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The red string of fate: romantic, fateful, wonderful. Source of the greatest love stories known to man—or just Asians. Particularly well-read weeaboos. Whatever.
In actuality, it’s just a fucking migraine. The thing about seeing red threads is—well, for one, Keith gets to see who everyone’s connected to. That’s cool. Or it was cool, before his parents got divorced because he didn’t have the foresight to know why it’d be so disastrous to tell them about their unconnected threads. Five-year-old Keith, eat shit.
Now though, it’s mostly cause for bitterness. Not from the divorce, of course; it’s just that he has to be the one person in the world who can see these stupid strings and not have one of his own, which, yeah, fucking stellar.
A world full of superpowers—pyrokinesis! Superspeed! Modern day Hercules! And he gets stuck with the literal fucking seams of people’s love lives. Wonderful. Wonderful.
“You’re so dramatic,” Pidge says, popping the bubble on her gum with a loud snap . Another bullet on Keith’s “eat shit” list: Pidge and her fucking bubblegum. It doesn’t even smell like cherries, or tropical fruit, or whatever normal bubblegum by itself is supposed to smell like—instead it’s this weird fusion of soy-sauce encrusted Panda Express and the world’s most funky eucalyptus. He has a suspicion it’s because the gum was wedged under a stash of cough drops with dried soy sauce, however that concoction was created. “So you can see people’s romantic lives. Boo-hoo. At least objects don’t talk to you. You ever play Pokemon?”
“No.”
“Well, no wonder you’re so miserable all the time.”
“Can you eat my shit?” He kicks sand at her, but some douche—i.e. Matt Holt—whirls it away with a warning finger. Siblings. Why couldn’t Shiro do that for him? Pidge got the protective, memey older brother, and Keith got the person who liked to regularly piggyback on him, despite being like, five-thousand pounds heavier. Worst luck of the draw in the birth lottery. “Maybe I wanna complain a little. Sue me.”
“Then I’ll see you in court in two weeks, bucko.”
“Shit,” Keith tells her. “Mouth. Chew.”
Pidge rolls her eyes. Keith thinks it should be illegal for people who are five foot nothing to roll their eyes at someone who’s definitely taller than five foot nothing, but the government doesn’t seem too receptive of his pleas. He knows. He’s tried. Bullet three on Eat Shit list: Shiro and his posse of senators.
“Speaking of shit,” Pidge says, which means she’s about to breach a topic that has nothing to do with it, “you hear about what Lance is up to lately?”
Keith snatches her thread and yanks as hard as he can. Pidge goes stumbling into the sand. It’s not shit, but she comes up with a mouthful of dirt, and that’s good enough for now, he supposes. He watches her spit like a rabid kangaroo, and drops her thread. “Warning.”
“It’s only a warning if you tell them about it before you pull some douchery!”
“Like you haven’t done worse.”
Pidge flicks a spit-dowsed wad of sand at him—bad—and grins. “Touche. But I mean it. You hear anything? Because I have, and ooh, this salt is delicious.”
“I don’t care,” Keith says, even though he obviously does and therefore is a filthy, filthy liar. “Why would I?”
“Uh, ‘cause he’s the love of your life that you stupidly let go like an incredibly disappointing straight rom-com?” Then she pauses. “Well, minus the com. And the rom too. And the straightness. So—disappointment in a bag.”
Keith pinches her string and waves it this time, because he is a nice person. “Warning.”
“I’m serious! You know—what’s his face, the dude that had the bad green string tied to Lance?”
“Lotor?”
“Yeah. So turns out Lance is going out with him now.”
Two weeks after they broke up, Keith created a list called How to Get Over Lance Espinosa. It made sense at the time, since Keith is the type of person to write lists and also never acknowledge his feelings until he eventually succumbs to death by repressed emotions, so according to Allura—who at this point is pretty much his unpaid therapist/ass kicker—it was a terrific idea to move past it. He recalls several things from that list, such as:
- ice cream
- intense horticulture
- five bottles of water every day
- Tangled, because Keith is a useless son of a bitch who likes to linger on past memories
among many others.
One that was specifically not on the list, though, was call Lance back and scream at him for being a fucking dumbass.
Pidge, who has secret powers as a telepath but for some reason can only read his mind, sees the expression on his face and says loudly, “No.”
“But—”
“No.”
“It’s a green string,” he tries persuading her. There’s always a 99% chance of that persuasion failing, but the 1% is what he’s banking on. Much like Wall Street. “You know those are bad news.”
“Yeah, yeah, abusiveness, gaslighting, general fuckery, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s Lance’s decision.” She peers at him under her glasses with something like thinly disguised pity. “You don’t have anything to do with him now. Your strings aren’t connected, remember? It’s not your responsibility.”
Keith bites down on his anger. “But I—it’s a green thread. I’d do that for anyone.”
“Not anyone,” Pidge reminds him, and wow, doesn’t that hurt. He flinches and looks away, but—hm. The ocean. Blue water and bluer eyes, and laughter on the sunset. The ocean: a colossal mistake for him, really. Accusations everywhere. “Anyway, you said that yourself. You’re not connected to him, he’s not your boyfriend anymore, and so you don’t have to do anything. Just sit back and enjoy the ocean breeze.”
“Then why’d you tell me?”
Pidge smiles. “I thought I’d pass on the rumor. A little gossip.”
Or so she says, but she’s wringing her bracelet between her fingers again. If Keith fails a polygraph test, she doesn’t even make it through the fucking door. Jesus. Times like these, he really fucking hates her.
“You’re awful,” he says. “You wanted me to get off my ass, didn’t you?”
“I will neither confirm nor deny anything.”
“Eat my shit,” Keith tells her again, then snatches all three of his belongings from the beach chair. Red strings of fate: romantic, fateful, and an absolute pain in his dick.