#happy birthday to keith akira kogane | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sage-nebula · 7 years

Note

Since keith's Birthday is in a few days do you have any thoughts on his life in general you want to share? Or headcanon on how he was as a child or who his parents were? I'm especially facinated with his early life and enjoy collecting peoples thoughts. No pressure though.

Oh man, do I …

It’s actually kind of funny that you’re asking this, becauseever since I did a couple of those headcanon prompt fills for Keith and talkedabout his dad a bit, thoughts and backstory and headcanons have just spilledout. Because of that I’ve been thinking about writing a pre-canon backstory ficfor him that would not only show a lot of the time he had with his dad, butalso the time that he spent in foster care after his dad was no longer in hislife, and howhe met Shiro, how they bonded, and all of that. I have been reminded in recentconversation with a friend, though, that posting a fic like that is probablynot a good idea in this fandom climate, because people in this fandom tend tobe … well, you know. But I still have all of these thoughts, and so I canshare general details anyway, at least in a headcanon post like this one.

So, Keith’s parents. I don’t have too much on his mom at present. The mostI “know” about her at the moment is that she was likely not loyal to the Galra Empire, or at leastnot loyal to Zarkon. The knife / sword that Keith has now is implied to behers, or at least, Keith thought it was hers enough to project that intohis mindscape during 2x08. Since the blade was one of the Marmorites’, I thinkit’s fair enough to assume that his mother was a member of the Blade ofMarmora, at least for a time. If she wasn’t a member, then she somehow got herhands on one of their blades in some other way. Either way, I think that evenif she wasn’t a member of the Blade of Marmora, her loyalty to Zarkon was stillprobably shaky at best. I also think it’s possible (probable?) that she wasonly part-Galra herself, which might have informed why she didn’t feelcompletely loyal to Zarkon. I say this because Keith’s Galra features arebasically nonexistent. If his mother was full Galra, then I feel like we wouldsee some of that in him. It sounds like he was originally intended to have morealien features in his original concept (white hair, fangs), but the interestingthing is that, fangs aside … I mean, yeah, the fangs are Galran, but thewhite hair sounds Altean. Could Keith’s mother have beenhalf-Altean, half-Galran? Hm. I’m not sure, and we don’t have enough evidenceto say either way, particularly since those features didn’t make it intoKeith’s official design. Either way, if his mother was part-Galra as well, thatcould have also informed her desire to split from the Empire, whether thatentailed joining up with the Blade of Marmora or otherwise.

At some point, though, I think she ended up on Earth, and that’swhen she met Keith’s father. While I’m not confident enough to come up with aGalran name, I can name a Japanese(-American) man, and so I’ve decided thatwhile his surname is obviously Kogane, his given name was Ryuuga. I’ve decidedon Ryuuga for two reasons. The first reason is because it can be written withthe kanji 竜賀. The 竜 kanji is read as “Ryuu” and means “dragon;imperial.” The 賀 kanji is read as “ga”and means “congratulations; joy.” That means that in this particular instance,the name Ryuuga means “joyful dragon.” When combined with the kanji thatmake up the surname Kogane (I don’t have them on hand, but the kanji that makeup Kogane in old Voltron canon translate to “gold”), his full namemeans “golden, joyful dragon.” I feel that that’s a fitting name for theman who would sire Keith, and so that’s my first reason for picking that name.My second, sillier reason is that I have a feeling that Sunny ( @kcgane )will read that I’ve named Keith’s father “Ryuuga” and will laugh really,really hard.

Anyway, so Keith’s mom—and god, she really needs a name. Ihaven’t yet figured out the naming conventions of the Galra, and to be honest,I don’t think there are any (I still remember how Lotor’s generals were nearlynamed after the Golden Girls, ffs) so I’m just going to pick one for her rightnow. Let’s call her … Mezri. That works as well as any.

Anyway, so Mezri ended up on Earth somehow, and I’m not sure ofthe circumstances for this. I don’t know if she was on a Marmora mission thatwent wrong, or maybe on a Marmora mission that went right, or maybe she was just fleeing from the Empire, or … whoknows, honestly. The point is that she ended up on Earth, and while on Earthshe ended up encountering Keith’s father, Ryuuga, through some turn of events. (And this is long, with a couple fanfic parts once I get to the Keith portions of the post, so the rest is going under a cut.)

Now, here’s the thing: Depending on how alien Mezri looked, combined with if she hadany ability to blend in with the populace at all (Galra don’t seem to, butAlteans do, and if it was intended for Keith to have Altean heritage as wellgiven that white hair …) means that her stay on Earth could be …complicated. I like to think that she was there for a little while; I like tothink that she was the one who picked the name Keith,after a character she liked in a movie she watched or a book she read whilevisiting Earth, whereas Ryuuga was the one to suggest “Akira” (using thekanji from the original show, of course) as Keith’s middle name. (Ryuuga wouldhave asked, bemused, why she wouldn’t want a Galra name, and Mezri would replythat she thinks this human name sounds a lot more fun and unique.) But again,that could complicate things depending on just how alien she looks, so … well, let’sjust say that they wouldn’t be able to stay on Earth long. Even if Mezri visitedEarth, and met Ryuuga through some series of circumstances (it might be that hejust happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, got swept up intothings, really wanted to help her with whatever she was doing, helped her toomuch and ended up abducted), she would have to leave eventually, and when shedid, she took Ryuuga with her.

The problem is that Ryuuga was a pretty normal guy before thiswent down. He wasn’t enlisted at the Garrison, he wasn’t part of any spaceexploration program. He was probably working a normal job, paying his bills,living his life. He was a normal guy. But then he ends up abducted (kind of—Imean, Mezri isn’t malicious), and swept off into space, and he and Mezri fallin love (infatuation?), and there’s a war going on, and things happen, and longstory short, Ryuuga ends up back on Earth with a baby boy and no Mezri.

As you can see, I haven’t figured out all of these details yet.I do know that the time spent in space was pretty traumatic for Ryuuga, bothbecause he really was not prepared to go into space at all (he was just anormal guy, I can’t stress this enough), but also because, again, there was awar going on. I have a feeling that even if Mezri took Ryuuga back to the Bladeof Marmora, they would not be happy to see a human in their base.They might have sent her packing. At that point, it’s Mezri and Ryuuga vs.Everyone Else (or at least a good portion of others), and once Mezri gotpregnant, that made things even more difficult, because it’s rather difficultto fight a war (and train the human you’ve (accidentally?) abducted to help youfight) while you’re pregnant, at least once the pregnancy progresses to acertain point. Thinking along those lines, even if the Marmorites kicked themout at first, they would probably change their mind once they saw that Mezriwas still loyal and pregnant, at least to offer her sanctuary. Though thatsaid, even if she got sanctuary, that doesn’t mean Ryuuga would … which means that he’s nowstranded in space by himself. That’s cool.

So anyway, I imagine the entire experience was somewhattraumatizing for him, even if he held it together pretty well. I imagine thathis (and Keith’s) return to Earth was somewhat unceremonious; I have a feelingit was more that they fled there versus they returned therevoluntarily, and I also think that Mezri not going back with them was … notentirely by choice? I don’t know that she’s dead (probably is), but it mighthave been a kind of … “I’m sending you back because you’ll be safestthere, and I’m not going with you because I have to fight here” kind of deal.And that’s why Ryuuga is very vague to Keith about what happened to her. Hedoesn’t say she’s dead, because she’s not. He also doesn’t say that she wantsto be with them, because honestly, he’s a little unclear on that himself. So heleaves it ambiguous and leaves it to Keith to fill in the blanks, which doesn’talways produce the best answers (“My mom left me”).

But anyway, depending on how alien Mezri looked, and how longshe was there, it’s possible that she attracted attention while she was onEarth. Also, depending on how space-time travel works, it’s possible that itmight not seem as though Ryuuga was gone for very long, even though he was. (Orconversely, maybe it seems like he was gone for DECADES, but then he’s suddenlyseen walking around again like it’s only been less than a year, and he thinksit’s only been less than a year, and that’s Suspicious™.) Add to that to thefact that he has a baby (and if the baby had white hair and fangs, oh man), and the fact that we know that in this universe the U.S.government is familiar with alien happenings (what with the Garrison and all,even if they lie and say they know nothing), and it’s possible that Ryuugawould have some government agents very interested in questioning him and hisinfant son.

Now, here’s the thing. Ryuuga might have just been a normaldude, but he’s smart. He knows that if the government finds out that his son ispart alien, they’re going to take him away, and do god knows what to him. (Ryuuga’snot quite knowledgeable enough to know the specifics of that, but he knows itcan’t be good.) And whatever his relationship with Mezri is, Ryuugadoesn’t want anything to happen to Keith. Keith is his son. He loves that boy. And even though he doesn’t really know what to do about childcare (does he have a job anymore? Nope, probably not), and has never had to be on the run from the government before (and maybe he doesn’t have to be now, but he’s paranoid, and he learned a lot of things about fleeing pursuers during that intergalactic space war he accidentally found himself a part of), he’s not going to let anything happen to Keith if he can help it.

So he leaves.

As you can see, all of the above is … kind of a jumbled mess, because I haven’t been thinking about those parts as much as I’ve been thinking of the latter parts. But to try and summarize the jumbled mess, at least a bit:

Keith’s mother, Mezri, was part-Galra and ended up on Earth somehow. This is where she met Keith’s father, Ryuuga, though a series of events that led to Mezri taking Ryuuga back to space with her. (Probably willingly, it probably wasn’t a complete abduction, but it’s also possible that Ryuuga didn’t realize they were going into space until he was on the ship and was like “wait, what?”)

The Blade of Marmora was probably not keen on letting some human wander into their base, and considering he had no idea what was going on, Ryuuga probably didn’t blame them much. This led to Mezri having to take Ryuuga with her, and probably being in sparse contact with the Blade while still trying to do her part in the war, and while trying to teach Ryuuga how to fight (particularly since he wanted to help now that he was there, which might have even been why he was there in the first place, like—he tried to help her, got taken into space, these things happen).

At some point, Mezri got pregnant, but she kept doing her thing until it became dangerous for the baby, at which point The Blade of Marmora offered her sanctuary. (Probably not Ryuuga, although maybe. I mean, he’d be pretty trustworthy by that point.)

The middle of an intergalactic space war is no place to raise an infant, but Mezri didn’t want to leave the Marmorites / her duty behind, so she gave Keith + her knife to Ryuuga and sent them both back to Earth.

Ryuuga was gone for ??? amount of time. He has Seen A Lot™ during the intergalactic space war, and has Been Through a Lot™ during the intergalactic space war, and now he has to both readjust to life back on Earth, and also raise an infant that the government may or may not be interested in if they suspect that Ryuuga knows things about aliens, and also might have a part-alien baby (which he does, but shhh). So instead of just trying to return to his own life, Ryuuga picks up his baby and goes.

All of the above means that Ryuuga … doesn’t live a stable life once returning to Earth. Like, the normal thing to do when you have a baby is to find some place to settle down and raise the baby. This is hard when you are returning from an intergalactic space war, and also have government agents kind of interested in your baby because of the whole space thing. Nonetheless, Ryuuga tries. He does his research in libraries and the internet and manages to forge a birth certificate saying that Keith was born in a normal hospital, in a normal city, in a normal state, in the normal United States, on the normal planet Earth, instead of in space in the middle of a Marmorite infirmary. He’s afraid to take Keith to the doctor for a check-up given that he’s not sure what they’ll find if they run blood tests or anything, and thankfully, Keith’s galra heritage makes him immune to most Earth illnesses, so it doesn’t end up being much of an issue. (Although, when Keith gets sick, he gets really, really, really sick, because there are some things his heritage gives him absolutely no defenses against whatsoever. Ryuuga does have to take him to the emergency room once when he’s six because of this, and it’s not a pretty sight. Thankfully, Ryuuga manages to get him out of there and on the road before any, ah, authorities show up to examine the kid who nearly died from an apparent stomach bug.) He has no money once he gets back to Earth, which is a big problem, but he takes out a loan at a shady cash advance place so that he can buy diapers, baby formula, baby clothes, and that sort of thing, just to get them started. He also remembers how to hustle pool, and so he takes baby Keith to a “family friendly” establishment with pool tables so he can do just that. Turns out, it’s even easier to hustle when people think you’re a bumbling dad, who knew.

At first, Ryuuga used the money he got from the cash advance place to get them a cheap apartment in the first city they could settle in after they were dropped back on Earth. (Like, it wasn’t a quiet drop-off, it was a crash, and government agents swarmed that site, so like … Ryuuga hotwired a car that he found nearby, stole it, and booked to a couple towns over, ditched the car, and went to the next town over on foot and settled there. Like, there was stopping in-between all this to get the money, the baby formula, diapers, et cetera, but yeah, he wanted to put as much distance between himself and the government as possible.) He wanted at least a semi-stable place while Keith was an infant, and plus it’s hard to cart around a crib and whatnot from motel to motel. But once Keith was old enough (~3 or 4), Ryuuga sold that apartment, paid off what he could of the loan money that he still owed, took the truck that he now had, and moved them to another town.

And for the next five or so years, this was what life was like. See, remember how I said that Ryuuga had a hard time readjusting to life back on Earth? That he went through a lot of traumatizing things? He did. It’s not easy for Ryuuga to handle, and he doesn’t really have resources to handle it because he has to put all of his time, energy, and money into looking after Keith. And that’s fine—he doesn’t resent Keith, or anything. He loves his son. But this means that time he might have spent finding a therapist to talk about how he misses his alien girlfriend(/wife?), and how he saw people die, and maybe even caused some of those deaths, and maybe almost died himself, is instead spent looking after his child and making sure that said child isn’t taken away to be experimented on by the men in black. (Who probably don’t exist, really, but … well, aliens exist. Ryuuga will believe anything at this point.) All of this, plus the fact that they have to move around a lot because Ryuuga is antsy about staying in one place too long (staying in the same city for a couple years worked, but he did move apartments once or twice, used fake names, et cetera), makes it hard for Ryuuga to hold down a job. He does some … not so great things to get money. I’m not sure what, but I have it that he is probably only ever paid cash under the table for what he does, and whatever he does, he justifies it by saying that it’s for the sake of looking after Keith. Which, I mean, it is. That’s not a lie. But he probably does some illegal things, some not so great things, things that he’s not proud of, but considering he might have done some worse things in space (I mean, if it’s self-defense in the midst of a war, is it murder?), maybe this isn’t so bad, comparatively speaking.

But he has money, at least some, and that goes to looking after Keith. Since they don’t stay in one city for more than six months at a time, once Keith enters school at around age five or six, he ends up moving and changing schools a lot. He’s already a naturally introverted kid, and he’s smart and blunt, and all of this—plus the fact that he doesn’t stay in one school for more than a semester at a time—means that it’s really hard for him to make (and impossible for him to keep) friends. There’s also the fact that Ryuuga constantly reminds him not to tell his friends too much about himself, because he doesn’t want to leave too much of a trail. They can know his name, and that he has a dad, but … don’t bring them back to the apartment (or motel, if this is a case where they just rented out a motel room for a month—Ryuuga did that a lot, because it’s easier to get a cheap motel room with fake IDs than it is an actual apartment, particularly since apartments usually do background checks and credit checks and yadda yadda), don’t tell them why he moves around a lot, et cetera. Keep things to himself. Ryuuga was just trying to avoid having Keith’s potential friends tell their parents things, which would lead to their parents possibly telling teachers or CPS or something, but because he didn’t share the reasoning with Keith (“Your mom was an alien, and so you’re part alien, and we don’t want anyone knowing that”), it just led to Keith thinking (subconsciously or otherwise) that he shouldn’t share a lot of personal details about himself with others, which led to other kids thinking he was weird even more than they already did, which … well, it all sort of fed into itself.

Despite that, though, in all honesty, Keith was mostly fine with it. School sucked because of the whole it’s-hard-to-make-friends-thing, and it also sucked because when you change schools a lot, it can make it hard to keep up with the curriculum (since all schools have different curriculums), and so Keith’s knowledge was often all over the place. Sometimes he’d be way ahead of a school he transferred into, and other times he’d be behind, and both of these things were especially true when they traveled across state lines (which happened a lot; although Ryuuga was raised in the south, he took Keith all across the continental United States, so Keith has lived everywhere from New York, to Missouri, to Texas, to California, to Oregon, to Florida at different points in his life). But aside from that, as far as he could tell, he was having a pretty happy childhood.

See, the thing is … although Ryuuga did some not so great things for money—although he self-medicated on his worse nights with alcohol (he was never abusive to Keith when he was drunk, so don’t you worry about that, although Keith did learn at quite a young age how to help his dad with a hangover), although he was paranoid about who might notice Keith when (Keith looked like a normal boy, but you never know), although he moved them around a lot and wouldn’t ever tell Keith why aside from “it’s just time to move on, son”—Ryuuga still loved that kid. As Keith grew up, and grew from a helpless infant into a walking, talking kid, Ryuuga loved him even more, and he did his best to make sure Keith knew it. They moved around a lot, but Ryuuga did his best to make sure Keith had fun. Since they were on the road a lot, he made sure to stop at those stupid little tourist traps so that Keith could look at all the “supernatural marvels” or other little ridiculous, overpriced attractions that littered the roads. He took Keith to the Grand Canyon, and maybe even up to Niagara Falls. As I mentioned in one of the drabbles, he entered them into a pie eating contest once when Keith was about seven, just so they could get some cheap, all-you-can-eat pie. Another time, he saw Keith trying to play with one of the toy lightsabers in a Wal-Mart (still in the box), and though he told Keith to put it back and go wait out in the truck, he secretly bought two of them so that they could play together when they went back (to their temporary) home. Keith was probably about eight at that time, and he was so thrilled when he saw that his dad had bought not only one toy lightsaber, but two so that they could duel with them. Even after their duel (which Ryuuga let Keith win, although it unnerved him just a little bit that it was actually a bit hard to fend his kid off), Keith kept practicing with the lightsaber. And yes, he insisted that he was practicing.

“You think you’re gonna get into a swordfight some time?” Ryuuga asked, bemused.

“You never know,” Keith said. “It could happen.”

Ryuuga wanted to laugh, but he remembered what had happened after meeting Mezri, and so he just sort of forced a little smile and cracked open a beer as he said, “Okay.”

Aside from that … Ryuuga liked classic rock, and so he played that whenever they went driving in the truck (and especially for their longer trips). Keith grew up listening to songs like “Stairway to Heaven” as lullabies. Similarly, because of so much time spent on the road and Ryuuga’s smoking habit (I know, I know—cigarettes and alcohol, not the greatest combination, but at least he didn’t drink while driving), the smells of old, worn down leather car seats and Marlboro cigarette smoke are comforting to him. They remind him of being curled up in the passenger seat, safe, warm, secure, and pretty much fast asleep.

All of that said, Ryuuga’s “jobs” would often take him away at all hours of the night, and sometimes for days at a time. Those ones—the ones that would have him gone for a couple days—were ones he took once Keith was a little older, like around seven or so. He didn’t want to find a random babysitter to watch Keith for a whole variety of reasons (not the least of which being “I’m going to go do this possibly illegal thing for a couple days, please watch my kid” is a good way to get CPS called on you), so Keith would usually be left alone in the motel room (or apartment, whichever they had at the time) with enough supplies to tide him over. Those supplies were:

Food, water, etc

Mezri’s knife, and some basic instruction on how to use it if he had to

A burner phone, in case of emergency

That’s about it

Since all of this was very normal to Keith, he was fine with it. He even took advantage of the nights he had alone to stay up late watching TV. Often times this meant he’d be sitting cross-legged on the motel bed, wearing pajama pants and one of his dad’s old t-shirts, eating cereal and watching some random old movie he found while flipping channels when his dad came home at 2am. Of course, Ryuuga was never pleased to find Keith still awake at that hour (and did he really need Lucky Charms at 2am?), but little eight-year-old Keith was really engrossed in his movie. It was a really cool one.

“You can watch a really cool movie at a decent hour,” Ryuuga said. “Now get to bed, you need your sleep.”

“Okay, fine,” Keith said, and he let Ryuuga take the cereal bowl from him before he bounced back toward his pillows. “Hey, but—Dad.”

“Hey, but—what?”

“Are aliens real?”

“What?”

“Are aliens real?” Keith and Ryuuga stared at each other, Keith with innocent curiosity, and Ryuuga with the look of a squirrel staring down an oncoming car. “Like the ones in the movie. Do you think they’re real?”

Ryuuga hadn’t seen the movie, but he didn’t need to see the movie to know that Hollywood’s depiction of aliens was bogus. He stared at Keith for a long moment, and then sighed heavily and said, “No, I don’t think aliens are real like in the movie.”

“Oh.” Keith’s shoulders slumped. He was disappointed. And against his better judgment, Ryuuga amended his statement with the truth.

“I know aliens are real.”

“Really?” Keith looked up again, his eyes wide, and he leaned forward a little on the bed. “How do you know? Have you seen them?”

“Never mind how I know, just trust me that I do. And trust that they’re nothing like in the movie,” Ryuuga said. “Now go on, get to sleep. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

“No I don’t. It’s just school,” Keith said. “What are aliens like? Did you meet them? What did they say? Could you understand them?”

“I said, never mind,” Ryuuga said. He was beginning to regret telling the truth. “It’s nothin’ you need to know right now. You—you’re too young.”

Keith blinked, processing this information, and then he made a face. “Eww, Dad—did you have sex with an alien?”

“Wha—I—you—why—what’re you—how’re you—” To say Ryuuga was flabbergasted was an understatement, and it was with great effort that he was able to form a coherent sentence again. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“You said that I’m too young to know. The last time you said I was too young for something was when you came home to find me watching that movie on HBO. When you were working again the next night I used the laptop to look up why the movie was rated R on the internet, and the internet said it was rated R for sexual content. I looked up what sexual content was on Wikipedia—” Ryuuga put his face in his hands, and Keith, heedless of this, plowed on, “—but it didn’t have a page, so I read the page on sexual intercourse instead.” His explanation done, Keith made another face. “So did you do it?”

“Did I do what?” Ryuuga asked, though he hated asking a second after he did, for Keith—not a shy bone in his body—asked:

“Did you have sex with an alien?”

Ryuuga stared at Keith for a hard second before he said, “You shouldn’t have—you shouldn’t’ve learned about any of this from Wikipedia or the internet. I’m takin’ the laptop with me the next time I go out.”

“What?!” Keith cried. “Dad—!”

“And it’s way past your bedtime. No more late night movies, Keith. I mean it.” Ryuuga kissed Keith atop his head, and nudged him to crawl under the covers. “Get to sleep. You’re gonna be real sorry come wake-up time at eight.”

“You could always let me skip,” Keith muttered. “School sucks, anyway. It’s not that important—”

“It’s more important than an education from Wikipedia,” Ryuuga said flatly. “Goodnight, Keith. Sweet dreams.”

(Years later, when he is first given reason to suspect he might be part-Galra, he will remember this, and panic and horror will set in when he realizes that his father never did answer whether or not he ever had sex with any aliens. He never said no.)

But aside from shenanigans like that, and the fact that Ryuuga’s parenting was clearly not the most stable (he really did try his best, Keith felt loved and happy, it’s just—that’s nowhere near a stable home environment, Keith saw a lot of things on TV he probably shouldn’t have, et cetera), Keith had a really nice (in his opinion) childhood with his dad, and he loved him a lot …

… until he was nine years old.

At some point during Keith’s nine year, Ryuuga once again left for one of his jobs that was supposed to last for a couple days. They had the motel for a month, Keith was given the standard instructions (here’s the food, here’s the knife, et cetera), and he was told to wait there until Ryuuga came back. And he did. He waited. And he waited. And he waited …

… but Ryuuga never came back.

Keith started to be very careful about his food rations after the first few days, but even though he ate them sparingly, he was still a hungry nine-year-old kid, and so they started to really deplete toward the end of the month. Ryuuga had left him some cash, so he utilized that in the vending machines at the motel, but tiny bags of chips can only get you so far when the bags are always half-empty. Plus, they only had the motel for a month, so when the motel manager came by the room to either have Ryuuga renew their stay or get out, she found not Ryuuga … but Keith.

“My dad’s not here right now,” Keith said.

To be honest, the motel manager was disturbed that a nine-year-old kid was left alone in a motel room for any stretch of time, but she felt more disturbed when she asked where his father was, and Keith said he was working. She felt even more disturbed when she asked when he would be back, and all Keith would (or could) say was, “Soon.” She kept an eye on that room for the remainder of the day, but Ryuuga still didn’t return. And seeing as how it hit nightfall and he was still not back yet, she ended up calling the police.

This … this did not go over well.

The police wanted to take Keith with them, because he was clearly an abandoned child. Keith, however, did not want to go, because even though he was just about out of food and money for the vending machine, his dad said that he would be back soon, and Keith believed him. Yeah, it had been several weeks, but maybe his job was just taking longer than normal. It happened. It had never happened before, but it could happen now. Keith believed his dad when he said he’d be back. Keith believed him. And Keith needed to keep his word and wait there so that his dad wouldn’t worry. His dad was always worried about him, he was always scared of Keith getting lost—Keith couldn’t give him reason to be afraid by actually running off, he couldn’t do that.

That said, he also knew better than to use his knife against the police. So he put that into his bag when he saw that it was police at the door, and he didn’t fight them with it … but he did fight. He struggled, a lot. And although he was a nine-year-old kid, he was a nine-year-old kid who—when he saw they were intent on pulling him out of the motel room when he refused to go quietly—started kicking, thrashing, punching, and doing whatever he could to get out of their hold. So, in all likelihood, they probably cuffed him before pushing him into the back of the car. It wasn’t a real arrest, but it was a restraint so that he’d stop fighting them (and biting them, ffs, he made one of them bleed) long enough for them to get him down to the station.

To say that this was a traumatic experience for Keith is an understatement. However much all the moving around, secrecy, and times being left alone might have shaped him in his early years, being forcibly dragged out of that motel room after his dad had been gone for weeks by police officers was not a happy experience for him. It became even less happy when they kept him there for the night, and then turned him over to child protective services the next day so that arrangements could be made for him to be put into foster care.

“I don’t need a foster family,” he told them. “I’ve got a family—my dad will be back, he said he would—”

But nobody listened.

Keith was given over to a foster family, and he hated them. He hated them on principle because they weren’t his dad, because his dad was probably back at the motel room, probably going out of his mind with worry about where Keith was, and Keith wasn’t allowed to go back there, or even so much as call the motel to ask if his dad had shown up yet. He did at least have some of his stuff; the police had grabbed Keith’s backpack, which had some clothes and his knife in it (how they didn’t find the knife is anyone’s guess, but Keith had buried it pretty deep), and also one of his toy lightsabers. Unfortunately, one of his new foster siblings broke the toy lightsaber, so. That was gone relatively quickly, and all he had after that was what he had in the backpack (clothes, knife).

Things didn’t work out with that foster family. Keith was constantly snapping at and mouthing off to the foster parents, because they were not his parents, these kids weren’t his siblings (especially the one who broke his lightsaber, because that jerk did it on purpose and Keith could tell), he wanted to go back to his dad, he needed to go back for his dad, his dad would be waiting for him, let him go. He tried running away several times, only to be brought back by the police each time. After about two months of this the foster parents gave him back up to social services, though it was determined that his next foster family would be one two cities over. When Keith learned this en route, he opened the car door and flung himself out of it (thankfully, they weren’t at the highway yet, the car was not going that fast, and he hit a grassy hill on the side of the road besides). It was bad enough he’d had to suffer two months in a foster home, but at least then he was in the same city as his dad. How could his dad find him if he was in another city altogether? Keith couldn’t let that happen, so he jumped from the car, picked himself up, took off running …

… and after some time got caught again, and this time got taken in a police car to his next foster family.

This happened … progressively … over the next few years. Keith was bounced from foster home to foster home, with nothing but a backpack, clothes, and his knife. He had decided, after the first night they took him away from that motel room, that he wasn’t going to let any of them see him cry. He was angry—he was furious—and yeah, he missed his dad, he missed … he missed his dad so much, but—when that one foster kid broke his lightsaber, he taunted Keith over whether Keith was going to start crying or not. Truthfully, Keith had kinda felt like it, because it had been a rough couple of days by that point. But that taught him that these people would use his tears against him. They would sense a weakness and jump on it, and he didn’t want to give that to them. His dad had always told him to keep things close to his chest. Only tell people what they needed to know. And none of these people needed to know how much Keith missed his dad. It was none of their business.

So Keith was bounced around. I imagine all of this taking place in Missouri, but the Garrison is in Arizona(-ish). Therefore, I imagine that perhaps by the time Keith was thirteen or fourteen the Garrison was already looking at recruiting kids from all over the U.S. Yes, many kids enlisted voluntarily, some were from well-off families … but considering that the Garrison is military, and also space exploration, it makes sense to me that they might try recruiting orphans, or kids from lower-income neighborhoods. Kids who are easy prey (as military recruiters do), or who won’t have anyone to miss them when they’re gone. They might set up recruiters at middle and high schools to talk to kids, and to get them started on special programs to ensure that they’ll meet the academic requirements necessary for admission into the Garrison by the time they’re fifteen (or likewise, guidance counselors might recommend them to parents, a sort of “you can send your kid off and it’s like a military school, it’s good for them, will teach them discipline, et cetera). And this, perhaps, was how Keith met Shiro. His foster family at the moment was fed up with him, as usual, because even if he wasn’t actually causing trouble, by the time he was thirteen or fourteen people looked at him and thought him a loner delinquent regardless of what he did. So when they heard that the Galaxy Garrison had a special program where kids as young as thirteen could be sent to Arizona where they would then stay and be mentored by a commanding officer until they could be admitted into the school as a student proper, well … they figured that was perfect. They tried to upsell it as being in Keith’s best interests, space is fun, et cetera, but Keith …

Well, in honesty, he didn’t care so much. Any care he did have was that if he was sent to Arizona, there really would be no hope of finding his dad again any time soon. It had been four or five years, but he still had hope. His dad was out there somewhere. Maybe, if he stuck around long enough …

But it was out of his hands. He was shipped off to Arizona. And he figured, okay, maybe this is for the best. Maybe he could escape whatever “commanding officer” they put him with, hotwire a car, and get back to Missouri to go find his dad himself. He hadn’t learned how to drive yet, but automatic transmissions just required you to put the car in Drive and press the gas. It couldn’t be that hard.

Well, that didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen because when Keith arrived in Arizona and was picked up by the officers from the Galaxy Garrison, he was introduced to Takashi Shirogane (who would have been about twenty at the time, perhaps recently graduated). And he was told that Shiro would be the one mentoring and teaching him so that he could pass the entrance exams and get into the Garrison. (He might have stayed with him as well, or maybe he would have been put into a dorm with other prospective, orphaned / delinquent thirteen-year-olds. Or maybe he started there, but it wasn’t a good fit, so Shiro secretly let Keith come stay with him sometimes, who knows.) And truthfully, this all still didn’t excite Keith at first. He was still keen on stealing a car to go find his dad. But Shiro foiled every one of those attempts, and was patient and seemed to actually, genuinely care about him, and slowly … slowly … Keith not only gave up on stealing a car to go find his dad, but he also came to look forward to getting into and graduating from the Garrison, and also … for the first time since he lost his dad, he found someone who genuinely cared about him, and who he genuinely cared about (loved) in return. Someone that he was actually comfortable calling family.

(“Shiro?” he asked once, maybe about six or so months after they met.

“Yeah?”

“If … if a parent went to the police to ask after their missing kid, and the police knew the kid was in foster care … would they tell him?”

Shiro looked away from the TV, but Keith wasn’t looking at him. Keith had his chin on his knees, and was staring determinedly at the television set. Shiro didn’t know a lot about Keith’s past—he knew that he was orphaned, and in foster care, but that was about it—but he didn’t have to know in order to have a guess at what (and why) Keith was asking.

“It … depends, I think,” he said slowly. “If the parent was dangerous, or the police thought it was unsafe to return the kid to him—”

“He wasn’t,” Keith said quickly. His throat sounded thick, but his eyes were clear. “He was a great dad.”

“Then … yeah, they’d probably tell him,” Shiro said. “If he was a great dad, then I’m sure the police would tell him where his kid was.”

Keith didn’t reply. He didn’t look away from the television, and though he swallowed hard, Shiro didn’t see any tears fall. But as Keith sat there, his arms hugging his knees and his eyes practically boring holes into the television set, he thought maybe that was the wrong thing to say.)

And that … that’s all I’ve got at the moment.

#starlightprincess17 #keith has not really had a stable life #but that's what happens when you are conceived and born in space #////#/////#voltron #keith kogane #ryuuga kogane #krolia

14 notes · View notes