’s content to be alone.

Once he’s done, he eats a protein bar and walks out onto the front steps, then sits down and looks out at the vast, open space in front of him, looks up at the myriad of stars above him. Somewhere out there, Shiro’s lifeless, frozen body is drifting in space.

It’s then and there that it finally hits him—in the middle of the night on the ruined steps of an abandoned shack in the heart of the desert—the fact that Shiro is never coming back.

He spent the last few days completely numb and furious with himself because of it at the same time—furious that he couldn’t even openly grieve, furious that he’s been unable to cry. Now, though, as he sits alone in the darkness, with the open, endless sky above him, he can feel the way his entire body shakes like he’s running a fever, and when he presses the palm of his hand to his mouth, it still does nothing to muffle the dry, heaving sobs that escape.

It brings him no relief.

.

Sometimes he thinks the world could end, and he would never know, hidden away in the middle of nowhere.

Out in the desert, the time flows differently, the days blurring into one another until he’s not entirely sure how much time has passed.

There are days he doesn’t speak at all.

There are days he’s surprised at the sound of his own voice, too rough and gravelly in his ears.

Finally, the money runs out. He gets a job in town, making deliveries twice a week, and if they recognize him from back when he was a cadet, they don’t say anything. It pays barely enough to survive, but he can take a little food in return for his service, too, and that makes it easier. The only things he really spends his money on are food, fuel for the hoverbike, spare parts for the power generator, and a few other necessities. He doesn’t really need much, all by himself.

“It’s no way to live,” the shopkeeper’s wife tells him one day.

She’s old and grey, her skin darkened from the sun and wrinkled like an old apple. She looks a bit like the only picture of his grandmother he has, the one that he found in one of the books his father left him, a long time ago.

Keith just shrugs.

It’s not really about living.

He’s surviving, and that’s the most important thing.

He’s been surviving for a long, long time.

.

He leaves the St. Ursula’s Boys’ Home at fifteen, with a duffel bag of clothes, a too-big jacket, a few books and a knife.

The night before, he emptied his secret hiding place for the last time, put the knife on the bottom of the duffle bag, wrapped in a t-shirt.

He knows the sisters are relieved to see him go.

It hasn’t been the easiest, for either of them. With Keith’s running away and sneaking out, and spending as much time flying—or pretending to fly—as possible, and with the sisters running the orphanage with an iron fist, and all the rules, and countless admonishments, they never really could see face to face, once Keith got old enough to know what he wanted.

This—this is for the best.

He’s getting what he wanted—to be a pilot.

They’re getting rid of him.

It’s an equal trade, he thinks.

On the day he leaves, Sister Martha sees him off. She gives him money for the ticket and hands him his lunch, packed in a plastic box.

“Be good, Keith, okay?” she says, and her usually stern face softens.

Neither of them says, I’m going to miss you.

The truth is, Keith is not going to miss this place, so unsuited to who he is as a person, and they’re not going to miss him in return, because, though they might have always taken good care of him, the only way they knew how, for Keith, it was never enough. It was surviving, nothing else.

Now—now he wants to live.

.

The desert calls out to him in the night.

It’s vast and open, and empty, and it calls out to him constantly, like it wants him to uncover the secrets it hides.

The first pull of it—familiar but much, much stronger now, almost like a compulsion—comes during a sandstorm. He’s curled up on the couch, watching the light bulb on the ceiling flicker as the generator almost gives out under the vicious attack of the wind and sand, when he thinks he hears a voice in the storm.

Come, the voice says.

Come find me.

It’s like a whisper on the wind, and for a moment, Keith thinks he must be imagining it. Maybe he’s been alone for too long, out here under the cruel sun, all by himself, with only his thoughts for company. Maybe it’s just his mind playing tricks on him.

But it’s the pull of it, too—the one he’s been feeling for a long, long time, long before he came here. Long before Shiro died.

He remembers all those times they went out into the desert, and Keith felt like there was something dragging him further and further away. Back then, Shiro was his anchor. Now he’s just a kite in the wind, ready to be carried away wherever the desert leads him.

He stopped trying to make sense of it a while ago. If he feels it, he thinks, it’s real enough.

After the storm passes, Keith wraps a scarf around his mouth and ventures into the desert. He doesn’t have a destination, and whatever is guiding him (or whatever he’s imagining is guiding him) feels like the faintest thread of a pulse, but he follows, as much as he can.

It leads him to a place he’s never been before, tucked away into the corner of the canyon, shielded from the human eyes. Keith doesn’t think even the Garrison knows about this place.

He leaves the hoverbike on a rocky shelf, grabs his bag and goes. It’s before noon, and the sun is starting to beat down on his back in earnest, but there is a little shade as he walks further into the gorge that splits the face of the rock in two. It’s narrow enough that if he reached his arms out, he could touch both walls at the same time.

At the end of the gorge, there is a cave, marked with what looks like an ancient carving of a lion. When Keith brushes his fingers against the lines etched into the stone, he feels something, almost like an electric current running through him for the briefest of moments, and then the strange pull is there again, impossible to ignore.

He pulls out a piece of paper and makes a sloppy map of this part of the canyon, draws the carving of the lion in his notebook, then takes a picture with the cheap camera he bought recently.

The cave itself is shallow, and it looks like there was a rockslide that obscured part of the northern wall, but the rest of it is covered in more carvings. Keith studies them for a moment, and eventually, they begin to form a pattern in front of his eyes, like they’re telling a story.

When he was younger, he read a book about the ancient Egyptians, and he remembers the way the paintings and bas-reliefs looked in the photos; these carvings—these pictures—are less ordered and less elaborate, but the similarity is still there.

He photographs whatever he can, draws a few of the markings to the best of his ability and leaves. He knows there are at least a few missing, but they were lost when the rockslide destroyed part of the cavern.

He waits for the sun to pass zenith, hidden in the shade by the entrance to the cave. He passes the time drawing a more accurate map of the terrain, tries to make sense of the story the carvings are telling.

He has no idea who left them here, in this little nook of a vast desert; he has no idea who was supposed to find them, if anyone.

He knows they’re ancient, but they’re also unlike anything Keith has ever seen.

Whatever it is that he’s just discovered, he’s certain of one thing—it’s important that he keeps looking.

.

There are dozens of caves, hidden in the very heart of the desert.

Keith finds all of them, one by one, over the next couple of months.

The calling never stops.

It’s been almost eight months since Shiro died, and the way Keith misses him is like an ache deep in his chest, like Shiro took some part of Keith with him when he left, and never returned it, and now there’s just a deep, bottomless pit somewhere inside of him, anchored just beneath his sternum. It’s a hollow, painful feeling that sometimes wakes him up at night and leaves him sleepless, his mind scattered.

This is what happens when you let someone in, he thinks. They take a part of you and leave you more incomplete than they found you.

But he has a purpose now, or at least a semblance of one, and that—that is better than whatever he’s been doing with himself these past few months.

So he pieces the clues together, finds more caves and more carvings, and what he finds out, he’s not sure he believes himself. The stories told in carvings differ slightly from cave to cave, but they all point to one thing.

An arrival.

An arrival of what—Keith has no idea. It could be just a story, the last vestige of some ancient civilization lost to the sands of time that carved their mythology into the rock that outlived them by thousands upon thousands of years.

And yet the desert still keeps calling him, the pull of it like the ebb and flow of a tide.

Whatever these ancient carvings were supposed to depict, it hasn’t happened yet.

Keith is not sure when, exactly, it’s supposed to happen, but he can wait. He has all the time in the world.

.

The truth is, in the end, he doesn’t lose himself or find himself in the desert. Instead, he finds something else.

It’s a funny thing, the way sometimes you never really stop grieving, the wound still fresh and open where you keep picking at it, like you’re afraid that when you let it scab over and scar, you will lose something forever, irretrievably.

So that’s what Keith does, over the year that passes as he lives in a little abandoned shack in the heart of the desert—keeps picking and picking at the wound that Shiro’s death left him with, refusing to let it scar. He knows he shouldn’t, he knows he can’t just hope that if he doesn’t stop, he will be able to fool himself into believing it’s all just a dream, and he’s going to wake up any second now. If he lets it scar, that’s how he knows it’s real.

So he doesn’t.

There’s another sandstorm that lasts two days and three nights, and the desert calls out to him stronger than ever.

Soon, the whisper in the wind says.

Soon.

He feels it before he sees it—the giant ball of fire falling rapidly from the sky.

He doesn’t hesitate even for a second before he wraps a scarf around his nose and mouth to protect him from the desert wind and from being recognized, if he doesn’t get there before the Garrison soldiers, tucks the knife behind the waistband of his pants and starts the bike.

When he reaches the site of the crash, there are already Garrison soldiers milling around, and quarantine procedures are being implemented. Keith hides behind a giant outcropping of rock, away from the site but with good view of what’s happening, and waits for his opening.

The explosives are planted and waiting to be detonated.

This is it—the moment he’s been waiting for ever since he felt that first pull of the desert.

His hands are steady when he presses the button on the remote controller.

Nothing could’ve prepared him for what he finds inside.

He feels almost faint with relief when he approaches the table and sees Shiro, a little worse for the wear but alive, lying there, unconscious.

What happens after is a blur—the three cadets from the Garrison: the annoying cargo pilot and his two buddies; the desperate run back to the hoverbike; the chase.

Once they’re back at his shack, the three cadets asleep in a tangle of limbs on the couch, exhausted after the adrenaline high, Keith slips back into the small, narrow bedroom where Shiro sleeps in his bed, his breathing shallow. He looks like he’s aged several years since Keith last saw him, even though it’s been less than a year and a half, and his shoulders are even broader and more muscular.

What happened to you, Keith thinks.

Shiro is sleeping on his side, cradling his prosthesis against his body. He looks more vulnerable than Keith has ever seen him.

For a moment, he considers crawling into the narrow space of the bed right next to him, burying his face in the crook of Shiro’s neck and just staying like that until morning, not even sleeping, just breathing him in, making sure he’s real. But he can see the lines in Shiro’s face that betray the change in him, and he knows something must have happened in that endless darkness of space that made him like this, and, for the first time in a long time, Keith has no idea how to read him.

He falls asleep like that, in a chair, sitting at Shiro’s bedside.

When he wakes up in the middle of the night, it’s because he can feel a hand closing around his wrist, metal fingers wrapping around the soft skin there, exposed without his gloves on.

“Keith,” Shiro says, his voice hoarse, and Keith’s throat gets tight, his eyes stinging.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says.

He doesn’t say, I thought you were dead.

He doesn’t say, I didn’t know how to stop mourning you.

Shiro hesitates for a moment, like he’s fighting with himself on the inside, then, after a long moment where they just stare at each other in the dark room, lit only by the faint light of the moon coming through the dirty window, Shiro shifts on the bed, making a little space next to him, his back almost touching the wall.

When Keith still doesn’t move, Shiro gently pulls at his wrist.

“Come on,” he says, his voice still weak, and in the quiet stillness of the house, he must hear the way Keith’s heart keeps hammering in his chest. “Let’s sleep.”

When Keith lies down next to Shiro, nestled in his warmth and surrounded by his smell, it’s the only thing that keeps him anchored, and he breathes raggedly for a moment as his heart stops pounding in his ears and his jaw unclenches, his throat no longer painfully tight.

So, in the end, Keith doesn’t find himself in the desert.

He finds Shiro.

That’s good enough for him.

4. Chapter 4

Notes for the Chapter:

And this is it, guys! We have finally reached the end of this story.
I continue to be absolutely blown away by the response this story has gotten, and I want to thank everyone who stuck around until the end. Seriously, thank you for all the amazing feedback--the comments, the kudos, the messages, the fanart. (You can see the two amazing pieces here and here.)
Also, huge thanks to my tireless cheerleaders, and to my awesome beta, lanyon. You guys are the best.

So it goes like this:

They save the world.

And then they do it again.

And again.

And again.

The truth is, no one prepared them for this—but then again, no one and nothing could have ever prepared them for this.

Keith always knew he would die young. He just never expected it would be this young.

But before he dies, he’s finally going to live.

.

Sometimes, in those quiet moments filled with just the endless expanse of space, Keith finds himself in front of Shiro’s door, his hand raised.

He never knocks. Instead, he just stands outside for a while, like he’s keeping watch.

Sometimes he wonders if Shiro knows he’s there. If he does, he never comments on it.

The thing about Shiro is that for such an earnest person, he is incredibly good at lying. So when he assures Allura that he’s completely fine to ease her concerns, and when he jokes around with Pidge and Hunk, and when he talks to Lance like nothing ever happened, it’s so, so easy to believe that he’s okay.

Maybe that’s why he avoids Keith so much, out of a fear that Keith will see right through him, that the eighteen months that passed between that night when Keith almost kissed Shiro goodbye and that night when Keith found Shiro strapped to a table, looking like he’d been through hell, have changed nothing between them. Maybe he fears that Keith will take one good look at him and see the bare bone peeking through the skin, the place where they didn’t stitch him back quite right.

Whatever it is, sometimes it feels like he could still be back on Kerberos, for all it’s worth.

.

It’s Shiro who finds him, in one of those rare moments of peace, sitting in front of a huge window overlooking the infinite terror of cosmos. The view soothes Keith, in a strange way, like it puts everything in perspective. No matter what they do and no matter who they are, they’re still less than a speck of dust in the face of the endless darkness of space.

“Quite a view, huh?” Shiro says, his voice startling Keith.

When he looks over his shoulder, Shiro is standing in the entrance to the room, leaning against the doorframe with his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Keith says, turning back to look at the little flickers of light in the darkness. “Yeah, it is.”

After a brief moment of hesitation, Shiro comes to sit next to Keith on the stairs leading down, further into the room. With its huge windows and lack of any furniture, it must have been an observation deck, once upon a time.

When Shiro finally sits down, he puts a little distance between the two of them, a little open space where their bodies can’t touch by accident. It feels deliberate, in a way all of Shiro’s movements are now, like he’s not entirely sure how to occupy a space with this new body of his, changed so much by the year he spent in Galra captivity, but there’s something else in there, too.

They still haven’t talked about that first night after Shiro’s rescue, when they spent half the night sleeping together in Keith’s narrow bed at the shack, and Keith woke up just before dawn to Shiro’s arms wrapped around his waist, Shiro’s face buried in the crook of Keith’s neck, the warmth of his body safe and familiar. For Keith, who spent an entire year completely alone, it was an overwhelming sensation, to be touched by someone like that.

When he woke up again, a little after sunrise, Shiro was already gone.

“I just wanted to ask how you were doing,” Shiro says after a moment of silence.

When Keith turns his head to the side, he expects to see Shiro looking out into space, but instead, he’s looking right at Keith.

Keith snorts. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

Shiro laughs softly, looking almost bashful as he stares down at where his arms are wrapped around his knees, the prosthetic fingers a stark contrast against his skin.

“I’m fine,” he says. He’s lying. “But you…you lived in that place, all by yourself, for what, a year? It couldn’t have been easy for you.”

Keith grits his teeth.

“A lot of things haven’t been easy for me since you left,” he says, his tone more cutting than he intended. Beside him, Shiro almost flinches. “I’m sorry,” Keith adds, already regretting the outburst.

Shiro just shakes his head.

“I’m sorry, too,” he says. “It’s not how I imagined it would end when I left.”

It’s the closest they’ve come to acknowledging this thing between them, but Keith knows that a lot has changed since then, and he has no idea where they’re standing now. It doesn’t feel like he can just ask, either, because they’re in the middle of a war, and the way Keith’s stomach feels like he just took a dive off a high precipice every time he thinks about Shiro is not the most important thing. It doesn’t even come close.

And yet.

He wishes he could just reach out and touch Shiro’s hands where they’re resting on his knees, his fingers clasped together. He wishes he could tell Shiro that he knows he’s just pretending, and that he doesn’t need to pretend around Keith, that Keith might not understand what Shiro has been through, but he would never judge him for what he did to survive.

He doesn’t do any of that; instead, he sits right there, right next to Shiro, but not close enough to touch. There’s still that little space left to bridge, and yet, from where he’s standing, it looks more like a chasm.

“You come here often?” Shiro asks, and in another person’s mouth, it would sound like the worst come-on whether they intended it or not, but when Shiro says it, there’s just genuine curiosity.

“Sometimes,” Keith says with a shrug. “It helps me calm down.”

Shiro is silent for a moment, looking straight ahead at the expanse of darkness and stars.

“What happened to you?” he asks then, and it startles Keith, for the second time that day. “After I left. I know what you told us, but…that can’t be all.”

Keith shrugs again. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “It was…hard, at first, but I was doing okay for myself, I think. And then they said that you…and I just, I don’t know, I lost it, I guess. Left the Garrison for three days, and when I came back, they were waiting for me, you know, the Military Police.” He pauses. “I got dishonorably discharged, but I guess that doesn’t matter now, huh?”

He doesn’t tell Shiro about the fighting, the running away. He doesn’t want him to know him about those parts of Keith, like he’s afraid to disappoint Shiro even now.

“And then,” he continues after a moment, “I just left. It wasn’t like there was anything waiting for me at the Garrison, and I had nowhere to go, and that shack was just standing there, empty and abandoned. I was…I don’t know, I guess I was just waiting for something, even if I had no idea what, exactly.”

Beside him, Shiro nods.

Keith wants to ask him the same thing, but he doesn’t think Shiro could answer.

When Keith first attempted to go through the simulation blind, Shiro told him, be brave. He squeezed his shoulder and ruffled his hair, and then he stayed with Keith, long after hours, as he crashed on his first try. He was there when Keith made it through on the second.

So that’s what he keeps telling himself. Be brave.

“I missed you,” he says, quiet, and watches out of the corner of his eye as Shiro stills, frozen for a moment like Keith managed to surprise him. It doesn’t happen often. Usually, Shiro can read him all too well.

“I missed you, too,” Shiro says eventually, but the distance remains, like he’s afraid of what is going to happen if he closes it.

“It was—” he pauses. It was awful, he wants to say. I don’t know how I got through this on my own, he wants to say. “I’m just glad to have you back.”

Shiro nods in acknowledgment, but stays silent. For a while, they just sit together, watching the stars. It’s almost like the old days, when they spent hours out on the roof of the Garrison, looking up at the sky, except now the stars are suddenly much, much closer, reminding them how tiny and insignificant they are in comparison.

“You know,” Keith says after a long time, not looking at Shiro, “you don’t have to do this alone. You don’t have to carry whatever it is that you’re carrying on your own.”

When Keith finally looks to the side, Shiro’s lips are pressed into a thin line, but then he relaxes his jaw and gently, slowly, puts his hand on Keith’s shoulder.

“You shouldn’t worry about this,” he says, looking straight at Keith, who’s almost forgotten how it feels, to have all of Shiro’s attention focused on him. It’s overwhelming. “I’m doing fine.”

.

It’s the middle of the night when Keith finds Shiro on the training deck.

Sometimes, when he can’t sleep at night (or what passes for night in the Castle of Lions), he wanders the corridors until he’s exhausted. Usually, the ship is quiet and dark, and empty, though the mice like to keep him company from time to time. But when he leaves his room that night, to walk aimlessly for a while as his body tires out where his mind cannot, he hears the unmistakable sounds of steel hitting steel coming from the training deck.

He presses the button to open the door, only to find Shiro, dressed down to his sleeping pants, chest bare and completely unprotected, fighting against the gladiator. When Keith comes closer, he sees the faint scarring on Shiro’s back, the way sweat drips down the column of his spine.

He remembers what happened the first time they faced the gladiator, the way Shiro just froze, locked in the memory of his time with the Galra. Now, Shiro is fighting, but he’s barely holding his own, as the gladiator pushes him back and back, and back, until Shiro has nowhere else to run, pinned down and about to be taken down.

Keith can see the exact moment all of his muscles lock up.

“End training sequence!” he shouts, already running towards Shiro, who just slumps to the ground and stays on his knees with his head down, heaving.

Keith kneels down next to him and reaches out to touch him, only for Shiro to flinch away. Keith tries not to feel hurt by this reaction, but it spreads through his stomach like concrete, heavy and cold in his gut. When Shiro finally turns to look at him, it’s like Keith is staring at a ghost, Shiro’s eyes vacant and wide. Wherever he is now, it’s far, far away.

“What happened? Shiro?” Keith touches him again, a hand on Shiro’s shoulder that moves to rest against the side of his neck, where his pulse is still running a mile a minute under Keith’s palm. “Shiro? Hey, it’s me; it’s Keith. Come back, okay?”

Shiro finally shakes it off, whatever it was, takes a desperate, heaving breath, and then another, and looks back at Keith.

“What the hell, Shiro?” Keith says, anger replacing worry. “Did you want to hurt yourself? Which level training was that even? What were you doing here, in the middle of the night?”

Shiro just looks at him for a moment.

“I…I can’t sleep, sometimes,” he admits after a while. “It’s…it’s hard to sleep, with the nightmares.”

So Keith wasn’t wrong about that. It’s not like he knew for sure, but he suspected, at least, with the way the circles under Shiro’s eyes seemed to grow a little more prominent with each passing day.

“Hey,” he says softly, sitting in front of Shiro with his legs crossed, “you know, you’re not the only one not getting any sleep, so maybe next time come find me before you try to get yourself beaten to a pulp by the gladiator, ‘kay? You know, for old times’ sake.”

Shiro nods, then looks down at his lap, his hands still gripping his knees tightly.

“Why can’t you sleep?” he asks then.

Keith shrugs. “Too restless, I guess.”

There’s something in him, that runs just under his skin, like a permanent itch that he can’t seem to scratch, an insistent, faint buzzing that doesn’t let him sleep, his mind running in overdrive.

Suddenly, Shiro looks up at him, his hand grasping Keith’s wrist. He looks exhausted.

“Thank you,” he says, solemn. “For coming to get me. Again.”

He laughs quietly, and Keith can’t help but smile. There’s another part of him, though, the part that wants to say, I’ll always come to get you.

But it’s a promise that he already broke once, millions of light years away.

“We should probably go to sleep,” he says.

What he wants to say is: come back to bed with me.

They could do nothing else, just sleep, just like that first night after he found Shiro. The interior of the ship is usually too cool for Keith, who spent his last year in the middle of the desert, to sleep comfortably, without feeling like his hands and feet are freezing. Maybe it’s a circulation problem—his feet get cold really easily, the same as his fingers.

But that night, when he slept with Shiro behind his back, it felt like one piece of a puzzle had finally fallen into place, and he wants to go back to that moment, wants to see if it wasn’t a fluke. Wants to see if they really fit.

And maybe Shiro needs this, too—to be around another person, breathing the same air; not to fix him, because it’s not something you can fix that way, but just for him to know that he’s not alone in all of this.

But, most importantly, Shiro needs to know that he can make his own decisions.

It’s just that Keith wants to let him know the offer is there.

Be brave.

“If you want, we could go back—” he starts, his heart hammering in his chest, up in his throat, but Shiro stands up abruptly, putting more distance between them. Keith closes his mouth, presses his lips together. He knows a brush-off when he sees one.

“Let’s just go back to our quarters,” Shiro says. “We have a long day ahead of us.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right,” Keith says quickly, his face burning with embarrassment, and he turns around abruptly, trying to get away from Shiro. It was a childish thought, and Keith has not been a child for a long, long time. “We should get going.”

“Keith,” Shiro says, soft and gentle, and he stops, his hand gripping the doorframe.

He shakes his head, doesn’t turn back to look at Shiro.

“Don’t mention it.”

.

It’s hard to miss anything when you left nothing behind.

For Keith, that one last piece of home—that’s Shiro.

But he knows that Shiro came back changed, and it’s not his place to demand anything of him—it has never been his place to demand anything of him, and yet Shiro gave so much willingly.

It doesn’t mean that Keith stops wanting. But wanting and having are two different things; it’s a truth he learned a long time ago.

Shiro, for his part, takes Keith up on his offer just once, when it’s clear he’s tried everything else, but he still does his best not to worry Keith too much.

Keith, if he’s being completely honest, thinks that maybe they should be worrying a little more about Shiro, who’s been shouldering the burden of command alone, but he’s not sure the others would really understand, despite everything they’ve been through together. They idolize Shiro as much as some of the other cadets back at the Garrison used to do, and that sometimes clouds their judgment, doesn’t really let them see beyond the façade.

But Keith still knows his tells, even after all that happened. He might have come back changed, but deep down, he’s still Shiro.

Two days after the ship almost kills them, Keith stops tossing and turning after about two hours spent getting tangled in the sheets, becoming increasingly frustrated at his own brain and the insistent buzzing just under his skin.

The corridors of the castle are quiet and dark. Keith wanders them aimlessly for a while, then checks the training deck, but it’s empty, too. Shiro must be sleeping, then.

That’s when he sees the mice, looking mildly alarmed, feels the gentle tug of little teeth on the hem of his pants. After a moment of hesitation, he follows them deeper and deeper into the heart of the ship.

He finds Shiro in front of the stasis chamber that, until two days ago, housed Sendak. Shiro is just sitting there, on the floor, not moving, staring into the pod like the empty space holds all the answers to his questions.

Keith approaches cautiously.

“Shiro?” he says, quietly, but it still echoes in the large room.

Shiro stirs, his head turning to the side as he looks at Keith.

“How did you know where I was?” he asks, but he doesn’t sound angry.

Keith feels a little silly when he says, “The mice brought me here,” but Shiro just nods.

“What are you doing here?” he asks after a moment, sitting down on the floor next to Shiro, his back against the stasis chamber. If he spread his legs just a little bit, their knees would be touching.

It’s a strange thing, to be so hyperaware of the space between two bodies, its presence or its lack, but whenever Keith gets to be close to Shiro, he cannot help but notice. This time, when Keith gently nudges him with his knee, Shiro doesn’t move away like he’s been burned. Keith will call that a victory.

“I don’t really know,” Shiro says. “I just needed a place to think that wasn’t my room. I keep going over what happened, and think that maybe if I didn’t—”

“No one is blaming you for what happened,” Keith says, a little too abruptly, a little too forcefully, but he needs Shiro to understand. None of what transpired in this room two days earlier was Shiro’s fault. “You were fighting for your life, just like the rest of us were. No one is holding that against you.”

“No, I know, but—” he pauses. “I know. But I can’t stop holding that against me.”

Keith bumps his knee against Shiro’s again.

“Well, it’s stupid, if you ask me,” he says, then hesitates for a long, long while before he adds, “And Shiro? If you ever need to think, or just get out of your room for a while, you know that I’m…you know that my door is always open, right?”

Shiro nods. His hand comes to rest gently on Keith’s knee, the warmth of Shiro’s skin seeping in through the fabric.

“I know,” Shiro says. “And I’m sorry.”

Keith doesn’t know for sure what Shiro is apologizing for, but he has a pretty good idea. It doesn’t make it sting any less.

.

In the next couple of days, a few things happen all at once:

They almost lose Allura.

They almost lose Shiro.

Keith almost dies at the hands of Zarkon.

(He made a promise, after all, and he would rather die than break it again.)

In the end, they all get lost, drifting through the vast expanse of the dark, dark space.

.

They find him last.

Keith spends six days inside of a dying lion on a distant moon of a gas giant, trying to make do with what little supplies he has left. Food runs out after two days, water runs out after four.

The atmosphere is too poisonous to go outside, even in the suit, and besides, the entire moon is just a solid chunk of rock and dust, nothing else.

When they finally find him, he’s running a high fever and barely conscious, almost hallucinating from dehydration, unable to stand. When he feels himself being lifted from the pilot seat, at first he thinks it’s just another dream, but he can feel the pounding of Shiro’s heartbeat even through his suit. Slowly, he puts his hand on Shiro’s chest, fingers resting right above the sternum, and sure enough, he’s real.

“Hey, hotshot,” Shiro says then, his voice rough and choked up.

Keith tries to laugh, but his throat feels closed up, his mouth parched and his lips cracked, almost bleeding.

He tries to swallow, once, twice, but it’s like trying to eat glass.

He doesn’t remember what happens after that.

When he wakes up, fresh out of cryo after over twenty-four hours in a healing pod, he still feels weak and shivery.

“Hunk found you,” Shiro says, later.

“Well, Pidge helped,” Hunk supplies from where he’s sitting on the other sofa.

“You bet your ass I did,” Pidge says in return, not really bothering to look up from whatever she’s reading. “You should’ve seen Shiro.”

When Keith turns to the side, Shiro is already on the opposite side of the room, facing away from the rest of them.

“I…I’m going to get some air,” he says before he leaves.

There’s a moment of silence, and then Pidge speaks up.

“So…is anyone going to tell him that we’re in space?”

For a moment, Keith wants to go after him, but Hunk just shakes his head. “I wouldn’t, man. These past few days have been rough on him, you know? Not that it’s any of my business or anything, but I think that maybe, I don’t know, maybe give him some space?”

The problem, Keith thinks, is that he’s been giving Shiro nothing but space, ever since Shiro returned, but he stays put.

“So…what really happened? While I was gone?” Keith asks. He feels dizzy, and the bright light is hurting his eyes.

Hunk point something out to Pidge on her screen as she nods, then turns back to Keith.

“Allura found us,” he says. “Well, me and Pidge first, then Shiro, then Lance. It took her a while, because the ship got damaged when we were getting away from Zarkon, and they had to repair a lot of the systems. But for some reason, we couldn’t pick up your signal at all, I guess because your lion got so damaged. And Shiro was…man, I don’t even know how to describe that.”

“Basically,” Pidge supplies from where she’s sitting cross-legged next to Hunk, “he was a mess.”

“Of course, he tried not to let it show, because he’s Shiro,” Hunk continues, “but we knew something was up. It was, you know, like a gut feeling? So me and Pidge, we started this thing where we—” he pauses, probably when he realizes that Keith wouldn’t understand much of it anyway. “In any case, we managed to locate your position, and then it took us a while to get there, because there was some interference with the castle’s navigation system, but we got there in the end.” He sighs. “That was a rough one, huh? But at least we don’t need to worry about Zarkon for a while. Allura says we lost them, at least for now.”

Keith nods, still feeling mostly shaky and overwhelmed.

“Yeah, that was a rough one,” he says, then gets off the couch. “I should probably go lie down, I don’t feel one hundred percent yet.”

Out in the corridor, he almost walks straight into Lance, who’s just now coming to join the rest of the group. Coran and Allura are off, running additional diagnostics on the ship.

Keith moves to the side to let him pass, but Lance stops for a moment, just looking at him. He was there, earlier, when they let Keith out of the healing pod, but then Keith lost track of him, still disoriented and almost too weak to walk. Now Lance is there, though, and Keith has no idea what to say.

Eventually, it’s Lance who breaks the silence.

“It’s…it’s good to have you back, man,” he says, then briefly touches Keith’s arm. “But, just so you know, you should probably talk to Shiro. He’d been sulking a lot while you were gone.”

“Yeah, I—” Keith swallows. “The others already told me.”

He hates that he needs to cling to the wall to make it to his room, the strange dizziness still there, making him almost nauseous. It’s like he suddenly lost the center of his balance, and he doesn’t know if it’s just the residual exhaustion or the side-effects of the pod. It wasn’t really built with human physiology in mind, after all.

Once he’s inside, he sits down on the bed and closes his eyes for a moment. The spinning sensation stops and now Keith can start to think straight, chasing away the cottony feeling lingering on the inside of his skull.

He knows that Lance likes to tackle problems head-on, but seeking Shiro out now, when he made it clear that he wanted to be left alone, wouldn’t do either of them any good, because as much as it might frustrate Keith, maybe a little more space now is just what they both need.

It really hits him now—the reality of the fact that he was so, so close to dying; the way Shiro’s arms felt, supporting his body as he carried Keith out of the lion; the way his heart was hammering in his chest; the way his voice broke a little when he spoke.

It was a close call, and they all know that.

But Keith knows better than anyone what Shiro is feeling right now; after all, he’s already done that once, except it didn’t take Shiro six days to come back.

It took him a year.

.

In the end, it’s Shiro who comes to him, a few hours later.

There’s a knock on the door that wakes Keith from a feverish nap, and when he croaks out a quiet, “Come in,” the door opens with a slight whoosh, and then Shiro is standing there, looking right at Keith.

“Hey,” Shiro says and comes inside. The door quietly closes behind him. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Keith shakes his head. “No, it’s okay. I probably shouldn’t be sleeping that much anyway.”

He shifts on the bed and pulls his knees up to his chest, making a little more space for Shiro to sit down. Shiro takes the silent invitation and comes to sit next to Keith, almost close enough to touch. Then he holds out a hand, and in his palm, there’s a strange fruit the size of a small orange Keith has never seen before—or at least Keith assumes it must be some sort of fruit.

“Here,” Shiro says, “they taste almost like peaches.”

The fruit is white, almost translucent, the skin a little more waxy than that on a peach, and completely see-through. When Keith bites into it, though, the familiar sweetness almost explodes on his tongue. The pit, when he finally reaches the center, is small and completely black.

Next to him, Shiro is sitting patiently, with his hands in his lap.

“Did you like it?” he asks once Keith is done eating, so fucking gentle with him that Keith can barely stand it.

What is the point of this, he thinks angrily, if there is always that little extra space left between them, that last gap, impossible to bridge.

“It was good,” he says.

“Keith, I—” Shiro starts then, sounding urgent, almost desperate. “I just wanted you to know that I’m really glad you’re okay. That we got to you in time. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you—”

Keith swallows painfully. There’s still the sweetness of the fruit clinging to the inside of his mouth, but he can taste the bitterness at the back of his throat, too. Because he knows the answer to this one.

“The same thing I did,” he says. “Go on living.”

Beside him, Shiro almost flinches, catching himself at the last second, but Keith can see it anyway.

“Maybe I should just let you rest,” Shiro says, then moves to stand up, and Keith’s first instinct is to follow, to catch him by the wrist and pull him down.

But he feels tired, mostly, and not braced for a fight, for once in his life.

“Yeah, I probably should.”

He lets it go.

.

He slowly gets better, then gets worse again when Zarkon’s people find them and they have to fly out straight into a fight that they almost lose, and by the time they’re back at the ship to lick their wounds, Keith feels unbalanced and dizzy, his entire side hurting after the lion almost crash-landed and he got thrown across the cockpit before landing against the protruding panel in the side of the lion, breaking three ribs in the process.

After another twelve hours spent in a healing pod, he feels better, if still slightly sore and tender to the touch, but that’s not really the worst thing. What really gets him now is fatigue. You can’t live your entire life on an adrenaline high—you need to crash, sooner or later, and the longer you wait, the harder the crash.

He’s not the only one, though. By now, they’re all exhausted by the constant game of cat and mouse they’ve been playing almost non-stop since they left Earth, however many weeks—months—ago.

It’s just a matter of time before they snap, like a bowstring that’s been pulled too taut.

Allura tells them they should be safe for at least a few days, maybe a week. For once, there are no distress calls from nearby planets, no Galra to fight.

They can rest.

The evening—or at least what passes for evening according to Keith’s internal clock—finds him on the training deck, facing against the gladiator. There’s a bayard in his right hand; in his left, he’s holding the knife.

Keith can hold his ground, he knows he can, but when he leaves himself open to an attack from the side and the gladiator hits right where his skin is still bruised and tender, Keith drops the knife and almost falls to the ground, catching himself at the last minute with his knee.

“Keith!” He hears behind him, recognizes Shiro’s voice. Then Shiro is kneeling next to him, like an echo of that night from a while ago, when Keith found Shiro in the middle of a waking nightmare, crumpled on the floor in front of the gladiator. “What the hell are you doing?”

Keith slowly pulls himself up. “I’m fine,” he says through gritted teeth. “He just hit me where it hurt. Literally.”

Beside him, Shiro’s face is stern. “Show me.”

“It’s not that bad, honestly,” Keith tries to argue as they move to sit down. “It just took me by surprise, and I guess I’m a bit more sore than I realized. It’s fine.”

Shiro gets this look on his face then, the one Keith doesn’t like, because it looks almost smug, like Shiro finally figured out something that would give him the upper hand.

“Well, if you’re fine, then you have nothing to worry about, right?” he says. “Come on, up.”

Slowly, Keith pulls up his shirt, and when he looks down, there’s a fresh bruise on his ribs, still red and hot to the touch. When Shiro’s fingers brush his skin a moment later, Keith instinctively sucks in a breath, holds it in for a moment as he stays completely still.

“See?” he says eventually, just to break the tension. “Not that bad.”

Shiro is laughing a little even as she shakes his head, but then he grows more serious again. “You should take better care of yourself.”

It’s not meant as anything other than a gentle rib, but it still makes Keith see red.

“Like you’re one to talk,” he says, pushing the fabric of the shirt down his torso. He puts more distance between himself and Shiro. “You’ve been running yourself ragged ever since this entire thing started, hoping no one would notice. Well, tough fucking luck, because I noticed. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.”

He realizes that suddenly he’s on his feet, almost screaming, but he just can’t seem to stop.

“You don’t have to do this alone, Shiro,” he says forcefully. “No one ever asked you to carry all that weight by yourself. That’s why there are five of us! So you don’t have to keep it all in, and you don’t have to martyr yourself, because you know what’s the one thing that all martyrs have in common?”

Shiro is staring straight at him, not saying anything.

“They’re fucking dead.”

As soon as he’s done, he realizes that he’s shaking all over, his hands balled up into fists at his side. He moves towards the door. Shiro doesn’t do anything to stop him.

“Goodnight,” Keith says as the door slides open.

Before it slides back shut, he hears a quiet, “Goodnight,” in return.

.

They touch down on one of the fringe planets of a solar system that still hasn’t been enslaved by Zarkon, to rest and resupply. The locals know Voltron only from legends passed down from generation to generation, but they’re friendly enough once Allura works her diplomacy magic.

They have a few days of peace and quiet, and they haven’t been found out yet, not by Zarkon’s patrols, and not by his druids.

This time, it’s Keith who’s been avoiding Shiro ever since that conversation on the training deck. He’s not angry anymore, but he figures that if anything between them is supposed to work, he can’t be the one to take the first step every time.

“I’ve been told there are hot springs to the north of the city, if you wanted to go ahead and relax for a while,” Allura tells them. “Coran and I will not be able to join you, I’m afraid, but it’s something to keep you occupied while we work on establishing diplomatic relations with the local government representatives, to aid us in our fight against Zarkon.”

They make the trip. The springs Allura was talking about form three small basins, tucked away in a remote corner of the neighboring woods, at the foot of a giant mountain that looms over the local landscape. It’s cozy and quiet, and just what they needed.

Once they arrive, Pidge is the first one to undress down to her underwear and take off at a sprint, followed by Lance just a few seconds later, and they splash against the surface of the water with a loud shriek. Hunk runs straight after them, leaving Shiro alone with Keith, for the first time in three days.

Keith, for his part, undresses slowly and unselfconsciously, methodically peeling off layers of clothes until he stands there, completely naked and unbothered by it. If Shiro is staring, Keith doesn’t turn around to see it.

“When I was a kid, we went back to Japan, to visit my mom’s grandparents, and they took us to a hot spring near Osaka,” Shiro says behind Keith’s back, and for the first time in a long time, Keith remembers that Shiro actually has people back on Earth that he misses, people who don’t even know he’s alive. “Maybe when we come back…”

The thing is, they probably won’t. But it’s nice to pretend.

“Yeah, totally,” Keith says, and when he turns to face Shiro, he’s standing a few feet away, completely naked. Keith doesn’t let his eyes linger. “We should all go together.”

He doesn’t wait for Shiro to make up his mind; instead, he chooses one of the unoccupied basins and gently lowers himself into the warm water, sighing with content as it reaches his still tender ribs. He lowers himself a little more, until he’s submerged up to his clavicle and getting his hair wet.

He closes his eyes, but he can still feel when Shiro joins him in the spring, the rustle of water and the way it ripples around Keith’s body, betraying Shiro’s presence.

They’re silent for a moment, before Shiro says, “I’m sorry.”

Keith opens his eyes and looks at Shiro.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he says, and it’s true.

He might have been angry at the way Shiro’s stubbornness and misguided sense of heroism had been putting him under even more stress, but he understands why Shiro did what he did. He can’t say he would’ve done the same in his place, because Keith is not a natural-born leader, the way Shiro is, but he understands, at least, where the initial impulse to hide, pretend and avoid had come from.

It doesn’t make it any less infuriating—trying to help someone who denies that they need help to begin with.

And Keith knows that it takes time, that healing is a process, that Shiro needs to do it on his own terms, in his own time. He just wants to be there to help in whatever way he can.

“Then why have you been avoiding me?” Shiro asks, and Keith stubbornly doesn’t look away, stares Shiro down.

“I haven’t been avoiding you,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’ve been giving you space. Isn’t that what you wanted? Space?”

It feels like they’re fighting again, which is not something Keith wanted, yet here they are, all the same. He sighs, his shoulders dropping.

“I just…I don’t know what you want, Shiro.”

They’re dangerously close to discussing this unspoken thing between them, dangerously close to going back to that promise from before Shiro had left.

When I come back, okay?

“I know,” Shiro says. “I’m sorry about that, too.”

Later, they get out of the hot spring to eat. The locals have been generous with their supplies, so they don’t have to rely on Coran’s questionable skills in the culinary department for once, and they eat until they’re full to bursting. The food is a little strange and completely new to them, but still delicious, and Keith is just content to lie in the purplish grass and close his eyes for a second, and not think about anything.

He wakes up some time later, feeling overheated and groggy, and a little disoriented. It takes him a few seconds to realize that he’s curled up next to Shiro with his head on Shiro’s arm. They’re still naked from the waist up.

“Where are the others?” he asks, his voice rough with sleep.

“They went back to the spring,” Shiro says, shifting on the grass. He doesn’t look away from Keith even for a moment.

“And you?”

Shiro shrugs, unbothered. “You fell asleep,” he says, like it explains everything.

Keith rubs his face for a moment, trying to wake himself up properly, while Shiro stays to keep him company. He could go—there’s nothing stopping him now (there was nothing stopping him before), but he chooses to stay.

And Keith—Keith tries not to read too much into it, because there are only so many times his hopes can be dashed before the sense of disappointment drives him away and further back into himself, but later, when they slowly walk back to the castle, Shiro stays at his side the entire time.

.

The next day Shiro comes to find Keith in his room. He knocks, as usual, and waits until Keith says, “Come in,” to push the panel that opens the door.

“Hey, do you have a moment?” Shiro says, looking around the room.

Keith hops off his bed and reaches for the jacket.

“Sure, I’m free,” he says. “What do you need?”

Shiro comes closer and leans against the wall, looking at Keith. He’s out of armor, and for the first time in a long time, he looks almost relaxed. Maybe their trip to the hot spring has worked its miracle.

“Could you…” Shiro swallows, “could you cut my hair?”

Keith almost freezes.

For all the friendly touches and how tactile Shiro has always been, Keith knows that these days, every now and then, Shiro flinches away from physical contact. It’s not often and he’s not sure if anyone else has picked up on it, but he knows when it happens. It’s a blink and you miss it moment, but it’s there. Keith isn’t surprised. If he were tortured for a year, broken down and rebuilt like a wind-up toy, he would be flinching, too.

So the fact that Shiro trusts him with this—it’s huge and overwhelming, like a pressure applied directly to the center of Keith’s chest.

He breathes deeply, once, twice.

“Of course,” he says. “Where do you want to do this?”

Shiro glances around Keith’s quarters. Keith knows they look Spartan, but Shiro’s are not much better—they all feel a little like they’re living on borrowed time, here at the Castle of Lions.

“We could just go to my room,” Shiro says. “I’ll tidy up when we’re done.”

Keith follows him along the corridor and to the left, until they’re standing in front of Shiro’s door. Keith he remembers all those times he came here, and never really had it in him to knock. Maybe he should have. Maybe he should have pushed harder, should have helped Shiro understand that there was someone on the other side of that door who cared, but he thought he was doing the right thing. It’s all in the past now. Keith is here, in front of Shiro’s door, and he’s here because Shiro wanted him here. Whatever happens once they cross the threshold, at least he’s not intruding.

Inside, Shiro quickly takes off the grey, worn tank top and pushes a chair to the middle of the room.

“Here,” he says, handing Keith the clippers.

It’s not his first time doing that—he used to trim Zara’s hair, back at the Garrison, because she always said he was the only one who didn’t make her look stupid, but he’s never done it for Shiro before. He feels nervous, all of a sudden.

It’s just hair, stupid, he tells himself. It’s just hair.

He’s still gripping the clippers like a lifeline when Shiro sits down in the chair in front of him and slightly tips his head forward, exposing the back of his neck. The moment feels more vulnerable than it should, with Shiro staying absolutely still and quiet with his head bowed down, naked from the waist up, with his neck clearly on display before Keith.

It would be so easy to just lean down a little and kiss him there.

Slowly, Keith reaches out to run his fingers through Shiro’s buzzed undercut. It hasn’t grown out that much yet, but it’s gotten softer and a little longer than usual. When he swallows thickly, he can hear the clicking sound in his throat, and he knows that Shiro must hear it, too.

His hands aren’t shaking when he takes the clippers to Shiro’s hair. It’s manual, not electronic, so it takes more time than it usually does, and when Keith first starts at the nape of Shiro’s neck, close to the hairline, Shiro shudders under his touch. In response, Keith settles the palm of his hand in the crook of Shiro’s neck, right where it meets the shoulder, the touch light but still there. He hopes it will ground Shiro, remind him that what they’re doing is not an invasion of his private space.

Shiro stays quiet the entire time, and maybe it’s the silence that makes Keith brave.

“Are we ever going to talk about it?” Keith asks eventually, brushing the stray hair clippings off Shiro’s shoulders before he goes any further up.

Shiro licks his lips before he can speak, a testament to how long he’s been silent.

“Talk about what?”

“Come on, Shiro,” Keith says, his voice quiet but even. “You know what.”

Shiro is silent for a long, long while. Keith just keeps cutting, but he’s almost done now, and he knows that once he’s finished, he won’t have the benefit of not having to look Shiro in the face anymore.

“A lot has changed, Keith,” Shiro says at last, his shoulders dropping, like he’s hunched in on himself. “Back when we said those things…neither of us could’ve predicted this. Neither of us signed up for this, not really, and it’s not fair—”

Keith puts the clippers away and runs his hands through Shiro’s undercut again, to shake off any stray hairs and check if it’s even everywhere. He can see the tension in Shiro’s shoulders, in his neck.

“You know what’s really not fair, Shiro?” he says, quiet. “This thing you’re doing right now. If you want me to stop and leave, and just…keep my distance, say so. Because I have no idea what you really want from me, and, frankly, it’s exhausting not to know. So just tell me to go, and I’ll go.”

When Shiro stays silent for a long moment, Keith shoves his hands inside his pockets to keep them from shaking and moves to leave.

“No, no, wait,” Shiro says, turning around in the chair to catch Keith by the sleeve of his jacket. “Stay. I want you to stay.”

Keith presses his lips together. His heart is pounding in his chest like he’s about to go into freefall. And maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing now—diving off a precipice even though they can’t see the bottom.

It’s a trust exercise, more than anything else.

When he kisses Shiro for the first time, it’s just a brief press of lips against lips, a little off-center, landing against the corner of Shiro’s mouth, a little desperate in the way Keith leans in and tips his face up, betraying the tension in his back and shoulders.

It’s not his first kiss—no, it’s his second—but it’s the one that counts.

After just a few seconds, they break apart. Keith’s throat is tight with embarrassment.

“A little rusty, huh?” Shiro says, but there’s no mockery in it, and his thumb brushes against Keith’s cheekbone where Shiro is cupping his face in his hand, gentle and warm.

Keith tries to laugh.

“What gave me away?”

Shiro laughs, too, and his hand slides down to rest at the side of Keith’s neck, the tips of Shiro’s fingers brushing the hair at Keith’s nape.

“You need a haircut, too,” Shiro says, and his voice is so incredibly fond that Keith can barely breathe, the center of his chest tight and airy at the same time. “You’ve gone all shaggy.”

He kisses Keith then, pulling him closer. This time, it’s a soft slide of lips on lips that has Keith closing his eyes, his arms wrapped around Shiro’s neck as Shiro gently cradles the back of Keith’s head, touches his neck, the line of his jaw.

Shiro slowly moves backwards as they kiss, pulling Keith along with him, until the backs of Shiro’s thighs hit the desk standing by the wall, and Shiro leans against it just as Keith comes to stand between his open legs, hands braced on Shiro’s thighs. He can feel the way the muscle strains under his palms, even through the fabric of Shiro’s pants.

His heart is going a mile a minute, fluttering like a bird inside of his chest. He feels lightheaded with it, with Shiro’s smell, the way he feels under his touch, solid and warm, and real, and right here with Keith.

When they finally break apart after a while, Keith is breathing rapidly, his face warm to the touch. His lips are tingling, and when Shiro presses the pad of his thumb to Keith’s lower lip, it almost draws a low, desperate sound out of him.

“Okay?” Shiro asks, and Keith can only nod, dumbstruck.

Carefully, he tries to angle his hips away from Shiro to hide the way he’s starting to get hard in his pants, straining against the zipper.

When he looks up, Shiro’s lips look dark and red. They look kissed, and it’s all because of Keith. To know that is exhilarating.

“Hey, you still with me?” Shiro asks with a breathy laugh, and Keith realizes that he’s just been staring for the past few seconds.

Now that he knows what it’s like to kiss Shiro, he wants everything.

But.

For the first time in what feels like a long time, Keith doesn’t just close his eyes and jump.

Maybe that’s how he knows it’s important.

So he takes a small step back, putting a little distance between their bodies, a thrill running down his spine when Shiro instinctively follows his movement before settling back against the desk, just looking at Keith.

Keith watches as Shiro licks his lips.

It’s late—late enough that everyone else is probably already asleep, and Keith needs to stop for a while, clear his head, but he doesn’t want to leave, either.

“Can we just…just sleep here? Together?” he asks, the words tumbling awkwardly out of his mouth, his shoulders hunched, almost like he expects Shiro to change his mind and tell him to go.

Instead, Shiro takes a step towards Keith and briefly kisses him on the forehead.

“Of course,” he says. “Just go get your pillow and a spare blanket. I don’t think we’ll fit together under one of these.”

Keith goes, barely containing the giddy feeling that continues to climb up his throat and spine, making him almost dizzy. He bundles up the pillow in the blanket, then goes to take a quick shower to cool off, the water almost freezing, but it works, and that’s what’s important. By the time he gets back to Shiro’s room ten minutes later, Shiro is just coming out of the shower, shirtless, his feet bare.

The bed is not very big, but they arrange the pillows and blankets, and then Keith lies down with his back to the wall. He doesn’t think Shiro would appreciate the feeling of being trapped.

Before he drifts off, he turns around to face the wall, and he feels as Shiro wraps an arm around his waist, shifting closer until they’re lying back to chest, Shiro’s warmth slowly seeping into Keith’s skin.

He finally falls asleep to the sensation of Shiro’s lips pressed briefly against the spot where his neck meets his shoulder.

.

When he wakes up and briefly glances at one of those strange alien watches they learned to read over time, out of necessity more than anything else, it’s still early—early enough that everyone else would still be asleep.

Keith stretches and shifts a little, buries himself in Shiro’s warmth and closes his eyes again. He’s about to drift off to sleep when he notices the change in Shiro’s breathing, the split-second moment when he wakes up, and then the arm he has wrapped around Keith’s waist pulls him closer against Shiro’s back, until he can feel the way Shiro’s abdomen muscles flex when he moves behind Keith to press his face into the crook of Keith’s neck.

He never really thought what it would be like, to wake up next to Shiro for the first time when they both knew it wouldn’t be the last one. He knew it would be warm, and safe, and solid—all these things Shiro is.

He shifts again and Shiro lets him go, loosens the hold he has on Keith’s waist, his fingers sliding to rest on Keith’s hip instead. He can feel the way Shiro is half-hard in his pants where he presses gently against Keith’s body, hot and firm against his ass. After a moment of consideration, Keith pushes further into Shiro, pressing them closer together until Shiro’s erection is trapped against their bodies. Behind him, Shiro groans quietly.

“Hey,” Keith says, craning his neck to look up at Shiro, who looks soft, his hair tousled from sleep.

“Hey,” Shiro says, his voice rough from sleep; then, “Don’t be a tease.”

He tries to cant his hips away, but Keith follows his movement, licks his lips as he makes up his mind.

“Who says I’m teasing?” he asks, then turns around in Shiro’s arms until they’re face to face, and Shiro’s eyes are immediately drawn to Keith’s mouth as he leans in the tiniest bit but doesn’t close the distance, waiting for Keith to do something.

He presses his lips against Shiro’s mouth, gently, like he’s still not entirely sure he would be welcome, despite everything. Despite the fact that it was Shiro who leaned in first.

Keith knows his affection is awkward and graceless, and he can’t show it any other way, so he only hopes that Shiro understands.

Shiro kisses him back, his lips soft and sleep-warm, as his hand reaches to cup Keith’s cheek, the side of his face, Shiro’s fingers buried in Keith’s hair. He’s being so gentle with Keith, and it’s overwhelming and exhilarating, but he wouldn’t mind it if it got a little rough somewhere along the way.

Slowly, he shifts until his legs are tangled under the sheets, their thighs brushing against each other. Keith can feel the slow drag of Shiro’s cock every time he moves as he keeps kissing Keith, their lips parted and their tongues sliding gently against each other, the quiet, wet sounds they keep making every time they part for a fraction of a second.

Eventually, Keith’s hand slides under the hem of Shiro’s tank top as he brushes his fingers against Shiro’s abs, and up to his chest. He wants to follow those fingers with his lips, kiss the smooth, soft skin and kiss the little faded scars that he can only feel but not see, trace them with his mouth and watch Shiro slowly let everything go.

They break apart for a moment to get rid of their shirts, and when they come together again, Shiro ducks his head to kiss the side of Keith’s neck, following the straining tendons with his tongue, and Keith has to bite into his lip to keep himself from making a sound. Shiro doesn’t stop even when Keith starts squirming under him, and his hand trails down Keith’s chest and his side, brushing against his ribs until it comes to a rest at his hip, Shiro’s palm splayed over the bony jut of it, just inches away from Keith’s cock, the closeness of it making Keith run hot under the collar.

Slowly and deliberately, he pushes forward just a tiny bit to grind against Shiro, and he can already feel the sticky wetness pooling at the tip of his cock, staining his underwear. The sound Shiro makes when he does that reverberates through Keith’s entire body, with Shiro’s lips still pressed against Keith’s neck, just above the jugular. He must feel how hard Keith’s heart is beating.

It goes on for a while, as Keith breathes heavily, barely holding on, before he gently pushes Shiro away and down on his back.

“Okay?” Shiro asks, and he sounds breathless, too. Keith just nods.

His lips are tingling and he’s almost painfully hard now, and he thinks that Shiro might have left a mark on the side of his neck, if the throbbing sensation is anything to go by.

Keith is no stranger to the way his own body moves, so he straddles Shiro’s thighs in one fluid movement, then reaches for the waistband of Shiro’s pants, biting his lip when he sees the outline of Shiro’s cock straining against the fabric.

Beneath him, Shiro laughs quietly.

“If you want these off, I think you need to let go for a sec,” he says, then moves to sit up, pressing a brief kiss to the corner of Keith’s mouth.

Keith knows that for all his bravado, it’s little things like these that betray his inexperience, and maybe if he were here with someone else, he would feel more embarrassed, but Shiro makes it all sound so easy.

As soon as Keith moves to the side, Shiro pulls his sleeping pants past his hips and then down his thighs while Keith just keeps staring. He knows what Shiro looks like naked, in that almost clinical, detached way you get used to when you live in a place with communal showers, but he never really let himself look, too afraid of being found out.

Now, he can not only look, but also touch. So he moves to lean over Shiro, nudging his legs apart to brace himself on one of his thighs, when Shiro stops him with a hand against his chest.

“Wait, you too,” he says, pointing with his chin to Keith’s boxers, already soaked through in one spot just under the waistband.

When Keith tosses the boxers away and looks up, Shiro is looking at him, with his head propped against his arm, and when his eyes trail down for a second or two, he licks his lips. Keith can see the way his Adam’s apple rises and falls.

Slowly, he braces himself over Shiro with one arm on the mattress and leans forward, his cock resting in the place where Shiro’s hip meets his thigh, then kisses Shiro at the same time as his free hand wraps around Shiro’s dick.

Keith pushes the foreskin back, getting used to the feeling of Shiro’s cock in his hand, strange and familiar at the same time. He can feel the way the muscles of Shiro’s abdomen clench against his knuckles where Keith’s hand is wrapped around his dick, brushing against the trail of sparse hair that leads down from his navel.

Beneath him, Shiro muffles the noises he’s making against Keith’s mouth, and every time their lips stop touching for a fraction of a second, he can hear how labored Shiro’s breath is, can feel the little stutter of his hips every time Keith’s fingers brush against the head of his cock.

His heart is pounding when he pushes himself up and off, then rearranges himself between Shiro’s open thighs. He can feel Shiro’s eyes on him, can hear the way his breathing picks up even more, and his eyes flicker up for a brief second, only to catch Shiro’s gaze. The way his face looks now—open and awestruck, a flush spreading across his cheeks and nose—makes Keith shiver.

He ducks his head down, suddenly almost shy, then presses a kiss to the inside of Shiro’s thigh before he closes his lips around his cock. The sensation is strange at first, the weight of it heavy on Keith’s tongue, but he tries to breathe through his nose as he sinks lower and lower, trying to take as much of it in as possible. Shiro is big, a lot bigger than Keith, and it’s brash determination more than anything else that makes Keith go lower and lower still, until the tip of Shiro’s cock hits the back of his throat. He chokes a little, his eyes watering for a moment as he pulls off, coughing, and wipes away the string of saliva that stretches between his lower lip and the underside of Shiro’s dick.

“Hey, hey, easy,” Shiro says as he cups Keith’s jaw, his thumb running along the curve of his cheekbone.

Keith’s lips are tingling and a little sore already, unused to the stretch, but he just swallows a few times and smiles at Shiro before sinking back onto his cock with his mouth. This time he’s more careful, using his lips and tongue as much as he can while he wraps his hand around the base of Shiro’s dick, trying to keep a steady rhythm.

He takes slow, measured breaths, and every time he slides a little further down, the little breathy sounds Shiro keeps making send a little thrill up and down his spine.

His jaw starts aching after a while as he gets a little bit bolder, a little bit more assured in his movements. One of Shiro’s hands is now resting gently on Keith’s head, not pushing, just touching, his fingers running through Keith’s hair. He almost wants to pull off for a second to tell Shiro it’s okay if he pulls on his hair a little, but Shiro is struggling to keep his hips from jerking up, and his thighs are trembling on both sides of Keith’s face, and it goes straight to Keith’s head, making him almost dizzy and all too aware of his own cock, trapped between his body and the sheets, desperate for friction.

It happens between one heartbeat and another—in one second Keith is sucking at the head of Shiro’s dick, his tongue pressed flat against the vein running on the underside, his own hips grinding against the bed, and the next second he’s coming all over his stomach and the sheets, unable to stop it before it’s too late.

The embarrassment burns in him even as Shiro pulls him up to kiss him, guiding Keith’s hand to wrap it around his own cock, their fingers tangled together. It only takes a moment—a few long, fast strokes before Shiro comes all over their joined hands, not even kissing Keith anymore, his mouth slack against Keith’s lips, breathing the same air.

When they finally part, Keith’s throat feels tight with shame, and he presses his lips into a thin line, avoiding Shiro’s eyes.

The sheets are a mess, and Keith still can feel the pressure in his abdomen, slowly turning into a knot in his stomach.

He swallows thickly, once, twice, his shoulders stiff with tension.

“We should probably change that,” he tells Shiro, moving to get up.

A deep breath, and another, and then he finally gets going, tries to find his underwear only to realize that it’s still wet in one spot and unpleasant to the touch.

His tank top must be here somewhere.

Maybe he could take a shower before he leaves.

“Hey, hey, where are you going?” Shiro asks, tugging at his wrist before Keith is even off the mattress. Keith looks back for a brief moment and sees the genuine confusion in Shiro’s face. “I didn’t even get to touch you yet. Come on now, how is that a fair deal, huh?”

He smiles, soft and gentle, and something in Keith’s chest clenches painfully at the sight.

“Keith, come on,” Shiro continues, a little more serious now. “Did you really think I would just leave you like that? Besides, that was…that was hot. You, getting off on getting me off. It was…I really liked it.”

Somehow, in all his embarrassment and rush to get away, he never really considered that—that Shiro would actually get turned on by it.

Slowly, he crawls back into bed and settles at Shiro’s side, his now soft cock brushing against his thigh. Next to him, Shiro is waiting patiently for Keith to make a move.

It’s so like Shiro, to know when to push and to know when to take a step back, with Keith. He’s known him long enough to be able to match his erratic rhythm of the everyday life, after all, so Keith has no idea why he didn’t think it would also extend to…this, whatever it is, this thing between them.

When he finally leans down to kiss Shiro, he’s already there to meet him halfway. It’s a good metaphor, Keith thinks, for how they are together.

Kissing Shiro now, while his lips are still sore and tingling from when he sucked Shiro’s cock less than ten minutes ago, is even more intense and overwhelming, the way Keith loses himself in the sensation a little, almost like in those moments when he just closes his eyes and flings Red off the edge of a cliff, plunging into freefall.

Kissing Shiro—it feels just like that.

It’s obvious that Shiro has had more practice with it than Keith has, and there are moments when Keith feels like he’s playing a constant game of catch-up, but, at the end of the day, he enjoys the chase as much as he enjoys being chased, and this—this is just a learning curve.

They just kiss for a while, tangled up in each other, the slow, wet drag of lips on lips and tongue on tongue, lazy and satisfied, when Keith notices that for all the touching they do, Shiro seems to always hesitate before he touches Keith with his prosthetic hand, like he isn’t sure if he should, like Keith will be forever tainted by association.

Keith knows that for Shiro, there are so many conflicting feelings tangled up in this weapon of their enemy, permanently attached to his body, and he knows that despite everything, Sendak’s words, back there in that stasis chamber, cut closer to the core than Shiro would admit to anyone.

Maybe Shiro isn’t even doing that on purpose, maybe it’s just a subconscious reflex for him by now, but Keith doesn’t give a shit, because Shiro isn’t broken or incomplete, or whatever else he’s been trying to tell himself, and Keith doesn’t care. When he signed up for this, he signed up for everything, but he’s also a firm believer in the stance that sometimes, actions speak louder than words, so he purposefully reaches for Shiro’s prosthetic hand and tangles their fingers together, palms touching, and squeezes, hard enough for Shiro to notice, but not hard enough to hurt. Then he guides Shiro’s hand down to his abdomen and lower, until he wraps Shiro’s fingers around Keith’s dick—not even half-hard yet, but slowly getting there.

Shiro pauses for a second and pulls back slightly to look at Keith. The look on his face is impossible to describe, but he exhales softly, and then his fingers tighten the grip around Keith’s cock, dragging down and then back up, Shiro’s thumb pressed against the slit. Keith stifles a moan.

Shiro doesn’t tease, not exactly, but he’s letting Keith’s body set its own pace, his fingers on Keith’s dick a light yet firm touch, slowly but steadily getting him to half-hard, the pressure in his abdomen building up again as Shiro never stops touching him at the same time as he presses slow, wet kisses to the side of Keith’s neck and behind his ear. It makes Keith’s hips buck up, but Shiro just presses the flat of his hand against Keith’s lower abdomen and gives him one last kiss before he shifts to kneel between Keith’s thighs. Now Keith can see that Shiro is slowly getting hard again, too.

Keith can only watch as Shiro hooks both of his arms under Keith’s thighs, pulling them up until he’s settled comfortably between Keith’s legs. His hands keep running up and down the insides of Keith’s thighs, and Keith’s breath catches as he shivers.

He suddenly feels very exposed, spread out in front of Shiro, his half-hard cock resting against his abdomen, his thighs enveloped by Shiro’s muscular arms.

Shiro gives him a small, almost shy smile and kisses the jut of his hip, then presses his lips just under the crown of Keith’s cock, soft and tender.

Keith bites his lips to keep himself from making a sound.

“You’re so quiet,” Shiro says before he leans down to press another kiss to the head of Keith’s dick.

When Keith glances down at Shiro, he’s looking back at him, his face open and earnest.

Keith swallows.

“I—” he starts, but Shiro shakes his head with a breathy laugh.

“No, no, it’s not…it’s not bad,” he says. “I was just wondering if you were always like this, or if you were just afraid the others might hear.”

Keith shrugs. “I’m just…not used to it. You know,” he says, his breath still coming fast, “not a lot of privacy at the barracks.”

Shiro nods before he ducks his head down and kisses the inside of Keith’s thigh, the place where his hip meets his groin, then closes his lips around the head of Keith’s cock, his tongue pressed against the slit. Keith’s hips jerk up involuntarily and he grabs at the sheets, pulling, his neck arching off the pillow when he feels Shiro swallow him down until his nose and lips are pressed against the base of Keith’s cock. The warmth of Shiro’s mouth is overwhelming, the feeling of his tongue pressing against the underside of Keith’s cock driving him crazy as Shiro slowly, methodically swallows around him, the muscles of his neck shifting under the skin, his Adam’s apple rising and falling in an even rhythm.

When Shiro makes a sound, deep in his throat, with his lips still wrapped around Keith’s cock, Keith moans and clamps his hand on his mouth out of habit, his hips arching off the bed, and Shiro presses his body down, gentle but firm, his warm hand lingering on Keith’s abdomen afterwards, grounding Keith in what’s happening around him.

He feels like he’s running a fever, and he’s aware of the little, jerky movements of his hips, despite Shiro’s hand pinning him down to the bed, of the way his thighs shake just inches away from Shiro’s face.

He’s fully hard now, and he can feel the way the warm tension pools in the pit of his stomach, the way his toes start to curl, but then Shiro pulls off, kissing the tip of Keith’s cock as he goes.

Keith lifts his head off the pillow, still dazed. “What—” he starts, but Shiro isn’t pulling away, and he’s still touching Keith.

“Just give me a second,” Shiro says, then reaches into the nightstand and pulls something that looks like a lotion of some kind.

Keith spreads his legs a little further in anticipation, but Shiro gently nudges him to the side, then kisses his shoulder.

“This should work,” he says quietly with his lips against Keith’s skin, then opens the lotion and dribbles a small amount of it onto the insides of his thighs before rubbing it into his skin.

Keith’s throat goes dry.

He read about it, because he was a weird kid with a fascination with the antiquity and no one to really supervise his reading habits, and his head spins now a little bit as he watches Shiro’s thighs, muscular and powerful, while he arranges himself on the bed on his side, then looks over his shoulder with a smile that looks almost bashful.

Slowly, Keith moves to lie behind Shiro, then presses a kiss to the nape of Shiro’s neck, and another one along the column of his spine, his fingers trailing down his ribs and side until Keith’s hand comes to rest on Shiro’s hip. He runs his palm along the curve of Shiro’s ass for a moment before he takes a deep breath and slips his cock between Shiro’s thighs, feels the way Shiro immediately presses them closer together. It’s warm and tight, and Keith can feel the way Shiro’s strong muscles work, clenching around Keith’s cock.

It’s overwhelming, the heat and the pressure, and when Keith exhales with his lips brushing against the skin of Shiro’s back, it comes out as a broken moan.

His hips jerk back and then forward again, and Shiro pushes back, a little off-rhythm at first, but after a few seconds, they settle into a slow, excruciating pace that has Keith barely holding it together. After a while, Shiro’s hand finds its way back to rest on Keith’s hip, guiding him and grounding him at the same time as he slowly loses it, pressing open, wet kisses to the nape of Shiro’s neck and his shoulders, trapped between the smooth heat of Shiro’s thighs. His arms are wrapped tightly around Shiro’s chest and torso, fingers splayed against Shiro’s abs, until Keith sneaks one hand down Shiro’s abdomen to wrap it around his dick.

He loses the rhythm for a second, trying to match the pace he’s set with his hand on Shiro’s cock, and Shiro twists in his arms just a little bit, just enough to crane his neck and press a hot, sloppy kiss to the corner of Keith’s mouth, and then another, pulling Keith’s lower lip between his teeth gently as they break apart. They’re both breathing heavily by now, Shiro’s back flush against Keith’s chest, and it’s so unbearably intimate that Keith’s throat goes tight, his movements more and more erratic as he gets close, and then Shiro clenches his thighs one last time around Keith’s cock, and Keith comes with a muffled sob, surrounded by Shiro’s smell and warmth, and dizzy with it.

He stays still for a moment after that, just breathing, trying to get his bearings, before he realizes that Shiro hasn’t come yet, and he pulls him onto his back to wrap his hand around Shiro’s cock, stroking him hard and fast now, until he comes all over his stomach and Keith’s hand.

They just stay like this for a moment, breathless and sweaty, and exhausted, their lips pressing careless kisses over whatever small expanse of skin they can find, before Keith sits back on his heels, still trying to get his breathing under control, and looks at Shiro.

The insides of his thighs are a mess, and it sends a small thrill down Keith’s spine, to know that he was the one who did that to him; there’s a flush that goes all the way down to Shiro’s chest, and his lips look red and tender, like he kept biting them when he wasn’t kissing Keith.

On impulse, he presses his lips against a spot on Shiro’s abdomen and licks at the streak of come, trying to get used to the taste. When he looks up, Shiro is staring at him, his mouth open in surprise. He seems frozen for a moment, like he never expected Keith to do that, then pulls him up to kiss him, his tongue sliding against Keith’s, chasing the last of the aftertaste away.

Keith feels exhausted, and after a moment, he just collapses against Shiro, with his head propped against Shiro’s chest, Shiro’s arm wrapped around his shoulders.

He tries to break the silence a few times, but finds himself at a loss for words. So he just gently wraps his fingers around Shiro’s wrist and hopes that, as with all things, Shiro will understand that, too.

.

Sometimes they don’t really sleep through the night.

Sometimes Shiro wakes up in the early hours of the morning in cold sweat, the echo of a scream on his lips. Keith knows he’s doing his best not to wake him up, but it never works.

“Go back to sleep,” Shiro says, pressing a kiss to the nape of Keith’s neck. “It was just a bad dream.”

It doesn’t surprise him, when it happens. After all, he knows what Shiro tries to hide behind the façade of smiles and confident leadership that fits him like a glove. It’s not a new thing, but now that he’s not fighting Shiro every step of the way, it’s so much easier to accept what cannot be changed. It’s a struggle, but Keith knows what to do in a fight, and when he has a clear opponent, he can at least figure out where and how to strike, how to twist the edge of his knife to make it bleed. It’s the uncertainty of what he’s fighting against that he just can’t take.

Keith knows that there are things that he can’t fix. Knows there are things that maybe nothing ever can, but at least now he knows that Shiro is not alone.

Maybe that’s the entire point—to just be, nothing else. Maybe everything else is just incidental.

So sometimes Keith turns on the lights in the middle of the night, and they talk or read side by side, or just lie together, Keith’s always-cold toes pressing into Shiro’s ankles under the blankets. Other times they get up and go a few rounds on the training deck, either against each other or the two of them against the gladiator.

They save the universe, again, and again, and again.

But they’re still alive, and maybe that’s what counts in the end—those moments after a mission, when Shiro touches his forehead to Keith’s, his hand strong and warm on the nape of Keith’s neck; Shiro’s gentle fingers rubbing muscle balm onto Keith’s bruised ribs when it gets rough; the way they fit against each other in bed and in a fight.

Maybe that’s it, Keith thinks. Maybe he finally figured it out.

.

Here’s an incomplete list of things Keith knows:

They’re drifting in space, light years away from anything they have ever known.

They live with the weight of a thousand worlds on their shoulders.

In space, time seems to flow differently.

Next to him, for once, Shiro sleeps soundly without nightmares.

Author's Note:

If you want, come say hi on tumblr :)

Works inspired by this one:

- nothing can breathe in space by idrilka [podfic] by Rhea314 (Rhea)

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- 1. Chapter 1
- 2. Chapter 2
- 3. Chapter 3
- 4. Chapter 4