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i.
“I thought I might find you here.”
Keith looks over his shoulder from where he’s sitting, hunched over, with his knees drawn up to his chest. It’s late, probably close to lights out, and he’s been sitting here for the past hour, maybe more. He didn’t bother to check.
“Hey,” he says when Shiro sits down on the ground next to him, his voice rough and quiet.
There’s a long moment where neither of them says anything, and they just keep sitting next to each other, looking out at the rest of the compound and onto the red desert beyond, their shoulders almost touching.
Shiro is out of uniform, dressed just in his fatigues, and when Keith glances at him briefly before going back to watching the quiet stillness of the desert, he can see the dog tags chain peeking out from behind the collar of his blouse. Even out of dress uniform, he could pass muster if anyone bothered to do an inspection right now, on the roof of the Garrison, the sleeves of his blouse neatly rolled up to above his elbows, his utility cover tucked into the back pocket of his pants the only thing out of place.
Keith swallows.
“I heard what happened in the simulator,” Shiro says. He sounds perfectly neutral, and if Keith didn’t know him so well, he would probably buy it.
Keith shrugs, watching out of the corner of his eye as Shiro tugs on the ball chain attached to his dog tags absentmindedly.
Sometimes he wants to reach out and yank Shiro forward by the chain, press their lips together. They would probably bump noses, their mouths smashing against each other a little too hard. When Keith imagines that, they laugh and then Shiro kisses him again.
Sometimes he just wants—what, he can’t exactly put into words, but something other than this tension, this longing.
“I don’t get it,” Keith says then, when the silence starts to stretch between them for a bit too long. “Why would they want us to fail on purpose?”
Shiro looks up at the stars, then back at Keith. “That’s why it’s called the impossible scenario,” he says. “It’s supposed to be impossible.”
Keith runs a hand through his hair. It’s probably too long and he needs a haircut, but he’s not going to ask Shiro to cut it for him now.
He sighs, impatient. “Yeah, but why?”
Shiro leans back on his hands and turns to face Keith.
“Come on, you’re a smart guy, Keith. Figure it out.” In someone else’s mouth, it would sound condescending, but Shiro somehow manages to take the sting out of the words.
They’re quiet for a moment as the sky above them goes from deep blue to black, the stars coming out.
“You can’t fight your way out of everything, Keith,” Shiro says then, and Keith wants to tell him it’s not true, you just need to be determined enough to want not to fail, but deep down, he knows Shiro is right.
That’s what the instructors wanted to convey to them back in the simulator, he supposes, but he’s someone who sleeps with a knife under his pillow, so it might take some time for that particular lesson to stick.
On impulse, he lies down on his back, with his arms behind his head, and looks up. After a moment, Shiro huffs with amusement and lies down next to Keith. He’s so close that Keith can feel his body heat, and he wonders if he should put more space between them, just to make closing that gap a little more difficult.
Above them, the stars look back at them, unmoved.
Where Keith comes from, there’s too much light pollution to see the stars, even when the night sky is clear. He remembers going camping with the other kids from the orphanage for the first time when he was seven or eight, far outside the city limits; the first night they let them stay up longer, and when the purple turned to dark blue turned to black and Keith saw the myriad stars lighting up the dark expanse of the sky, it was the first time he thought that maybe there was something more waiting for him.
He knows that Shiro grew up in a big city, the same as Keith. Sometimes he wonders what Shiro thought when he saw this overwhelming infinity of cosmos for the first time. If it was like a puzzle piece falling into place for him, too.
“I know,” Keith says eventually. He licks his lips and shifts onto his side. Shiro follows suit, until they’re facing each other; Keith can’t help but wonder if Shiro can hear how hard his heart is beating.
“Know what?”
“That I can’t fight my way out of everything.”
Shiro’s eyes don’t leave Keith’s face, like he’s looking for something in his expression. If he finds anything, Keith has no idea what it is. It’s hard for him to keep his guard up around Shiro.
“Good,” Shiro says. “I just wish you would act like it.”
Keith remembers the knife under his pillow, the handle of it fitting perfectly into his hand, like an extension of his arm.
He licks his lips again and rolls onto his back, looks up at all the distant stars he learned the names of, and all those he never did.
“I’ll try.”
ii.
“Come with me,” Shiro says, catching Keith by the sleeve of his uniform after dinner.
Keith just lets himself be led, and maybe people who only think they have Keith all figured out would say that it’s a metaphor for how he is with Shiro, watching the two of them from the outside. But they both know it’s more complicated, more of a push and pull that comes and goes in waves. Keith likes it that way, and he thinks Shiro does, too. Or at least he hopes he does.
It’s hard to read Shiro sometimes, but they’ve known each other long enough that there’s a warm, comfortable familiarity between them, a sense of closeness that Keith has never felt before.
They make their way to the roof, climbing the metal staircase that leads up to the hatch, and Keith watches Shiro unlock it and open the door.
“After you,” Shiro says with a small smile, moving to the side to let Keith pass.
“What—” he starts, ducking in the low doorway to avoid hitting his head, but then he looks up to the sky and his breath catches.
“Wow.”
It’s only after he feels Shiro’s chest against his back and his hand on his hip, guiding him forward, that he realizes he just stopped moving, staring at the meteor shower, enraptured.
Behind him, Shiro laughs, and Keith can feel the vibrations reverberating in his chest. He’s never felt more warm in his entire life.
He takes a step forward, and then another, until there’s more space between him and Shiro. He’s still looking up at the sky, where the stars keep falling and falling, and falling.
“The Leonids,” Shiro says.
Right. It’s November. Between all the sim training and cramming for his pilot exams, Keith almost forgot that there existed a world outside of the main compound of the Garrison.
It’s not the first time he’s seen a meteor shower, but it’s the first time he’s seen one this bright, illuminating the entire sky as far as he can see. It’s breathtaking.
“Make a wish,” Shiro says, bumping shoulders with Keith. He’s smiling, soft and warm, and Keith’s heart stutters in his chest.
He huffs under his breath, but then his eyes flicker down for a second, away from the rain of light.
The truth is, he could make a hundred wishes, and Shiro would still be standing there, at a safe distance, and Keith’s parents would still be dead.
It’s silly, believing in wishes.
“Wanna sit down and watch?” Shiro asks when Keith says nothing, and Keith nods.
They sit down, leaning against the parapet, shoulder to shoulder. Keith is one of those people who, contrary to their temperament, always run cold, and he remembers how back at the orphanage, his feet would always be freezing in winter and well into the spring, no matter how many extra blankets he had, his fingers always stiff and clumsy. When he was thirteen, he started wearing fingerless gloves at all times that the sisters hated because they said it made him look like one of those rebel kids, but at least the gloves helped him get the feeling in his hands back.
But Shiro always radiates warmth, and Keith has no idea when he really started noticing it, when he started to feel like his insides were filled with bright, burning heat every time Shiro leaned into him. It’s selfish, leeching that much warmth from one person, but Keith still leans in, too, every time.
“I was ten when I saw something like this for the first time,” Shiro says. “Perseids. My sister woke me up in the middle of the night to watch, and we snuck out round the back of our parents’ summer house, went down to the lake to take a better look. We almost fell asleep sitting at the end of the pier.” He laughs quietly, and Keith can feel the way his shoulders shake. “Aiko was only five. Mom got so mad when she found us.”
Keith never met them, but he knows that Shiro comes from a wealthy family with a long history. He doesn’t talk about them very often, but when he does, it’s always about the small, insignificant things, funny stories, random memories, like this one.
Keith doesn’t like to share the stories of his life at the orphanage, and Shiro never pries, but looking up at the meteor shower that continues to light up the sky like fireworks, he finds himself opening his mouth before he can think better of it.
“I never saw the stars until I was seven, maybe eight,” he says, staring straight ahead. He feels Shiro shift slightly next to him. “The sisters took us camping, and I just looked up at night and saw all of this. It felt…I don’t know, it felt right, I guess. Like I knew where I wanted to go.”
There was no meteor shower that night, but there was one falling star that he caught out of the corner of his eye. He made a wish, too young still to understand that it wasn’t a star and that it didn’t grant any wishes at all.
Beside him, Shiro smiles and ducks his head for a brief moment, then looks up at Keith.
“And now you will, one day soon,” he says.
He looks good in his uniform of a Flight Officer, still brand new and stiff around the collar. The falling stars reflect in his pilot wings until they die out right before they reach the horizon.
“You made it happen, you know,” Shiro says, and something clamps around Keith’s heart like a vice. “You, no one else. That’s something to be proud of.”
Keith looks up at the sky, thinking about that younger Keith, gazing up at the same stars and finding himself reflected in their light.
No, I didn’t, he wants to say, willing Shiro to understand.
You were there to help, he wants to say.
But Keith knows what Shiro meant, and, once again, he’s right.
It’s cold, so he tucks his hands between his thighs and leans a little closer to Shiro.
“I guess it is,” he says.
iii.
“Come meet me at the hangar after dinner,” Shiro says when they pass each other in the mess hall.
It’s Tuesday, which means they’re serving beef stroganoff with a potato mash and green beans. It looks as unappetizing as ever.
“Sure,” Keith says, loading up his tray with the food and snatching an apple from the bowl.
When he looks over his shoulder, Shiro is already gone, back at the officers’ table, talking with Danvers over dinner.
He sits down at the first free table he spots, across from some guy he vaguely recognizes from his flying classes and his mechanic friend. The guy gives him a weird look, but Keith just keeps chewing, eyes fixed on his tray.
When you grow up around a lot of other kids more or less your age, you learn to eat fast. It’s one of those things that are almost impossible to unlearn even once you grow up.
He finishes while the two other guys are still halfway through their meals, then, when he gets up to return his tray, he takes a quick glance at Shiro, who’s still discussing something with Danvers and another officer as he eats.
Keith swings by his bunk on his way out and changes into his fatigues before making for the hangar. He figures he’ll wait for Shiro there; at this hour, there should be just one soldier standing guard, everyone else back at the mess hall, getting dinner.
He doesn’t have to wait long. After ten, maybe fifteen minutes, Shiro walks up to him, also changed out of his uniform, and elbows Keith gently in the side, gesturing towards the hangar with his head.
“Ready?” he asks, and he turns on his heel, walking backwards, his eyes never leaving Keith. He’s smiling. “C’mon, let’s go, we have to be back before lights out.”
The hoverbike Shiro bought with his first pay after they made him an officer is still shiny and new, just like the pilot stars on Shiro’s uniform. Keith’s fingers still itch every time he gets near it.
“Hop on,” Shiro says, gesturing to the pilot’s seat.
When he moves to sit behind Keith and wraps his arms around his waist, pressing his chest against his back, warm and strong, it takes everything in Keith not to let it show how much this closeness affects him. He takes a deep, steadying breath and bringing the engine to life with a flick of his wrist.
Then they’re off, deep into the desert.
They finally stop at the edge of the canyon, near an outcropping of rock that they can climb to get a better view. The stars are out in full force across the clear expanse of the night sky, hundreds of thousands of them lighting up the darkness. This is the first clear night they’ve had after the sandstorm that swept over the Garrison for three days, leaving behind a lingering residue of red dust.
Tonight, the desert air is cool and crisp.
“Happy birthday,” Shiro says, moving closer to touch shoulders with Keith where they’re sitting, propped against one of the thrusters of the bike.
When Keith looks down, Shiro is pressing a small box wrapped in tissue paper, with a little lopsided bow tied at the center, into Keith’s hands.
“For you,” he says. His eyes are warm, just like his smile, and Keith’s heart stutters for a fraction of a second, his throat tight.
Keith tears the tissue paper away and opens the box to find a pair of black fingerless gloves inside, then looks back to the pair he’s currently wearing, almost faded to dark grey and frayed at the seams with use.
“Thank you,” he whispers into the crook of Shiro’s neck as he hugs him, a little awkwardly, like he’s not really sure where they’re standing when it comes to physical affection.
Sometimes he doesn’t know how close to the plausible deniability line he’s toeing, how much or how little it would take to upset the balance.
Their relationship might be all about the push and pull, but sometimes Keith feels like he’s diving off a precipice, head-first.
When they separate, there’s a moment where their faces are close enough that all it would take would be for Keith to tip his chin up and lean in, and then they would be kissing. Then Shiro looks away, as if reading Keith’s mind, and all that’s left is Keith’s heart hammering against his ribs and the tight knot in his stomach.
Keith swallows around the lump in his throat and sits down on the ground, still warm even after sundown, and puts on the new gloves. They fit perfectly and look expensive, soft to the touch and well-made, with a small clasp on the inside of the wrist.
“Do they fit okay?” Shiro asks.
Keith laughs under his breath as he moves to lie on his back with his arms behind his head, looking up at the sky.
“Don’t worry, Shiro,” he says, then glances back at Shiro, who keeps sitting by Keith’s side, his arms wrapped loosely around his knees, legs slightly parted. He looks comfortable. “They fit just fine.”
“I’m glad.”
Shiro bumps their knees together, briefly touches the ticklish spot below Keith’s kneecap with his hand. Keith just keeps stubbornly looking at the stars, his jaw setting painfully.
He tried to fight it, he really did. He still does, half the time, letting himself be pulled into Shiro’s orbit the other half, with no resistance at all. But maybe it’s one of those things he can’t fight his way out of. Maybe Shiro was right about that, too, without really realizing what it meant for Keith.
Above him, the stars are still distant and cold, a tangible proof of the indifference of the universe. Beside him, Shiro is just out of arm’s reach, radiating warmth.
Keith reaches out despite himself, tugs Shiro to the ground next to him.
“Yeah, me too. And Shiro?” He shifts, propping himself up on his elbow. “Thanks. For everything.”
iv.
“Hey,” Shiro says, and Keith startles, but of course he should’ve expected this to happen. He should’ve hidden better. “I’ve been looking for you. You didn’t think I would leave without saying goodbye, right?”
Keith wants to shrug it off, say it’s no big deal, then go back to mapping out the constellations in the sky. He knows it’s impossible to see Pluto from Earth with the naked eye, much less the smallest of its moons, but as long as there’s even the slightest thread of connection whenever Keith looks up at the sky while Shiro is gone, it’s good enough for him.
It’s supposed to be symbolic, not utilitarian.
“I thought you’d be in quarantine already,” he says. “I was sure that I’d missed you.”
Behind him, Shiro laughs as he approaches.
“You wish.”
He sits down next to Keith on the ground, still dressed down to his fatigues before they put him in the suit once he enters the pre-flight quarantine. He smells clean and fresh, like he’s just showered, and Keith is sure that if he ran his hand along the curve of Shiro’s jaw, his skin would be soft and smooth.
“I’m gonna miss this, you know?” Shiro says, pointing to the sky above them. “Sitting here with you, watching the stars.”
Keith smiles despite himself, ducking his head.
“You’re gonna be a lot closer to them now,” he says. “I’m gonna be fine.”
He doesn’t know what makes him say it. Maybe he wants to reassure Shiro. Maybe he wants to reassure himself.
Shiro doesn’t speak for a second, and when Keith glances to the side, he can clearly see his strong profile as he continues to watch the skies.
“Will you, though?” His voice is quiet and gentle when he asks, and something in Keith’s chest squeezes painfully.
Shiro knows that Keith doesn’t have many friends at the Garrison, knows that he’s not good at making friends to begin with. Keith has never really cared, if he’s being honest with himself, but Shiro does.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Keith says. “Go, be the hero.”
There’s no bitterness in his voice; if anyone is supposed to reach the stars, it’s Shiro. He’s just now realizing his potential, barely twenty and already on top of the world, the way it should be.
Keith has always found it easier to stay in the dark, and Shiro, shining golden and bright, casts a long shadow.
Shiro laughs, low and warm. Keith can feel the vibrations of his body where their shoulders are touching.
“I don’t know about that,” he says, teasing. “I’m just a pilot.”
Keith could say a lot of things: how they decided to trust him with an incredibly important expedition without a second thought; how Shiro is the youngest mission pilot in the history of space exploration; how you can be a hero in very small, seemingly insignificant ways.
“How much time do you have left?” he asks instead. “Before you have to go?”
Shiro looks at his watch.
“Half an hour, maybe forty minutes if I go straight to med bay for the last check-up.”
He pauses to look at Keith, who catches the movement out of the corner of his eye, determined to keep looking up at the sky. His eyes are stinging, but there’s wind coming in from the desert, so it must be the dust.
“Hey,” Shiro turns to Keith and places his hand on Keith’s shoulder, squeezing gently, “I’ll be back before you know it.”
Keith smiles, forced and awkward, but he can’t help the way his shoulders sag and hunch.
“Of course you will.”
When he looks down to Shiro’s chest, he sees the dog tags, shiny and new, where they must have slipped out from under Shiro’s t-shirt. He wonders what happened to the old ones. He almost wants to ask if he could have them, just to have something that would remind him of Shiro while he’s gone, but he thinks it would probably cross the line, upset the balance.
He’s not sure if he’s imagining it, or if they’ve been both toeing closer and closer to that line, coming from the opposite directions to finally meet in the middle, but neither of them has had the courage to close the gap yet.
Now it’s the night before Shiro leaves for Kerberos, and Keith wants to take that leap.
But he won’t. Not because he doesn’t have the courage or thinks he would be rejected, but because he has too much unfinished business in his life already to add this, too. They won’t see each other for a year. When Shiro returns from Kerberos, maybe they’ll just go back to being friends, or maybe they’ll go on to become something more, but whatever happens, it won’t happen tonight.
Keith knows he’s reckless, but he’s learned how to not be reckless with his own heart. It’s the only self-preservation instinct he has.
“Mom says she should start sending you care packages, now that I’m not here to receive them,” Shiro says suddenly with a low chuckle, startling Keith out of his reverie. “So if you get anything while I’m gone, you know who to blame.”
Keith has never met Shiro’s parents. He wasn’t even sure they knew he existed. So he’s not entirely sure how to take this. Maybe it’s another one of Shiro’s funny stories about his family. Maybe it’s an admission of something—Keith has no idea.
It feels almost like they’re still teetering on the precipice of something, despite the circumstances, even as they slowly run out of time to let themselves fall.
But before Shiro has to go, Keith pulls him into a hug, buries his face in the crook of his neck. A moment of weakness.
Shiro hugs him back, his arms wrapping around Keith’s back without hesitation. Keith can hear the faint echo of his heartbeat.
“What was that for?” Shiro asks with a breathy laugh when they part.
Keith looks up, his hand flat against Shiro’s chest, resting over his heart.
“For luck.”
v.
The universe keeps expanding at an exponential rate, stretching into infinity.
What it means: the stars he used to watch with Shiro are now further away from each other than ever before.
What it means: Kerberos and the Kuiper belt will never be as close to Earth as they had been at the moment of Shiro’s death.
If Keith is a fixed point in space, then Shiro has been only moving further and further away from him, never to return. When he looks up now, all he sees is the vast expanse of darkness and the indifferent, distant stars.
It’s a cold night in the desert, with breath that turns to mist when Keith exhales, but the sky is clear and littered with stars, and there’s something in Keith that pushes him outside, to sit in the pilot seat of Shiro’s hoverbike with his legs stretched out, leaning back to look up at the darkness stretching all the way down to the horizon.
He took the bike, along with Shiro’s old dog tags and a few of his other personal effects before they kicked him out of the Garrison for good. It wasn’t even a one final fuck you to all the rules he’d already broken at that point; he was just hurting and lashing out, and he knew what he wanted, so he took it—the last pieces of Shiro left.
It was selfish, perhaps, because the dog tags could’ve gone to Shiro’s grieving mother, who did end up sending Keith two care packages along with some really nice notes, but he wasn’t thinking clearly. He wasn’t thinking at all. He just took them, kicked the hoverbike into gear and high-tailed it out of there before they realized what happened.
He knew the shack was there, hidden in the middle of the desert, old and abandoned but still habitable, so it made sense to come here.
Now that he’s been alone for months, he knows that nights are the worst; it’s when everything he tries to keep at bay during the day comes back to haunt him, like the ghost of everything that could’ve been.
The dog tags are now resting against his sternum as he half-sits, half-lies in the pilot seat of the bike. He stopped wearing his own a long time ago, ripped them off his neck as soon as he left Garrison grounds, left them to rust in the red dust of the desert. It’s stupid and sentimental, and Keith is neither of those things, but he still wears Shiro’s dog tags every day, never taking them off, hidden under his t-shirt.
According to Keith’s calculations, they should be getting another meteor shower soon, but he doesn’t know if he could watch it now, with the memory of himself and Shiro watching the Leonids still fresh in his mind.
For now, though, it’s just stars, slowly moving further and further away from Earth with each passing second. Shiro’s body, frozen in space, moving further away from Keith.
Some things just can’t be changed, no matter how much he wants it to be true.
You can’t fight your way out of everything.
And isn’t that the biggest fucking joke, because Shiro died alone, light years away from Earth, and there was nothing Keith could do about it, because he might be a boy who sleeps with a knife under his pillow, but there are still things that even he can’t fight. Shiro dying horribly in space was one of those things.
He didn’t cry when he heard the news, but that first night at the shack, when it was still barely habitable and full of red dust that got everywhere this far into the desert, Keith walked outside after dark, looked up at the sky and screamed until his throat felt raw and he started losing his voice.
He hasn’t looked up at the stars since, until tonight.
He doesn’t expect to find any answers there, because he has already resigned himself to the fact that he will never get any real closure—just another thing to add to the pile labeled: unfinished business.
It doesn’t get any easier the second time around.
Still, he catalogues the sky: Andromeda and Cassiopeia, Phoenix and Pisces. All the other stars whose names he’s never learned, the ones he knows only by their designations. Somewhere out there, invisible to the naked eye, is Pluto with its five moons.
He remembers the facts: Pluto is a dwarf planet located in the Kuiper belt, made primarily out of ice and rock. It is orbited by five known moons, of which Kerberos is the smallest. It takes about five hours and thirty minutes for the light from the Sun to reach Pluto at its average distance. There are roughly four billion miles separating Earth from Kerberos at any given time.
It’s a long, long way to get there. For some, there is no way back.
Keith remembers the day he learned about the Kerberos mission, the day he learned that it would be Shiro leading the expedition. It made sense that they’d chosen him, the brightest cadet at the Garrison, just recently graduated and made Flight Officer, the wings still new and shiny on his uniform.
Keith would never have been so selfish as to say: don’t leave.
He knew why it mattered to Shiro, why it meant so much to him to be chosen at such a young age, the child prodigy turned perfect officer of the Garrison. Ever since they saw the stars for the very first time, they have been both propelled by the need to get closer to them, discover the secrets of the universe.
He would never have tried to take that away from Shiro.
When he was younger, Keith imagined what it would be like, to touch the stars. He spent days dreaming about leaving Earth behind and flying until he had no way of coming back. He imagined that he could get far enough to reach all the stars he’d seen that night out in the clearing where they were camping. Then he could see them for what they really were, almost close enough to touch.
Between then and now, he met Shiro.
Now he knows: when you touch a star, you burn.
(i.)
“Hey,” Shiro says, sitting beside Keith in the middle of a field of grass that stretches in all directions as far as the eye can see. “I thought you’d already gone back to the Castle.”
Keith picks a blade of grass and watches as the blood-red juice stains his hands. He should’ve known it would end like this, under a sky full of unfamiliar stars. They haven’t really had a chance to be alone ever since they found each other after getting separated by the unstable wormhole, on the run from the Galra and trying to shake them off to get a chance to rest, resupply, and regroup.
The little fringe planet they landed on remains outside of Zarkon’s influence and, as Allura informed them before they landed, still has ties to the Altean royal family. It’s been peaceful so far, the first real moment of rest they’ve had since they left Earth, and after weeks—months—of breathing recycled air, Keith welcomes the chance to get away from that for a moment.
It’s a beautiful, starry night, the sky dark and clear, and even though Keith couldn’t name any of the stars and constellations stretched over the black expanse of the sky as far as the horizon, he still looks up at them. It’s a compulsion, a reflex. He always dreams about what he can’t touch.
“We haven’t done that in a while, huh?” Shiro nudges Keith with his elbow.
Keith leans back on his hands, the stray blades of grass tickling the skin of his forearms, brushing against his fingers where they’re buried in the sea of red. His jacket is off, and he’s rolled up the sleeves of his t-shirt. The planet is hot even at night, but Keith prefers that over the cool interior of the Castle of the Lions. He’s always run cold, but here, he doesn’t even need his gloves, so the fact that he’s still wearing them is force of habit more than anything else.
Shiro is dressed in civilian clothes as well, sitting close enough that Keith can see the faint scars on his left arm even in the dark.
“Yeah, it’s been some time,” Keith says.
He tries to remember the last time he looked up at the stars just to watch, and his jaw tightens a little when he realizes it’s not a memory of Shiro, but of his time in the desert, alone and trying to survive more than live.
There are other, earlier memories, though—memories of the two of them stargazing together, and Keith looking at Shiro more than he looked at the stars.
Now they’re here, under the new, unfamiliar skies, and Keith still has no idea where they’re standing. If that line that had been there before Shiro left still exists; if it got more definite or maybe a little more blurred.
He can live with that, if that’s what Shiro wants.
He pulls on the collar of his t-shirt, still overheated despite the late hour, and his hand catches on the ball chain attached to the dog tags he’s been hiding from Shiro ever since he returned, tugging them out from under the shirt. He tries to snatch them away, but the metallic sound and the glint of steel alert Shiro, who catches onto them before Keith can put them back under his t-shirt.
“You’re still wearing these?” Shiro asks, sounding surprised, then leans in to take a closer look.
Keith faced Zarkon on his own, but now he feels scared and paralyzed, unable to move under Shiro’s curious gaze. His heart is going a mile a minute.
He can’t fight his way out of everything.
He could never fight his way out of this, not when it came to Shiro, and it was stupid of him to even think he stood a chance.
“These aren’t yours,” Shiro says. Keith can read nothing in the tone of his voice.
“No,” he answers flatly, snatching the dog tags away, stuffing them angrily back under the t-shirt.
His face is burning. He should move, he should get up and go, head for the Castle before Shiro catches up to him.
Instead, he still sits next to Shiro, rooted to the spot.
“Where did you even get them?” Shiro asks as Keith stubbornly refuses to look him in the eye.
“Does it matter?” he asks, his voice more cutting than he intended. He pauses, then continues after a moment, when Shiro says nothing in return. “I stole them, okay, before they kicked me out for good. I knew I was done, and I thought you were dead, and I wanted something that belonged to you.”
There it is, all out in the open.
“But why?”
This time, Keith looks right at Shiro when he answers.
“Come on, Shiro, you know why.” His voice is harsh, and he’s still gripping the ball chain so hard he can feel it press painfully into the skin of his palm.
“Maybe I just want to hear you say it,” Shiro says and reaches out, gently prying Keith’s fingers off the chain. Keith drops his hand into his lap, still balled up in a fist, his muscles tense. Shiro doesn’t move away; instead, he brushes against the hollow of Keith’s throat with his fingers, a ghost of a touch. Keith’s breath hitches. “Just so I know we are on the same page.”
Keith nods, and then Shiro grabs the chain and tugs at it, tugs Keith forward, and Keith goes easily, until Shiro’s lips press against his, until Shiro’s hand moves to the side of Keith’s neck, cradling his jaw as Shiro kisses him again, this time catching Keith’s lower lip between his, more confident but still so, so gentle, like he’s trying not to scare Keith away.
Keith’s heart is pounding against his ribs and when they part for a second, he feels almost out of breath.
Shiro looks at him, searching for something in Keith’s face, his thumb brushing against the corner of Keith’s mouth, and Keith leans into the touch, kisses the pad of Shiro’s thumb on impulse. It’s a silly little gesture that makes him feel embarrassed, but Shiro just whispers, “I missed you so much,” in a rough voice, their foreheads touching, and then he leans in to kiss Keith again and again, and again, until their lips are tingling and red.
Above them, the stars are watching.