Chapter Text
Shiro
Twenty-Three
Shiro can't stop looking at Keith, cataloguing his every detail and wishing, wishing wishing there was something he could have done different, something he could have done right. Something that would stop the bleeding and un-break a nose that's obviously been broken at least twice. Twice in three months.
Christ.
Shiro closes his eyes and hangs on and tries not to count ribs as he says over and over again "I'm here, I'm here," like a mantra now because it's lost all value as a promise and Shiro hates that.
There's a steadily spreading wet spot in the middle of Shiro's t-shirt and it rattles him to the core.
He hasn't seen Keith cry since he was four years old.
"I was following you!"
Goddammit.
He bends down and presses a kiss to the top of his kid brother's head like he's five instead of fifteen because Keith, tough, dependable, smart Keith, Keith the kid who was holding off three other teenagers, all bigger than him (god, Shiro can't get that sight out of his head, his little brother with his lips drawn back in a snarl, clenching his fists and bracing himself for a blow that doesn't land but might have if Shiro hadn't shown up, if Shiro was any slower). Keith is shaking like a leaf. Nothing big or obvious, just a slight live-wire tremor running across his skin.
Shiro feels like he's spent most of his life worrying about this kid. He probably has.
"Come on," he orders again; his voice is rough, "Get your stuff, we're leaving."
Keith tenses and pulls away, his face shuttering in a way Shiro has never seen. He just closes down, no expression, no emotion; his eyes, the color of space, purple-blue-black and infinite, a blank void.
"Sure," Keith says and his eyes are bloodshot but aren't wet anymore. Around them the hyena-pack has gone silent, three teens with bloodied faces staring at him with wary, feral eyes, their foster mother with her half-done makeup looking caught somewhere between indignation and confusion. Shiro can see where this would have gone if he hadn't shown up. She would have barreled in and shouted at Keith and shooed the rest of them away, shouted some more, thrown on some more restrictions and the minute she left the room Keith would have been out the window like a desert wind.
The social worker's lips are pressed together in a hard line and her fingers are tight on her briefcase. "This was obviously not a good fit," she says into the silence, a verbal bandaid; a hasty patch job meant to soothe the building tension without having to address it.
Shiro stares her down and she looks back with tired eyes. "Obviously," he says coldly because he can't muster up the energy to play nice anymore. He's tired too.
"He started it, y'know," one of the teens mutters.
Shiro looks at him and the kid slouches even harder, like bad posture makes him look tough.
"The freak, he started it," the boy accuses.
Shiro stares at him, "You think I give a fuck about that when I just saw three guys corner my brother and beat the shit out of him?" Shiro doesn't raise his voice, doesn't even emphasize the profanity, keeps his tone flat and even and edged like a blade, "and for what? What did any of you get out of that?" He shakes his head, "what a waste of time."
The foster mother looks like she wants to argue and the teens look like they're about to start calling Shiro really foul names in lieu of actual protest. But Keith appears in the doorway with a backpack, a big black duffle bag and a portable radio/cassette player.
"Shiro," his voice is quiet and Shiro is reminded of years of summers, of how the first few days of hyperactive joy at his arrival would give way to a pensive, quiet Keith who had to relearn how to share space with someone else.
"Can we go now?"
Shiro nods, "Yeah, lets go."
Neither of them look back.
...
Keith paces the perimeter of Shiro's apartment like a cat learning its new space. Shiro half-expects his brother to bolt like a kitten and find a hiding spot. Except this is New York and the apartment is small and cramped and the only hiding space to be had is the fire escape. It's a studio and it reminds Shiro a little uncomfortably of the summer they spent living in an abandoned shack in the desert. Of how the dust and sand would cling to everything, hiding in the floorboards and the sheets and the creases of your skin.
Keith tosses his bags onto the couch and says, "I guess I sleep here," a quiet mumble at the floor, face veiled by messy hair - he never has been able to keep his cowlicks under control.
"Uh, yeah," Shiro says, rubbing at the back of his neck, "I'd give you the tour but," he shrugs, it's a studio apartment, everything but the bathroom and Shiro's fold-up bed are visible without much looking, "what you see is what you get."
Keith looks up and around at that, as if he has to confirm that he sees it all in order to get it. He has hungry eyes. He nods as he looks around. "Okay."
"Yeah?"
Keith nods again, more firmly this time, "yeah, okay."
It's a start.
…
Shiro is in his second year of nursing school and working nights at a bar downtown.
"I'm a big guy," he explains with an awkward shrug, "I can typically stop stuff before it gets too rough."
Keith listens to this with his head tipped to the side, considering. He doesn't talk much. It's like losing their mother fundamentally changed something in Keith. Three months in foster care didn't help either.
But he loves that radio. He held it in his arms the whole drive back - a drive because Shiro can't afford to fly anywhere and even when his father, awkward, shoulders hunched forward, eyes not quite meeting his son's offered to pay for Shiro's ticket to Phoenix Shiro found himself refusing. He couldn't do it; he couldn't take his father's money for this. He wasn't sure why but it felt wrong.
And he knew what it had cost his stepmother when his father went to Mom's funeral with him.
The ghost of Diana Kogane and what once was would never leave the Shirogane men and sometimes that was too much for Stella to bear.
On the road back Shiro had reached for the car stereo but a soft "Stop" from Keith had him halting and waiting while his brother yanked his backpack open and pulled out a second-hand cassette and forced it into the plastic tray, snapping it closed with finality. He fiddled with the buttons until some song by the Indigo Girls Shiro recognized but couldn't place filled the car.
"Mom's favorite band," Keith explained, looking out the window.
"I remember."
They listened to the whole tape, singing along to some of the more recognizable tunes and by the time it ran out of sound Keith's hands were flying, replacing it with The Eagles and Shiro was laughing at his brother's old-fashioned taste while they belted out 'Take It Easy' and crooned along to 'Hotel California'.
…
Keith hates school.
Shiro probably should have seen this coming.
Keith is perfectly content to spend the whole day out on the fire escape, listening to the city and reading Great Expectations but god help them all if Keith had to do anything because a teacher told him to.
Keith nearly gives Shiro a stroke when Shiro finds himself called out of class one day because his brother is truant and no one knows where he is. His veins immediately fill with ice and dread. Shiro rushes home only to find Keith out on the fire escape as usual, staring at the windows of the skyscraper across the way with a pensive line between his brows.
"KEITH," Shiro roars and is slightly gratified when his brother twitches like a guilty cat and looks at him.
"The bus system is confusing," Keith says because his main defense mechanism is fighting and misleading non-sequiturs, "it was easier to get around Phoenix."
Shiro nearly bursts a blood vessel; he can feel his jaw tic. "Keith, get your ass inside right now and tell me why you're not in school." It is taking everything Shiro has not to scream at his brother right now.
Dammit, his heart won't slow down, how do actual parents do this? How does it not kill them?
Keith narrows his eyes at him but climbs inside, immediately crossing his arms and slouching. "What?"
"Why. Are. You. Not. In. School."
Keith shrugs, "I didn't want to be."
"Keith," Shiro growls.
"They don't want me there either!" Keith protests, "They think I'm too stupid or have 'discipline issues' and 'difficult personality'. Literally no one gives a fuck if I'm there or not. Actually, I'm pretty sure they like it better if I'm not there. So why the fuck go?" He glares are Shiro and Shiro can't help but remember bruised eyes and a bloody nose.
"It's all useless anyway," Keith mutters.
"Keith, you have to go to school."
"Why?!" Keith demands, "Mom didn't make me go to school. She said you learned more living life than stuck in one place."
Shiro's lips curl and he is this close to saying something he will really regret about their mother but he chokes down the words. "Mom didn't know everything."
"Mom was a fucking genius!"
"I'm not talking about Mom right now, I'm talking about you!" Shiro shouts, suddenly exhausted, the adrenaline dump of 'oh god, Keith is wandering New York City alone, what if Keith's dead in an alley somewhere, what if Keith's hurt/run away/in danger?' finally fading, "You have to graduate high school, okay? After that, do whatever makes you happy. But high school is where I draw the line. A high school diploma means you can get better jobs, maybe go to college; get into trade school, whatever. Just go to high school and get the stupid piece of paper that, hey, might make your life easier, okay? Just, please, try. For me."
Keith stares at him and Shiro wonders if it worked, if he got anywhere with this stubborn, too-smart kid and his thick skull.
"Okay," Keith finally says, eyes narrow and considering, "I'll do it. For now."
Shiro sighs and runs a hand down his face. Fine. It'll do for now.
...
Shiro is pretty sure Keith is in love with Central Park. One of Keith's first weekends in New York Shiro impulsively woke him up one Saturday morning with a brisk, "Get up, we're going somewhere cool," and thirty minutes later was dragging a still-yawning Keith onto the Subway and away.
The minute Keith saw the park his eyes got huge and he actually rocked back on his heels, one hand propped on his hip (their mom did that too - Shiro has a photo of their mom and nine-year-old Keith at a canyon, their backs to Shiro and their hands on their hips, unconsciously mimicking each other.). "Holy shit," Keith breathed, "It's so green."
Sometimes Shiro forgets his brother has never been out of the desert.
They spent the day roaming the park, stopping for hot dogs and ice cream cones and street falafel whenever they got hungry. Keith climbed thirteen different trees and for a while was just jumping from tree to tree while Shiro yelled at him that he was insane and could he please come down before Shiro had a heart attack?
A very nice officer on horseback finally asked Keith to please get down and Keith, to Shiro's consternation, actually obeyed with no argument. The officer went on his way with a wry smile and a shake of his head and Shiro gave his brother a look.
"What?" Keith shrugged, "he's just a guy doing his job, why would I make his life harder? He was really nice about it too."
Shiro stared at his brother and shook his head, "You've got layers, kid, lots of weird layers."
Keith snorted and rolled his eyes, "Fine, see if I act like an upstanding citizen again." But he didn't fight it when Shiro threw an arm around his shoulders and ruffled his hair.
They stumbled across an amusement park some rich businessman had built for his equally rich kids and was now open for public use. It's all kiddie rides they're technically too old and definitely too tall for but they bought cotton candy and ate it sitting on a park bench, Keith perched on the back, feet propped on the seat, Shiro sitting like a normal person, both feet firmly on the ground.
"Wonder what it's like," Keith said over the sounds of little kids squeaking in delight.
"What?"
"Having your name on an amusement park. Even a little one. Knowing your dad just casually built this whole thing for you."
"Had built," Shiro corrected him, "had built for you. It's different."
"How?"
"I dunno. I guess spending money's easy? Spending time isn't."
"Yeah but if time is money..."
"I don't want to play a logic game, Keith," Shiro chuckled, "you asked me what I thought. That's what I think."
Keith was quiet for a beat before saying "it was cheesy as hell."
"Shut up. Let's keep moving."
They spent the whole day in Central Park and when they got home Keith was smiling brighter than Shiro had seen in a long time.
...
Shiro doesn't hate his stepmother. Stella is a good woman and his father loves her (not the way he loved Shiro's mother, not in that tragic, desperately devoted way and perhaps that's for the best, perhaps this quieter love is better, or at least less painful).
But she is driving Shiro mad.
"How is Keith settling in?" She asks, a tense razor-edge to her voice, vibrating like a saw, "Not getting into too much trouble, I hope? Your father says he was raised very...different."
"Keith is fine. It's an adjustment."
"Well, if you don't have enough space you might want to consider getting a bigger place, your father and I will help as much as we can...it's unfortunate this had to happen..."
Shiro is twenty-three years old. He doesn't want to be any further in his father's debt than he already is. "We're fine. Keith likes it here."
"But are you alright? It just seems like it'd be a bit...cramped. What with having another person there..."
Stella doesn't like calling Keith his brother. Shiro thinks his mother makes her uneasy, despite the two women never meeting (Shiro tries and fails to imagine that meeting and isn't sure if he wants to laugh or cringe).
"We're brothers, I think we can handle fighting over the bathroom, ma'am," Shiro says, putting some distance between them with the honorific, passive-aggressively reasserting his and Keith's bond with the comment.
It's mean - Shiro shouldn't be like this, but he's tired and he had a test today and he has a shift tonight and Keith is grimacing through his biology homework like the subject physically pains him.
"Well as long as you're fine..." Stella huffs and Shiro hears the ghost of their conversation before he took off for Phoenix.
"You don't have to take him. It sounds like he's been placed. Foster care can be good for some children."
"He's my brother. I promised I'd come for him."
"But is it best?"
"I promised."
Shiro hangs up with his stepmother feeling drained. He pours himself an extra cup of coffee and sits down heavily next to Keith. He ruffles his kid brother's hair and sees the line of tension between his shoulder- blades.
"She was talking about me again, wasn't she?" Keith asks, scratching out a paragraph response to a comprehension question. The pages of his textbook are stained and scribbled on in handwriting not his. The diagram of a cell Keith drew above his numbered responses is more detailed than the textbook’s. Although it could just seem that way to Shiro - the book's color-coded diagram is a grayish smear to his color-dead vision.
"Yeah, kiddo, she was." Shiro takes a large gulp of his coffee and regrets it. It's way too hot.
"She doesn't like me."
"She doesn't like the fact that my dad is still in love with our mom," Shiro says bluntly. He never could lie to Keith.
"Really?"
"Yep."
"Huh," Keith goes back to scrawling out lazy sentences, Shiro is pretty sure every good grade that boy gets is out of pure spite. Shiro doesn't know what Keith's biology teacher back in Phoenix said to him but Keith hates the subject and yet excels at it with a single-minded passion. "I think Mom was still kind of in love with my dad. I think she was waiting for him to come back."
Shiro takes another sip of coffee.
It still burns.
...
Apparently Keith joined a club and earned the undying hatred of half the athletic student body population without Shiro knowing. These two facts are unrelated beyond Keith coming home with a black eye, a split lip and a packet of posters for the school play on the same day.
"Can you help me hang these up?" Keith asks, holding out the posters even as Shiro sputters questions about the injuries.
"What happened to your face?!" Shiro finally manages to force out.
Keith just shrugs, "The football team was playing truth or dare at lunch. Things got out of hand."
"And you're on the football team?" Shiro is skeptical. It's not that Keith isn't athletic - he's basically bones and muscle held together by skin and attitude - but he's not really a team player and he thinks most rules are stupid.
"Nah. They dared one of the guys to kiss a drama nerd for like, five seconds, I think? I dunno, I didn't want him harassing one of the girls, so I said I bet he was too chicken to kiss me."
"So the football team beat you up?"
Rage is boiling in Shiro's chest - he wants to find that football team and beat the crap out of them for hurting his kid brother.
Keith shrugs, "I think they were mad about how much he liked it,” he puts the posters down, apparently giving up on Shiro taking them in the next century and gets some orange juice out of the fridge and pours himself a glass, "So I'm the new school slut and the new school troublemaker, my reputation is awesome."
Shiro breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, "please tell me those boys were suspended."
Keith takes a swig of orange juice and winces when the acid burns his split lip, "Probably if someone narc-ed. I'm kind of the hero of the losers now? So if someone saw them jump me after gym, then probably."
"That's it," Shiro said, "I'm calling the school."
"Why?"
"Because some asssholes can't make a game out of forcing people to kiss each other and they definitely can't beat up my kid brother up for kissing another boy. I won't allow it!"
Keith raises an eyebrow, "Gonna right all the world's wrongs, Shiro? Gonna fight all the injustice out there with what? Your stunning personality? Let me handle it."
"Keith, you're bleeding. Because some dickheads think they have the right to hurt you. That's messed up. That's wrong."
Keith looks at him with cool, assessing eyes and Shiro wonders if anyone has ever stuck up for this kid in his life. If Mom ever noticed when he came home with scrapes and bruises. If she pulled him out of school because it was easier to avoid their problems than confront them.
"Okay, call the school if it'll make you feel better," Keith says, trying to act casual, like he doesn't care, when he's watching Shiro's every move as he places the call.
After Shiro is done airing his very valid concerns in forceful, barely-polite terms he hangs up, takes a deep breath and turns back to his brother, “they will be dealt with."
Keith nods, one eyebrow arched skeptically.
"So?” Shiro says, pouring himself a glass of orange juice too, “You joined the drama club?"
Keith chokes on a laugh, “Yeah, yeah, I did.” He shakes his head, “When you get detention they either give you to the janitor to clean stuff or they give you to the drama teacher to build stuff. I got lucky, they needed people to build stuff more than they needed people to clean stuff.”
“When did you get detention?” Shiro asks. He can feel his brows furrowing – this damn kids is going to give him worry lines by age thirty at this rate.
Keith rolls his eyes, “Whenever. I started doing stuff on purpose just to work on sets for a while. Until they stuck me on janitor duty,” he makes a face, “They don’t even teach you to mop right.”
“There’s a right way to mop?”
Keith gives him a very expressive ‘duh’ look, “Yeah, mop a few stages sometime. They’ll teach you have to mop right. They’re really picky. Or Ms. Kincaid is. She’s the drama teacher.”
“So how come I never got a call from the school about your many detentions?” Shiro asks archly.
Keith doesn’t even look shifty, the brat, “I gave them the number of the pizza delivery place instead of our home phone on the enrollment paperwork. The only accurate number on there is your cell on the emergency contact part. Y’know, just in case I’m in the hospital or the school burns down or something.”
Shiro drops his face into his hands and groans. “Keith.”
Keith is utterly unrepentant, “And then Ms. Kincaid stops me in the hall when I’m mopping, correctly, and says ‘you know you don’t have to be in detention to help out’. So I’m part of drama club now, I guess? I’m a stagehand for the show. So you should probably come. Or something. Just to admire how invisible I am as I move furniture around in the dark in all black clothing.”
“You’ve found your dream job,” Shiro says dryly, “Professional poltergeist.”
“Pretty much, yeah,” And Keith is grinning despite it pulling on his split lip.
…
That night Shiro wakes up suddenly, sits bolt upright in bed and practically jumps off it to shake Keith awake. “Keith. Keith. Keith.”
“What?” Keith growls.
“You said you were the ‘new school slut’. Did Mom give you the, you know, The Talk?”
Keith looks profoundly offended as only Keith can, “You woke me up to ask me that?”
“I need to make sure I don’t fail as your guardian.”
“Ugh. Yes. Of course our mother who, if you remember, got accidentally pregnant with me from unprotected sex gave me the Talk when I was like, thirteen. You can sleep easy at night knowing I am a very safe school slut.”
“Keith.”
“Shiro.”
“I worry about you.”
“Well, I’m gay so worry less.”
“Yeah, it’s more of a general vague ‘what if I fuck up and your life is horrible because no one taught you how to be safe or make good choices or, I don’t know, cross the street correctly’ sort of worry. Possible teen pregnancy doesn’t really factor in.”
“Your face is dumb. Go back to sleep.”
“I’m trying to be a good guardian.”
“You have done well, I bless thee as a very excellent and fretful guardian,” Keith sighs, “Now go the fuck to sleep.”
Shiro flicks him in the middle of his forehead and Keith flips him off as Shiro trudges back to bed. Well. That went fine, right?
…
Shiro does go to the show, and admittedly, slightly overdone adolescent performances of The Diary of Anne Frank are not usually his cup of tea. But he loves the huge grin opening night puts on his brother’s face (now mostly healed of its bruises and contusions) and he is willing to admit that the set looks pretty sturdy and Keith the stagehand was very invisible.
(Shiro has a sinking feeling that this is going to end in Keith buying even more black clothing in bulk and he’s not wrong – but it’s still worth it.)
The next show the high school is doing is A Christmas Carol. “Because,” according to Keith, “not enough people were down with Chekhov at Christmastime.” Keith claims, “I still think Russian writer equals winter equals great winter play but whatever, Yuletide fun.” (Keith is turning into quite the little cynic and Shiro is trying valiantly not to laugh and hug the stuffing out of him whenever he gets particularly pretentious and absurd.)
Keith is helping build that set too and might get to assist in props if he plays his cards right and Shiro doesn’t really get the complex politics involved in high school drama, but he’s willing to listen just to see Keith enthusiastic about something other than Central Park.
Of course, this new passion for the stage has Keith stalking into their apartment after school one day saying “That’s it, I’m rewriting the script,” so Shiro might want to reserve judgment on this one.
“Oh?” Shiro looks up from his own homework, his head foggy and frustrated with staring at the computer screen for too long. His inability to see color makes the internet a trial some days. His eyes are very tired.
“Well, actually, I’m writing a new one,” his brother announces, starting a fresh pot of coffee and pulling…three packets of ramen noodles out of the cabinet.
“What?” Shiro’s still not tracking.
“The script they have is garbage, totally strips the language of any nuance. Completely neuters the story, removes nearly all of the wit and humor of the original Dickens story. I mean, come on,” Keith huffs, putting a pot of water on the stove and setting it to boil, “It’s fucking Dickens, that prose is graceful as fuck. I will not have it defamed like this.”
Shiro shakes his head, “So your response is to make instant noodles?”
“This is fuel, Shiro!” Keith declares, “Fuel for this great endeavor!”
“Keith, you’re getting weird again.” Some days Keith almost seems normal and then he does stuff like this and Shiro sees so much of their mom in Keith Shiro almost can’t believe he missed it before.
“I’m writing my own adaptation of a Christmas Carol, Shiro.” Keith says, leaning over the island, eyes a light and dancing, like their mom’s used to when she felt like she was on the edge of a breakthrough, “and I’m doing it right.”
“Is that legal? What about copyright?”
“Public domain!” Keith is practically jittering in place as he stirs his pasta, “Hey, do you want some ramen?”
Shiro sighs, “Sure.”
“Okay.” Keith goes and gets another packet and add it to the three already in the pot, “That one’s for you.”
The kid’s insane. How did Shiro get a crazy person for a brother?
…
Keith stays up all night mainlining coffee and ramen and a truly regrettable amount of Red Hots and writes his own stage adaptation of a Christmas Carol. When Shiro finds him lying face-first on the breakfast bar, surrounded by mugs and bowls and empty Red Hots boxes he blinks groggily and says “I did it,” and grins like the sun.
Shiro kind of wants to find whoever it was that told Keith he couldn’t manage it and laugh in their face really aggressively.
…
Keith’s reworked Christmas Carol is script is, admittedly, pretty great. Shiro reads it over to check for spelling and grammar errors as his brother hovers restlessly over his shoulder like a neurotic hummingbird. The minute Shiro oks it Keith is grabbing it out of his hands and racing off to school. (He’s heavily caffeinated. Shiro is pretty sure he’ll be unconscious by lunch but at least he seems happy.)
…
Keith is definitely unconscious by lunch. Before lunch, actually. He falls asleep standing on second base in gym class and breaks his nose for the third time when a baseball nails him between the eyes. He also has a minor concussion and Shiro almost has major heart failure when he gets the call. (Seriously, Shiro feels like he needs to join a support group – accidental parents of difficult teens anonymous – but he feels like that’s a bit too niche to actually be a thing.)
Keith is pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, although he keeps threatening to find whoever threw the baseball and kick their ass and he’s particularly offended that the gym teacher didn’t notice he was asleep and maybe pull him off the field before something bad (i.e. airborne deathballs) happened. Shiro keeps the very groggy Keith from escaping his hospital room to hunt down the perpetrators mostly by being bigger, more reasonable and significantly stronger than the addled Keith.
“Was it worth it?” Shiro huffs, exasperated, when he finally gets Keith back to the apartment.
Keith beams at him, letting Shiro guide him back into the studio, “Yeah, it totally was. Okay, really sleepy now.” And then he’s unconscious dead weight again and Shiro curses a blue streak and barely keeps him from hitting the floor.
Yeah, Shiro definitely needs a support group.
…
They do Thanksgiving at his father’s house and Shiro instantly regrets it. His stepmother is awkward; Keith is terrified but refuses to show it (which basically translates to Keith is silent and prone to unnerving staring and occasional flashes of temper when pressed) and Shiro’s father is obviously uncomfortable. (That one Shiro actually regrets – his father has done a lot for him, his father has always, always, tried to do right by everyone and this only puts him between a rock and a hard place – Shiro is old enough that he gets no vindictive pleasure out of the role reversal, just a kind of lingering sadness.)
Shiro’s stepsiblings don’t know what to make of Keith. There are two of them, Aubrey and Anika, twenty and eighteen respectively and they spend the first few hours after their arrival obviously biting back questions and giving each other significant looks.
Stella makes everything worse, chattering away over dinner about how well her girls are doing in college and how it’s really too bad Shiro didn’t go to school until now, he’s such a bright boy, really wasted so much of his life just wandering around like that – and it takes a few quiet words from Shiro’s father about his military service to shut her up.
“So how old are you…Keith?” Aubrey tries to cover up her mother’s faux pas by changing the subject. Stella’s not a bad woman, Shiro reminds himself; she just puts her foot in her mouth when she’s uncomfortable. Badly. She puts her foot in her mouth badly.
“Fifteen,” Keith says. He’s shrinking in on himself, making himself seem smaller, trying to take up less space, while tensing his body, readying himself to spring up and fight if he needs to.
“So what grade are you in?” Anika picks up her sister’s line of questioning, trying to fill the silence with small talk.
“I’m a sophomore.”
“Do you like school?”
Keith shrugs and that’s not Shiro’s brother. That’s not bright, exuberant Keith who obsesses over Dickens and junk food and loves Central Park. Shiro’s heart aches a bit.
“Sorry, we’re kind of burnt out from the drive,” Shiro says, and it’s true, it’s a long way to go from New York to Virginia, “We ran out of music halfway through so Keith just read Tale of Two Cities out loud until my brain was as tired as the rest of me.” He gets a polite chuckle out of that and a slight loosening of Keith’s shoulders.
“It was that or Shakespeare.”
“I’m pretty sure I can understand Dickens a little bit better than the Bard, kiddo.”
“You’re smarter than you think you are.”
“It’s not about being smart it’s about the stupid accents you do. Makes it impossible to follow.”
“That’s the point of Shakespeare!” Keith protests, some light coming back to his eyes, “Doing the voices!”
“No, the point of Shakespeare is gory deaths and sneaky sexual puns.”
“Mom used to do the best voices,” Keith protests, “Especially in the comedies.”
“You were way too young for some of those.”
“Eh,” Keith shrugs, “I’m a ‘bastard begot’, aren’t I? Seems kind of fitting.”
“Don’t quote plays I can’t remember at me,” Shiro groans theatrically, around a laugh and it’s only when Keith is chuckling in return that they realize that everyone else at the table is just watching them uncomfortably.
Shiro is hoping Keith doesn’t notice, but of course he does and is right back in his shell just like before.
“Well,” Anika says awkwardly, “Did everyone see the game last night?”
They make stilted conversation about football for the rest of the meal and Keith is dead quiet.
…
Shiro finds his father out on the patio again. He’s not smoking, but his face is wreathed by steam from his breath. It’s cold.
“Hey, Dad.”
Shirogane nods at him, “She doesn’t mean any harm.”
“I know.”
“Your brother. He looks like your mother.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s a good kid,” Shirogane surprises him. Shiro turns to look at him but his father isn’t facing him, he’s watching the stars, “You need to stop worrying about me, Takashi.”
“What?”
“You mother and I…we weren’t ever going to be. If there’s such a thing as ‘star-crossed’ we were it. But I loved her, probably too much. But it’s the past and it’s gone. I’m sorry if we’ve hurt you but I’m not sorry you came to be, you understand, son? Being your father has been a great gift. Just like I think being that kid’s brother has been a gift to you.”
Shiro finds himself smiling slightly, “Dad. Did you just make a star-crossed pun?”
Shirogane doesn’t respond, but the corners of his lips curl up ever so slightly.
“Because Mom was obsessed with aliens…? You made a pun. My image of you is irrevocably changed. You made a pun. It’s the end of the world as we know it. My father just made a pun and told me he’s proud of me. Is this the finale of a heartwarming family dramedy? Are there cameras I should know about?”
“Shut up, kiddo,” Shirogane says gruffly, but he’s smiling.
…
“Your dad is pretty cool but can we do Christmas our way?” Keith asks, slouching deep into his coat and seat in Shiro’s car on the way back to the city.
“Yeah, kiddo. We can do Christmas our way.”
“Good. Because your stepmother was talking about church and apparently there are rules and I don’t understand any of them.”
Shiro chuckles, “Oh you feral desert child.”
“Shut up.”
Yeah, they’re okay.