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Keith was used to being alone.
He was alone when his dad died. He was alone when he moved from house to house, repeatedly getting told that he needed to fix his “behavioral issues” if he wanted a home. He was alone when Shiro went missing on the Kerberos mission. Hell, he was surrounded by people who considered him to be family, and he was still alone.
Every time he found someone or something, he lost it. Every single goddamn time. And yet, the loneliness never seemed to get easier. You’d think that experience would make it hurt a little less, but Keith was nothing if not stubborn, so he hurt anyway.
It was ridiculous. Here he was, wallowing in self-pity, when he was the only one who even knew. Not even knew- suspected. He studied his knife, twirling it around in his fingers and imagining what would happen if his hand slipped. No one else on the crew had ever had the thought that, hey, maybe Keith is part Galra- but Keith had had that thought.
Why else would his handprint work on Galra technology? Why else would his knife match the ones wielded by the Blade of Marmora? He knew that no one else suspected a thing, but he did, and that was enough for his anxiety to spiral.
He forced himself to think like Shiro probably would. What if he was wrong? Well, nothing would happen. Shiro would probably give him a pat on the back, tell him to stop doubting himself. Lance would probably say something snarky. Hunk would make some comment about relief even though there was nothing for him to be relieved of, because in this scenario Keith would have never been Galra. Pidge would push up her glasses and talk about the science behind it all or something. Coran would laugh it off and say “oh, paladins these days.” Allura would say that she was glad there were no intruders on their side, and how she was glad that none of them were that evil.
Oh, God, what if he was right?
Everyone would hate him. The Galra were public enemy number one. They were trying to take over the universe. They had wiped out entire races, destroyed worlds without so much as a second thought. And he would be one of them. Every single one of his friends had suffered so much at the hands of the Galra. Coran and Allura were the last surviving members of their race. The paladins had all gotten their fair share of injuries and beatings from the Galra. And Shiro- Shiro, his older brother who had seen him with all of his angst and anger and said “I’m going to love you anyways”, had been kidnapped by them and had gone through God knows what thanks to them.
He felt an all-too-familiar pang in his chest. It was like church bells tolling- he knew damn well what the warning they carried meant, and he knew that it was inevitable, but he couldn’t bring himself to just cut it off now. No, he had to prolong everyone’s pain, because who was Keith if not a selfish idiot who couldn’t make a single kind decision for anyone if he tried?
He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. He looked around the kitchen. He had initially been in his bedroom having all of these thoughts, but he had felt trapped. He needed some space to breathe, and it felt like the walls in his room were closing in on him. He should get up. Get himself a glass of water and go to bed. He should do something, anything. But he just sat there, because even with all his experience being alone, he had always needed someone to pick him up when he fell. He was really bad at being alone.
He set his knife down, folding his arms on the counter and resting his head on them. He really should sleep.
“Keith?” a familiar voice asked.
He looked up. “Shiro,” he plainly responded, unsure of what to say.
“What are you doing up?” Shiro asked, walking over and moving a stool right next to Keith’s so as to sit next to him. There was unsubtle concern in his voice and face, and it was almost unbearable.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Keith said, shrugging and looking back at his knife.
Shiro’s gaze followed his, and his brow furrowed. “What’s with the, uh, knife?” he asked, and Keith’s eyes widened when he realized what Shiro must be thinking.
“Oh, I’m not- I’m not trying to use it, um-” he quickly spluttered, pushing the knife further away from him to further illustrate his point. “It just… reminds me of the past.”
The more Keith paid attention, the more he realized that Shiro was truly awful at hiding his emotions, because the relief on his face was as clear as day.
(It would be a very long time before he considered that, maybe, Shiro wasn’t trying to hide anything from him.)
“Everyone on the ship’s been getting a little homesick,” Shiro replied, a look in his eyes that looked suspiciously close to grief as he looked at Keith. “We’re all willing to listen, but if you don’t want to tell everyone else, you can just tell me. My door’s always open.”
“It’s not really homesickness,” Keith said, tearing his gaze away from Shiro again. “I don’t really know what to call it.”
“Take your time,” his older brother replied, and his tone was so calm that it was actually infuriating.
“Everyone on this ship has someone to miss, but I don’t. This castle feels more like home than Earth ever did,” he began to explain, fidgeting with his fingers in the absence of his knife. “But the longer I spend here, the more I think about that, the more I wonder- there’s so much about myself that I don’t know. It feels like there’s nothing for me to leave behind, but I’m still leaving something behind. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, it does,” Shiro said. “Like there’s unanswered questions and you don’t know if this is the right way to answer them?”
Keith nodded. Thank God for Shiro’s unending emotional intelligence. “I wish my dad was still alive,” he said quietly. It had always been hard for him to talk about that kind of stuff- he had never really liked voicing his emotions. It was just easier to blow up at people or isolate himself. But he needed to get this out at some point, and he knew Shiro would listen. “There are so many questions I need to ask him, but I can’t. Even if he couldn’t answer any of them, I wish he was still alive for me to miss.”
“It sounds to me like you miss him anyway,” Shiro said, placing a warm hand on his shoulder.
“Yeah, but at least everyone else has a chance to stop missing their family,” he muttered. He was being selfish. It’s not like they had it better than he did just because their families were alive. But all the bitterness he had felt since his dad died, and all the times he had wanted to scream and cry and vomit when he was shuffled around again like some old toy no one wanted to play with anymore- all of it had to surface somehow, and it was just true to his nature that it came out in a way that insulted the people who cared about him.
Shiro sighed. “Y’know, when the Galra took me, I remember that one of the only comforts I had was that you were safe, on Earth, at the Garrison. Whatever the Galra took from me, they couldn’t take you. But that all got ripped away when they decided to get a little close for comfort to Earth, and to you, and now we’re both in the line of fire. Now I’m right next to you-” he squeezed Keith’s shoulder- “but I still miss when I didn’t have to be happy about that. When it was just the three of us and getting you through the Garrison.”
He still doesn’t know I got kicked out, Keith briefly remembered. Whoops.
“The way I figure it, you never really stop missing people. Especially not when you’re in our situation. I can’t necessarily speak for the other members of the crew, but I’m sure that when they reunite with their families, they’re not going to stop missing them. Their families will be right there, sure, but it won’t be the same as before. It can never be the same as before. It’s like some twisted version of nostalgia- we all want what we can’t have. We want peace for the universe, but in obtaining that, we’ll never have peace for ourselves. My point, however drawn out, is that you aren’t alone, so don’t spend even a second thinking that you are. I can’t, well, raise your father from the dead, but I’m never gonna give up on you, and that’s the second best thing I really can do.”
“But what if you do give up on me?” Keith asked. “What if I became something you hated, or if I always was something you hated and I just never told you, or if I did something awful and I kept it from you? What if you gave up on me then?”
“Oh, Keith,” Shiro said, fondness spreading across his face. “I could never hate you.”
“Why?”
Surely Shiro was lying. If he found out that Keith was a Galra failure who got himself kicked out of the Garrison immediately after Shiro went missing, he would hate him. That was the only reaction that made sense. Why wouldn’t he hate Keith?
“Because you’re my little brother, and I love you,” Shiro said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Shiro pulled him into a hug, and Keith melted into it. He didn’t deserve this at all. He was an awful person. However, like most awful people, Keith was selfish, so he clung onto Shiro anyway and tried not to think about how betrayed Shiro would feel when Keith finally told him the truth.
“I promise that nothing you could ever say or do would make me stop loving you,” Shiro murmured, and Keith felt like he had just shattered into a thousand pieces. Shiro didn’t deserve to have to put up with him like that.
When they finally pulled away from each other, Shiro’s fond smile didn’t leave his face, and Keith pocketed his knife. It was worthless to dwell on it right now.
“Y’know, I’ve been meaning to ask you this,” Shiro said, and Keith immediately screamed internally. Was he going to have to force Shiro to go back on his promise this quickly? “How did you do at the Garrison after I left? You’ve always been a stellar pilot, so I imagine you were doing pretty well despite… well.”
Keith sighed. Well, it was going to get out eventually. It was better that Shiro heard it from him as opposed to Lance.
(He hated Lance so much, and he also hated the fact that he really, really didn’t. It was actually quite the opposite, but that was an entirely different beast to confront.)
“Um, about that,” Keith began, rubbing the back of his neck.
Shiro raised an eyebrow, his expression suddenly becoming a little suspicious. “What is it?”
“I got kicked out for disciplinary reasons,” Keith said sheepishly, avoiding Shiro’s gaze.
Shiro took a deep breath. “What?”
“I got kicked out for disciplinary reasons.”
“And what were those ‘disciplinary reasons?’”
“I may or may not have punched Iverson.”
His brother took another deep breath, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Why did you punch Iverson?”
“Take a guess,” Keith muttered.
Keith had felt lost without Shiro. Hearing Iverson yap to their class about how Shiro had just become a great example of when “hubris” interferes with a mission was infuriating, and when Iverson had stopped right in front of him and made a pointed comment about how Keith was raring to end up the same way, well… it was only natural that Keith’s fist would meet Iverson’s face.
He explained as much to Shiro, who proceeded to roll his eyes and mutter Iverson’s name under his breath with a potent amount of irritation. “Of course he did.”
“So, if you think about it, the disciplinary reasons were less of my fault and more of his,” Keith said, hoping to get out of trouble.
“You sound like me when I was younger,” Shiro said, a smile once again spreading across his face.
“Really? I thought I sounded more like Lance,” Keith responded, shuddering.
“Well, I was a little like Lance when I was younger, if you can believe it.”
“I can’t, actually. That’s kind of disgusting to imagine.”
“Y’know, I don’t think you hate him nearly as much as you pretend to,” Shiro said, crossing his arms and raising an accusatory eyebrow.
Curse Shiro’s unending emotional intelligence.
“Feel free to keep thinking that, but you’re wrong,” Keith replied, crossing his arms and mirroring Shiro’s expression.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re awful at lying to people? Y’know, seeing as that’s what you’re doing. Lying to me.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re awful at gaslighting people? Y’know, seeing as that’s what you’re doing. Gaslighting me,” Keith mocked, trying to channel how annoying he must have been when he was younger.
To Shiro’s earlier point, Keith supposed that he had never stopped missing Shiro, either. Back when Shiro had practically adopted him, Keith hadn’t realized how good he had it. Then Shiro had disappeared, and that particular realization was pretty abrupt. Now they had each other again, but Keith still found that he missed the days when they could just sit together and watch a crappy TV show and ignore the world around them for a moment. This was about as close as they were ever going to get to that now, and it felt like coming home.
He would eventually find out for certain that he was Galra. Shiro would eventually find out, too. But for now, nothing about their relationship had to be different. For now, they could just be two brothers trying to annoy each other late at night instead of sleeping. This was as close to normal as Keith was ever going to get, and he found that he actually kind of liked it. It definitely beat moving through foster homes or trying to take down Galra ships.
So when Shiro noticed that Keith was half asleep and offered to carry him to his room, Keith sleepily agreed and pretended he was less awake than he was just to feel the warmth of Shiro’s embrace as he picked him up and walked him over to his bedroom, gently placing him down on the bed. He also pretended not to notice when Shiro brushed a strand of hair out of his face and whispered that he loved him before walking out of the room, because it was probably easier for both of them not to confront that this was just one moment of many, and it wasn’t going to last forever.
But as Keith drifted off to sleep, he found himself wishing that it would.