Chapter Text
This wasn’t his room.
The walls were bare and the bed was on the wrong side. Keith peeled his face off the toilet seat, groggy and disoriented, rinsed the acid out of his mouth, and stumbled out the door.
All out in the open now. The last card against his chest laid bare at Lance’s feet, the one thing he swore he’d take to his stupid, and at this rate premature, grave. With whatever shreds of the painkillers he hadn’t puked up long worn off, his body was back to a series of stings, throbs, and aching. Purple bruises ringed brown and yellow at the edges. He ran his tongue along his teeth, found one a little higher up in his gums than he remembered.
For the first time in weeks, Keith entered the kitchen during the daytime. He ignored Hunk's gaping mouth, and definitely ignored Lance next to him, beelining straight to Shiro at the far counter.
‘Pidge said you had my pills.’
‘Good morning Keith, yes I slept fine. The mission went well too, very kind of you to ask.’ Shiro finished rinsing off his plate and turned to him, a flicker of something sad passing over his face when he looked at Keith, quickly smoothed out, ‘When’d you take the last one?’
‘Last night,’ he crossed his arms, ‘But I threw it up.’
‘Keith-’
‘Check the toilet if you want,’ he rolled his eyes, ‘Or just toss me back in the pod, then we don’t have to do this.’
‘No, no more pods. You’re healing the long, ugly way so you don’t just run out and do it again.’
‘So fucking dramatic, you sound like a guidance counsellor. What’s next, hiding the sharps?’ Keith sneered, ‘Look, can I get them or not? I just wanna go to sleep.’
Shiro looked at him for a long time, and sighed heavily, ‘Fine. But you’re not going back to bed.’
‘What?’
‘Pidge is in the mechanics lab, south wing. You will go and sit with her today, pass her tools, I don’t care. But this-’ he pointed up and down at Keith, ‘Ends today.’
‘Thought I needed to rest.’
A vein bulged at his temple, ‘You can rest at night, like everybody else. No more hiding and no more sneaking about.’
‘Alright, fine,’ Keith threw his hands up, ‘I’ll go sit with Pidge, you can stop holding my meds hostage now.’
Shiro reached into his pocket and pulled out a full blister of the same tablets Pidge had given him. He used the pinkie tip of his Galra hand to slice one section off, gave that to Keith, and slipped the rest back into his pants.
‘Why is it only one?’
His diction was clear, carefully enunciated in the way that meant he would hear no argument, ‘Because I said so, cadet. Come and get the second before you go to bed. At night.’
Keith glared, but knew it was useless to try. He turned on his heel and stomped back out to the hall. Lance shot up from the table, sliding between Keith and the door, biting at his lip.
‘Hey, can I talk to you quickly?’
He tried to sidestep Lance, but the other boy stepped in time, kept blocking his way, ‘Think you’re asking the wrong one.’
‘I’m asking you. Can we just talk,’ his voice dropped down to a whisper, ‘About what happened last night?’
Keith froze, finally brought himself to meet Lance’s stare, open and pleading. He couldn’t imagine anything worse. Mopping up the guts he’d spilled, whether Lance believed him, whether he even cared. If he’d gone right back to the clone and told him everything Keith had said. If they’d laughed about it, maybe even kissed again.
‘No,’ Keith answered, ‘There’s nothing else to say.’
He barged past Lance and out the door, shoulder checking him on the way. It hit right in a huge bruise on his chest and his eyes smarted, but he was already gone.
Pidge sat at the workbench in a position Keith didn’t know it was possible to sit in. Closer to a squat with one foot up on the armrest, tongue poking out the side of her mouth in concentration as she tightened a screw tinier than a strawberry seed into the curved panel of a large, metallic sphere. Keith was on the floor, laying on his back with his legs tipped up against the wall, feeling the blood rush down and leave his feet tingling.
They’d sat in comfortable silence for a few hours, but he was getting bored. He’d tried to sleep at first, but she kept waking him up by throwing increasingly elaborate paper airplanes that managed to hit him in the eye every time.
‘How’s the telomere gauge coming along?’ he asked, turning his head until his cheek lay against the cool floor.
Pidge shrugged, ‘Good. Running some tests in the garden, Hunk has a couple of propagated seedlings and ideally we’d wait for them to mature for a control test, but life isn’t ideal. And plant proteins are way different, so we still need to tweak it for humans. But I’d give it a few days, max.’
‘Few days,’ Keith nodded, ‘Good.’
‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Like a child,’ he said, ‘I don’t need a babysitter. Sorry you got the short straw.’
‘Didn’t, I volunteered,’ she said, reaching her hand out behind her and making a grabbing gesture, ‘Can you pass me the six-bit axel wrench?’
Keith dropped his legs down and sat up, reeling a little, and rummaged around in the toolbox. Thank god they were labelled.
‘Why?’ he asked, handing over the wrench that really looked more like a pair of pliers.
‘You annoy me the least,’ Pidge turned back to her work and Keith leaned back against the wall, letting his eyes fall shut, ‘And Shiro’s right, you know. Can’t keep locking yourself up like this, it’s not good for you.’ Keith picked up a random tool from the box, started toying with it because there was nothing better to do.
‘I’ll be good when the gauge is finished and that thing is dead.’
‘Hear hear. You know - shit,’ she bent under the desk and rummaged around for a dropped length of cabling, ‘You know, it’s a real shame they picked you for this. I could get so much more done around here with a second me.’
‘Until it tries to replace you.’
She shrugged, ‘Hmm, maybe. Depends on its sentience, I guess. You think he knows he’s a clone?’
For all his boredom and annoyance, he was glad to be with Pidge. There had always been a mutual eagerness to avoid pointless chatter and over amiability that he’d enjoyed about her company. But now she was the only person in the castle he actually felt sane around, and could talk openly with without fear of it getting back to the clone.
Keith thought back to the observation deck. The gladiator score. The bare faced lie; ever since the Garrison, ‘He knows,’ he said, ‘I’m sure.’
A knock sounded through the heavy door, rang out like a hammer on nails. Pidge called to grant access, and it whirred open to show Lance in the doorway. Keith looked down, suddenly fascinated by the - some kind of screwdriver? - in his hands.
‘Hey, Pidge,’ Lance said, lingering in the doorway, ‘Can I, uh, can I ask you for something?’
‘Make it quick,’ Pidge barely looked up from her sphere, ‘I’m busy.’
‘Alone?’
She looked up, spun slowly in her chair, and squinted at him, ‘No. Ask it here.’
‘Pidge-’
‘I told you I’m busy. I don’t have time for this, and you know what Shiro said.’ Keith didn’t know what Shiro said, but he had a suspicion, ‘Ask me now or find someone else.’
Lance looked at Keith, up to the ceiling, and whispered a curse, ‘Fine. How do we, um, access the old mission reports? Like, to read over them or whatever.’
Keith’s knuckles went white around the screwdriver. Pidge squinted harder.
‘Which one are you looking for?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ he said in a hurry, scratching at the back of his head, ‘Just, you know. Wanted to check over something that’s been bothering me.’
‘Right,’ she drawled, long and drawn out. Lance winced. Keith dared a glance at him, barely a second. ‘Well, we all have accounts on the castle record base. Password is your last name. You need the translator to find the file but the reports are all in English, organised by date and subject. Central galactic calendar though, not Earth. Should be able to pull it up on your tablet or print from the archive if you need.’
‘Cool,’ he nodded, ‘Cool, cool, cool. I’ll just go, um, do that. Thanks. Leave you two to your… this.’
Keith snuck one last look, jumped when he caught Lance’s eyes on him. The other boy nodded once and slipped back out the door. Keith’s heart was beating like he’d run for an hour straight, and the edges of the screwdriver left red grooves in his palms.
‘You have any idea what that was about?’ Pidge asked. Keith shook his head, staring at the door after him, not trusting himself to speak. There were hundreds of mission reports in the castle logs.
It was too late to start hoping.
Keith spent two more days shadowing Pidge, finally having the brainwave of bringing a book with him rather than sitting on his ass all day. Then another running stock checks around the castle with Hunk, who’d spent hours on end chattering nervously, mostly to himself. He got one painkiller from Shiro in the morning and one at night, but they hadn’t tried to drag him to a meal. Which meant the other one was going.
The clone was nowhere to be seen. Maybe that was intentional, but on whose part, Keith didn’t know. But he saw Lance. Once, wandering past the comms room, scrolling furiously through a list of contacts and muttering under his breath. Keith walked straight past.
Every time he’d seen Lance since the observation deck, the other boy tried to talk. To have A Talk. Keith dodged him so far, but Lance was persistent, and knew he’d crack sooner or later. Each time he refused, each time Lance’s face flashed with rejection, it stung a little more. But it was a battle of wills, Keith just had to outlast him.
On the fourth day of his enforced socialising, Shiro gave him a different pill.
‘Aren’t these usually blue?’ he asked, poking the tablet in his palm. This one was a pale yellow, almost pastel, like the outside of a daffodil.
‘Usually,’ Shiro agreed, ‘But these are the non drowsy kind. You’re training today.’
Keith blinked, ‘I’m allowed to train again?’ He’d been locked out of the deck ever since the gladiator, despite trying to break in every time he took his evening painkiller.
‘Only alongside the rest of us.’
His hand clenched into a fist around the pill, cracking it down the middle, ‘No.’
‘Keith-’
‘I told you. I’m not going if he’s there.’
‘He won’t be,’ the older man said sternly, ‘Coran is watching him while the rest of us train with you, and tomorrow Coran will stay with you while the rest of us train with him.’
‘So what,’ Keith stepped back, face twisting in disgust, ‘We’re taking turns so you can run a mission with whoever you pick in the end? Just let me do it by myself. Better yet, flip a fucking coin and get this whole mess over with.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Shiro snapped, ‘You’re lucky I’m even letting you set foot in there after what you did.’ He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, and his voice came out softer, ‘Work with me, Keith. I know you don’t like it and I know you want to train, but I can’t just let you… I can’t. And we are not “picking” anyone, you know that. Please, please tell me you know that. But what happened last time cannot happen again, I refuse to risk it. This is the compromise.’
Keith stared him down for a minute, but glaring had never worked on Shiro. Not as a teenager, and not now either, ‘Fine,’ he relented, ‘I’ll go.’
Shiro marched him towards the training deck with one hand on his shoulder like he might bolt. Keith couldn’t even get mad at him, because he considered it. The other paladins were spread across the room in various stages of warming up. He ignored the poorly hidden surprise on all their faces and walked straight into the corner to start stretching. Perhaps Shiro hadn’t told them his plan. Perhaps they hadn’t thought he would agree.
Training started light, agility drills in the obstacle course and a calisthenics circuit. With the painkillers he only felt the familiar burn of working muscle, and kept his eyes set ahead of him, holding his body in a plank until he shook all down his spine and his arms seized up.
But every now and then, his attention would drift towards the config stand. He hadn’t seen the final number before passing out. When Shiro called out for a water break, he floated over to it as subtly as he could, pretending to be looking at something on the weapon rack beside it, checking around at his teammates, and then tapping away to bring up the leaderboard.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Shiro’s voice behind him made him jolt, turn around like a kid when the cops came.
‘I wasn’t doing anything.’
He narrowed his eyes, ‘You were checking the score.’ Keith clenched his jaw, admitted nothing. Shiro wiped a hand down his face, ‘Do you think we’re honestly that stupid? I had Pidge wipe it before we brought you in here.’
‘What?’ Keith’s mouth fell open, ‘It’s, it’s gone?’
‘Yes, it’s gone. The last thing we need is you two getting competitive. Now sit down and drink some water.’
Everything he’d worked for; gone. Just like that. His mark, his proof, vanished into the pixelated ether with a tap of a finger. Every hit he’d taken, every bruise and sore spot on his body - he would never know if it was worth it. All for absolutely nothing.
Keith held his eye for a moment longer, then stomped away. He was grateful that nobody tried to speak to him during the rest of the break. But all that gratitude immediately dissolved when Shiro clapped his hands together and ordered them into sparring pairs.
Keith shot to his feet and nearly sprinted towards Pidge, barely making it three steps before Lance caught him by the elbow, spun him round so quickly he nearly crashed into Lance’s chest.
‘Keith-’
‘No.’
‘You don’t even know what I was going to say.’
‘I’m not sparring with you. What, you haven’t gotten enough yet?’ His body twenty feet away sitting astride Lance’s stomach. His hands, not his own, pinning down Lance’s by the wrists. His mouth, the wrong mouth, pressed against Lance’s. Keith wrenched himself free, shoved the other boy away, ‘And I told you not to touch me.’
Lance flinched back from him. Started up one more time, about to open his mouth when Pidge sidled up beside him and latched onto his sleeve.
‘Hey,’ she tugged at him until Lance finally acknowledged her, tearing his eyes away from Keith, ‘If I get in there with Hunk he will actually crush me. Can I pair with you?’
‘Pidge, I-’
Keith didn’t give him the chance to refuse. He was already standing next to Hunk and chalking up his palms by the time Lance looked his way again. Pretending not to feel Lance’s eyes on him was hard, but Keith had done hard things before. Dropping down into the guard stance, forearms before his face, watching every twitch of Hunk’s nervous limbs as they circled each other.
Lance’s eyes burned into the back of his neck as he ducked. He heard Pidge land a hit she should have missed. Keith struck out, aiming for the solar plexus, and Hunk blocked it with his elbow, countered with a kick that sent him crashing down to the mat. Wow, these painkillers weren’t as strong as the old ones. But he got up, slightly winded, and brushed off Hunk asking if he needed a minute.
‘I’m fine,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘Point to you. Start again.’
He won the next three points. The first was close, the second was not. The third felt like cheating. Hunk threw a punch right for his cheekbone that Keith dodged too slow, it should have caught him hard on the jaw. At the last second it missed, yanked back towards the yellow paladin’s body.
Someone else would have missed it. Keith was nobody but himself. He stopped short, wiped the sweat off his hands and turned to his teammate.
‘You’re pulling them.’
‘What?’ Hunk laughed tightly, ‘No, no I’m not. Just, you know, gotta work on my aim.’ Hunk was always the worst liar on the team. Bitterly, Keith thought that Hunk’s clone wouldn’t last five seconds. Some people get all the luck.
‘Bullshit, your aim is fine. You’re pulling your punches, too scared to fucking hit me.’
‘Keith,’ Shiro appeared at their side, ‘Hunk just missed a throw, it happens.’
‘He’s missing more than usual,’ Keith narrowed his eyes, ‘Which one is it; you think I’m the clone, gonna go psycho on you if a wire knocks loose? Or do you just think I’m weak?’
‘That’s enough,’ Shiro laid a hand on the back of his neck, ‘Take five, all of you.’
Keith shook him off, ‘No. Not until he hits me.’
‘I’m not gonna hit you, man.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want to!’ Hunk threw his hands up, ‘Fine, I slowed it down a little because you’re still injured and I don’t want to hurt you, are you happy now?’
Keith stepped forward, ‘I don’t feel injured. So hit me for real.’
The yellow paladin shook his head, ‘I’m not doing that, buddy.’
Burning red filled his vision like a fog. Displaced, doubted, discarded and disregarded. Erased and replaced, his whole slate wiped clean and drawn over with something prettier. This whole stupid plan was nothing more than a leash, a way to keep him happy and under control like a toddler at the mall. Sorry, Shiro.
‘What, you want proof?’
His fist moved before his brain, lunging out like a viper and socking into Hunk’s cheek with a muffled slap. Pain bloomed down his knuckles as the other boy’s entire body jolted left from the force of the hit. They were surrounded in seconds, the rest of the paladins wrangling Keith away, hurling curses and insults he hadn’t remembered deciding to say.
Still the discipline case, still the nuisance child.
‘You wanted this, Keith!’ Shiro jabbed a finger in his face once they wrestled him out the door. Lance and Pidge had gone back to check on Hunk, get an ice pack for his face, while Keith got the lecture. ‘You wanted to train and I tried, I did what I could to give you that. What the hell were you thinking?’
‘That wasn’t training,’ Keith yelled back, ‘That was, it was fucking dance class! What, you told them to go easy on me because I got a boo-boo? It’s a load of shit, you know I can take it, I just showed them they didn’t have to walk on eggshells.’
‘No, you attacked one of your own teammates because he wouldn’t hit you hard enough. Do you understand how deranged that sounds?’
‘You’re taking it out of context.’
‘And you are really not helping your own case here,’ Shiro realized what he’d said as soon as he heard it, ‘Keith, I didn’t mean-’
‘You did,’ Keith stepped back, ‘You might not want to, but you did. Don’t,’ Shiro tried to reach out and he stepped back further, ‘No. You tried, you failed. Just leave me alone.’
Shiro let him go. Keith wandered again, down hallways, away from distant footsteps bounding off the walls, away from any sign of anyone else. He debated going back to his room, but it was too easy for someone to find him there.
Instead he found an old reading room, one of the few besides the lounge that had chairs with actual cushions, and curled up in one beside the window. He switched the lights off manually, pressing his temple against the glass and staring out into the dark void of space, pinpricked by stars millions of light years away, probably dead already. Keith stumbled in and out of consciousness, and thought of the look on Hunk's face in the split second before the punch landed.
He hadn’t deserved it. Christ, if there was one person alive who didn’t deserve it. Keith knew that, somewhere inside himself, but couldn’t convince himself it mattered. Same as anything else. The door whizzed open behind him.
‘I told you to leave me alone, Shiro.’
‘Too bad,’ came the voice. It rang through him like a gunshot, and Keith tried to remember if there'd been a second door when he entered.
‘Go away,’ he said, closing his eyes to avoid catching the reflection in the window, ‘I said I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘Yeah, and like I said,’ Lance crossed the room, loomed over the side of Keith’s chair. Keith kept his eyes shut, ‘Too fucking bad. You can’t avoid me forever.’
‘That might not be as long as you think.’
Beside him, Lance sighed.
‘Just, just tell me one thing. And if it’s really what you want I’ll leave you alone. Just tell me. Even if I don’t deserve it now, I must have once, right?’ He was too close, his voice crawling into Keith’s ear from slightly above him, ‘What you said the other night. About… about the bonding moment. Did you mean it?’
Keith opened his eyes, drew his feet up to curl into a ball and stared down into his lap, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Doesn’t- the hell do you mean it doesn’t matter?’ He caught Lance in the glass, flailing his arms like a madman, ‘You said you loved me! How, how does that not matter?’
‘Because you already made your choice.’
Lance locked eyes with him in the reflection, ‘And what if I’m starting to regret it?’ Keith whipped around in his chair.
‘Don’t, don’t you dare,’ he hissed, ‘What the fuck are you trying to pull here, Lance - try out both to see who fits you best before you throw your lot it?’
‘That is not what I’m doing,’ he stepped toward Keith, hands splayed out, and Keith turned back around, ‘Will you just look at me for one minute?’
‘No.’
‘What, what do you want me to do; get on my knees and beg you to speak to me? Because I will, Keith. At this point I’ll do it. This fucking point, with all this fucking shit, I will.’
He was halfway to the ground, ‘Don’t be stupid, get up,’ Keith said, wrapping his arms tighter around himself, ‘Go find your boyfriend instead of wasting your time. He doesn’t like seeing us together.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ Lance spat, ‘And he’s not going to see.’ He sighed, crouched down in front of the chair, ‘Please, Keith. This, this whole thing is… it’s torture.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’
‘I know you know that,’ Lance fought against the rising of his voice, pushed it back down, ‘I just… Okay. you remember when you got here, and we all asked you questions?’ Keith frowned, nodded slowly, ‘Well, the last one. When I asked you why you left. You said you didn’t want to be the black paladin. And Ke- the other one, he said it was because of me. What we talked about, the math.’ Keith frowned harder, and Lance went to lay a hand on his knee, pulled it away, ‘Which one of you lied?’
Keith looked at him, at his eyes, open and shining with the distant starlight, and wished he’d ran away when he could.
‘Both,’ he whispered, ‘Both of us. And, I guess, neither.’ Lance’s eyebrows furrowed, and he gaped like a fish, ‘I-’ Keith swallowed, ‘I didn’t want to be in charge. I couldn’t face the chance that if I gave an order, and someone got hurt - or worse - I couldn’t. Then you came to me, to me, with all this spare paladin stuff and it was so stupid,’ Keith shook his head, ‘Blue chose you first of anyone. We can’t - and I can’t - this doesn’t happen without you. And I could fix it, I could fix them both in one, so why wouldn’t I?’ He looked at Lance one more time, then back down, twisting his fingers until they hurt, ‘I meant what I said the other night. Of course I meant it, that’s what makes it awful.’
Lance scooted closer to his chair, chin nearly in Keith’s lap, ‘So why didn’t you say anything before?’
‘Because I was never going to say anything,’ he dropped his hands, folded them across his chest, ‘Jesus, if it wasn’t Allura it was an ally, or a rebel soldier, or a fucking mermaid. Why the hell would I ever think you’d- I didn’t, and I accepted that. It was never going to happen, leaving wouldn’t change that. And then it did, but only with him.’
Lance was quiet for a long time. Maybe the longest he’d ever gone without speaking. Then he pushed a strand of Keith’s hair behind his ear and said, ‘I think-’
‘Don’t say it,’ Keith shook his head, ‘Because you were sure about him three days ago. One conversation can’t change that. And I can’t, Lance. I cannot afford to hope; not with this, not with any of it.’
His knuckles brushed over Keith’s cheek, light as spiderlegs on the bruising, ‘Will you look at me?’
Maybe Hunk was right, maybe he was weak. Because when he looked at Lance it took all the strength he had not to break down, and he still didn’t manage it. Long, thin fingers grazed his skin again, wiped at the corner of his black eye, ‘Don’t cry. Please don’t cry,’ he said gently. Keith sniffed, held his stare, and the worry etched into Lance’s face softened into a tiny smile. ‘There it is,’ he whispered, barely loud enough for Keith to hear, ‘That’s what I thought it’d look like.’
He rose to stand, and swooped back down to press his lips against the top of Keith’s head, dirty with dried sweat from training. By the time his body had thawed out of the shock, Lance was gone.
Keith didn’t see him again. He wasn’t in the kitchen when Shiro gave him his painkillers, he didn’t bother Pidge or Coran or whoever was babysitting that day. Not Hunk anymore. Keith didn’t blame him.
Glad as he was to finally put an end to the chase, it made him nervous. Lance had said things to the clone too. Lance had held him too, kissed him too, told him he would try. If Keith started hoping now, it would only make things worse.
Allura passed him in the hallway and wondered if he could get away with ignoring her. Keith had almost made it when she turned and called his name. The princess had been distant - not cold, just distant in her own eternally busy, distracted way - since he returned. He stopped in his tracks.
‘Did you find Lance, in the end?’ she asked, hands folded neatly in front of her. Keith raised his wrist to show the bandana wrapped around it, ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘My mistake. Well no matter, I was looking for you anyway.’
‘Me?’
‘Either,’ If she saw him flinch, she didn’t comment on it, ‘I came to inform you that Pidge has finished building the gauge. We’re ready to test when you are.’
Ready. Was he ready? His heart sped up at the mention of it. This was the end, ‘Yeah,’ he said roughly, trying to hide the cracks, ‘Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go.’
She smiled, gestured for him to follow her, and led them down a series of turns he’d probably taken at some point, but couldn’t remember where they went.
The two of them came out into the lounge, which struck him as hilariously casual. Were they all going to kick back and relax afterwards, while one Keith bled out on the floor? Everyone was gathered save for Lance and the clone. Keith’s stomach didn’t drop; he hadn’t started hoping. Nobody quite met his eye.
A few minutes of awkward silence passed until the final pair arrived. The other Keith, fidgeting and sour, shepherded in by a Lance who looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. Pidge cleared her throat, and everyone turned to face her.
‘So,’ she held up a device about the size of a cell phone, with a small, satellite shaped disc at the top and a q-tip like rod sticking out of it, ‘This is what we’ve got. It’ll scan a genetic sample, in this case we’re using one blood sample and one spit sample to prevent taking an outlier for an answer. It’ll scan the cells in all four samples - we’ll go one at a time - and show us the average telomere size in each Keiths’ cells.’
The other one spoke up, face set in a deep scowl, ‘And how does that prove who the clone is? Neither of us is a kid, so it can't be that different.’
‘Well,’ Hunk interjected, looking nervously between the two of them, ‘The clone grew way faster than Keith prime, right? And since neither of you are cancer patients, that implies there was some kind of tech helping the cells divide so quick without damage, which would reduce the loss of base pairs during mitosis. That, plus the fact that clone Keith would have been alive for less time, means that real Keith has more pairs replaced by telomerase and is older, molecularly speaking.’
‘It’s a lot to bet on an implication,’ the copy hissed.
‘Just shut up and let them do it,’ Keith rolled his eyes.
The other one scoffed, shifted his weight onto one hip, ‘Seriously? Why are we all pretending we don’t just know he’s the fake?’
‘Because we don’t,’ Pidge snapped back, ‘The science backs it. Are you going to let us test you or not?’
The clone’s nostrils flared, but he stopped fighting, ‘Fine,’ he spat, pushing up his sleeve, ‘Let’s get this over with.’
Keith did the same, let Pidge draw out a vial of his blood, then spat into a different vial. She corked them up, shook them about, and opened them again. Hunk tested the other Keith’s vials first, dipping a short, thin rod in the center of the dish into the vials.
‘Base pair loss of 1327,’ he said, noting it down on his tablet.
‘That’s high,’ Pidge frowned.
The clone shrugged, ‘Galra genes.’ Nobody said anything else. Hunk sterilised the rod and dipped it back into the second vial, and waited for the scanner to flash.
‘1194. Average of - nine plus seven, carry the three - 1238.’
The clone looked over at Keith, eyes steady and seething. Keith tried to breathe slowly and keep himself from panicking. Like his life wasn’t resting on those numbers. He didn’t even know what a base pair was, but what choice did he have? Again the rod was cleaned, and Pidge handed Keith’s vials over to Hunk. He started with the spit.
Every second of waiting was agony. He knew he wasn’t breathing anymore, and would be shocked if anyone else was. The screen flashed. Hunk looked down to read it, then read it again.
‘Six…’ he said thinly, ‘670.’
Keith’s head split in two, ‘What?’
‘I told you,’ the clone flung his arms out, grinning bright and manic, ‘This whole time, I fucking told you!’
‘This is why we took two,’ Pidge said firmly, but she glanced up at Keith, and he could tell she was nervous. He stared back, tried as hard as he could to convey that something must be wrong, but she just waved at Hunk to hurry up and test his blood.
His blood. Spilt to cause this whole stupid mess, and one way or another, spilt again to end it. Keith couldn’t tear his eyes away from the stuff. Red and dark and viscous, climbing up the walls of the vial when the rod dipped in, leaving lacelike trails of itself behind.
Maybe the spit was a fluke. If his blood was high enough, they could test him again. Nothing was decided yet. They waited. The screen flashed.
‘Pidge,’ Hunk said in a low voice, ‘Can you check this for me?’ She leaned over his arm, snatched up the gauge, and held it inches from her face.
‘It’s wrong,’ she hissed.
He shrugged, gestured again at the screen. ‘You built it.’
‘Then I built it wrong, it doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Can we just get this over with?’ The other Keith called out, ‘I hate suspense.’
Loathe as he was to admit it, Keith agreed. The terrible downsides of hating someone with your exact brain. Pidge and Hunk looked up from the gauge, between the two Keiths, then between themselves, trying to get the other to speak instead. Pidge must have lost, and she looked at Keith, sad and confused and angry, as she said, ‘Base pair loss of 621. Averages out to 645.5.’
Keith’s heart jumped into his throat while his stomach promptly fell out of his ass. The empty space left behind filled with cold, bitter panic. Lance collapsed down onto the couch and Pidge started shaking. Shiro covered his mouth with his hand, Hunk stared at the gauge like it might suddenly change its mind, and the princess turned to face the wall, leaning her forehead against the metal. Coran was impassive, save for a slight twitch of his mustache, and the clone doubled over laughing.
‘Finally,’ he said, dragging himself upright, his eyes floating over and landing on Keith, ‘Weeks, we dragged this out for weeks on end when I told you all from the start. You,’ he pointed dead at Keith, free hand reaching up to drag something out from the back of his belt.
Keith had four knives hidden in his room, his mother’s luxite blade not included. If he had his room he would have brought all four, which meant the clone had done exactly that. He stumbled back as the metal glinted in his double’s hand. Around them the rest of the paladins were frozen, brains still working to catch up.
‘I’ve waited months for the chance to cut that sad little puppy look off your face. It’s embarrassing. It’s weak, and it makes me look weak because of it. You’re a ghost, Weapon. You’re a bad fucking dream. And the sun's coming up,’ The clone flipped the knife in his hand, and he remembered spending hours in the shack teaching himself that trick. Dropping it on the floor, slicing his own palm. Not much to do in the dessert.
Keith stumbled back as the clone pressed forward. He could chance an escape, if he really tried. Make it down a hallway and a half before someone chased him down. He could fight. Unarmed, injured, up against a version of himself that was neither. But he had been so sure, how had he been sure? The blade report, his memories, he knew, he knew something had to be wrong here, something was wrong and Keith was going to die and he’d never get to-
The clone looked back over his shoulder at his team.
‘Someone hold him still.’