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autisticlancemcclain · 2 years

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Keith is good at compartmentalizing. Always has been. Sure, he’s not always great at emotional regulation, but when the serious shit pops up? Under lock and key it goes, to be brought out only late at night when he’s feeling sorry for himself and wants to make things worse.

(Okay. His coping mechanisms could be better.)

(He’s doing his best, alright? Life is hard.)

But sometimes, his compartments get too damn full. His brain just gets so cluttered with shit that he has no boxes left to shove the hard shit into, and he just has to handle it. It always sucks. It’s always a million times worse than his late night freak-outs.

This one in particular, though?

This one takes the cake.

If one were to steal a probably-dusty manila file from the desk one of the social workers for the State of Arizona, labelled ‘Keith Akira Kogane’, they would see, clearly labelled, a section called ‘ORPHAN’. Under that section would be a subheading — ‘Death of Father’. If this person were to read further, they would discover that officially, according to the Arizona State Reporting District, Texas Kogane died tragically trying to put out a house fire in the line of duty. His son waited three days for him to return home before walking to the fire station and demanding to see his father, and was then swiftly picked up and brought to the Grass Hills Region Arizona State Social Services Office, and assigned a group home after speaking to a child psychologist and social worker.

That story is, almost entirely, false.

Keith’s father did die tragically and heroically in the line of duty. It was a particularly brutal house fire, and Texas did manage to save the family that was trapped, at the cost of his own life.

What the story fails to mention is that the house was, specifically, home to Keith’s closest friend at the time. The file also fails to mention that Keith’s father often worked long hours, and so Keith frequently spent time at that friend’s house.

The article fails, perhaps most ardently, to mention that the day of the fateful fire, Keith was present at the house. The day of the fateful fire, Keith watched the house go up in flames faster than he could comprehend. The day of the fateful fire, Keith cried for his father, curled up in the corner of a room with a wet t-shit over his face, soot covering his hair and smoke lining his lungs. The day of the fateful fire, Texas Kogane kicked open the door behind which Keith was trapped in a blaze of glory, scooping up his small-for-his-age son in his arms and rushing him safely out of the house, hugging him tightly and pressing the briefest of kisses to his dirty hair before rushing back into the house to save the rest of the family that was trapped inside.

The file fails to mention that on the day of the fateful fire, Keith watched his infallible father sprint into the house, and never make it back out.

Keith doesn’t much like fire. The file doesn’t mention that, either. (Keith knows. He stole it, one day, and read it. It had to be locked away in a little box in his head, too.)

Space happens so goddamn quickly.

One day he’s chilling in his stupid shack with a couple cool lizards, dicking around on his hover bike and tracking some weird energy, and the next he’s flying through a real-life wormhole on a sentient lion piloted by a boy with startlingly striking brown eyes that he kind of vaguely remembers if he squints. And then that wormhole leads him to a real-life alien castle, and real-life aliens (he knew it, Keith knew it, he was right all along, his Pa was right all along, they both were —) and he’s informed by a real-life alien princess that he’s the Paladin of the Red Lion, the Universe’s Guardian of Fire.

And oh, does the bitter taste of irony flood his tongue.

He swallows quickly, desperately shoving the box closed, adding as many mental strips of duct tape that he can. He forces his face into a mask of stoicism (practiced to perfection from years of home after home after home) and prays that no one was looking closely enough to see the lick of terror flash through his eyes.

He’s lucky, that way. No one ever is.

He keeps that dangerous box closed as he frees a petulant mecha lion from a Galra ship that he navigates too easily (yet another box), keeps it closed as he argues and fights with the boy with pretty brown eyes (rival, his rival — his shadow?), keeps it closed as he fights a dictator and the dictator’s general and holds the hand of the same boy who smiles and says they make a great team. Keith holds that box shut with both hands as he nearly fights an alien who tries to take his knife at a space mall and trains with the man who’s like a brother to him, along with a brand-new team he’s supposed to trust with his deepest secrets.

Keith squeezes that box shut with every ounce of mental strain that he has, and then some. He grits his teeth and tells himself that fire is good and warm and powerful and life-ending and frightening and —

His bayard unlocks a blazing canon, flames sweeping out and brightly illuminating the stifling emptiness of space, burning everything in its path, and the box bursts open.

“Holy shit, Keith!”

“Yo! Is that a flamethrower?”

“Excellent work, kiddo.”

“‘About time you caught up, Mullet.”

The words are distorted, far away. His team’s transparent excitement fans the flames wreaking havoc on every carefully sealed box in his head, turning strict lines to ash and reducing his head to embers. His skin burns as bright as a sun, sweat dripping down his forehead, and smoke fills his lungs until he’s coughing, wheezing, choking to death —

He has no idea how the rest of the training goes. He has no idea how he manages to keep upright, with his vision swimming in and out and his hands slipping off the controls. He has no idea even how he manages to stay alive with flames licking him from the inside, burning him to a crisp from his bones out to his skin. He has no idea how he manages to land Red in her hangar, how he keeps from turning to ash in the pilot’s seat. How he manages to rip off his seatbelt with hands that have turned to burnt coal and rush down the ramp on legs that are simmering flames.

“Ay, Greñudo! What’s keeping you? You’ve been locked in here for half an hour, Shiro’s got a firecracker up his ass worrying — Jesus Christ, Keith, what’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Can’t he see? Can’t he feel the flames that lick up Keith’s skin and burn him up? Can’t he feel the heat of Keith’s destruction? Do his eyes not burn from the brightness of the fire?

How is Keith alive? How is he standing when his lungs have stopped working, cooked in his chest? Keith tries to inflate them, to force them open with clean air, but it doesn’t work, they don’t work, the smoke is choking him and killing him and there’s no Pa to save him —

A shock of freezing cold gently touches his neck, his cheek. A breath is startled into his lungs.

They work again.

“Smoke’s cleared,” Keith croaks, because it must be, now that he can feel the cool air trickling down his throat again. He takes large, gulping breaths, taking in as much air as he can before the smoke returns and he suffocates again.

“That’s it,” Lance soothes. “In and out, starboy. Your lungs are clear, yeah? There’s no fire, no smoke. Feel that air. In and out.” The coolness on Keith’s cheek spreads, following the shape of his cheekbone, back and forth, again and again.

Lance’s thumb.

His hands, on Keith’s cheek and on his neck.

“Y’r hands’re cold.”

Lance cracks a smile. “Iron deficiency.”

“Oh. You should —” Keith’s breath shudders as it regulates. He realises his hands are clenched on Lance’s wrist. “—you should eat more red meat.”

What is he even talking about?

Lance smile gets a little wider. It softens his eyes again, deep and brown and dark, like they looked after Sendak. Keith likes it when he smiles at him.

“I’m a vegetarian. That’s cute of you, by the way.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.” It takes Keith a moment to process Lance’s other sentence.

This time, his face gets hot for a whole different reason.

“I didn’t — I didn’t mean —”

“Hey. Cool it,” Lance orders, tapping Keith between the eyes. His lips are still curved into a smirk. “You’re coming down from a gnarly-ass panic attack. The last thing you need is to freak out again. Keep matching my breathing, okay? You’re doing great.”

“Never thought I’d hear you say that,” Keith manages between his still-heavy breaths. The redness has yet to recede from his face, but he’s pleased to hear Lance’s quiet laughter.

“Yeah, yeah, Greñudo. Treasure it, ‘cause I’m not saying it again.”

Keith swallows, tightening his grip on Lance’s wrist. Greñudo. That nickname again, but it’s not malicious. Teasing. It’s the softest he’s ever heard Lance say it.

“What’s that mean? Grendo?”

“‘Grendo’ means nothing,” Lance replies, amused. “But Greñudo means disheveled. Messy. Slang for —” he tugs gently on the hair at the back of Keith’s neck — “mullet, like this travesty.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh’.”

Keith slowly moves his hand up Lance’s arm, from his wrist to his elbow. He stops when Lance’s breath hitches, simply resting on the smooth skin, but continues on when Lance doesn’t stop him, slowly tracing the lean muscles and bony joints down Lance’s bicep, his shoulder, his side, settling at his waist. Lance’s hands have stilled, but remain on his cheek and neck, cradling his face.

“You channeling your Gomez, huh, Mullet?” Lance asks, but his voice isn’t it’s usual barbed wire, but soft; quiet and stuttering.

“I liked Starboy better,” Keith says quietly. All the burning pain has quietly slipped away from his body, leaving only a soft, tender glow behind, like the amber embers from the campfires he and Pa used to have on late nights.

It’s not scary. It’s — warm, even. Comforting.

“I bet you do.”

Keith says nothing. He stays right where he is, pressed to Lance in three different places, the coolness of Lance’s skin pulling the burning heat from Keith’s bones.

“Are you always this cold?” Keith asks. It’s not what he wants to say — what does he want to say? — but it’s what he can manage, standing so closely to Lance, the quiet scent of his floral shampoo pushing out the smell of smoke caught in Keith’s nose.

Lance hums. “You always feel like you’re running a fever?”

“Yes. Worse since I started piloting Red.”

“Guess I’ll have to help you cool down, then.”

“Guess so.” Unbidden, a smirk fights its way on Keith’s face. “That would make us a pretty good team, huh?”

It takes Lance a moment to react, but then he does, pulling away with a groan and a smack to the back of Keith’s head.

“There you go,” he admonishes, “bringing up fake bonding moments are ruining the real one we were having. Can’t let things go, huh?”

Keith shrugs, but the smile stays out on his face. “Can’t let your lying ass keep getting away with it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lance says, rolling his eyes. He hesitates a moment, then darts forward and grabs Keith’s hand, yanking him towards the door as he power walks out of Red’s hangar. Keith stumbles after him.

“Let’s go,” Lance says, once Keith’s got his balance. He glances back at Keith, small smile showing the barest hint of teeth. “Starboy.”

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