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Tell Them All I Said Hi (I’ll be just fine, don’t worry ‘bout me)
Shiro comes out to his mom first. As much as he loves his father, they’re in a weird place right now. Shirogane has begun dating again and every conversation they have about relationships and romance feels balanced on the head of a pin. Plus, if his mom is weird about it, well…they’ve always had a weird relationship, haven’t they?
If he could, Shiro would tell Keith first, but he doesn’t think he’s up to the challenge of explaining bisexuality or sexuality at all to Keith no-number-of-questions-is-too-many Kogane.
They’re loading up on canned goods in an Arizona Costco. Shiro is fifteen and frazzled beyond belief. His mother has gotten into a vocal argument with a perfectly coiffed suburban housewife in the dry goods aisle and Keith is trying to climb up the shelves like a monkey, tiny brows furrowed in concentration. Shiro is simultaneously trying to escape Stepford Clone Woman’s notice, not look like he’s with his mother, and still keep an eye on Keith. It’s totally unfair that the guy stocking the shelves the next aisle over is obviously a college athlete on summer break, built like a swimmer and painfully hot.
One glimpse of sun-bronzed, toned abs and Shiro is crashing into a stack of granola bar boxes.
At least his mom stops yelling at Mrs. PTA. Although Shiro might be too dead to appreciate it when the spring break Adonis cranes his neck around and asks, “Hey, kid, you okay?” like he has no idea how hazardous his abs are to random, less-than-straight passerby.
Keith rescues him. Between one blink and the next his little brother is launching himself off of the shelving unit and dive-bombing Shiro in his pile of granola boxes and shame. Shiro gasps on impact, Keith’s tiny body driving all the air out of his lungs all at once.
“Jeez, give me some warning,” Shiro wheezes around Keith’s knee in his stomach.
Keith gives him a flat look, “Sneak attack,” he says solemnly.
Well, okay then.
On the way home, after being ushered out of Costco by some kind but firm employees (not spring break Adonis, thank god), Diana looks over to Shiro, who is trying valiantly not to burst into embarrassed flames in the passenger seat.
“So…guys, huh?” she says, a crooked smile tugging up the corner of her mouth.
Shiro buries his face in his hands and groans. “Can we pretend I’m not a bisexual disaster person for five seconds?” he pleads into his palms while his mother cackles heartlessly.
After Diana has calmed a bit and Keith has given up asking what’s so funny in a huff, she reaches over to cup the back of Shiro’s neck and rub the knob of his spine with a calloused thumb.
“Hey, we can be bisexual disaster people together, baby,” she says.
He peeks up at her through his fingers.
Her eyes are tired but full of affection. “You’re a good kid, you’ll grow out of the disaster part.”
Shiro narrows his eyes at her and she smiles, “It’s not a phase. You can change the words you use for yourself and you can reassess who you’re into any time you like. But your are who you are, and you like who you like. Be proud of that, cuz I know I am. Takashi Shirogane is a good person to be proud of.”
Shiro’s fifteen and nothing feels stable or right in his life and nothing has for years, really, but goddammit, he loves his mom. “Thanks, Mom.”
“You’re welcome, baby boy.”
…
He remembers her words when Stella ‘teases’ him for being ‘indecisive’ at the world’s most awkward ‘family dinner’ that fall after one of her daughters blurts out that Sheri Haines saw Shiro kissing the captain of the boys’ baseball team under the bleachers yesterday.
After dinner, while washing dishes with his father, Shirogane tells him, “I don’t care who you’re with, just make sure you treat them with respect and they do the same to you.”
Shiro appreciates the thought, but he wishes for a twisting, wrenching moment his father had a shred of his mother’s boldness and dared to say those words at the dinner table.
He says thank you anyway.
…
“So you like both boys and girls?” Keith says out of nowhere one day when he’s almost eight.
“Yeah,” Shiro replies, unsure where this conversation is going.
“And that’s called bisexuality?”
“Yeah…”
“Mom kissed another girl at a bar one time and some men called her names,” Keith says bluntly.
“God, Keith, I’m – you know that – ”
“Yeah, I know it’s not okay to treat people like that. Yeah, I know there’s nothing wrong with Mom kissing girls or you kissing boys. It just sucks. People suck. I hate them.”
“You can’t hate all people, Keith…”
“I don’t hate you.”
Shiro sighs, “You can’t just go through life assuming everyone is against you, Keith. You have to be willing to take a chance sometimes.”
Keith scoffs at him and it hurts his heart a bit to hear it.
Shiro leaves it for now, taking the path of least resistence and changing the subject with only a twinge of regret.
…
Shiro doesn’t date much in high school. He kisses some boys, takes a few girls to dances, but there’s something in him that just doesn’t sit well with other people. It’s easy to blame it all on the complicated sitatuation with Keith and his mother. To say he just has trust issues, that his parents’ divorce messed with his head. But that feels a little like cheating. He doesn’t date because he doesn’t know how. He wonders sometimes, in the dark of the night, when insecurity comes creeping, if he was born with a little less love to give than everyone else, that he’s spent it all on Keith and the bottomless pit that is their unfathomable mother, and now he doesn’t have any more left to share.
Keith tells him that’s stupid. “Love’s not like money, dumbass. You don’t run out of it. You just make a choice to love someone and then you do it.”
Shiro tells him not to say ‘dumbass’ and wonders when his kid brother got so smart.
…
Shiro meets Adam at the army recruiter’s office. He’s nineteen.
Adam has sharp brown eyes behind black-framed glasses, hair and skin the color of desert stone warmed by the sun. His grin is a flash of white teeth, brief and startling like lighting. When he smiles his whole face folds into the shape, crinkles at the corners of his eyes, light sparking in his irises. He’s more measured than Shiro, his energy held in and focused somewhere. Shiro feels like a car speeding down a dirt road. Adam feels like an electrical current running along a familiar path, sparking out now and then at the right kind of contact.
Shiro wants to be the right kind of contact. He wants some of those sparks.
They go through boot camp together. They’re assigned to the same unit. They have the same days off and the same allotted hours for recreation every evening. They’re inseperable from day one, just falling together like pieces into place.
Shiro meets Adam and wants to know everything about him right now. Shiro meets Adam and thinks “oh.”
He calls his mother that night from the hotel, using the pay-as-you-go cellphone he picked up at a nameless mall somewhere. “I think I get it now.”
“Get what?” she asks.
“I just…I want to know everything about him. I met someone and I just wanted his eyes on me. I just wanted to knowhim. I wanted him to know me.”
“Oh honey,” she says and he thinks of Keith’s father and how she’s still waiting. The edge of regret in everything she does.
But Shiro pushes that deep down where it can’t hurt him.
He learns Adam instead, and Adam learns him in return. An equal opportunity exchange of facts, data points in their lives.
Adam hates wearing shoes without socks but he hates wearing socks without shoes, even when his feet are freezing. One time, on leave, they got a hotel room together, away from barracks and prying eyes and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. They thoroughly rumpled both beds’ sheets, though.
(“You never know, Takashi,” Adam said, eyes wide with faux-innocence and a devilish gleam, “One could be better than the other and we’d never know if we didn’t try it out.”)
Adam took fiendish delight in tucking freezingtoes up against Shiro’s sides right before Shiro managesdto drift off to sleep. His breathless, laughing “oh my god, Takashi,” when Shiro shrieked and actually managed to flip himself off the bed onto the floor will haunt the halls of Shiro’s mind to this day.
Adam watches everything with subtitles turned on so he can turn the volume down low and still follow what’s going on if he has a migraine or is just sick of sound for the day. He likes indie music groups Shiro has never heard of, and teases him mercilessly for his ‘pathetic’ iTunes library. He’s the first person to tell Shiro completely unprompted and honest that he has a beautiful singing voice. Shiro likes to sing Disney songs at the top of his lungs and purposely gets the lyrics wrong until Adam is laughing so hard he can’t breathe. He can cook but he can’t make a decent bag of microwave popcorn to save his life. He studied French in high school but speaks it with such a horrible accent it’s almost pointless.
He joined the army because he couldn’t afford college. “It’s my ticket somewhere better, Takashi.”
“Where?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where are you going that’s better?”
“I don’t know, I figure I’ll know it when I get there.”
He’s the only person allowed to call Shiro ‘Takashi’.
They can’t be open with their relationship, not in the army. But they know what they are to each other. They can feel it when their eyes connect, a battery and a combustion engine. Sizzling and sparks. Heat and hurtling through the world at a million miles an hour.
Shiro tells himself that when they get out they’ll go home and he’ll introduce Adam to Keith. They’ll like each other. They’re both sharp-edged and dry-witted with quirky preferences and hard opinions on things that don’t objectively matter. One day they’ll get out and go home and hold hands and go to college and find Adam’s ‘somewhere better’.
One day.
…
Shiro goes to Arlington every June after he comes home, after the explosion. The first trip he takes alone. He’s still in pain and can’t manage the long drive, so he takes buses and taxis down from New York. He’s one raw aching wound by the time he arrives, and he doesn’t so much sit in front of the grave as sag down into the earth before it.
He sticks two miniature flags in the earth at the headstone. The stars and stripes and a slightly larger rainbow pride flag. The rainbow flutters in the breeze and the tears don’t so much fall as rip themselves away from his eyes.
‘Adam Wilde’ the headstone reads.
…
Keith comes with him the next year with more rainbow themed tokens. Every June Adam’s grave blossoms into a tiny pride shrine and Shiro slowly heals.
“I was in the hospital when he was killed. It was after the explosion…I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there to protect him.”
“You aren’t superhuman.”
“I should have been.”
Keith punches him in the shoulder, “That’s your problem. You spend all your time trying to be Superman. Just be Clark Kent for a while. He’s got more friends and better fashion sense anyway.”
Shiro shakes his head. “That was really cheesy.”
“Fuck off.”
“So heartfelt and out of character.”
“See if I comfort you ever again.”
“…Adam would have really liked you.”
“Thanks, Shiro.”
…
Shiro’s a little afraid of liking Allura too much when he meets her. Keith and Lance introduce them and Shiro’s heart does that fluttering thing in his chest when he sees her slide easily between poised and composed to gleeful and energentic from one minute to the next. He hates it. He’s afraid of it. He loves it a little.
He only has a few photos of himself and Adam. He looks at one for a long time when he gets home later, studying their faces. So young. So far away. Shiro isn’t sure he’s the boy in that picture anymore. But god, he will never stop loving the boy with the messy brown hair and crooked black-framed glasses.
…
He and Allura can exist in each other’s space in an easy way he’s found with very few people. They’re taking things slow. They’re friends. Shiro wants to know everything about her. But he can take his time. He doesn’t think he could handle flying into this one. Learning Allura is stepping into a pool expecting a scalding hot tub but instead finding a soothing warm bath. Their hearts are both a little dented, a little battered. They’re both labeled ‘handle with care’.
They’re sitting out behind Shiro’s new house upstate, a warm July day coming to a twilight close around them. Shiro doesn’t have a pool, but he has a pair of extremely comfortable padded pool loungers set up in his yard because in Lance’s words “Who doesn’t want to sit up while also lying down while outside but within easy reach of inside?”
Lance had only laughed when Keith deadpanned “The painfully indecisive?” behind him. Those two are good for each other.
Allura is curled up on her side, knees tucked up toward her chest, pink and white patterned skirt fanning out around her long legs. She’s watching him intently with her clear blue eyes, sipping a mixed drink that’s mostly blueberry vodka and instant lemonade through a bendy straw. Her hair is gathered in a loose knot at the base of her neck, tendrils of sliver starlight bright against her dark skin.
“Hi,” Shiro says, taking another pull of his own vodka and lemonade concoction.
A small smile curls the corners of Allura’s mouth, “Hi,” she echoes, then, “I wanted to say thank you.”
Shiro’s brows fold together, tugging on the swathe of scar tissue cutting across his face, “For what?”
“For taking things slow with me. With this whole…us thing.”
Shiro offers her a smile, “Thank you then, for going slow with me.”
Allura’s lids droop, a little sadly, along with her shoulders, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been burned before by this whole…romance, relationship…thing. For a while, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. If I just didn’t do relationships right, if I just didn’t know how to find good people.”
Shiro reaches over, lets Allura find his fingers and squeeze as she tells her story.
“I dated this guy in college, in undergrad, before I met Lance and Hunk and Pidge. He seemed like everything I wanted. We had similar interests; we came from similar backgrounds…it seemed like such a perfect fit. My father had died only the year before and I was overwhelmed and lost...and he offered to help me sort out his estate. He took quite a shine to my father’s charity foundation, offered to do all kinds of work to keep it running in the interim while I sorted everything out. He was just so…kind.” Her eyes harden, “Of course I didn’t expect to find out he’d drained the charity fund dry. He killed it, he murdered a charity my father set up in my mother’s name, a charity my father put everything into – I didn’t find out until months after that bastard broke up with me. He said horrible, horrible things, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I couldn’t stop finding all the ways in which they were true. Even rearranging my own memories to make them make sense. Because he wouldn’t have said it if there wasn’t something to it, right?” Allura shakes her head, “It took a long time to start trusting people after all that. I suppose I owe some thanks to Lance, Hunk, and Pidge. They’re the ones that taught me friends should give as much or more than they take.”
Shiro squeezes her fingers, “Thank you for telling me.”
“I wanted to get it off my chest. And you’re a very good listener.” She smiles at him and it’s like a little flicker of sunlight through the clouds.
“I…I’m not always going to be good at this. Or perfect, pretty much ever,” Shiro warns her, “I lost the first man I ever loved in Afghanistan. He died while I was unconscious in the hospital.”
“Oh Shiro, that’s terrible.”
“Yeah, it is,” he agrees, tired and heavy with emotion, “I’m not all that great at love, you know?”
“I get the feeling he wouldn’t agree with that assessment,” Allura says with complete confidence, “Because I don’t agree with it at all. You’re human, Shiro. And you have so much love and strength in you that you try to just hand it out to whoever asks for it, no matter what. The only person you have a hard time figuring out how to love is you.” She raises his hand to her lips and presses a kiss to his knuckles. “And I can help with that.”
“Oh can you?” he teases, although his eyes are still heavy with unshed tears.
“Definitely,” she says with utter confidence.
…
The next morning he wakes up to a text message from Allura.
Allura:
Today’s Reason to LOVE Shiro
He always takes me seriously and he listens to me.
<3
…
The first full summer Shiro lives upstate he and Allura take giddy advantage of Keith’s trust in them and use the key he gave them “FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY YOU ASSHOLES” to break into his and Lance’s half of the duplex and glitter-bomb the sleeping couple at four in the morning.
Keith is up and fighting in less than five seconds, yelling, “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, SHIRO,” at top volume.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up Lance, I need my first bi-five of Pride,” Allura shakes Lance on the other side of the bed while Shiro struggles to fend off an irate Keith.
“Go bi-five Shiro you useless bisexual,” Lance grumps into his pillow. “I’m bi-key asleep.”
“You’d better not replace every use of the word ‘high’ with ‘bi’ for the entire month of June, Lance, or ther will be consequences,” Keith growls.
“Bite me, babe,” Lance sticks his tongue out at his husband, blows him a kiss, and burrows deeper into the covers.
Allura sighs deeply and flops on one side of Lance, drawing the covers taunt over him, “Keith, get on the other side,” she orders, “If he won’t get up, we’ll trap him in until he gives up.”
“You’re all adults, remember?” Shiro reminds them, “Allura, you’re a doctor. People trust you to heal them. Keith, you’re…I still don’t get your job, honestly.”
“Fair, I still don’t get sales tax,” Keith acknowledges generously.
“WAIT,” Lance’s head pokes out of his blanket prison, “…if Allura’s bi, Shiro’s bi, I’m bi, Keith’s gay, Pidge is aroace, and Hunk’s demi-pan…THERE ARE NO STRAIGHT PEOPLE IN THIS BUILDING.”
“Finally statistics are in our favor,” Shiro solemnly intones while Allura laughs.
“GET OFF ME, LOSERS, WE’RE GOING TO PRIDE,” Lance shouts over their chuckles.
…
Shiro still visits Arlington every year. He still keeps his small footlocker full of memories from the handful of brilliant, terrifying, electric years he spent with Adam Wilde. He will always love his brown-eyed boy. But time means he can finally breathe and heal enough that when he opens that box, he can recall the good before the bad.