If he’s honest with himself, he doesn’t know if leaving will do any more good than staying would when it comes to him and Shiro - there’s an awkwardness between them that only time is going to be able to soothe, and he’s had a few weeks to make his peace with that. It’s not all about Shiro, either, even if a lot of it is. He does want to make a difference and find a place for himself, and it doesn’t feel like he’s going to be able to do that on Earth, no matter how much he’d like to.
He’s never felt like he really, truly belonged. He found himself out in space, beside his friends sometimes and on his own, others, and that - fit. Now that he’s feeling unmoored again, it only makes sense to reach outward and try to find his place where he knows there are more spaces for him to fill, doesn’t it?
Keith had been so sure of it when he made his choice, and in a moment, all of his certainty unspools and scatters.
There’s nothing gentle about Shiro’s mouth on his, nothing kind or even particularly caring about it - the residual anger and restrained violence of a fight that hadn’t quite had the chance to start is pressure in his throat and behind his teeth, tension coiled tight in his gut. He wants to throw Shiro off him, because this is wrong and not what either of them want, but he wants to drag him closer, too, and suffocate himself in this moment, because knowing that it isn’t right means that it’s a mistake, and he can’t see Shiro making this particular mistake twice.
His heart cracks open in his chest, a terrible wound that he’d been doing his best to cauterize since he foolishly inflicted it on himself to begin with, but there’s no helping it.
This hurts, worse than being let down easy had, by a long shot.
He lets the kiss go on too long, and worse than that, he responds; he opens to it and kisses back, equally fierce, equally bruising. It’s nothing like what he wanted it to feel like when he kissed Shiro, when he’d actually allowed himself to think about kissing Shiro, but maybe that was for the best.
It wasn’t supposed to happen, anyway.
He breaks away with a low, anguished noise, breathing hard beneath him, and all of his confusion and hurt coalesce into a critical point and burst out of him in a surge of betrayed anger.
“What are you doing? Shiro, what are you doing?” He shoves at him and tries to scramble away at the same time, heart pounding so hard that he can feel it knocking against every rib. Blood is rushing past his ears, and he feels cold. “You can’t just - you know how I feel about you! That’s not fair!”
He gets far enough away to fall back onto his hands, chest heaving, and his voice cracks as he speaks. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
There where a few moments where he felt the violent urge to back pedal and apologize, snap to senses he no longer felt were even the right ones to fall back on. But it all stalled in him, sinking in like sharp claws and teeth into delicate meat and getting hooked inside. So when Keith shoved, he let it push him backwards, like he wasn’t just about twice his muscle mass.
There’s millions of things rolling through him all at once, and he recognizes it for what it really is. That was a misstep, the whole ordeal was one giant mistake and he had no right to take any of this out on Keith. He didn’t like the way the resentment climbed up his spine like icy spiders, for himself, for what he was doing. This wasn’t right, and the panic made everything hazy and blurred at the edges. Upside down. Inverted.
Shiro sat back on his calves, staring down at the floor, anywhere but directly at Keith and tears felt like acid when they snuck out before he reeled it back in. Snapped a few pieces of himself back together enough to at least try to be composed. His flesh hand scrubbed at his face, anguish dragged away and flung like it mattered.
“Because...” he had to stop, swallow around the choking swelling of his throat and try again so his voice didn’t sound so forced and edged with the emotions he was forcing back down. “Because saying no was a mistake Keith.”
Part of him wasn’t sure if he would have come to that conclusion if the other wasn’t leaving, at least not this soon. But he couldn’t let him leave the planetside without at least knowing in some way how he was kept up far too late questioning his life choices. How it had hurt to turn him down, but more so for his own sake than Keith’s. He thought it had been right, to not face any of those feelings and step away. But doing that made him feel like a whole lot more than just his arm was missing, and that didn’t count the dying and coming back part either. That had hurt less. Hell, he wasn’t sure if he even felt that at this point.
But this. This tore at him, left him raw. And he didn’t want Keith to leave, with a fierceness that could rival the depths of the universe as a whole.
And then reality kind of sunk back in and he reared back like he was struck or burned, standing up quickly, a little off balance but retreating to put more space between them. He still couldn’t look.
“I-I’m sorry Keith. I shouldn’t have...”
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