Work Text:
~~
And I feel sure that my wounds will heal
And I will bloom here in my room
With a little water and a little bit of sunlight
And a little bit of tender mercy (tender mercy)
“Absolute Lithops Effect” by The Mountain Goats
~~
Two months after Shiro’s wedding, Keith goes MIA.
Occupational risk, that.
The thing that haunts him, that dogs his steps for the next few forevers, is that Keith wasn’t even fighting. Shiro’s been off full time active duty for years at this point, but his name still has weight. He gets a hold of the files and he reads them, re-reads them. Prints them off and runs his fingers along the lines, like he might find something there-
“Whatever helps, Takashi,” Curtis murmurs, rubbing his shoulders comfortingly when he finds Shiro asleep at his desk again. “I can’t imagine what he meant to you.”
Keith’s tiny cruiser was meant to rendezvous with the Blade mothership outside orbit and it simply… hadn’t. Shiro’s watched the feeds, again and again, frame by frame. Keith kneels before solemnly shaking the hand of the tiny rabbity Usul leader, then rises to his feet. He tosses that long braid over one shoulder and whistles for Kosmo who whisks him back onboard the cruiser. After a moment, the ship takes off. The live feed shows it leaving atmosphere and entering space.
And then?
Nothing.
Sector Xi is quiet, mundane. Keith had been there to negotiate a work-exchange with Daibazaal, desperately in need of agricultural specialists while the Usul were stretching their own resources dangerously thin due to overpopulation. It had been, according to Acxa’s report, completely satisfactory and pedestrian. There is no enemy here but loss.
At first there is hope, and then there is action. Coalition forces mobilize. The Garrison sends a support regiment. Daibazaal utilizes the entire might of the Blades. Shiro is glued to the scanner. Curtis is quietly supportive, bringing him cups of green tea from time to time, always just a touch too sweet. Shiro drinks them anyway, absently grateful.
When it’s time for the memorial, Shiro doesn’t want to go.
“Takashi, they need you. You’re their leader,” Curtis reminds him. “You’re not the only one who lost him.”
He’s right, of course he’s right, but it stings. It’s not- it’s not quite the same, is it?
“You all have that Paladin bond,” Curtis continues, leisurely folding a sweater and adding it to the bag he’s packing for Shiro. “You’ll feel better all together with people who understand.”
“He’s not lost,” Shiro says lamely.
“Just for now,” Curtis says gently, but Shiro doesn’t think that he means it.
Shiro goes, and it’s awful. It’s hell. Too many lapses into silence, distracted and pensive. Whenever a datapad pings, there’s too much naked expectation in the answering- open disappointment when it’s not about Keith. It’s as though they expect him to walk through the door at any moment, as though their gathering, so rare and perfunctory, might summon him from wherever he might be.
They drink too much and eat too little over dinner. Pidge blinks sleepily over her plate, drooping like a cut flower in a dry vase. Hunk, for once, has no appetite, and even Coran is subdued, excusing himself early and quietly midway through the meal. It leaves an empty seat that Shiro can’t stop staring at.
“Two down,” Lance says into his cup, clearly drunk. “Four to go.”
Shiro closes his eyes to wrestle down the urge to slap him across the room. After a beat, he opens them and gets to his feet.
“Come on,” he says, in that old Black Paladin voice, and it works. Hunk and Pidge and Lance all get up from the table and follow him dutifully out in front of Allura’s statue. He positions them none-too-gently, and when he raises his datapad to take the picture, they make a miserable tableau. Shiro snaps the picture anyway. Hunk begins clearing the dishes and Pidge sinks to the floor, leaning against a wall, after, but Lance hovers, watching over Shiro’s shoulder as he uploads the attachment to the secure comms link.
It’s not the same without you, Keith. Please come back home.
Shiro hits send.
“Do you think it would have made a difference?” Lance asks quietly once the checkmark confirms delivery. “If we, I dunno. Tried harder. Saw each other more than once a year.”
A difference to what, Shiro doesn’t ask.
Lance’s hand comes up, fingers tracing along the curve under his eye along the blue Altean marks.
“Probably not,” Lance decides.
~~
K—
After the memorial, Krolia told me about your promotion, while you were up there. I’m proud of you. I know how hard you worked for it, and it’s well-deserved. We could celebrate when you get back.
(.... I know you’ll come back.)
Things are going as well as they can be here. The team is working hard, but they miss you. Recently we tested a new amphibious explorer. Have you ever seen the ocean before? I don’t remember if you ever said, but I wish you could see this one yourself. There’s plans to go into the Mariana Trench, if all goes well, before we deploy it extraterrestrially. The vidscreens don’t do it justice- but it’ll have to do until you get back.
(you will come back)
My favorite is the third clip- with the sunfish.
—S
~~
The letters are sporadic, at first. Occasional things that break apart the madness of Shiro’s endless days. Then he needs it more- the little messages the only outlet for the grief that presses against his lungs from the inside, crushing and invisible.
So he writes, and the more he writes, the less he lives in today. It isn’t eventful, and just like when he was actively working, he pushes himself as hard as he can consulting, reviewing Keith’s case, Paladin outreach- until he’s so exhausted his sleep is dreamless. How can it matter, what the Garrison does, what this policy or that representative might say? Shiro’s seen intergalactic war. He’d thought there could be nothing worse but somehow the monotony of Life After Keith… is.
It just is.
~~
K—
Do you remember riding out before Kerberos, hiking up out by your dad’s old place? Curtis took me for a long weekend to a B&B retreat just recently and I remembered that. I think he’s trying to cheer me up. Those mountains aren’t the same, though. Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about it. They’re worn down, weathered away by centuries of erosion. I suppose that is something I have in common with them. Still, I miss the sharp peaks and dramatic valleys of the west. They remind me of you.
Everything reminds me of you.
I hope you’re well.
—S
~~
Curtis is a saint, and that’s what damns him. His steadfast devotion, his everlasting patience- it grates. Loss is a fact of life, his placid eyes seem to say. Sad but inevitable.
As if he doesn’t know, what Keith was to him.
… what was Keith, to him?
Best friend. Best man. Savior. Protege. Successor. Keith.
What was he, to Keith?
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. But a little bit of him thinks, maybe…
Six months after Keith disappears, Shiro wakes starkly from a dream or a memory of the last time they’d spoken one on one- Keith had asked him out for a rare and wonderful desert ride and he’d done it- he’d made time. He’d wanted to- and anyway, it was as good a time as any to tell him about Curtis.
“I need to say something,” Keith had said, looking a little pale. The heat, maybe?
“Me too,” Shiro had said. And then Shiro had gone first.
There was something in the squareness of Keith’s jaw, looking out over the desert, after. Something fiery and… far away. Shiro had a single soft moment of doubt, then.
“Keith?”
“I get it. I do. He’ll be lucky to have you.”
Shiro squeezed his shoulder. “What did you want to tell me?”
Shaking his head, he pulled away and got to his feet. “It was nothing. We better head back to Atlas. Don’t wanna be late.”
… had that really been the last time they’d been alone together?
(had he really not known what Keith wanted to say?)
~~
K—
I’ve been thinking a lot lately, over the past few months, why I remember all of these small details about you. Memories have faded for the different places I’ve been, and people I met, but never with you. If I close my eyes, I can still see you as clear as day, I can still perfectly envision you as you were the last time I saw you. I remember your voice. I know why I can’t shake you. I love you.
I think I always loved you.
—S
~~
Curtis is already sitting at the table when Shiro wakes, fully dressed. That’s the first sign that something is wrong- Curtis is perfect in nearly all things, but a morning person he is not.
Curtis slides two things across the kitchen table top, expression serene but eyes a little red- a little soft and wet.
A cup of coffee just the way Shiro likes, and Shiro’s datapad, open to his last sent message.
“You read them,” Shiro says. Perhaps he means to be outraged, but it comes out flat. Inevitable. Inexorable.
“I’m your communications officer, Takashi.” Curtis reminds him gently.
“You read them all?” Shiro asks.
“I read them all.” Curtis agrees.
“I don’t know what to do,” Shiro admits. He notices, detachedly, that he’s crying.
“I know,” Curtis agrees, and he’s tearing up too. “But you can’t do it here. I love you, but you can’t do this to me anymore. I can’t let you.”
Shiro nods, defeated.
~~
K—
What even is there to say? You’re there, and I’m here, and that’s that. I don’t begrudge you for it. What would I have done, if you had said it? If you even felt the same, could I have recognized it? We wanted different things. You had a decision to make and there was never any reason or obligation to try and convince me otherwise. But I wish you had, or at the very least told me it was a possibility before it was too late.
Was it possible, Keith?
Were we possible?
—S
~~
Is it a surprise that Shiro ends up on Lance’s front door?
The Blue Paladin, steady in his own way. He looks Shiro in the eye and then drags him in by the front of his shirt. He even lets Shiro mope in the guest room for eighteen full hours before kicking in the door with a plate of homemade mac and cheese, sickeningly sweet juniberry tea and information.
“He left a will, you know.” Lance says, and Shiro stops chewing mid-bite.
“Who?” Shiro asks, afraid.
“Who else?” Lance shakes his head, mouth tight. “It was you. Of course it was you.”
Keith left everything he owned to Shiro- that is, everything that was on Earth. His rooms on Daibazaal, his secrets with the Blades- those belong to Krolia, who had told him dry-eyed at the memorial that she would never step foot on Earth soil again.
Keith’s father’s place, out in the desert.
It takes a little time to make the arrangements- legal, financial. Retired, divorced and despondent, Shiro reaches the shack just as the sun has sunk behind the peaks, sending bright rays of light intermixed with pink and orange skies. It paints everything in lovely watercolor. This view is his, and his alone, and he wishes it wasn't.
The shack is not a shack, in truth it’s less and more. Keith had clearly begun reconstruction some time ago as a quiet, private endeavor taken in his two capable hands between missions. Part of the walls are missing- there’s water damage, but also the beginning of indoor plumbing. Set unattended for a year, it’s dismal and unfit for habitation.
The first thing that Shiro finds, carefully wrapped in tarps in back, are glass panes, aluminum extrusions, gutter components, half rotted lumber-
A greenhouse. Keith had been planning a greenhouse.
So Shiro sets up a sleeping bag and a makeshift tarp roofing over the living area and he builds the greenhouse first.
~~
K—
I never told you what I needed to tell you. I think that I must have known, but by the time I would have been ready, it wouldn’t have been fair to either of us. I thought I needed Earth and Earth things to know who I was and where I belonged- The Garrison, green grass… a normal, everyday life. A normal, everyday love. I like to think I would have figured it out. I like to think we could have found our way someday.
But there’s no point in wanting something when we’re already past the expiration date. The distance toward the end was supposed to lessen the blow, but I guess I didn’t let that happen.
I’m still not letting that happen.
—S
~~
The first months are hell.
It doesn’t snow because there’s not enough moisture in the air, but it’s still cold as hell. Shiro’s shoddy attempts at finishing Keith’s pipework are subpar at best; they freeze one night as he lies sleeping and he wakes with a sputter as the whole place floods.
The aftermath is a horror show- the wood frames he had pretended were salvageable were exposed, wet, molded and crumbling. Keith’s home- the home he’d left in Shiro’s care, is a near total loss.
Just like Shiro.
He follows that line of thought, that spiraling rabbit hole to the deepest and darkest places, and when he resurfaces, gasping for breath and yearning for a reprieve, he is always empty-handed.
He considers it a moment too long.
He’s a fighter, isn’t he? He’d proved that in captivity. Still, Shiro can’t lie to himself about the appeal of lying back down. The water is cold. Surely, after a time, that too would fade away. These things happen.
Truly, how much longer could he endure this?
Keith… would hate that.
Shiro, dying.
Shiro, dying here.
And so he gets up, makes it into town- checks into their dingy Motel 6 and starts the process of rebuilding all over again. The house. Himself.
The greenhouse, at least, survived somehow. Too warm to freeze over, perhaps. The ground inside is warm and bare. He remembers this, in the checkout line of the combination hardware and garden center.
“What’s that?” He asks, eyes falling on an ugly little plant. It looks like a rock, if rocks grew from the ground. The color is mottled and it’s split in the middle, almost as if pursing its lips for a kiss. It’s cute, in a hideous way.
The young kid behind the counter shrugs, somehow even less interested in the plant than he is in Shiro. That’s also part of the appeal, maybe, so Shiro buys it.
He sleeps in the greenhouse, next to that tiny plant, for the week it takes to get even just the main room livable again. It’s bigger now, with a big glass bay window facing the mountains, and a window seat. The wood for the new floor and walls is oak, or oak synthetic- the Olkari type is so good as to be indistinguishable and affordable to boot. It looks, he thinks, like the kind of place Keith might have liked to live.
The day he sets the last nail into place, the plant dies.
~~
K—
I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough, really. I have a lot to apologize for, so I guess it’s alright to add one more thing to the list.
The new bathroom is perfect, but… it’s twice the size of your blueprint- honestly, Keith, you saved the world. You deserve a bathtub. It’s even separate from the shower, Japanese style. I thought about installing jets but in the end, I went with the claw foot. I know you think they’re silly and dangerous, but I love the way they look. I love feeling cradled in the water, held a little separate from it all. I think you’d like it too. Maybe you’d forgive me, if you ever had the chance to try it out with me.
I think you loved me, but was it that kind of love? Is it better or worse either way?
—S
~~
“Lithops,” the kindly old lady running the register tells him when he buys another. Her grandson is stocking the fertilizer today, spindly limbs thrust into motion by necessity. “They’re easy. They like the heat.”
He only waters it every other week.
(It still dies.)
This one hurts a little less. Maybe it’s because he’s finished the bedroom meantime, in dove grey and black, pops of red in the pillows and the rug. It feels like him. It feels like… them. He sleeps the night through and when he wakes, he drives into town.
He buys all five of the lithops left. The bored teen rings him up. He doesn’t care about Shiro, but Shiro tells him to have a good day anyway. Then he calls Lance.
“Butt plants,” Lance says after scrutinizing the vidscreen. Shiro feels vaguely offended on their behalf. “That’s a good starter plant.”
“I’ve killed two of them,” Shiro confesses darkly.
“Well, yeah.” Lance shrugs. “It’s like that sometimes."
“What am I doing wrong?” Shiro asks.
“Too much water, probably,” Lance advises. “Leave it somewhere bright. It goes through stages.”
“Just leave it alone?” Shiro asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” Lance says softly. His hand comes up to run along the faint fading blue mark beneath his eye.
~~
K—
How am I supposed to be happy? How could I move on when there’s a massive question mark surrounding what could’ve been? Of course I don’t need to be handled delicately. I know if you could see me like this, you’d tell me to snap the hell out of it, even if you didn’t want the same things. And you’re not wrong- I can handle it because I have no other choice... but that doesn’t mean I’ll get over it.
—S
~~
Two years after Keith disappears, Shiro finishes the shack.
It’s a lovely little thing- an oasis. Not a shack at all, of course. Pidge has been sending irrigation prototypes, and Hunk found hardy fruit-bearing trees that wick moisture from the air.
And two of the lithops are still alive.
It had been hard to give them space. He wants to worry them like a dog with a bone- he’d always solved his problems by doing not… waiting.
But he’d found that as they wilted and flowered, grew and changed that he’s changed too.
Not in the ways that really matter, maybe, but… enough.
“I’m glad you’re doing better,” the surly teen says one day out of the blue when Shiro’s come to buy a detachable kitchen sink faucet and finish the last thing on his home improvement list.
“Excuse me?” Shiro asks, surprised.
The teen shrugs and looks away, uncomfortable with Shiro’s full attention. Something about it is so achingly like another standoffish teen he’d known before that Shiro’s heart shudders in his chest.
“You looked like the world was ending whenever you walked in before,” he says.
Maybe it did. Maybe it had. Shiro’s busy now- exporting the fruit to Hunk, reporting progress to Pidge- working on the grounds and settling into something that looks like a life… if you didn’t look too hard. Even with the construction finished there’s never any shortage of work to be done, be it refilling the various water storage tanks, clearing out potential hazards from the land or working on Keith’s hoverbike. Which really, even if there isn’t anything specific that needed maintenance, he often found himself tinkering anyway. It’s a nice way to pass the time and Shiro thinks he might even be getting sort of good at it.
And he’s gone a full month without writing.
If it’s like this, he decides, he’ll end it on his own terms.
And so, on the two year anniversary of Keith’s disappearance, Shiro sends his final message.
~~
Keith
This is the last. That’s not to say that I’m over it… over you. That isn’t possible and it isn’t necessary. More like… I’m accepting you. I always thought you can’t be gone, and I’m right, aren’t I? How can you be gone when I’m here? In this house I built for us, you’ll always be with me. I don’t need to put it into words. You know. You have to know. You’re more than a crush, or a fling, or anything like that. I don’t know what you ever defined any of that, or me, as, but I loved you. I still do. There’s never going to be anyone else like you for me.
Love, always and forever
Shiro
~~
Shiro wakes in the night to his data pad ring- emergency frequency.
He hasn’t heard that sound since-
Well.
He swipes it open and stumbles out into the front room, clicking the light on as he goes. He’s only in sleep pants, mussed and shirtless, when he sees Pidge staring back at him. She’s breathing hard, eyes wide-
“What is it? Where do I need to be?” Shiro asks, command slipping on like a cloak, familiar and easy.
“I need you to sit down,” Pidge says.
“Fuck that,” Shiro answers immediately. “Where am I going?”
“I’m serious,” Pidge says and means it. “It’s alright. We have time.” Shiro grudgingly sinks onto the couch. “What do you know about time dilation?”
“Cliffnotes, Pidge,” Shiro says flatly.
“I’m trying, okay? This is… above and beyond what I can understand, much less explain. If I hadn’t seen- but I’m getting ahead of myself. General relativistic gravitational time dilation, is what I’m saying.”
“You’re not calling me about theories, Pidge.” Shiro reminds her. He’s glancing around the room, noting the location of important items- keys, wallet, boots.
“I’m talking about the quantum abyss, celestial bodies.”
“...the space whale? The cosmic whale.” Shiro clarifies. “Did something happen with Hunk? I didn’t think he was off world.”
“No, Hunk’s on Altea. It’s not… it’s not Hunk.” Pidge bites her lower lip. There’s a murmur off screen and she glances that way. “What do you mean, he-?!”
“Pidge!” Shiro’s tone sharpens, calling her attention back. “Tell me.”
“Keith was older, right? But he shouldn’t have been. Twin paradox, because both groups are treated as independent observers, the known universe and the inhabitants of the quantum abyss. The proper time interval between two events on a world line is fixed only up to an arbitrary additive constant of two years and two weeks. And we were so dumb! Like, ‘oh, quantum abyss, whatever, timey-wimey spacey-whaley junk’ but-” Pidge’s voice comes in a flood of information. Shiro latches onto the familiar.
“What about Keith?” he demands.
There’s a knock at the door.
“No,” Shiro whispers, afraid. Afraid to not be afraid.
“Open the door, Shiro,” Pidge says before the screen goes dark.
Shiro drops the datapad and it bounces off the couch cushion, skittering across the floor. He walks, step by endless step, to the front door.
He can’t look.
He can’t.
He unlocks the deadbolt with trembling hands and almost before it even clicks into place, the door is opening.
Keith stands against the desert night like a dream. One hand is on the door. In the other, he holds tight to his data pad.
“Shiro,” he says, and Shiro’s knees buckle. Keith catches him, holds him up until he can steady himself. He might never steady himself, too lost in the impossibility of it all. Death, regeneration… now this.
“Hey, shhh… it’s okay.” Keith is saying. He’s put his datapad aside on the entry table and one arm holds Shiro up, the other cradling the back of his head and neck close. Keith smells a little sweaty and in need of a bath and that’s what breaks him- the confirmation that this is real
Impossibly, impossibly real.
“There was a strange signal in sector Xi and when I followed it, I found a baby cosmic whale. It was beautiful, you should have seen her- like a new world, just born. Anyway, she wasn’t where she was supposed to be and it took me about two weeks to get her back on course and on my way again.”
“Two weeks,” Shiro echoes.
“Two weeks,” Keith confirms.
“Keith, you’ve been gone two years.” Shiro says, or tries to say. His voice breaks halfway and he has to stop, to stand back so Keith can come in and shut the door. He turns his face away, overwhelmed and ashamed.
“I wasn’t. Or, I wasn’t for me. I don’t know what happened.” Keith shakes his head. “Pidge was saying something all techno-jumble, but when she said you were taking it badly, I had to come here first-”
“The space whale,” Shiro says, still looking at the wall. “Two weeks and two years. You regained all your lost time, solving the paradox.”
“Can you look at me?” Keith asks a little desperately. Shiro shakes his head no. “Why not?” Keith demands.
“If I do, I’ll kiss you.” Shiro says.
Keith inhales sharply. “You don’t mean that,” he says, but he doesn’t sound sure.
“Check your messages,” Shiro manages.
Keith raises his datapad, flicking through screens easily. His motions slow, eyes going wide as he reads. Shiro tries to control his breathing. In and out. The floor beneath his feet. The darkness outside. The two lithops, sitting in the greenhouse Keith wanted and Shiro built, thriving.
“Look at me,” Keith says, his voice trembling. “Shiro, look at me…” his fingers brush against Shiro’s shoulder and so Shiro does- looks at him and pulls him into a fiery kiss that’s a sharp contrast to the chilly desert air on the other side of that door. Keith’s mouth is cold and Shiro chases it away, kissing him until he’s warm and flushed and alive.
“You mean it,” Keith murmurs against his mouth. “You mean it-!” his happiness is so profound it’s tinged with despair; a hope he’d never spoken and never thought could grow. A sign of all that Shiro had missed- had almost missed forever.
“So much,” Shiro promises. “Maybe it won’t fix everything that’s happened in the past, but if you care for me still—”
“I’ll love you till I’m dead,” Keith promises fiercely. “And a long time after that, probably.”
“Don’t,” Shiro begs, the idea of Keith and Death too raw and real to voice just now. He leans down, resting his forehead against Keith’s shoulder. “Just… stay with me. Here.”
Keith tilts Shiro’s chin up with his fingertips and presses a soft kiss against his lips. “Baby, I’ll stay wherever you want me to.”