Chapter Text
I Can Hold the Weight of Worlds (if that’s what you need)
Six
Shiro’s parents get divorced when he’s six years old. He doesn’t really know what’s going on, just that there used to be a lot of shouting and now there’s just silence and a new kind of cold that isn’t on his skin, it’s under it and no matter how many blankets he wraps around his shoulders like it’s not enough to make it go away.
He remembers it clearly – the night he realized that it was over. His father was out on the patio, sitting on a wicker chair, elbows braced on his knees, his boots on his feet and a cigarette between his lips. His head was bowed over loosely clasped hands and for a moment Shiro – Takashi then. He used to just be Takashi, sometimes Taka if his mommy was feeling playful. He was small then. For a moment Takashi thought his daddy was praying like he’d seen people do on television.
His father was staring out and away, up at the stars and Shiro remembers the exact way he looked. His father was so big to him, broad-shouldered and powerful. Quiet like a stone, like the earth, full of infinite patience and a kind of rumbling power. Shiro remembers the bright ember flaring at the end of his father’s cigarette, the way the weak light reflected off the panes of Shirogane’s face. (It was years before Shiro knew his father’s given name – he was always just ‘Shirogane’.) It made everything look grayscale, a world with the color subtracted, pared away until there was nothing left but a worn man and a bright orange ember.
“Daddy?”
Shirogane turned towards his son with old eyes, “Takashi. Come here.”
Takashi approached his father, stood in front of him and allowed himself to be lifted onto his father’s knee.
“Look at the stars, Takashi. What do you see?”
Takashi thought long and hard about his answer. What to tell his daddy? What would make his daddy happy? He had looked so sad lately.
But then he stopped himself. Wait. What was Daddy asking? What did he really see when he looked at the stars?
“Somewhere new,” Takashi finally said, decisive and hopeful at the same time, “Someplace we’ve never been.”
“Do you think anything’s out there, Takashi?” Shirogane just sounded so hopeless and Shiro remembers this conversation even now because of its surreality; its mystery and its finality. It’s the sort of conversation lost far deep in the murky past that returns to mind only when one is old enough to finally understand what it meant.
“Mommy thinks so,” Takashi told his father with all the innocent honesty of a child, “But I think it’s too far away for us.”
“What do you mean?” And it’s only now that Shiro understands that tone in Shirogane’s voice, that searching sound that meant he was looking for answers in a world that had none – and he knew it.
“Well, if it’s out there it’s out there,” six-year-old Shiro struggled with his words, struggled to communicate something bigger than his vocabulary, “Mommy’s not going to find it here.”
Shirogane sighed and extinguished his cigarette. “I don’t think she’s going to find what she’s looking for here either.” He sighed and Shiro doesn’t know for sure but he’s pretty sure his father watched the stars for a few minutes more after that until finally he said “Come on, kiddo. Let’s go back inside.”
That’s when Takashi Shirogane knew it was over. His mother was going away to find what she was looking for.
…
Eight
Takashi Shirogane is eight years old the summer he comes to live with his mother and finds out she’s pregnant. At first she’s throwing up all the time and Shiro’s scared – he doesn’t know what to do and what if his mom is dying or something? And the small, vicious part of him, the part of him that can’t quite forgive her for an empty house back in New York with his father and him bouncing off the walls like lost marbles, says it serves her right, but he crushes that meanness before it can spread to the rest of him.
Instead he holds back her hair and heats up chicken noodle soup on the hotplate because the RV’s stove doesn’t always work right and goes to the Quick Mart and buys as much 7-up and ginger ale as his skinny arms can carry.
Once he calls his dad in a panic, asking what to do, how to make it alright again. And he has never forgotten that conversation either.
“Dad, I don’t know what to do, Mom’s throwing up all the time and maybe she’s dying? I don’t know, we’re in an RV and I don’t know who to ask for help.”
A sigh on the other end of the line and Shiro knows today, now that he’s older, now that he’s Shiro and not Takashi, the depth of the weariness, the sadness in that sigh. Because his father has never stopped loving his mother, despite it being impossible and hopeless because they’re all wrong for each other and they will never ever work. Shiro heard a lyric in a song once: ‘sometimes the one you want is not the one you need’ and he had to stop for a moment as it rang through his head, the perfect expression and explanation.
“Take your mom to the drugstore and tell her to pick out what she needs,” Shirogane said, the growl of his voice like stones worn down, made rough by time and weather.
And that’s what Takashi-sometimes-Shiro did.
He forgets things sometimes, there are whole chunks of his time in Afghanistan that he’s pretty sure aren’t coming back, but he remembers this.
He remembers when his mom tried to tell him he was going to have a baby brother or sister and burst into tears halfway through. He remembers sitting on the kitchen floor of a crappy RV with his mom, hanging onto each other, hugging and crying and he’s still not sure if it’s for joy or sadness.
…
Nine
Takashi Shirogane is nine years old when he holds his brother for the first time.
Keith is so tiny – even though he’s six months old by the time Shiro sees him for the first time. Shiro can’t imagine him tinier, even though his mom sent pictures of her and him in the hospital, when Keith was first born. Keith has huge, strange eyes, blue and purple like the night sky. Their mom – and it’s their mom now, they share her – says they’ll probably change when he gets older, turn a more normal color, but Shiro doesn’t think so. Something in Shiro says this is a starchild, a baby born for the night sky.
Keith’s eyes don’t change color. They’re the same night-sky purple-blue-black at twenty-six that they were at six months.
Shiro was the one to name Keith – just like he named himself. He’s Shiro now, everyone at school calls him that and it’s only his father who calls him Takashi these days. His mom throws all sorts of nicknames his way and in his darker, more irrational moments Shiro wonders if it’s because she’s forgotten his name in the face of aliens and Keith. But he knows that’s just the way she is. It’s her way of showing love.
But Shiro named Keith. His mom asked him if he wanted to help look for a name for his new sibling when he went home at the end of the previous summer and Shiro threw himself into the project, researching name after name, quizzing his friends on what names were easy to make fun of, what names lent themselves to crappy nicknames, what names were hard to spell, what names would get your butt kicked. His brother wasn’t having a name like that. His brother needed a good, solid, un-make-fun-able name.
He sent his mom the final list and she picked one. He has a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t nearly as careful about her picking process as he was. He’s pretty sure she just liked the way Keith Kogane sounded.
(He’s not upset they have different last names, his brother and him, he’s not, he’s not, he’s NOT. He says that to himself a lot, when he’s feeling particularly disconnected, adrift and far away from the strange little world here in the desert.)
Shiro remembers holding Keith for the first time like it happened yesterday, like he just saw it in IMAX 3D, like he’s liable to experience it all over again despite the fact that his brother is in his twenties now and miles away.
“I’m here,” he’d whispered to his fussing baby brother, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
And Keith stopped crying. He didn’t laugh; he looked up at Shiro with big, skeptical eyes. A challenge. Like this tiny person was saying ‘oh yeah, prove it’.
And Shiro, newly nine years old, promised that he’d prove it.
…
Intermediary
Ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen pass much the same way. Keith is tiny but precocious and their mom is loving and lovable but absent-minded. When Shiro is nine he makes the mistake of innocently asking where Keith is going in the winter – isn’t he going with his own dad?
She gets very quiet in a way his mother rarely does and says, without looking up from the gadget she’s fiddling with, “No. Keith stays with me,” and she finally glances up to smile at Shiro’s brother, but it’s strained, “Isn’t that right, Keithy-baby? Just us two out here in the wild, wild world?”
Shiro tries not to be jealous.
It’s surprisingly hard. He doesn’t like living like this, but it would be nice if his mom wanted him around all the time too.
But time passes and Shiro never learns much about Keith’s father beyond “Takashi, drop it,” and he finds himself teaching his brother to read by accident. He sits on the rickety lawn chairs outside in the desert sun and reads National Geographic with Keith on his lap while their mom works or sleeps off a night of work and one day four-year-old Keith starts pointing out words on the pages, telling twelve-year-old Shiro what they are.
They read together after that.
Shiro takes Keith everywhere with him in the summers. He’s like a good luck charm or a toddling security blanket. He’s smart and chatty and doesn’t always make sense. Shiro worries about him. He teaches him basic math with rocks and sticks and equations drawn in the dirt. He makes sure there’s always food in the house within easy reach of hungry hands. He wonders about his mom. She’s leaner, he cheekbones sharp, her hair messy and her eyes bright. He thinks she’s happy but he doesn’t know if she’s healthy.
Some days he’s sick of it. He’s sick of dealing with them. He’s sick of Mom and her aliens and Keith and his nonsense words and he hides – in his room if they’re in a house with multiple bedrooms, in the loft over the driver’s seat if they’re in an RV, in the bathroom if neither is possible. He hides and he goes on the internet and he makes himself sick with envy looking at emails from his friends talking about summer camps and neighborhood picnics and Boy Scouts.
He makes himself so miserable he can’t think straight and he gets mad and a couple of times he leaves, just wanders the desert and kicks rocks and yells at cacti.
He remembers when he stopped doing that. Twelve years old and short for his age with floppy hair that’s just getting floppier since Mom left her love of cutting hair behind in last summer. He was just so angry when he got there. He was angry they weren’t in the same place as last year. He was angry that he wasn’t normal – that when the other kids at school asked him what his summer plans were he had to say ‘going to stay with my mom and baby brother in the middle of fucking nowhere’ instead of something cool. At least he knew better than to talk about the alien thing.
He was mad at his mom for being nutty and he was mad at Keith for being a stupid baby and he found himself back in the desert again. He still isn’t sure how long he stormed through the scrub, he just remembers hearing a tiny, squeaky-mouse “oof” behind him and turning around to see four-year-old Keith laid out flat on his stomach, silent tears trickling down his face as he tried to push his tiny body back upright on scraped hands and knees. There was dirt on his face and dust all through his clothes and bits of plant tangled in his hair.
Shiro, yanked out of self-pity like a comedian dragged off the stage in an old cartoon, raced back to where his baby brother sat in the dirt.
“Hey, hey, don’t cry. Don’t cry. What we you doing out here?” Shiro demanded, wiping the saltwater and grime off Keith’s face with his t-shirt.
“I – hic – was – hic – following – sniffle – you!”
Shiro’s own eyes filled with tears and he dragged his brother – so small, fine-boned like a bird – onto his lap and cuddled him close. “Shh, why were you doing that, dummy?”
Keith’s little hands convulsed against his chest, gripping his shit tight, “I thought you were leaving again.”
Shiro buried his face in Keith’s soft hair, “I’m not leaving yet; I’m here, kiddo. I’m here.”
Shiro didn’t go charging off into the desert again after that. Keith doesn’t remember that moment, he was four, but Shiro can never forget a tiny face covered in dirt and tears and a tiny bit of blood saying “I was following you.”
…
Fourteen
When Takashi Shirogane is fourteen his father remarries.
He gets to be in the ceremony, he’s Shirogane’s best man, ahead of all his military buddies and that makes Shiro proud, but while the woman is nice and he kids aren’t too objectionable, he spends the whole ceremony staring vacantly into space and imagining all the things his mom would be saying under her breath, trying to make him laugh as the preacher drones on.
When he gets to the desert that summer Keith is watching him closely, purple-blue-black eyes narrowed suspiciously. And Keith refuses to admit he remembers the conversation that followed Shiro’s return that summer but Shiro didn’t forget.
Six year old Keith folded his arms on the chipped formica of their current kitchen table, steepling his fingers and probably trying to look like the businessmen and CEOs he’d seen on tv in gas stations and rest stops. “Your dad got married.”
“Yeah,” Shiro answered easily. He knows Keith, knows how his brother can work things up in his head, how wound up he gets. The only way to counter Keith’s neurosis is with an attitude of extreme casual-ness.
“She has children.”
“Yeah. From her first marriage.”
“They’re younger than you.” And this was the part where Keith began to crumble. He was, after all, only six, “And they’re not as weird as me.”
Shiro tried to refute that statement but Keith just steamrolled over him.
“And you’ll see them more and they won’t actually be your real siblings so you won’t have to share your dad or your mom with them. And they’re older than me but younger than you so you’ll be closer in age and have more to talk about,” Keith wasn’t looking at him anymore. His eyes were fixed on the tabletop and his fingers had fallen out of their steeple. The last bit of his statement was whispered to the tabletop, “You’ll like them better than me.”
Oh shit. Shiro had to stop this before it could get too bad, turn into a monster he couldn’t control. “No way in hell,” he said bluntly, not even caring if Mom heard him say a bad word to his kid brother, “No way in hell could any kid ever be as cool and as special and as awesome as you. No way in hell.”
Keith looked up at him with huge eyes and Shiro walked around the table to hug him tight, “You’re my brother, idiot. You’re automatically better than any crappy step-siblings. Haven’t you read any fairy-tales. The stepsiblings are always secretly evil.”
Keith had giggled at that and the hug had devolved into wrestling, Shiro theatrically letting his baby brother defeat him and sit on his chest to celebrate his victory.
…
Fifteen
When Takashi Shirogane is fifteen he goes off to camp for the first month of summer. He figures Keith and mom will be fine on their own. Keith’s seven; he’s barely going to notice the difference. They can have their summer, just…later. After Shiro goes to camp. After Shiro gets this one thing.
Shiro loves camp, he really does. But at night, when he’s not running around with the other kids, when he’s not learning new stuff and messing around and having fun, when it’s just him and the wilderness outside his cabin…he wonders. He wonders what Mom and Keith are doing. He wonders if Mom remembered to cook dinner or if they’re just eating poptarts again. He wonders if Keith’s read the books he sent him for Christmas. He wonders what Keith thinks of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. He misses his little brother when he’s left alone to think.
Camp ends and he joins the alien squad in the desert in July and Keith refuses to speak to him.
When Shiro finally corners him and demands to know what’s going on Keith stares at him with the cold, hard eyes of a kid who has begun to realize that this vagabond life isn’t the way normal people live. “You left and didn’t come back,” he says and gives him as hard a shove as he can before marching past to help Mom move surveillance equipment.
Shiro spends the rest of the summer trying to teach Keith to trust him again but it feels a little disingenuous. They both know where he’s going in the fall.
…
Sixteen
His stepmother keeps trying to bond with him. Shiro wishes she would stop, but doesn’t really have anyone to complain to about it and conversely doesn’t have anyone to get advice on how to deal with it. All of his Dad’s military buddies just snort and shake their heads when he grumbles about her hovering and her careful, dainty questions about his mother and ‘her son’ and ‘her work, out there’.
(Shiro hates, hates, hates that everyone seems to think of him and Keith as belonging in separate categories – ‘her son’ and ‘his son’. Shiro wants to shout at people sometimes, “I can hear what you don’t say! I’m not stupid!” and “You know I’m the crazy lady’s kid too? So if you’re gonna say it JUST FUCKING SAY IT” and “shut up and let me punch you”.)
He doesn’t want to talk about it with his school friends, talking about it would mean talking about his mom and the conversations that dance around her and her problematic self. His father just wants them all to be happy, to get along. He wants something good and pure and Shiro feels bad sometimes because what his father wants he will never have, not all the way and it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just life.
Keith might understand\
if he was older, but he’s eight and halfway convinced that dads are mythical creatures.
So when Stella the too-nice stepmother tries too hard, (“You don’t have to go out there, to the desert, you know. Not this year. Your father really has full custody; she doesn’t have to get you at all. That man, he’s just too nice. You could stay here; do normal things with us. Maybe we’ll do a couple nice family camping trips.”) Shiro snaps. He doesn’t shout at her but he packs everything and leaves two weeks early instead of taking a few weeks between the end of school and leaving for Mom and Keith.
“You’re early,” Keith said when Shiro showed up, frazzled and wide-eyed with a duffle bag and a tight grip on the steering wheel. Keith’s hair was too long again, hanging in his eyes, cowlicks everywhere.
“Stepmom wanted me to stay with them the whole summer,” Shiro told him tersely, like that was an explanation.
“Uh-huh,” Keith squinted at him, like he was trying to solve a math problem in his head.
“So I decided to leave early.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to.”
And it was a pretty good summer. Shiro, in a fit of teenage pique, snapped a shot of him with Keith on his back and his mom squished in beside him, all of them making funny faces at the camera, and printed out three copies. One for mom to stick to her dashboard, one for Shiro and one to tuck into an envelope to send back ‘home’.
“You’re very passive-aggressive.”
“You’re eight, where did you hear that?”
“I hang out with really neurotic people.”
“How did you learn was neurotic means?”
Keith just shrugs.
…
Seventeen
Shiro feels trapped, like he’s running out of air, like there never was any air. Not here, squished between a rock and a hard place and getting crushed by both, but so slowly he doesn’t know it until he’s gasping for his next breath.
That summer is good because it get him out of his father’s house and away from his stepmother’s querulous, fretful questions about his Future Plans (their relationship has never been the same, not since the summer before and his early departure and The Picture). That summer is good because Keith is nine and knows the desert like the back of his hand and isn’t liable to hurt himself and they range all over. They see more of the desert than Shiro thought possible. The place seems infinite, gorgeous; it leaves Shiro hungry. It makes him want to see more. It gives him the same feeling the stars used to, an empty spot in his stomach, growling, demanding to be fed.
That summer is bad because his mother is driving him insane.
“Is Keith even in school?”
“We’re homeschooling.”
“But are you teaching him anything?”
“He’s learning.”
“Is he? Because from where I’m standing you’re just letting him wander the desert unsupervised and calling it math, science, English, history, and PE!”
Shiro is glad he brought his homework for next semester with him. Keith is too young for calculus and Chaucer, but he’s bright, and the books give Shiro an idea of where to begin. He teaches Keith algebra on a McDonald’s napkin. He takes his car and drives them to national parks and tries to remember the right history. They find a dinky little library stranded in the middle of a dusty town and clean out the shelves.
It’s good enough for now.
“Mom, there isn’t any food.”
“There are poptarts. Probably some ramen. Don’t worry, babydoll, there’s plenty of food.”
“Real food. Mom. Where is the real food?”
“What is real, anyway?”
“What the fuck do you two eat when I’m not here?”
Shiro teaches Keith the basics of the kitchen – Keith is better at algebra than he is at manning a spatula.
Shiro goes back to his dad’s house with sand in his hair and an itch under his skin.
…
Eighteen
He gets a letter from his mother.
Takashi, honey,
We’re on the trail of something big and we’re just not going to be setting up camp anywhere for more than a few days. You probably shouldn’t come this summer, you’ll never find us, we’re just all over the place, sweetie.
Keith and I love you, gumdrop,
Mom
That’s the last straw. If his mom doesn’t want him around, if his stepmother doesn’t want him, then fine. He’ll just say ‘fuck it’ and leave. Go do something he wants for a change. Fuck it all.
There are billions of people in the world. For the first time, Takashi Shirogane just lets himself be one of the billions. He stops trying and surrenders. He takes off traveling and doesn’t stop until he’s nineteen and joining the military because it turns out wandering the world doesn’t pay as well as it used to.
…
Interlude
There are holes in his memory where Afghanistan used to be. He remembers whole chunks of it, in bright, horrifying Technicolor. But that’s the strange thing about brain damage. It’s unpredictable.
He remembers the explosion. He remembers thinking about how loud it was. How it didn’t seem like it should be quite that loud. In the split second between ignition and agony he remembers thinking, nonsensically, that someone should turn the tv down, the sound effects were too noisy.
…
Twenty-Two
He wakes up in the hospital. Everything is black and white now; there’s a good chance he’ll never see color again. Keith, a gangly teenager, still small for his age, all angles and grace, is curled up on his bed at his feet, head resting on Shiro’s shins like a cat. His hair is still too long and too messy.
Even when it’s all gone to hell, it’s comforting to have his family near.
…
Twenty-Three
When Takashi Shirogane is twenty-three years old his mother dies in a freak accident. Keith Kogane is only fifteen. He spends three months in the foster system while Shiro shouts, pleads, bullies, negotiates, and aggressively stares down every barrier between himself and getting custody of his brother.
Family stays together. Leave no man behind.
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”