An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Shiro’s life is kind of a mess. His job sucks and his best friends are moving across the country back to their hometown. All he really has is Star Trek until the Big Bang pairs him with an artist that just might change everything.
“Do you remember that event I told you about?” His voice came out barely above a whisper.
Laughing again, Matt sat his sandwich down. “You mean your totally-not-porn writing competition?”
Shiro groaned. “It's not porn,” he hissed out quietly, “and it's not a competition, it's just an event.” He said, looking up into Matt's judgmental eyes. “Look, you own 6 replica anime swords. It's literally illegal for you to judge me for anything, ” he pointed an accusing finger at Matt's chest.
Matt held up his hands in mock surrender. “Ok, ok. So what about your event thing?”
Shiro looked back down at his phone with an awed smile. “I got paired with my favorite artist…” He answered wistfully.
This is for the prompt “fic writer shiro and fanartist keith collaborate in a big bang and they become very close and move across the country to live together“ from the @sheithpromptparty!!!
I posted the Tokyo Ghoul prompt to Ao3 and completely forgot to post to Tumblr. Oops! Now I have 2/3 prompts filled on tumblr. Will post the third one once it’s complete.
Prompt #1: Tokyo Ghoul AU with Keith as a ghoul and Shiro’s right arm was used in an experiment to transplant kagune.
Title: What Do Ghouls Fear?
Author: @write-my-dreams
Characters: Keith, Shiro
Pairing: Sheith
Warning: Mentions of past torture
Genre: AU, Tokyo Ghoul, hurt and comfort
Rating: T
Summary: Months after Shiro was captured and experimented on, Keith still can't beat his anxiety that something like it will happen to Shiro again. Keith can't lose him, so he worries and rages against everyone who hurt Shiro before.
Read it on Ao3!
(If tumblr won’t show links, here it is: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16784122)
Prompt #2: The first time Keith sees his new neighbor running topless in the park, he discovers a whole new appreciation for having a dog to walk there.
Title: The Hot Neighbor
Author: @write-my-dreams
Characters: Keith, Lance, Shiro
Pairing: soon to be Sheith
Warning: Keith’s thirst
Genre: AU, present day
Rating: G
Summary: Keith always hopes to see Shiro when he takes Kosmo to the park. Sometimes he’s in luck, sometimes he isn’t. Lance calls on his way to the park and invites him to a party along with the suggestion he ask Shiro to come too.
trading darkness for the dawn - 2.7k, rated t, galra!keith, soulmate!sheith
this fic was a long time coming. written for @sheithpromptparty!!!
Keith cruises into Earth’s airspace with fast breath and hands shaking in excitement. He tightens his grip on the ship’s controls and engages atmospheric cloaking as the planet looms bigger, deep blue oceans twisted through with brown and green land, cut by pure white cloud systems. This is where he was born, the planet he hasn’t stepped foot on since his mom took him back to the Blades with her after his father passed. Keith was only three years old then, and he barely remembers what this world looks like.
He cuts the ship’s speed down to half as gravity starts to take hold, pulling him into the planet. This is Keith’s favorite part of flying; he swears blood rushes faster through his veins when he feels the tug down, straight into the heart of a planet.
The sun is blinding. The horizon flares white, glowing in a beautiful sweeping arc over quilted clouds
Keith smiles, thinks, This is where I’m from, and plummets into a dead drop.
This is a very big day for Keith. It’s his first official mission, and while it isn’t much more than an information pick up and drop off with the Blades member currently stationed on Earth, it’s still his mission. His mother isn’t tagging along ‘just in case’ and Kolivan isn’t sitting in the shuttle with him to ensure he follows protocol. Not even Thace is aboard the ship as insurance. Only Keith.
And since it’s only Keith, he gets to fly this mission however he wants—he gets to hurtle towards Earth’s crust at borderline dangerous speeds, borderline only because he knows this ship too well. He knows what she can take, how to yank her back up to run perpendicular with the ground below them at ten miles up.
He whoops, loud in the tiny compartment, as he makes the course correction. The sun rises through the sky ahead of him as he hurtles through the atmosphere at speeds this planet has probably never seen. Forceful winds buffet his ship, but Keith wouldn’t call himself a pilot if he couldn’t fly in these winds blindfolded, nothing but instinct and muscle memory keeping him from a death spiral.
More than anything in the universe, Keith loves to fly.
Keith glides down lower, allowing the air to push back on his ship and reduce his speed. By the time he hits land, he’s practically coasting through the air, hanging just underneath the clouds so he can admire the land. Big, shiny buildings poke up along the coast, clustered together like tiny soldiers standing in proud formation.
He goes lower, zips over mountain ranges he never knew existed, follows the playful turns of a river through a deep jagged canyon, stares down at the sand and marvels that it’s just as white as his mom always swore it was. He’s giddy, Keith realizes, high on the reality of Earth below him. He never imagined it would be quite like this.
There’s a ways to go until Keith reaches his contact’s location, but the Blade won’t be expecting him for some time yet. Keith’s reckless entry into the planet’s atmosphere ensured he shaved off a significant amount of time from his journey.
He’s just thinking about turning around back to the ocean to follow the coast when an error message flashes on one of his screens. It looks like a small maintenance issue, nothing more. These ships aren’t actually built to fly through atmospheres as thick as Earth’s, so it’s not a surprise that something has come loose on one of the wings. The ship shudders momentarily as she balances out the issue, and Keith doesn’t pay it any mind. This is, after all, a simple, low stakes mission with very low odds of anything actually going wrong.
And so, of course, very naturally, everything has to go wrong.
Keith crashes. Sort of. The ship goes down and he just barely manages to control the landing enough to keep himself from slamming head first into the ground in a mushroom cloud of sand and death.
It’s not Keith’s finest moment, coming to in the smoking cockpit of his ship.
Saying the ship is in bad shape is an understatement—all the main power is cut, and even one of the two emergency lights flickers in the background. He groans, slumping back in his chair, and his vision swims so much he has to shut his eyes against it.
Cursing at the ship, Keith resists the urge to kick at the side of its hull as he half climbs, half drags himself out of the cockpit. His body aches from impact; his chest feels like a giant bruise from the force of his body thrown against the harness holding him in place and his shoulders feel wrenched half out of their sockets from trying to keep the crash landing as smooth as possible. He’s dizzy and the sunlight is blinding. Keith tugs his hood low to block out as much light as he can; his mask is built to regulate the amount of light it lets in, but any light is too much for Keith now.
God, he aches.
Stomach rolling and head aching, Keith crouches down in the sand because he can’t do anything else. “Fuck,” he whispers. The radio died with the engine, and he has an emergency transponder, but he foolishly left it in the ship. He doesn’t know if he can climb back inside right now.
Mom is going to be so disappointed in him when he finally gets back. He knows, he just knows that a mechanical failure this bad has to be his fault—the stupid dive was too much pressure on the wings. Now Mom is going to kill him, which is Keith’s dramatic way of saying that she’s going to make sure he doesn’t see another mission for at least another decaphoeb, all because of one moment of recklessness. Turns out the fun wasn’t even worth the pounding headache.
His most immediate problem is survival. His injuries are rough but not life-threatening, but Keith can already feel his suit struggling to compensate for the sunlit desert heat
It really can't get worse until it definitely does: Keith hears a voice. A human voice.
“Holy shit,” it says. The translator in Keith’s suit garbles it for half a second while it adjusts, but the mere start of the noise sparks Keith into motion. He nearly trips over his own feet to get his knife out while standing and readying his stance, but it’s hard to balance like this and he stumbles again, falling out of position.
“Whoa, there,” the alien—the human says. Hands go up in the face of Keith’s blade, and Keith already regrets that his first contact with his father’s species is a threatening scene..
But there are more important concerns. Because Keith realizes, with dizzying certainty, that he knows this face. He’s never met a real life human before, never seen Earth beyond the occasional fly by from space and the pictures his mom has saved of her time here, but he knows that face almost as intimately as he knows his own.
Keith swallows hard.
And then he passes out.
***
Keith dreams of his soulmate.
He’s always dreamed of his soulmate, in fits and moments as long as he can remember, because that’s what it means to be Galra. His mom told him the legend when he was a child: long ago, people were joined together with their soulmate as one being, only to be separated by cosmic force, and now they long to find their lost halves. Galra are lucky, she said, because they are sensitive to the quintessence that flows through the universe and have the ability to know who they search for.
Keith knew a human was somewhere in his destiny, the same way his mom knew a human was not hers. Love, she said, takes many forms, and the universe is not so cruel as to make it possible to only love one other. After all, she teased, how else would parents love their children?
The only thing Keith didn’t know was how they would come into each other’s lives, if they ever would.
In his dreams, the human is always smiling a quiet smile that makes his eyes light up in recognition, and Keith’s heart pounds hard in response. There’s something so honest, so disarming about his soulmate that Keith trusts him immediately; he doesn’t need to know more than a kind face to set his imagination running wild.
It’s difficult, in dreams, to collect a fully composed impression, no matter how many sleeping hours Keith has spent just staring into his soulmate’s eyes. Now he knows his soulmate is taller; his shoulders are broad, covered by a black jacket with a dull shine, and his hair is black, like Keith’s, but far shorter. Very attractive, for a human and a number of other species Keith can name. In the brief moment before Keith hit the ground, he took in a tired and windswept appearance, hair askew and cheeks bursting red in a way that Keith recognizes with startled understanding.
His soulmate loves to fly through the open air. They have that in common.
***
Keith wakes up to a slatted brown ceiling and low sunlight coming through the window above the couch his body is laid out on. His vision swims and he aches more than should be possible, all the pain slamming into him at once until he shuts his eyes against the force of it. A weak moan falls from his lips.
He remembers the crash but not how he got here.
Attempting to sit up fails; his chest hurts like nothing else where the seat harness caught him in the crash, and just trying to roll from his back onto his side proves nearly impossible and completely debilitating to his ability to continue moving. His body jerks in some weird attempt at a roll and a wriggle at the same time, but it gets him nothing but a groan of pain punched out through his throat and suddenly roiling stomach.
“Hey, stay still,” a voice says, startling him. Keith blinks, mind hazy, but he recognizes his soulmate moving into his line of vision, even now. It would be impossible not to.
Speaking is hard. “Wh—happened?” he grunts, as if it’s the most complex sentence in the world.
“I think you have a concussion.”
Keith’s translator garbles the last word for a moment, but when it comes, he can’t help but sigh. Of course; his head must have slammed back against the seat when he crashed.
Kolivan is going to kill him. Mom is going to bring him back just to do it again.
A glass of water hovers over his lips, and Keith gratefully accepts. It’s possible his lips are chapped, but it’s difficult to tell over all the other pain. Just a few sips of water sooth him far more than Keith would expect, and as he carefully blinks the haze away from his vision, he stares into his soulmate’s eyes. They burn with an intensity that might be fear.
“You,” Keith starts, and it’s a struggle to speak, but he needs to say this. “You are—even more beautiful than in dreams.”
And like a dramatic romantic lead, he slips from consciousness again.
***
Waking up the second time is much, much easier. The light is totally different this time, cold blue and harsh. Keith can see the moon hanging in the window above his head.
Sitting up is painful but not impossible. His mom says Keith heals at a rate that seems to be about average between human and Galra, too slow to match her or the Blades but much faster than his father ever healed from anything.
Keith’s soulmate sits slumped over a table, breathing heavy and slow. His face is turned toward Keith, mouth slack and face handsome, and all of a sudden, all Keith knows is the need to get closer. He heaves himself up, ignoring the wave of dizziness, the pull of sore muscles, and limps his way over to the second chair. The rough wood scrapes at his oversensitive skin as he pulls the chair out and settles down.
He wants to reach out and touch, but it feels wrong to do so while his soulmate sleeps. Keith wants to know if his soulmate’s skin is warm, if his palms are soft, if his bare touch will shoot electricity through Keith’s body, and he wants his soulmate to do the same.
God, he wants to know his soulmate’s name.
Too impatient to wait for him to wake, Keith reaches over with his foot and presses against his soulmate’s leg until he starts awake, his shocked face in the moonlight sending Keith’s heart flipping over itself again.
“You’re still here,” his soulmate says. “You’re real.”
Keith nods. He can understand how this might be a shock on a planet with no recorded contact with extraterrestrial life.
“I don’t understand,” Keith’s soulmate says. “You’re the man of my dreams.” He pauses, and his voice goes rough. “No, I mean, I literally saw you, in my dreams, and I just—I don’t understand. Who are you?”
“I’m Keith,” he says, trying to keep this as gentle as possible. “You—you’re in my dreams too.”
“Fuck,” he says in response. Keith watches his soulmate scrub two hands roughly down his face and resists the impolite urge to stare—there are few species that like it, but something about the stormy gray of his soulmate’s eyes captivates Keith; their shine in the moonlight is much brighter when Keith is so close.
“Tell me your name,” Keith asks—begs.
A heavy sigh. “It’s Shiro. And I really thought that I would be calm about meeting a purple alien I had prophetic dreams about by the time you woke up, but.” He spreads his hands and tips his head back up to the ceiling, as if it might have answers for him.
Keith says, “Shiro,” tasting the word on his tongue. “Shiro, I can tell you. I can explain.” Keith might not be much of a talker on a regular day, but the helplessness on Shiro’s face makes him want to soothe.
Shiro nods, just once, and so Keith explains. It doesn’t take him very long, and Shiro still looks overwhelmed by the end of the story, but the fear in his eyes is quieter. No longer poised to run, he contemplates instead.
“Soulmates,” Shiro says, and Keith nods. Shiro shakes his head. “You don’t know anything about me. You—we can’t be.”
“Tell me,” Keith says. He takes a leap and reaches out; his hand lands with fingers that just brush Shiro’s palm. It sends a shiver up his spine. “Tell me something about you. Anything you want.”
Shiro stares hard at him. Keith can’t read him, doesn’t yet know the contour of every emotion on Shiro’s face, but he wants to. He wants to pry this man apart until he’s a picture book of signs and symbols that Keith can decipher and love each one.
“I've always wanted to see the stars,” Shiro admits. “To travel through them. It’s why I signed up to join a space program.”
“When are you going?”
“Going?”
“Yeah. To travel through the stars.”
Shiro's smile twists. “There isn't a planned mission right now, so I can't say. I'm working in recruitment right now, you know, going to high schools and—”
“Why don't they let you fly?” Keith asks.
“One day,” Shiro says. “One day I will.”
His right hand clenches into a fist on the table, balled up so tight the veins in his bare forearm stand out for a brief second. It's enough time for Keith's mouth to go dry even as a tiny question worms it's way into the back of his mind, sewing together in Keith's head the fist and Shiro's furrowed brow. Something isn't right.
“You should come with me,” Keith says, the offer careless but more sincere than he thought he could be. “You can fly my ship.”
Shiro laughs dryly. “I think you'll have to get a working ship before that happens.”
Keith scoffs. “After that. Fly my ship.”
There’s so much hesitance in Shiro’s body, but when he looks at Keith, fire burns in his eyes. He looks like the best thing Keith has ever seen.
