Chapter Text
Dreams of Metal Birds
Chain Reaction
October 1 st , 3:32 p.m.
“So there's this thing,” Pidge said out of nowhere, her mouth drawing into an all-too-familiar pouty smile, her eyes narrowing dangerously.
Oh no. This couldn't be good.
“Thing?” Keith asked reluctantly after a while, avoiding eye contact, and by the time he did, his classmate's expression had already morphed into a devilish grin.
Nothing good whatsoever, Keith thought. Come to think of it, nothing good ever came from his interactions with Katie Holt. The girl was a fiend, and a persuasive one at that. They didn't talk much, but whenever they did, it always ended badly for Keith, and always felt like some kind of bet. A game of truth and dare in the middle of Chemistry, which they both sucked at in their own right, though put together as lab partners, they were practically a safety hazard.
One time they miscalculated the ingredients for the Elephant's Toothpaste experiment they made in the previous year, which ended up covering their whole corner of the classroom in thick foam. Another incident caused a funny smell to linger in the lab for a week and a half because of burnt sugar. Both accidents were caused by Pidge's disdain for following rules. Keith thought it was absolutely horrifying. Pidge thought it was hilarious. That was the way she was, he guessed.
“Just, a thing,” Pidge said innocently, shrugging in her way-too-big of a lab coat, her eyes darting between the whiteboard and her computer, taking some notes. Then, ever-faux-casually out of the corner of her mouth, she said, “a party.”
“Hmm,” Keith hummed, his disinterest obvious.
Pidge nudged him with her elbow, dropping the indifferent act. “It's happening tonight – you know, a kickstarter for the school year. Juniors only.”
“Hmm.”
Her face dropped sarcastically – it was almost comical. “It's happening tonight,” she repeated, “and we're going.”
Keith scoffed, a little too loud, which earned him an unamused "shhh!" from his Chem teacher, Professor Montgomery. He mouthed, sorry, though in his mind he placed the entire fault on Pidge.
“Speak for yourself,” he whispered after their teacher looked away. “the only kind of party I need is a rescue party from tomorrow's test.”
Keith gestured to his cluttered notebook. His handwriting, which was usually somewhat neat, looked absolutely jumbled and unreadable on the page. It was times like this that he envied Pidge's laptop, capable of organizing all her notes neatly in a matter of seconds, despite Pidge being the most disorganized person Keith knew.
She took advantage of Keith's attention on her side of the table and kept prodding.
“Hey, if you tell that joke at the party people might laugh!” Pidge said, tilted head and beaming.
“No, thanks.”
“Come on.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
Thirty different watches beeped all at once, and everybody was hurrying out in a matter of seconds. Keith, who never liked lunchbreaks, was still relieved. Whatever Pidge had in mind was her problem. He wasn't going to that stupid party.
October 1 st , 10:28 p.m.
Keith was at the stupid party.
He didn't know what happened, or how he'd succumbed to Pidge's attempts to drag him into a social event, but somehow he did – Pidge knocking on his dorm door just as night began to fall – and there he was now, standing awkwardly in someone's summer house, a place he had never been to, with a soda in hand and Pidge talking to him about a hundred different topics all at once by his side.
See, they had this sort of weird understanding. It was weird because they weren't even friends, Keith didn't think. They were just a strange combination of two introverted people who happened to be lab partners with nothing in common at all. Pidge would hang out with Keith whenever she needed company, and Keith would hang out with her if he ever did. Except the latter never happened.
Neither of them had to outright say it for them to know it was a deal that they both kept. But even in that – in being introverted – they were different, because Pidge, ever since Keith had met her in the first Chemistry class of freshman year, always went out of her way, sometimes in the Garrison halls literally, to make friends. To talk to people. To attend social events like the one Keith got miserably sucked into. She was shy, but she tried.
Keith, on the other hand, was never a people's person. He kept alone. In all his life, Keith had a total of one friend, and even he was gone.
A girl walked by their set spot in the mess that was that party. She had long black hair, and Keith recognized her face vaguely, but not her name. She waved at Pidge – Keith knew it was Pidge she waved to because no one knew him well enough to wave at him – and just like that Pidge's ramble about Binary Systems (or maybe binary code? – Keith wasn't really listening, what with obnoxious pop music screeching in his ears) was cut short, and she lept away towards the girl, turning only to give Keith a wink and two finger-guns, before Keith could protest.
And that was how Keith ended up stranded in a foreign living room. Great, he thought, feeling pathetic with his crumpled up cup and awkward stance. Just great.
October 2 nd , 1:35 a.m.
Keith was limping on a highway. Actually dragging his muddy feet over the vast, stretched out nowhere road in some shithole in the Nevada desert. He reeked of beer. His hair felt stiff on his head.
Why, oh why, did he ever listen to Pidge?