Chapter Text
When the Fight is all We Know
He met Diana Kogane on a clear September night almost thirty years ago and he still remembers her today. The way she looked, standing there in her grey cargo pants and combat boots (not the patent-leather kind they sell in malls to moody teenagers, the practical kind that have seen some dust and dirt and maybe some blood too)…it stuck with him, clung like cobwebs to the bumps and ridges of his mind.
Her dark hair kicking out in a riot of cowlicks around her face, sharp brows arching over piercing amber-gold eyes, no, there was nothing forgettable about Diana Kogane.
“What are you doing?” he’d asked her and she’d turned his way, tipping her head to the side and folding her arms across her chest. The carnival rides behind her splashed a riot of color across the canvas of her skin, pinks and purples and blues. She looked like something from another world. He wondered if she’d held still, if he had more than this moment, if he could capture some of that ephemeral nature in ink and paint. He’d sketch her outline in fountain pen and black ink, shade in her shape with watercolor. A splash of color and light here and gone in seconds.
“You can’t do that here,” he’d told her and she’d laughed.
“If you don’t know what I’m doing, how can you know I’m not supposed to do it?”
“You’re not authorized to be back here. It’s a safety hazard.” It was true – they weren’t allowed to let anyone back here, near the heavy machinery. His boss liked to say that letting patrons wander was a lawsuit waiting to happen. One of his coworkers, the guy who ran the kiddie area, the one with the spinning teacups and baby rollercoaster, would shrug and say ‘plus, it ruins the magic when you see how it actually works’. There are two types of people.
“Do you see me touching anything?” she crooked a smile.
He shook his head, refusing to be charmed (he already was), “Doesn’t matter, you can’t be back here.”
“If it doesn’t matter, then why’d you ask me what I was doing?”
“What?”
“Exactly,” she winked at him, “you led with a question. You asked me what I was doing before you told me to stop. You’re curious.”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
She laughed. He wasn’t sure what was funny but he smirked anyway. “I’m searching for aliens.”
He chuckled, “We’ve already got them – funhouse number two.”
“Not little green men. Real ones.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why the skepticism?”
Why indeed. “Seems weird to go looking for them. What’re you going to do if you find them? Never seems to work out in the movies – finding the aliens, I mean.”
She blinked at him, long and slow, considering. “You know, that’s the first reasonable explanation for skepticism I’ve ever heard.”
He shrugged, at a loss. “Okay.”
She suddenly grinned, bright and sharp. “Have you ever done something just to do it? To know, deep down, that you’d done this thing? It doesn’t get you anything, you don’t benefit from it, but you feel better for doing it. There’s a satisfaction there. Just from knowing you did it.”
“Sure.” He was here, wasn’t he? He’d run away and joined the circus. Well. He’d run away from home years ago, when he was a dumb, angry, lonely kid. He hadn’t so much ‘joined the circus’ as realized that there’s only so many places a hungry, angry high school dropout can find work. Maintenance for a carnival ride company was one of his better options. He’d done worse, had worse.
“That’s part of why I’m looking for them. I know they’re there, it’s math; it’s science. The probabilities are in our favor. I just want to be able to say that I’ve seen them. I know who they are.”
“Seems like kind of flimsy reasoning.” He couldn’t really judge.
She looked at him, really looked at him. It was almost painful, having her eyes on him like that. “Sometimes the real world isn’t all its cracked up to be.”
“Or we aren’t what the real world wants us to be.” It sounded dumb. Scripted. Overly-hypothetical-philosophical-what-have-you. He felt like a character in a philosophy anecdote – one of the ones by Plato or maybe Aristotle where the student character says a line or two and then Socrates monologues at the poor bastard for three pages.
But she was nodding along like maybe he said something worth thinking about. He wondered briefly which of them was Socrates. “Yeah. Something like that.” She went back to what she was doing.
“You still can’t set that equipment up here.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure about that? Cause I’m doing it.”
“Set it up somewhere else.”
She looked at him over her shoulder, the corner of her mouth quirked up, “If I wanted to set it up somewhere else, don’t you think I’d be somewhere else?”
And looking at her he knew right away that there was no way he was going to convince this woman not to do this. They’d argue for hours and she’d set everything up in the meantime and he’d be in trouble no matter what.
Well fuck that.
Don’t untangle the Gordian knot, cut it clean through.
Without putting any extra thought into it, without working this new series of events out to its inevitable conclusion, he glanced at her equipment, zeroed in on the one component the right size and location to be important but portable, grabbed it and took off running. It was long moment between him taking off and her processing exactly what he’d done and her racing after him, tearing at his heels. And she was going to catch him eventually and he was going to catch hell for this, from her, from his boss for causing a scene, from the whole wide world for falling into his twenties full of desperation and no direction but for that moment he was running, clutching something he didn’t understand to his chest and chasing behind him was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in a at least a year.
Oh yes, he still remembers Diana Kogane. She isn’t – wasn’t – it had been over a decade since her funeral and he still couldn’t think of her as gone, it seemed wrong. He’d seen her grave, thrown in the obligatory fistful of dirt. But…but nothing. She was gone. She just wasn’t the sort of person you could forget.
His five years in prison he thought of her.
Prison leaves a lot of room for thinking if you play your cards right. He was a pretty big guy, intimidating. Something about him told people they were better off not messing with him.
He wondered what she’d think of him now. She’d once told him, eyes unexpectedly sad, “You’re either going to save the world or burn it to the ground, baby.” Well, she was half-right. He just hadn’t managed to burn anything to the ground expect maybe himself.
He’d gotten one phone call when he was arrested. But he hadn’t had anyone to call. It had been a few years since the last time he saw her. She’d probably changed her number.
He was working in a diner now, the kind of greasy roadside place you see in movies but don’t expect to run into in real life. During lulls he pulls a paperback out of his pocket and reads, leaning against the countertop while Mabel files her nails and chatters on the phone like a secretary stereotype straight out of the fifties. She tries to talk to him about her book club sometimes, but they’re always reading some bodice-ripper romance and it makes him a little uncomfortable. He has to bite his tongue on some of his cleverer comments. Mabel’s not built to understand irony or subtle sarcasm.
He likes when Stacy works – she’s seventeen and comes in after school to help with the afternoon and dinner rush. She’s a good kid, smart. He’ll miss her when she graduates and gets out of this nowhere town – if he’s even still around. He might have taken off by then. He’s got nowhere to go but that doesn’t mean he wants to stay here. She’ll talk about books with him, serious books with weight and heft. She’s always popping her gum and comparing him to fictional characters.
“You know who you remind me of?”
“Who?”
“Shadow from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. You should read it. It’s long, you’ll like it.”
“If length was all I needed to enjoy a book I’d have a higher opinion of The Mists of Avalon.”
“Just read it, asshole.”
He lets her call him names, he figures it’s healthy and he doesn’t really care about kids respecting him. It’s not like his age is a sign of any great wisdom, expect maybe a long list of what not to do.
One day she comes in, and she’s carrying her backpack like usual but when she sees him she frowns.
“What, kid? Do I have something on my face?”
“Gimme a sec.” She digs in her backpack and pulls out a book, hardback, but with the dust jacket slightly torn and softened at the edges like she’s been carrying it around a lot. She pages through until she hits what looks like a clump of glossy photo pages in the middle and holds the book up, as if she’s comparing something in there to his face. Her brows are folded together in concentration. He tries to read the cover but it’s too far away and he’s a few years too deep into middle age to have 20/20 vision.
“Hey, super weird question, but am I crazy or does this kid kind of look like you?” she lowers the book and walks over to the counter, “I mean, I can’t really call him a kid, he’s totally older than me now, but you know how it is.” She slides the book over to him and he’s confronted with something utterly unexpected.
It’s Diana Kogane. She’s standing behind a teenage kid, an arm slung around his chest, pulling him into a halfway hug, he chin sitting on top of his head, eyes scrunched up in a laugh. She looks older than he remembers her. She’s still beautiful.
He looks at the date on the photo. Fifteen years since the last time he saw her. It’s been what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years now?
His mouth is dry. “What’s the book?”
“It’s a memoir. You know I don’t normally read them. Mostly cuz they’re not exactly ‘targeted at my age demographic’ or whatever,” she’s a teenager, she uses air quotes, “But I saw the title and figured why not? It’s actually really good. It’s about these brothers; their mom was some kind of alien hunter. Kind of one of those stories that’s half funny, half sad and just really good, you know? Anyway, I thought the kid kind of looked like you. Crazy, right? Sorry for bugging you.”
It’s not so crazy.
“I knew her,” he finds himself saying, “The woman, that’s the mom?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s Diana Kogane.”
“Yeah, I knew her.”
Stacy stares at him. “Huh.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Okay, dude.”
And that’s the end of their conversation about the book. But he thinks about it late at night, when he’s all alone, staring at the ceiling and pretending to sleep. He gives up around 2 am and pulls out his laptop, running a search for the only name he can remember – the title of book escapes him at the moment – Diana Kogane.
And there she is. Her pictures and the book: The Adventures of Spaceman and the Alien Boy, by Takashi Shirogane with an introduction by Keith Kogane.
He doesn’t know why he does it, but the curling feeling of dread or something in his stomach tells him no even as his hand moves and clicks on the free Amazon preview and he’s reading the first chapter, which is really the introduction.
When I was fifteen years old my English teacher told me to write about a fictional character I related to. I was as pissed off as I was pretentious so I picked Pearl from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. And no, this choice was in no way motivated by that terrible Demi Moore movie. My brother’s editor made me take out my long rant about how wrong that movie was, but suffice to say it’s ridiculous.
He takes a moment to shake his head at the screen and laugh, a shaky, threadbare thing.
He opens a new window, not quite ready to read the rest of it, and pulls up Takashi Shirogane’s Wikipedia page. He scrolls down until he hits a mention of Keith Kogane, complete with birth dates. And there it is. Keith Kogane is twenty-eight years old, a professional stage manager living with his husband in upstate New York. Parents are listed as Diana Kogane, father unknown.
It’s been just short of twenty-nine years since he last saw Diana Kogane. He doesn’t need to count off the months, but he does anyway.
He has a son. Keith Kogane is his son. And she never told him.
He takes a long moment to stare blankly at the screen, the impersonal details; the offer from Wikipedia to ‘Edit This Information!’. He has a wild impulse, a sudden urge to edit the goddamn page, to add his name in somewhere, to scream, through zeroes and ones, that he was part of this story; that he was there for some of it.
But he wasn’t. Not really. And that burns like a lump of dry ice in his stomach.
He stares at the screen until it goes dark, goes to sleep like he should have. He can’t decide if he wants to buy the damn book. He can’t decide what to do.
What do you do when you’ve been written out of nearly thirty years of history?
He stares at the dark screen and remembers Diana Kogane and wonders, over and over again on endless loop ‘why, why, why?’
…
When Keith was eighteen he threatened to go on an epic roadtrip vision quest to find his father instead of going to college, despite the fact that he’d been accepted to both NYU and Columbia (shocking, really, considering he didn’t acutally have a transcript from his freshman year of high school and he’d spent the first semester of sophomore year passive-aggressively aceing biology and equally passive-aggressively failing everything else). He and Shiro had been fighting more and more as senior year wound down and graduation loomed closer and closer. Keith could feel the future pressing against his ribcage, swelling up inside him like spray-foam insulation, expanding, expanding, expanding and crushing all his internal organs as it went. He’d been fighting with Shiro more and more just to have something to fight against. He couldn’t punch looming adulthood in the face, but he and Shiro could snarl and snap at each other until they couldn’t bear to breathe the same air.
He’d thrown out the suggestion in the middle of an argument, an exclamation point before storming out and climbing the fire escape up to the roof and sitting there, sulking in the clinging, damp pre-spring air.
“Hell, maybe I’ll spend all my savings on a shitty car and drive around the desert looking for my deadbeat dad! Which do you think I’ll find first, him or mom’s fucking aliens? Mom couldn’t find either so if I get one I’ll at least be doing better than her!”
The words’ residue lay like a thin skin of curdled milk against the back of his throat and he wasn’t sure why exactly he regretted them so utterly, but they felt like poison against his teeth.
Shiro followed him up to the roof because Shiro was too good sometimes; he tried too hard.
They sat shoulder to shoulder and Keith tried not to hate anyone. He tried to not hate Shiro for loving him for no good goddamn reason. He tried not to hate himself for not being worth that kind of caring. He tried not to hate his mother for making him this way. He tried not to hate his father for being fucking nonexistent.
“Is that what you really want?” Shiro finally asked, words uncertain and almost painfully gentle. Keith wondered if he’d practiced that tone before climbing up here. “Do you really want to try to find your father?”
Keith sighed, “No.”
“Then why did you say it?”
Keith shook his head as if he could shake out every thought in his skull, lay them out before him and arrange them just so – until they made sense again, “Because that’s what I should want, isn’t? Aren’t people supposed to want to know where they come from? Who they are? All that coming-of-age-story bullshit?”
Shiro tipped his head to the side, “Are they?”
“I don’t know!” The words exploded out of Keith’s chest, tearing him open as they went, “All I know is Mom didn’t ‘find herself ‘ or whatever before she did the conventional college thing and somehow that messed her up so much she had to spend the rest of her life trying to do it all over again, but it was too late and she got stuck or something. I don’t know. And then you did the whole find-yourself shtick and look at you, you’re…you. What if I don’t and I end up like her? I’m supposed to want to know who my family is, to understand my past and everything…aren’t I supposed to want to go and find my father?”
Shiro stared at him and shook his head, “Buddy…I think you’ve been watching too many indie movies.”
Keith tried to scoff at his brother, but it’s also startled a laugh out of him so what came out as a congested tangle of sound capped off with a sad little sniffle. He was crying, but not the tears of someone who wants or expects any kind of comfort. They’re long, silent tears, making a break for it, escaping his eyes like convicts fleeing prison in the night.
“Oh, kiddo,” Shiro somehow understood, despite the fact that Keith knew he wasn’t making any sense. But then Shiro was there, gathering Keith up in his arms, hugging him close and safe, “What do you want?”
“I don’t want to end up like Mom,” Keith choked out into Shiro’s shirt.
“Then don’t be.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, it is. You’re Keith, she was Diana. You’re two different people. You’re already not the same. Your future’s up to you. Don’t do something just because you think you should want to. Do you want to know who your father is?”
Silence as Keith considered, even though he already knew the answer, “If I meet him, no matter what, I lose.”
“Yeah?”
“Either he’s an asshole and I know I’m blood-related to an asshole til the end of time, or he’s a good guy who never knew about me and I spend the rest of my life knowing I missed out on years of having a good dad. Either way I lose.”
“Okay,” Shiro’s voice was measured, even, “Do you feel…incomplete? Not having a father?”
A long moment and then a very soft, slightly guilty “No.”
“Okay.”
“I already know who I am. I don’t need…I know who I am. Right now. But…shouldn’t I want to - ?”
Shiro sighed, “Here’s a tip, kiddo. Don’t do shit just because you think you should.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
And that was the last time Keith ever seriously considered trying to find his father. His father hasn’t been on his radar for years. He’s fine with it; he’s never felt like he’s missing anything or like he needs to connect with the past.
He knows who he is. He’s happy.
…
When Keith is twenty-eight there’s a knock on the door. It’s not an extraordinary morning. Lance forgot his lunch accidentally-on-purpose because he knows if he does Keith will bring it by the Community Center and they can have lunch together. He hasn’t seemed to figure out that he could just ask to meet up for lunch instead of this elaborate and incredibly obvious ruse. Keith must find it endearing or something because he plays along every single damn time. If he had any sense at all he’d leave Lance’s forgotten lunch behind and teach him a lesson about direct communication and not being forgetful and all those adult things they only pretend they’re good at.
But he doesn’t because Keith is gullible and doesn’t like eating lunch alone nearly as much as he pretends he does.
Keith is on the phone when he hears the knock on the door. It’s the director on the other end of the line and they want things to happen and the scenic designer is texting him things she wants to happen and the technical director just emailed him about all the things that aren’t happening and it’s been a busy morning. He hears the knock on the door and assumes that it’s Pidge forgetting her keys or Matt wanting to sneak into Pidge’s lab via the dumbwaiter or maybe Hunk with some of the muffins he made yesterday. He yells something vaguely placating at the door; wraps up his call with the director, and grabs both lunches, his messenger bag, and his travel mug. He’s so distracted he’s almost forgotten about the knocking until he opens the door and sees a face both familiar and completely foreign. Almost like…seeing a celebrity in real life. It’s someone you’ve been programmed to recognize but can’t really process in a real-world context.
Except he’s only seen this man once, from a distance, at his mother’s funeral, and a few dozen times in her stories when she was feeling warm and loose and nostaligic enough to sketch him out with rough, ill-fitting, too-casual words.
He still recognizes him, in a way.
Keith can feel his eyes narrow and his metaphorical hackles rise.
“Uh, Hey. Do you know who I am?” The stranger-not-stranger says.
Keith’s not proud of what he says next. “You’d better be dying or something equally Hallmark or this reunion is a waste of my time.”
An eyebrow quirks in a familiar way and Keith wonders if his mother stole that facial expression from this man or if he borrowed it from her or if they made it together, like a beta-test version of Keith himself. “So, judging from the overt hostility I’d say she either told you too much or not enough about me.”
Keith cannot handle this, he hasn’t felt this furious and out of control since he was an angry fifteen year old all alone against the world. “Get the fuck off my porch,” he snaps and slams the door shut.
On the other side, safely confined to his house’s entryway, he throttles back a scream as too many feelings build up like fizz in a violently shaken soda, like lava in a dormant volcano, freshly disturbed. Hands shaking, breath rasping against his throat, too fast and too rough like sandpaper, he drops his things and throws all his strength and rage and panic and fury into a single punch to the wall.