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“Wan’ me t’ get that?” Adam grunted as the knocking on the door pounded again.
“Nah, I got it,” Shiro said through a wide yawn, rolling off of his side of the bed. He had been awake anyway, despite the fact that it was two in the morning; monsoon season was in full gear tonight and was making itself loudly known.
He flicked on the light in the kitchen and plodded his way over to the door, then peered through the peephole. It was unlikely that an armed robber would go for a student apartment, considering the value of the items in place - to which their entire kitchen cabinet devoted to ramen noodles stood testament - but there weren’t many other reasons someone would be coming by at two in the goddamn morning , so it didn’t hurt to check.
He frowned when he couldn’t see anything through the peephole, and when he opened the door, he discovered why. A familiar figure had been practically pressed up against the door, too short for the peephole to catch from that angle. The moment Shiro opened the door, Keith stepped back, crossing his arms in the sleeves of his oversized hoodie. His very, very wet oversized hoodie. In fact, everything about him was very, very wet, from his hoodie to the raven hair plastered to his head to the puddle at his feet, the end of a trail of wet splotches along the carpeted hallway from his footsteps.
“Keith!” Shiro gasped. “How did you get here? What the hell are you doing here? Are you okay?”
“I walked,” Keith said softly, apparently electing only to answer the first question. His crossed arms tightened and he shivered. “Can I - is it okay if - ?”
“Yeah, yes, come on in,” Shiro said. Right, of course, the kid was soaked to the skin. First priority would be to get him out of those wet clothes before all that time in the rain resulted in his death from pneumonia.
He closed the door behind Keith after he trudged into the apartment and simply stood in place, shaking to his bones. “Here, I’m gonna grab some towels,” Shiro said, darting to the bathroom closet and pulling out every dry towel they had. When he returned and Keith didn’t reach for the stack, he draped one of the towels across the boy’s shoulders, one over his head, and dropped the rest onto a nearby ottoman. “Now,” he said as he took the towel on his head and started rubbing at the drenched mop of hair. “What happened to make you decide to walk all the way to - ?”
He froze as he moved the towel back and finally got a look at Keith’s face. Judging by his expression and the pink of his eyes, the shaking and pink nose and the streaks of water on his face weren’t just due to the rain. Keith was crying, crying hard.
And the bruise blossoming across one eye and cheek and crusted blood beneath his nostril gave Shiro a pretty good idea of why.
“Keith?” he whispered. He reached a hand out to his face. His fingertips barely ghosted over the edge of the bruise, but Keith still flinched violently away from his touch. “What happened?” Shiro asked.
Keith sniffled before answering in a mumble, “I… got in a fight. At the home.”
Shiro set his jaw. He had been worried from the start about Keith returning to that damn foster home for summer break. Keith had always been frustratingly silent about his past experiences in foster care, but his difficulty in getting along with his peers, along with his history of ‘disciplinary issues’, suggested that sticking him with foster siblings doesn’t end well.
“I’ll get you something for the bruise,” Shiro said. “Do your foster parents know what happened?”
Keith stiffened and dropped his eyes to his feet before answering, “My - my foster mom’s out working the night shift toni- ” A sneeze cut him short, and Keith sniffled, lip wobbling.
“Okay, you start drying up,” Shiro said. “I’ll try and find you some dry clothes to change into. At least take that sweatshirt off for now, it’s gotta be freezing.”
Keith nodded silently and started slowly pulling his hoodie off over his head as Shiro turned on his heel and went to the bedroom. Once there, he flicked the light on, rousing Adam, and made a beeline for the dresser to start pulling open drawers.
“’Kashi?” Adam grumbled as he reached for his glasses from his nightstand. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Where did you put those sweats I kept in here for Keith?” Shiro asked.
“Uh, bottom drawer, I think?” Adam levered himself up on his elbow and raised a brow at Shiro. “Why do you need them?”
“Keith’s here,” Shiro answered, kneeling down to open the bottom drawer.
“What?”
“Something happened with one of his foster siblings, he’s hurt, he came here.”
“Ah shit,” Adam said, sitting up fully and tossing aside the bedcovers. “How is he?”
“Wet,” Shiro replied. He straightened up, the folded Keith-sized clothes in his arms, and headed back to the main room. Adam followed behind him, nodding in greeting to Keith, who was standing exactly where he had been earlier and now with his dripping hoodie in his hands, as he entered. Adam muttered something about making cocoa and headed to the kitchen in search of the instant packets.
“Got those clothes,” Shiro said, holding them up as he approached Keith. “You can change in the bathroom. Want me to go ahead and hang your hoodie up to dry?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Keith mumbled as he reached out to make the trade. Doing so also gave Shiro his first look at Keith’s arms, and he held back a wince at the darkening bruise encircling one of his forearms. It was distinctly hand-shaped, and when Keith turned, Shiro caught a glimpse of four clear finger shapes that had grabbed him.
It took a second for one other detail of the bruise to fully hit Shiro, and when it did, he felt his blood begin to boil: the hand was way too big to belong to a kid.
He was just about to hold Keith back to ask him about it when a quick succession of knocks pounded at the door, triple in volume to the ones Keith had been making earlier. Like a startled deer Keith took off, rushing to the bathroom and slamming the door behind him.
Shiro hastened to drop the wet hoodie behind a recliner and out of sight before turning to the kitchen. “Be prepared to call the police,” he stage-whispered to Adam.
“What?” Adam replied. “Why? Who is - ?” But Shiro just shook his head at him before opening the door.
He had seen Keith’s current foster dad a couple of times before, when he was picking up or dropping off Keith at his home, but no conversation had extended beyond curtly exchanged niceties. Still, Shiro recognized him instantly: a match for Shiro in height, slightly balding, prominent jaw, formerly muscular build now starting to sag and currently hidden by a tan rain slicker.
And, Shiro noted, a couple of scratches along the side of his face that definitely could have been left by a kid’s fingernails.
“Can I help you?” Shiro asked, pulling the door closed enough that he was completely blocking the view into the apartment.
“I think you probably can,” the man replied. Shiro couldn’t recall his name exactly. It had begun with a D, he was pretty sure. Dan, Dave, Derek, Doug - something like that. “See, my son Keith decided to run away from home tonight.”
“You don’t say,” Shiro said.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. There was a bit of an argument at home, and Keith lost his nerve a bit and took right off. He has a bit of a history of elopement, you know.”
“Yeah, I’m aware,” Shiro said. “So why’d you come here?”
“You seem… surprisingly unconcerned.”
Shiro shrugged. “Keith’s a tough kid,” he said. “He knows how to keep himself safe.” He let his eyes linger on the scratches on the man’s face.
The latter’s expression darkened to a scowl. “I know he’s here,” he growled.
“He’s not,” Shiro said flatly.
“The kid’s always hanging around your place.”
“Well, I haven’t seen him.”
“Where the hell else would he go but here?”
“Plenty of places. Lots of businesses open twenty-four hours. Maybe he’s at one of those. Or checked into a hotel. Or gone to a sleepover at a different friend’s house.”
The man snorted. “Keith doesn’t have friends,” he scoffed.
It was Shiro’s turn to glare. “In that case, maybe he went to the police station to explain why he ran away in the first place.”
The expression on the other man’s face would have turned any lesser man than Shiro to ice. “And what would that explanation be, exactly?” he growled.
“I don’t know, I haven’t seen him.”
They stared each other down for a few moments more before the man finally turned away, grumbling under his breath and stomping down the hall. Shiro withdrew back into the apartment, double-locking the door behind him and letting out a heavy breath as he realized just how hard his heart was pounding.
“Shiro?”
He looked up to see Keith peeking out through the bathroom door, pale-faced and fully dressed in the dry clothes. “Was that - is he - ?” he asked shakily.
“He’s gone,” Shiro answered, deciding to leave off the ‘for now’.
Adam cleared his throat from the kitchen. “Uh, cocoa’s ready,” he said, holding up the mugs. “It’s dairy-free,” he added to Keith. “So, no worries.”
Keith shuffled into the room to accept a mug with shaking hands, and Shiro took one too and sipped slowly at it, although he could barely taste the chocolate. He was too focused on watching Keith, keeping an eye on his dewy eyes and trembling hands and quiet sniffles as he drank.
Exhaustion finally seemed to be hitting him, too, since he yawned a couple of times and, as he reached the end of his cocoa, his eyes started drifting closed of their own accord. “All right,” Shiro said the instant Keith finished and set the mug down. “We should probably get some sleep. I can go ahead and get some extra blankets into the guest bedroom, if you - ”
“Oh, that’d be great, Takashi,” Adam cut him off. He turned to Keith. “My back’s been out of sorts the past couple days, and the mattress in the guest bedroom’s better for it, so I’m sleeping in there. Guess you’re gonna have to share the master bed, Keith.”
“Okay,” Keith mumbled, and Shiro smiled gratefully at Adam. Keith got up to put his mug in the sink, and Adam leaned forward to whisper, “Do you still want me to call someone about…?” He gestured his head toward the front door.
“Tomorrow,” Shiro mouthed as Keith sidled up next to him. He wrapped his arm around the boy, still shaking a little even now, and guided him toward the bedroom. They were all tired, and drained. Tomorrow they could get Keith’s foster dad dealt with and see what could be done about his living situation.
For the moment, though, all that mattered was that his little brother was warm, safe, and in his arms.