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a-lonely-tatertot · 19 hours ago

Text

this is the ground we build

fandom: keeper of the lost cities

wordcount: 2523

summary: The incessant buzz of Sophie’s emotion shifted closer, and then drew away; Keefe was all at once grateful and exhausted. He twisted onto his feet and went to shut the windows, every step away from his two whole universes like a weight falling away from his back. Bitten-off, he said, “I just don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do.” // a vignette of life at the cusp of a new age.

note: part 2/3 of @let-them-sing-of-others' gift from @song-tam's KOTLC secret santa 2024! the queerplatonic sokeefitz fic continues but this time from keefe's pov.

taglist: @a-lonely-tatertot @cowboypossume @ravs6709 @an-ungraceful-swan

read on AO3

Keefe woke up to his head pillowed on a soft arm and his leg pinned under Fitz’s, and the morning light inching its gentle way through the crack in the curtains.

They really should find someone to fix that, Keefe mused, tilting his face to the light—but he’d gotten used to it, almost. Fitz’s room was filled with small imperfections like this: curtains that didn’t close right, rugs with mysterious stains, desk legs meticulously scuffed. He didn’t think he’d used to notice, before, but living here, he’d gotten to know all of them.

If he squinted, he could almost see the gardens—rolling hills of flowering vegetables and the citrus trees that the Vacker family had spent centuries cultivating. Della was probably out there by now; Keefe shut one eye to look for the silhoutte of her pointed sunhat.

Fitz made a snuffling sound in his ear, and then inhaled deep, coming to consciousness as slow as always. Keefe lifted his head, but Fitz’s arm didn’t move; instead he turned, wriggling around in their half-discarded blanket, and dropped his head again. The soft green of Fitz’s awareness buzzed at his cheek, happy to be heard.

“Morning,” Keefe whispered. In the space between their skin, the green bloomed into bright, flowering contentedness.

“Morning,” Fitz whispered back. He was smiling already, one eye cracking open. “W’time is it?”

Keefe hummed, resting the back of his hand on Fitz’s arm as he rolled over to check the clock. “Eight. You have time.” He opened his mouth to ask if they were getting breakfast, but all that came out was a silent whoof of air as Fitz flopped over his back, eyes definitely dropping shut again. “Oh, you’re trapping me with you, is that what this is,” he asked.

“Yes,” Fitz said into his shoulder, muffled. Keefe put his chin on his folded arm, huffing a laugh into the quiet air, and then let his eyes fall shut again, drinking in the quiet garden of Fitz’s feelings.

Eventually, they had to get up—or at least, Fitz did. Keefe watched idly from his spot in bed while Fitz bounced from corner to corner, looking for an appropriate work shirt, then trousers, then a rippling cloak, and then downstairs to heat up breakfast and find his shoes.

He came back up the stairs, boots in hand, to grip Keefe’s hand and squeeze it tight. “Have a good day today,” he said to their intertwined hands, and then he was off, saving the world again.

Keefe flopped back over on the mattress, inhaled deeply, and let it all go.

“A good day,” he said to the ceiling, at last. “That’s the goal.”

***

Sophie called him halfway through his third re-sketch of the day. They looked tired, but this time instead of so tired they were going to fall over it was tired from a good day’s work. It was… it was different. It was familiar. It was something they hadn’t been allowing themself before.

It looked good on them.

“Hey,” Keefe said, putting down his pencil and dusting off a grey hand on the hem of his shirt. “Lunch break?”

Sophie hummed confirmation through the sandwich they were currently munching, and briefly flipped the screen away to show off the whipping wind and sun. Keefe was glancing outside at his own assortment of clouds when Sophie said, “Still in the studio? How’s the portfolio coming along?”

“Oh, it’s,” Keefe looked at the mess he’d made of his canvas and carefully did not wince. “It’s definitely going. No complaints here. How’s Verdi?”

They raised an eyebrow at him through the screen, but said, “She’s doing better. I had to go up and apply the balm for her rash, so if my room is covered in red feathers tonight it’s none of your business.”

Keefe laughed, dropping to a crouch and peering at Sophie over his knees. “My lips are sealed.”

“You say that, but I don’t think I believe you,” Sophie said, mouth lifting in a grin. They tilted their head, examining, and Keefe angled the imparter just a teensiest bit further away from himself. “Are you… doing okay?”

He scrunched his nose, crinkled an eyebrow, watched their eyes shine with amusement. “Why wouldn’t I be?” When Sophie leveled him another look Keefe put his arm over his knees and leaned his chin there. “Soph, I’m fine. No crises here. The sun is shining, my pencils are sharpened, everything’s fine.”

“The amount of it’s fine’s you just said right now is not very convincing,” Sophie said, and opened their mouth to go on, but then there was a call from somewhere off-screen. They sighed, then looked back down at Keefe, hair breezing over their face. “I gotta go, but we’re talking later, okay?”

“Okay,” Keefe said, trying to focus on the topic at hand and not at the way the light was hitting them perfectly.

“You’re important to me, you know,” Sophie said, bringing the imparter up close to pull a wide-eyed, twisty-mouthed face at him. “Don’t get too busy over there.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Keefe said, waving and pulling a face back. “Have fun out there, Soph.”

They were still making the same face when the imparter froze and then the light dissolved away, leaving a blank silver screen.

Keefe met his eyes in the reflection for only a moment before he tossed the imparter across the floor. It skittered away, unaffected, reflecting more light.

***

He spent the rest of the day’s light in the garden, building a palace out of pebbles. Somewhere in the back of his mind this was something familiar, a trick born of telepathic muscle memory—he remembered making it enough that he’d figured out how to make multiple floors, but not enough to know the source.

He’d just placed the next roof-slash-floor to his palace when exhausted satisfaction drifted down onto him like a blanket.

“Amy and I used to make those all the time,” Sophie said from behind him eventually, pleasant surprise wafting in curls of baby blue. “They’re called fairy houses.”

Keefe had felt them coming a mile away. He leaned back and met their gaze with a quirked eyebrow. “You guys believed in fairies, but not Einstein-Rosen bridges?”

“Well, excuse me if I wasn’t an expert on the theory of relativity at eleven years old,” Sophie said, and rounded the gate, tossing their bag down beside them in their smooth collapse into the grass. They pointed at the doorway, where Keefe had slanted two rocks against each other just so and placed a fallen leaf on the floor in front of it. “Look, you even got the doormat right.”

“What in the fuck is a doormat,” Keefe asked, mostly so he could see Sophie roll their eyes at him. Their hair breezed over their forehead and Keefe leaned left so he could tuck it away—bright gold colored his tongue, tasting like cinnamon, just before Sophie decided to smile. “How was your day,” he asked, just to ask.

Sophie just hummed, leaning bodily into his side as he brushed the tips of his fingers over blades of grass. “Long. Good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” They radiated warmth. “Mom taught me some more flower blessings. You can call me flower picking certified now.”

Keefe smiled into their hair, inhaled cardamom. “You’ve progressed, young flyhopper.”

Sophie nodded in agreement and then, after another moment of quiet, turned their face into his shoulder. “You ready to go?”

Keefe nudged his fairy house gently with one toe; it didn’t budge. Without dislodging Sophie from his shoulder, he plucked a red feather from the grass and placed it on the roof, securing it in place with a squareish stone.

“Now I’m ready,” he said, and Sophie smothered their laugh into his shoulder as they got up together.

***

Dinner was an agonizingly long affair—they spent most of it juggling Edaline and Grady’s attention between them, fielding assurances that everything was fine and yes they were just a little tired and yes they would leave the door to Sophie’s room open, nevermind that it was up a full flight of stairs and noise didn’t travel that far down anyway. By the time they did make it to Sophie’s room, Sophie was already beelining for the bed, irritation wafting off behind them.

Keefe exchanged a sidelong glance with Fitz, but there was hardly any need. They landed in the plush comforter seconds later, Fitz sideways and sprawled over Sophie’s torso, Keefe on the outer edge with his legs over the backs of Fitz’s knees.

Fitz, as always, relaxed immediately into their touch. Keefe looked up to exchange a knowing look with Sophie, and only then realized his mistake—they tilted their head at him and asked, “So how’s the portfolio going?”

Keefe kept his gaze on the ceiling, but the edges of uncertain orange still played at his vision. He ventured with a joke— “If you can call trashed pieces progress, then boy, have I made a lot of it. Like a lot.”

Fitz craned his head to look at Keefe, and Keefe didn’t look back, shoulders raising to his ears. Sophie had gotten the ball rolling, and he was loathe to stop it.

“I just… don’t know about applying anymore,” he said, and it was out. Relief and fear tied him up, kept him still on the edge of Sophie’s bed.

Fitz said, careful, “Like, you can’t do it?”

Keefe sat up. “It just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like the thing.”

“Keefe, come on, it just takes time. You’ll figure it out—”

“But what if I can’t?” It burst out of him, jagged, slicing through invisible arteries. Keefe turned away, his vision slanting red. “It was all over months ago. We’re supposed to be getting better, and you guys are, and that’s amazing, but I’m just sitting here and the world is turning and everyone else is building things and I’m not doing anything.”

“Keefe,” Fitz said aloud, but nothing further. The wave of relief-regret-wretched-sadness was cloying enough to choke on.

The incessant buzz of Sophie’s emotion shifted closer, and then drew away; Keefe was all at once grateful and exhausted. He twisted onto his feet and went to shut the windows, every step away from his two whole universes like a weight falling away from his back. Bitten-off, he said, “I just don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do.”

He could hear the pause, the have you considered you don’t have to, on Sophie’s tongue, but they didn’t say it. Instead, rhodusite blue in his peripheral, they said, “How about this.”

The deal: he had to choose one thing a day to work towards. The catch: it had to be small. No finish an entire spread this week. No save the entire world again. Sophie vetted and reviewed his suggestions with such a viciousness that Keefe had to exchange knowing looks with the silphium flowers in the garden, but eventually they got into a rhythm: Keefe called to impart his goal for the day, Sophie approved it, Keefe endeavored to pick one single flower or make Fitz laugh so hard he honked or make a painting in one color.

It was, unbelievably, miraculously simple—and it worked.

Some days were still awful, overwhelming, intertidal; some days he elected staying in bed was better than trying and dealing with the consequent failure. But it was—it was something. It was better than nothing.

In the middle of it all was Linh, who—as soon as ze’d found out he had freed up his time from trying for apprenticeships—became a bi-weekly staple at the Vackers’ family home, bringing with zem various sketchbooks and government projects and the latest thing that Tam and Marella were working on, if it hadn’t exploded in trial. Keefe spent a surprising amount of time nudging zir projects in the right direction, if it was ever needed, and otherwise offering support by way of long walks down various shorelines, which was a task Linh had assigned to zirself back when they’d first entered peacetime, but never wanted to do alone.

It was on one of these beach walks that Linh was pacing in zig-zag, pencil tapping incessantly on the page of zir sketchbook.

“I can’t get it,” Linh hissed, a splash of white-hot water just before ze thrust the sketchbook at Keefe. “The story part, I have, but it’s—something about the shape or the flow or—I don’t know.”

“…I mean, you’re getting there,” he said, holding his hand out for the pencil. When Linh handed it to him he used the corner of the page to make another, smaller sketch of the arch, less symmetrical in element. “Maybe it’s just that you’re thinking too hard about the weight? It balances out on its own, kind of.”

Linh took the sketchbook back, and zir eyebrows twitched.

“Not right?” Keefe hazarded a guess, and reached again for the sketchbook, but Linh didn’t move to give it back.

When ze looked up again the flare of silver in the air was enough for Keefe’s hand to twitch to disperse it. Right when he raised a hand to cut through, Linh said, “Would you want to work with me?”

“What?” Keefe said, half-laughing. “Is this not working with you?”

“No, not like this, like,” ze flipped to a new page perhaps in emphasis and began to make sweeping lines, “like actually. As a partner. I’ve come to you for advice for seventy-five percent of the projects I’ve worked on and every time you’ve come out with something like this, that just works. You see exactly what it needs.”

“I can’t—” he faltered. “I wouldn’t know how to do half the things you do.”

“I’ll teach you. Do this with me,” Linh said, breathless, eyes sparkling. “I want you to help me see these through because you’re a good artist and you fucking get it.” Ze made another mark and gave the sketchbook back, a project spread out on a hundred different papers just coming together—and Keefe could see it, could see the exact way the petals curled. Ze was right—he’d learned this. He knew this like the back of his hand, like the feel of the brush across canvas, and hadn’t he been waiting for something that felt this right?

As if ze’d heard him, Linh said, “I don’t want you to just get credit for this, Keefe. You know what I mean.”

“I,” Keefe said, the tide in his chest swelling. He gripped his sketchbook, palms slipping, the cover embossments digging into his hands.

“You find your own ways to change the world,” Sophie had said, that night they’d laid out the plan and everything had begun to feel a lot less like getting caught in a riptide and more like surfing, waiting for a wave suspended in the air.

One little universe at a time.

Keefe met Linh’s gaze, tasted the shimmer of the ocean on the air, inhaled.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, “let’s do this,” and the wave crashed down.

For once, it didn’t feel like drowning.

#YESSS #YESSSSSSSSSS #i love how you write them all it. bjfkgfkdngidme #sorry just got outta work this is all the words i have

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