Work Text:
Something that became very evident within the first few weeks Shiro had known Keith was that the kid was a hard worker.
At first he had assumed that whatever he did in the Garrison, the good grades and flight simulations, was just him being exceptionally gifted. That was a shameful assumption to make because he soon found out that Keith’s good grades were only because he stayed up with a study book in hand, slaving Over terms while the other cadets slept or hung out with their roommates and friends.
Yes, the flight simulation part may have been pure talent and what got the school's attention, but Keith was always observing and improving at a scary pace, even beating some of Shiro’s records at his young age.
Shiro hadn’t realized exactly how hard Keith had been working until he started hitting up the library to freshen up on flight terms in preparation for the Kerberos mission in a year. The library at the Garrison held textbooks and study books instead of the normal enjoyable books, and Shiro knew that the Garrison was a military school but even he thought that was a bit too far.
But because of the sparse selection it was rare to see younger cadets in the library, mostly being occupied by professors and the seniors.
Which was why Shiro nearly did a double take when he noticed the small figure on the far table, papers spread out along the surface as he valiantly slaved over copying notes from a textbook.
“Keith?” Shiro asked as he cautiously approached, and Keith’s pen froze as he looked up, about to yell only to realize it was only Shiro.
“Shiro,” he greeted before returning to his work.
“What’re you doing here?” He pushed, approaching across the table to get a good look at the small and neatly slanted handwriting over the papers. When Shiro caught a look at the textbook he was studying he actually did a double take this time around. “Mechanics and inter-workings of the ship? Keith, you shouldn’t be on that subject until at least next semester.”
All cadets were forced to take a mechanics class even if it wasn’t their main pathway. Keith was bound for the fighter pilot path, and Shiro knew that learning the mechanics was better safe than sorry but he didn’t know anyone who would willingly learn it in detail when there wasn’t a test involved. At least, not anytime soon. Keith shrugged, “it’s interesting,” he grumbled to himself, tired eyes roving over the textbook.
He didn’t even look like he was processing the information with those bags under his eyes. Has he always looked so tired? It had been a bit since Shiro had seen him.
Guilt bit at his insides as he sighed, eyeing the time on his watch. It was late, nearly lights out. The library was abandoned and dark except for Keith’s lamp lit table.
“Hey, the library’s about to close. How about I grab the book I need and we get out of here? I’ll walk you back to the cadet dormitory?”
“No,” Keith denied, “‘M not done.”
He looked done, rubbing at his drooping eyes. He wouldn’t last too long and Shiro wasn’t comfortable with leaving him in the dark library all alone. The garrison was a safe place, a military school, but Shiro would always be paranoid when it came to Keith’s safety.
An idea formed.
“Okay then, how about instead of getting kicked out of the library you come back with me to the apartment and study there? I need to work on something anyway,” it was a lie, Shiro had planned on grabbing the book and crashing when he got back, “sounds good?”
“Mmhmm,” Keith grumbled, hands fisted in his hair as he almost drifted off.
“Ok, I’ll be back, let me check out this book.”
Shiro was quick to find the on duty librarian behind her desk, packing things up for the night. When she spotted Shiro she nearly jumped out of her skin.
Shiro put his hands up in surrender, “sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No no it’s okay,” she waved him off. Shiro didn’t know much about her but he knew she was a nice old lady, much too homely for a place like the Garrison. “I didn’t notice you coming in. I assume you're checking this out?”
“Yes,” Shiro handed the book off to her and watched as she scanned the barcode on the spine before handing it back. Shiro took it and frowned.
“Is something wrong dear? I can see worry written all over your face. You wouldn’t want to get wrinkles like me,” she joked and Shiro chuckled to be nice as he settled the book under his arm.
“Yes, actually. You may be able to help with it. Do you know Cadet Kogane?”
The woman’s eyes lit up as she adjusted her frameless glasses over her nose, the beads on the side of her glasses clinking together. “Yes, a hard worker that boy is, but I see him in here much too frequently for it to be healthy for him.” Her eyes widened as she turned around in her desk to peer behind the bookshelves, “I didn’t realize he was still here, I was closing up.”
“Frequently?” Shiro questioned.
She nodded, “yes, he comes almost every night and camps out at the far desk in the corner. The poor boy looks so tired, I wish there was something I could do to help him.”
Shiro was inclined to agree, “you may be able to help him, can I?” He gestured and the woman nodded. He took a notepad resting on the top of the desk, flipping through it until he found an empty page, quickly jotting down his number before tearing out the page and passing it to her.
“Anytime he stays here for too long, call me. I’ll come and pick him up and take him back to his dorm.”
“Ah, of course,” the woman smiled warmly as she took the note and thankfully placed it out of sight on a cabinet. Shiro was thinkful, he didn’t hand out his personal contact much but he wouldn’t want a bunch of spam calls from cadets if it got leaked. “Thank you for this, it gives me some peace of mind.”
“No, thank you,” Shiro stepped back to retrieve Keith, “Have a good night.”
The woman bid him farewell as he returned to place a hand on Keith’s shoulder. Keith jumped slightly before realizing it was just Shiro and relaxing once more. He hadn’t even seen Shiro approach from his front?
“Let’s get out of here,” he helped Keith gather his notes and place them in the binder he had brought along with him. Before Keith could grab for his stuff Shiro stacked the mechanics textbook onto his and simply led Keith by the shoulder out of the library.
The walk back to the apartment building for professors was a ten minute one, but the stars were bright and there was a breeze so Shiro didn’t mind.
“I heard you’re a frequent visitor at the library,” Shiro said offhandedly, almost like he was making small talk instead of gently pressing the cadet for information.
Keith didn’t even bother to look up at the stars like he normally did, just staring down at his boots as if he was hyper focused on walking and not tripping. He shrugged and didn’t offer any words.
Shiro pursed his lips, “you need some time to yourself Keith, downtime. I don’t think studying a course that you shouldn’t be taking for months counts as relaxation. It’s important for kids your age to get social interaction in.”
Keith looked up at him as if to say ‘are you done with your lecture now.’ And Shiro could hear it so well that it scared him.
“I’m not trying to lecture you Keith, I’m just worried.”
The night outside was loud and silent at the same time, the starry sky spanning above them like a large globe, a peaceful stillness. The crickets chirped and the night creatures, Scorpions and opossums, scurried around the campus.
“I’ll be fine,” Keith said tightly, and Shiro had never heard such a lie in his life, but he didn’t push any further.
By the time they got back to the apartment it was around midnight and Adam was probably asleep in their shared bed. Shiro found food in the fridge covered with foil that Adam must have left behind for him. He heated it up, splitting the portion between two plates before bringing them to the study room that had been slowly transformed into Keith’s bedroom with a large desk and bed.
Keith was already back at it, pen jotting down probably unintelligible notes, eyes darting between the book and the paper. He didn’t even come up for air when Shiro nudged the plate under his nose.
Shiro sighed. Taking care of a teenager had to be more complicated than taking care of a baby. Good thing he and Adam weren’t planning on attaining a child anytime soon, Keith was enough of a handful as it was.
Deciding that Keith was going to do what he wanted whether Shiro approved or not, he decided to pull up a chair on the other half of the desk that was empty to pull out his newly acquired book.
Occasionally he would look over to see Keith’s eyes drooping, his head dropping slightly. Finally, an hour later when Shiro looked up to rub at his eyes and the words on the paper were starting to blur together, did he realize that Keith had finally fallen asleep.
His head was buried in his arms but Shiro could see enough of his relaxed face and the way his back rose and fell slowly to tell that he was passed out.
He didn’t look like he would be up anytime soon, so Shiro simply sighed and shrugged off his own jacket, placing it over Keith’s back before returning to read the last of his chapter.
Hours later he woke up to Adam standing at the doorway, looking at him and a still asleep Keith was disapproving.
Shiro was a bit of a hypocrite, wasn’t he?
The next week Shiro had received two calls, both regarding Keith’s health.
The first one had been only two days after he left the librarian his phone number. It was at the ungodly hour of midnight where he was out running drills on the hover bike with a class of third year cadets who were night training.
“Formation thirty-six!” He shouted as an outcropping of canyons appeared in the distance. They were about halfway through the drill, expected to return to the garrison around one in the morning.
“Cadet Stover, bank more to your right!” He ordered over the roaring wind, his eyes half lidded under the wind because cadet Lucas had forgotten his goggles and Shiro, being the senior officer, offered his own up.
“Yes captain Shirogane!” She shouted back and readjusted so that she was slightly more to the right in front of him. These kinds of drills had always been the ones Shiro enjoyed, they were meticulous and involved a lot of memorization that the other cadets despised.
Just when they reached the rocks and the cadets had all split up to go their own ways through the canyon, Shiro felt a buzzing in his pocket. He usually had it on silent but decided he would leave the ringer on because if anyone was calling him this late then it would surely be an emergency…
Shiro pulled his bike over, silently apologizing for his unprofessional attitude to the cadets before fishing his phone out of the zip up pocket.
He thumbed at the screen, eyes narrowing when he realized the number wasn’t saved to his phone, it wasn’t Adam or Sam but it was surely a Garrison number.
He bit at the end of his leather glove, pulling it off as he put the phone up to his ear, tilting his head into his shoulder as he undid his other glove and sent a beacon to the other cadets' vehicles. Yellow told them there was a holdup, but not an emergency. Shiro was sure they would wait for him outside of the canyon, they were all good and smart cadets.
“Hello?” He asked, thankful that the canyon hadn’t interrupted his reception. “Who is this?”
“This is Mrs. Leslie, the librarian,” an older voice answered, and Shiro was about to ask how she had his personal number until he remembered…
Oh no.
“Keith,” he breathed, not not worried about the other cadets flashing their yellow lights over the vehicle's connected light system in response. They could wait. “Keith, is he okay?”
“He’s alright dear, but i’m closing up the library and he’s a bit… slumped.”
Shiro let out a huff of air, but it wasn’t a breath of relief nor frustration, just acceptance that this was his life now.
“He’s exhausted himself?”
“He looks like he just needs sleep and assistance in his dorm room. I wouldn’t want a young boy like him walking back to the dormitories all alone, especially with how sleepy he looks.”
Shiro could only estimate how worse those eyebags of his had gotten. “Okay, thank you for calling, I'm not available to pick him up at the moment but I can send someone over if you wouldn’t mind waiting back and keeping an eye on him.”
“Yes, that’s alright, I'm just glad the lad has someone.”
Shiro offered another goodbye before tapping on one of the pinned contacts with no hesitation.
“Takashi,” Adam’s voice was groggy, and Shiro winced, knowing he had been sleeping off a long day of running drills in the desert heat. Shiro was lucky he had night training. “Do you have any idea how late it is?”
“It is…” he eyed his watch, “Now twelve ‘o five. I need you to do me a favor.”
“Takashi, I quite frankly do not have the libido to do much of anything right now so if you come back all hor-”
“No no, wrong type of favor,” Shiro, despite being with his fiancee for years, still blushed. “I got a call from the librarian saying that Keith needed help back to the dorms. I’m in the middle of a class could you…”
“Yeah yeah, but only for you,” Adam grumbled and Shiro could hear him on the other side of the phone rustling around the closet for presentable clothes. He probably took Shiro’s out of spite.
“And Keith,” he added, “you like Keith too.”
“I tolerate him,” Adam mumbled, and they both knew it was a lie. Despite being drawn in most of the time, Keith liked Adam too. “I’m not taking him back to the dorms, who knows what his roommates are up to. I’ll just bring him back to the apartment and set an alarm for his morning class for him.”
“Thank you, Adam.”
“Whatever, you owe me a favor.”
Shiro’s lips quirked upwards, “I sure do babe, i’ll see you when I get back-”
“Captain Shirogane!” Cadet Stover called as she and three others navigated their hover bikes across the corner.
Cadet Lucas must have seen the flash of his screen when he hung up with Adam because his face shifted from panicked to unimpressed, “please tell me you weren’t ditching us to have phone sex or something.”
Shiro blushed bright red.
These cadets were good and smart but they had loud mouths.
-
When Shiro returned all was well. Adam was in the kitchen, a cup of coffee in his hands as he scrolled through his emails under the lonley kitchen light. Shiro turned on the living room lights on his way in.
He was sure Adam was just planning on his downfall after dragging him from bed to take care of their hostile teenager. Speaking of said teenager, Shiro slung his bag over his shoulder as he poked his head into Keith’s room to find him passed out, drooling all over the pillow.
Shiro huffed, this time in amusement as he dropped his bag on the hallway floor (he would probably trip over it later) to return to the kitchen. He brewed his own coffee and watched Adam adjust his glasses, tying away at a lightning pace. Yeah, he was definitely coordinating Shiro’s very accidental death. He would probably hack the Kerberos ship and blame it on aliens or something.
Adam finally finished, looking away from his computer and taking his glasses off to rub at his eyes. Distantly Shiro wondered if Adam would ever wear beads on his glasses like the librarian lady did. He didn’t know much about fashion and what was ugly but Adam did.
“He’s out,” Shiro commented offhandedly as he took a sip of his much too hot coffee, hiding his wince.
“I bet he is,” Adam snorted and there was definitely a story behind those words.
“What happened?”
Adam shut his laptop and adjusted his Garrison issued robe. A perk to being staff of the Garron meant they got a bunch of unnecessary merch. “He was barely lucid when I got there. Mrs. Leslie said it was okay for me to leave his notes on the table since apparently he had claimed it for himself over the past months. I ended up dragging him back, he was stumbling over his shoes, Takashi Shirogane.”
Shiro winced. Not the full name.
“He’s not having the best time right now,” Shiro offered, and Adam shot him a look as if to say ‘you think?’
“Do you know exactly why?”
“No,” Shiro dumped the rest of the coffee into the sink, the movement not going unnoticed by his fiance. He was totally on the top of his shit list now. “I don’t know why he’s working himself ragged, but i’ll ask.”
“Asking won’t be enough,” Adam pointed out, and Shiro knew he was right. He most always was. “Keith is closed off and he won’t come to you unless he’s dying.”
Shiro winced, “then maybe it’s a good thing he hasn’t said anything about it.”
Adam glared, “You’re sleeping on the couch tonight.” Was all he said before disappearing back into his bedroom and yeah, Shiro deserved that.
He would need to interrogate the answers from Keith if his health kept declining at this rate.
And of course, it had, because only three days later Shiro got the second phone call from Sam Holt. Sam wasn’t like Matt because Matt always called to talk about life, like Shiro was a personal vlog channel. ‘Hey Shiro, I just found a mouse that reminded me of you.’ ‘Hey Shiro, it’s pizza day today in the lunchline. It’s a solid nine out of ten because the cheese burned me. Do you have any bandages?’
Samuel Holt only called out of necessity, so of course he quickly excused himself from a nice and relaxing lunch away from the Garrison with Adam to answer the phone. He only mourned his ruined, stressless lunch a little.
“Commander Holt?”
“Kid, you're off duty, call me Sam.”
Shiro cleared his throat, leaning back against the diner's window, “Right, sorry. Why’d you call, Sam?”
The silent ‘you never call’ went left unsaid.
“It’s about that kid of yours, Cadet Kogane.”
Of course it was, when was it never not?
Shiro leaned his head back against the cool glass and he caught a glance of Adam looking at him worriedly. Shiro waved to him in reassurance. ”Keith? Did he get into any trouble in your class?” That would be strange because Keith had always liked commander Holt’s lectures. He remembered that the commander was giving one today, and he knew Keith would be well behaved even if the kid behind him tugged on his hair.
Another mental thing to add to Keith’s bucket list, a haircut.
“No, he was very well mannered, though I am calling out of worry. I feel I'm obligated to let you know what happened during my lecture today…”
When Shiro returned to the booth, shoulders slumped in defeat and worry, Adam slid his pieces of bacon onto Shiro’s plate and nudged him with the smooth end of his fork. “Eat before you talk about Keith, I don’t want us to lose our appetites.”
Shiro inhaled his extra bacon before diving into the story. Apparently, Sam had been in the middle of his lesson and he noticed Keith nodding off, his head falling to the desk and rising back into wakefulness every other minute. As if that wasn’t worrying enough, apparently Keith had completely fallen asleep and by the time the room cleared out Samule had walked over to shake the cadet by the shoulder and escort him to the nurse, but as soon as his hand came in contact with him, Keith had jumped right out of his desk. The way Sam had described the fear and desperation in Keith’s eyes made Shiro’s stomach crawl.
“Takashi…”
“Somethings going on,” Shiro admitted, “you were right. I’m going to talk to him as soon as I can.”
“Well you know where to find him,” Adam idly scooped his eggs across the plate and then moved to drag the sausage, kicking it off of his plate like it was a spider. Shiro didn’t know how Adam could be a vegetarian, but if he got extra sausage he didn’t mind.
“Yeah,” Shiro agreed, “I know exactly where to find him.”
By the time he made it to the library it was too late. The librarian gave him that kind smile of hers and Shiro felt bad for not having time to stop for a conversation because he could see a flash of the orange and white Garrison appointed uniform escaping through the back exit.
Shiro followed Keith down the back stairwell but he quickly lost him.
So he was actively avoiding Shiro.
They played the game of cat and mouse through the remaining week, Shiro losing painfully. He would have kept loosing if he hadn’t received the fateful phone call from Mrs. Leslie, whom he had added into his contacts. Even if it wasn’t about Keith, Shiro still enjoyed talking to her. She reminded him of his grandma back in Korea.
“Mrs. Leslie, to what do I owe the pleasure?” He answered after only the second ring. It was the library closing time again and lights out for the Cadets.
“I have Keith here for you, he won’t wake up. Before you panic, he’s breathing, but I think he passed out, even more so than the other times.”
Shiro was definitely panicking.
“Don’t try to wake him up,” Shiro said into the phone as he pulled on a pair of sweatpants, slipping on his outside shoes. Keith could lash out, but Shiro also had him right where he wanted. Cat and mouse was over. “I’ll be there to get him and if he’s in bad shape I'll take him to the clinic.”
Keith was, in fact, in bad shape. Shiro’s first instinct upon seeing him, paler than normal and in an uncomfortable slumped over position was to reach for his pulse. He pressed against his neck with two fingers to find out that it was slow, but not thready. He was out.
“Keith,” He attempted to wake the cadet up, even if he knew it wouldn’t work. He shook his shoulder and even tried to lift his head. When Shiro brushed the bangs away from his face, Keith’s forehead was warmer than he would have liked, but not dangerously hot.
“Do I need to call down a Doctor? I’m sure they have a stretcher we can use to lift him,” Mrs. Leslie offered, but Shiro quickly declined. If Keith happened to wake up at any point he would immediately roll off of the stretcher and try to backhand the doctor or something.
“No, it’s nothing too serious to warrant a stretcher. His spine is stable so I can carry him back to the apartments,” Shiro grunted when he slid a hand under Keith’s back and knees, lifting him to his chest. He was lighter than he should be, but he was also dead weight in his arms, his muscles not even instinctively twitching at the contact.
“I’ll keep his work here,” the Librarian kindly filed away his textbooks, “I have space under my desk reserved just for him.”
“I appreciate it, and I know Keith doesn't talk a lot, but I'm sure he does too.”
“Oh, he is a very kind lad, respectful too. Always says yes ma’am and thanks me when all I do is scan the books. He doesn't talk much, at least not when he’s studying, but the way one acts in a silent space like this says alot about their personality, and I can tell you have a real gem there, Captain Shirogane.”
Shiro’s chest swelled with pride and he perked up just a little, “Yeah, Keith’s a diamond in the rough.” If Shiro was one in a thousand, then Keith was one in a million. “Thank you for calling, I haven’t been able to see him lately.”
“Of course, I'm sure I'll see him back here again.”
“Maybe not as often,” Shiro adjusted Keith’s limbs so that he was resting on his back in a piggyback ride to avoid any further embarrassment for him. “I plan on talking to him about this, granted he doesn't escape through the window when he wakes up.”
Shiro made a mental note to lock the window before hefting the sleeping body up on his back more and leaving the library's back door to go the shortcut to the apartment buildings. With it being night there weren't many people out, but those who had late jobs to attend briefly stopped to salute Shiro before continuing, eyes lingering on Keith, whose head had fallen even more down his shoulder.
Adam was waiting for him when he got back, looking almost dead as tired as Keith did. Silently they tucked him under the sheets, flipped the lamp on, and waited for the Garrison's on-campus night shift doctor to make their way to them.
“So he was just slumped over?” Adam paced the room and Shiro sat on the couch, occasionally taking glances to the back hallway to make sure Keith wasn’t trying to sneak out. “In the library?”
“Yes.” Shiro answered for the fourth time, “I figured the safest bet would be to take him here.”
Just when Adam was about to respond, there was a knock on the door and he sighed, “We’ll see, Takashi.”
Shiro had never seen the night shift doctor before. He had encountered the day worker many times before, whether it was him getting hurt when he was younger or one of his cadets, but never the night worker.
He was a long and thin man who looked like he was running on pure caffeine, with a wiry frown on his face. He acted just as he looked, blunt and unsympathetic. He made a racket when Shiro led him to Keith’s room, Adam flanking him as he scooted a chair up to the bed with an ungodly screech and thumped his medical kit on the desk.
Keith didn’t flinch, not once, but just in case he woke up to a stranger in the room, touching him and observing him, Shiro stayed at the foot of the bed, Adam at the doorway. The doctor didn’t say one word of introduction or greeting as he set to work, checking up on Keith. He twisted his body around like a ragdoll to check his reflexes and press a stethoscope under his shirt on his back.
“He’s fine,” the doctor reported shortly after they cleared out of Keith’s room, Adam hanging back to resettle Keith back into the bed.
Anger bubbled in Shiro’s chest, “He’s fine? Because he doesn't look too fine to me. Are you sure you’re even a real doctor? Because you are severely lacking in bedside manner.”
“I’m a doctor, not a servant of the man,” he replied promptly as if he had been told many times before. “He’s just a little tired, aren’t we all.”
“Get out of my apartment and don’t come back,” Shiro opened the door and the doctor left without another word. The night shift must not have needed him much at all if this was how he acted and he hadn’t been fired yet.
In the end Adam and Shiro took shifts watching over Keith, half to make sure he didn’t run away at the first chance and half because it wasn’t smart to leave an exhausted kid unsupervised.
His fever broke at morning time and he awoke around lunch the next day. Shiro had been scrolling through his cadets' work, grading them when Keith’s eyes slowly fluttered open. Shiro immediately flicked on the bedside lamp and set his laptop aside to shake on the kids shoulder in encouragement. It was nice to see him open his eyes for once since the library incident because ever since then he had been eerily silent and limp. Whereas normally he would roll around restlessly he remained curled on his side.
“Keith?” Shiro asked, pulling his arm away so that Keith could shake himself from his sleep coma. It took about ten minutes of him simply blinking at the ceiling, fighting against sleep until he finally won the battle and slowly sat up, leaning heavily against the headboard, Shiro noted.
“Shiro?” He finally asked, sounding just as exhausted as he looked. His skin had a new pallor and his eyes were sunken. He truly hadn’t slept for days.
“Yeah, you’re in your room, you're okay.”
He blinked sluggishly, scanning the room looking much like a lost puppy. “How’d I get here? The last place I was…” He strained to remember, “the library.”
“You passed out,” Shiro supplied, leaving out the part of the doctor's visit, “We got you back here. You passed out for a day, Keith.”
And that must have been the wrong thing to say because the cadets eyes widened and he threw back the blankets from his body before teetering to his feet. “My notes, and classes!”
“You sit down, right now.” Adam ordered from the doorway, his tone taking on an authoritative sound, one that he rarely heard. Keith immediately sat right back down, whether it be from how unsteady he was or Adam suddenly appearing with a bowl of soup in his hands, Shiro didn’t care.
“Mrs. Leslie had your notes, and I called in to inform your classes ahead of time so you’re excused.”
Keith didn’t look relieved, if anything, he looked even more stressed out. Shiro didn’t know what else to say, but luckily he had Adam.
“You need to take a minute and relax,” he set the bowl of soup down onto the nightstand and firmly grabbed Keith by the shoulders, forcing him back down and pulling the covers all the way up to his chin. Shiro tried his best not to laugh at Keith’s affronted expression.
“I need to go to class-”
“You’re going to stay down and eat your soup, and you’re going to listen. I’ll get Takashi to hold you down while I spoon feed you myself.”
Keith immediately reached for the spoon and carefully tried not to spill soup over the sheets without sitting up. His hands were shakier than Shiro had ever seen them in his life, not when he had picked him up from the foster home after an unfortunate beating and not when he had flown his first flight simulation in front of the Garrisons staff members.
Shiro didn’t help him though, because he knew that Keith liked the freedom to do things himself, even if he had to struggle a bit.
“Good,” Adam approved, “now do you care to tell us why you were working yourself to the point of collapse? You obviously haven’t been eating or taking care of yourself.” Keith opened his mouth to reply, but Adam quickly shut him up. “No, I'm talking. You’ve been a regular in the library after your classes until midnight, and me in Shiro have even had to pick you up and take you back ourselves. That on top of the fact that you look like absolute shit and even have professors calling to express their worries tells me that you haven’t been taking care of yourself, and as the closest thing to a family you have, I feel that we are obligated to know so that we can help you get better. If not, it’s that or the school's therapist and I know you don’t like her.”
Keith stiffened, “That’s because Nicholes a stuck up-”
“This is a military school, Keith,” Shiro sighed, taking the spoon that the cadet had dropped to the floor with shaky fingers and placing it off to the side. He decided he would try to take the nicer approach to counterbalance Adam’s silent rage. “Everyone's stuck up. We’re not mad at you, we're worried and we know you can look after yourself. You're smart but you wouldn’t do this unless something was wrong. At this rate, you won’t be able to graduate if all you do is study and pass out.”
Something in the sentence seemed to freak out Keith because he sat up fully, scrambling to get his back to the wall as he looked at them with a wild animosity in his plum colored eyes. “No- you’re not going to report me, are you?”
Shiro and Adam shared a weary look before Shiro spoke again, “No, Keith. God no, why would we do that? You’re not in trouble, me and Adam are just worried about your health above anything else.”
“Yes, even above your grades,” Adam’s glasses glinted in the lamp's light and his eyes bore right into Keith. He must have figured out what was going on because Keith slumped at being figured out. He didn’t look like he was about to have a panic attack anymore, but he didn’t look any less hysterical either.
“That’s what this is about?” Shiro questioned, “Grades?”
Keith looked to the far right corner of the room, avoiding eye contact, and that's when Shiro knew he was right because Keith always made direct eye contact when talking. Shiro couldn’t imagine focusing on his grades so much that his physical health deteriorated.
“Why?” Adam asked, this time gentler as he sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re a hard worker, your grades haven’t slipped once this year except for astrophysics and astrophysics doesn't count because it beat even my ass.”
“I’m a hard worker,” Keith said and he clutched the seats in his fisted hands, “but it’s hard. It takes a lot of review for me to understand things that others would easily get so I have to go back and study extra hard.”
“But why were you studying things not even in your semester plan?” Shiro asked.
“So I don’t get left behind, if I'm familiar with the material then I can get the upper hand and not lag.”
Shiro ran his hands through his undercut, something he always tended to do when he was stressed. Specifically about Keith. “Gosh Keith, you don’t need to do that. You’re treating this school like it’s… Oh.” He realized, then horrified, “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Keith admitted, though it looked like it pained him to do so. “If I can’t- can’t stay in the Garrison then I have to go back there.”
There, being the group home because Keith had run out of any other options besides the Garrison.
He cursed himself for not realizing sooner because at that age, while Shiro had been going on late night hoverbike rides with Adam, Keith was holed up in a library desperately trying to secure his future.
“You know we wouldn’t let that happen,” Adam reassured, “me and Shiro aren’t dumb and Sam and Matt know what they’re doing. We can teach you the material if you need it, but at a much healthier pace than what you’re doing now. And even if you do get kicked out, for whatever reason, me and Takashi can arrange something. We’d take custody if we had to.”
Both Keith and Shiro looked surprised at this, heads whipping over to Adam. Shiro wasn’t about to make an argument about the claim because Adam didn’t just say things off the tip of his tongue. The decision had been thought through, and Adam never said things without meaning them.
Keith looked to Shiro to make sure he wasn’t hearing things, and Shiro nodded encouragingly.
After a long moment, Keith asked, “Can I go to class now?”
After another ten minutes of chastising from Adam, Keith was back under the covers and all of the soup had been eaten. Shiro called in to tell the commander that Keith wouldn’t be in classes for the following day, seeing as an extra day of rest would do good for him.
He returned to the doorway, phone in hand, to see Adam who had taken Shiro’s spot on the chair next to Keith. Shiro couldn’t get a good angle to see Keith’s face but he could tell they were talking slowly about something.
“Adam?” Keith asked in a hoarse voice. Shiro’s heart warmed slightly when he noticed Adam’s long fingers twining through Keith’s hair just like he liked it. (Keith would only admit it if he was dead, but they all knew he craved the simple comforts, just like every other kid.)
“Go to sleep, Keith.”
“Did you really mean it?” Keith asked, his voice sounding the most fragile that Shiro had ever heard. He must have really been tired. “The whole taking custody thing?”
“You know me Keith,” Adam said, “I don’t lie. Close your eyes.”
Keith didn’t reply and Adam continued to play with his hair long after his chest had evenly started to rise and fall to the rhythm of sleep. Shiro watched from the doorway, feeling light and trying his best not to smile too much.