Archive of Our Own

The shack, Keith thought, needed a good clean.

The couch especially. It was speckled with dust, which was a little gross, considering that was where Keith slept. And his soup bowls (used almost exclusively for maple syrup-flavored microwave oatmeal) were starting to pile up on the coffee table. His tennis shoes needed—a wash, or a sanitation, or a fire-bombing, or something. They stunk like hell. And throwing them under the table wasn’t really doing anything. Out of sight, out of mind didn’t exactly apply to the other four non-sight senses.

But the reality of it was—and Keith was very much aware of this—the house wouldn’t be getting a cleaning any time soon. He didn’t have the energy to spare. The gross tennis shoes would stay where they were, and the soup bowls would act as a little conversation piece for the table, and he would inhale dust every time he went to sleep. So it would go until . . . until whenever it was that he stopped living here.

It had been about two months now, by Keith’s approximation, since he had gotten kicked out of the Garrison. Two months since he started living in this little place. He kept a calendar by the couch where he slept and tried his hardest to remember to cross out the day every morning, even though it wasn’t a habit he’d ever had to keep before. Hell, there were a lot of habits he was trying to get into that he’d never kept before. He’d never lived on his own, after all.

(Well, he sort of had. But not explicitly.)

But he seemed to be carving out his own little routine well enough. In fact, most of Keith’s days were fairly monotonous. This day—a Tuesday—was no exception. They always started out with oatmeal, then a book, then a venture out into the desert. He would spend anywhere from three to six hours out there before returning home for food, more books, and finally some sleep. There was something nice, he supposed, about having that routine. There was a certain comfort in it. Routines hadn’t always been easy to come by in his life.

After finishing his oatmeal and putting the bowl in the sink, Keith picked up a book and put a CD on. It was a collection of classic American folk songs. He had purchased it at a corner store, after finding it lying out of place in the snack aisle, and seeing that it was only a dollar fifty, and thinking of the layer of grey dust coating the CD player in his shack, and going, well, why the hell not.

None of the tracks were familiar to him, so he let the first one play, settling down on the couch and flipping through a few pages to get to his favorite poem. The words of the song arrested his attention.

“My girl, my girl, don’t you lie to me,

Tell me where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine,

I would shiver the whole night through.

My girl, my girl, where will you go?

I’m going where the cold wind blows . . . ”

Keith closed his eyes for a moment, breathing. He didn’t know the words to this song, but the melody was repetitive enough that he could hum along.

“In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine,

I would shiver the whole night through.”

It was a beautiful song. The grainy crackling of the old recording was like the sand, he thought, and the man’s voice was like an echo across the wide sky and the huge rocks that looked like fingers clawing their way up from the ground. If the desert was a song, it would sound like this.

As the song played on, Keith felt himself start rocking from side to side, content. There was something nice about this. Like breathing—easy. Maybe if someday his life turned out in a similar fashion, where he spent his time sitting in a calm little space of his own, rocking freely, with books to read and music playing . . . maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Then—creak.

Keith’s whole body froze stiff. What was that?

It had come from outside. He had the thought of turning off the music, but didn’t. Then whoever was there would know he heard them. Instead he stood, slowly and carefully as possible, his muscles liquid steel. The shack wasn’t very secure. It would be easy to break in, with a hard kick to the door or a rock to the window. Was someone trying to break in now? Who even knew that he was living here?

There was silence. Keith’s hand hovered over the hilt of the knife attached to his belt, fingers curling preemptively. Heart pounding, he waited.

Then—there it was again . The noise was soft, muted, high-pitched. Coming from the porch?

Keith sucked in a breath, readjusted the grip on his blade, and crept towards the door—then opened it with one sharp tug.

A grey cat sat on the edge of his porch, so still that Keith thought, for one bizarre moment, that he was looking at one of those little statues that people put in their gardens to scare away rabbits.

But it wasn’t. It was an actual living cat. As Keith stared, stupefied, the cat stood up and stretched its back in a graceful arch. It mewed at Keith, soft, like the squeak of a chair. Then, when Keith didn’t do anything, it wandered across the porch, slipping between his legs and disappearing into the shack.

What the hell.

“What the hell,” said Keith aloud, not necessarily to the cat, but just to the general trends that his life seemed to be adhering to lately.

Through the radio speakers the man crooned, behind him.

“In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine,

I would shiver the whole night through. ”

Keith ignored the hell out of the cat that had apparently decided to start up routine visits to his shack. It was easy to do so. Unsurprisingly.

He didn’t want a damn animal to take care of. He had other things to do, like clean the house (which he would probably do, eventually). And animals were not his thing. They were on opposite sides of the venn diagram that represented what Keith had in common with the outside world, which in Keith’s head was actually just two circles next to each other, barely touching but not really overlapping. Or something. Okay, metaphors weren’t his thing, either.

Plus, he didn’t intend to stay out here forever, and he certainly didn’t need another living animal to become dependant on his presence. He’d only been living in this shack for two and a half months. Or was it three, now? Shit, he’d stopped keeping track with his calendar. His relationship to time was coming undone, like a loose door, and every day was like another sharp kick that rattled hinges and splintered wood. Maybe something important would fucking happen one of these days and he’d get snapped back into a timeline. Jesus Christ. He could only hope.

The next time he saw the cat, some weeks had passed, and he was reading over his daily bowl of plain oatmeal. He wore boxers still, his legs folded under himself comfortably. It was a calm day, a day for gentle swaying and soft humming—interrupted, abruptly, when Keith heard a noise in the room and quickly looked up.

And there it was—the fucking cat again. It was sitting next to the table like it owned the place. Jesus, how the hell did it keep getting in?

“What do you want?” Keith said, irritated. The stupid thing was just looking at him. It made him squirm internally. He didn’t like being stared at.

“Quit staring,” he tried, next. The cat only blinked, not looking away. After a moment, Keith gave up.

He scraped up the last of his oatmeal, holding his book open with his other hand. Today’s choice was a poetry anthology. A well-loved one, with a beaten cover and a loose spine. Keith couldn’t remember where exactly he had gotten it from, but when he saw its cover and flipped through its familiar pages he had the feeling that it had been with him for a long time.

After a moment, Keith cast a quick glance up, frowning. The cat was still there, squinting in the sunlight, looking like it was good and ready to fall asleep on Keith’s carpet, beer stains and all. Its paws were outstretched, claws flexing and retracting in an alternating fashion. Keith wrinkled his nose. Why was it doing that? Just—for comfort?

It wasn’t really a pretty cat, now that he was looking. It was sort of a ratty thing. Its short fur clumped around its face, and one of its green eyes seemed to be perpetually half-closed, like maybe it’d sustained a few nasty scratches. The tail looked like it’d gotten chomped on a time or two. Maybe this cat was a fighter. Or maybe it was just old—honestly, it was hard to tell.

“I’m not gonna feed you,” Keith said, pursing his lips in a deep frown. He wasn’t even spared a bored glance. Rolling his eyes, he turned his attention back to the poem he had been in the middle of.

I have some questions for the cosmonauts

were the stars much bigger

did they look like huge jewels on black velvet

                            or apricots on orange

did you feel proud to get closer to the stars . . .

His leg was twitching. He huffed, forcing his leg to lay still, and started the stanza again.

I have some questions for the cosmonauts

were the stars much bigger

did they look like stars . . .

No, that wasn’t it. He wasn’t reading right. Focus. Come on.

did they look like jewels

did they look like huge jewels

did they look like . . .

The cat’s presence itched at a space in his brain, even as he resolutely did not look up at it for a third time. Annoyed at his failed efforts to read, he turned the page, flippant. The words looked shallow, loosely attached to the paper as if a firm shake could send them tumbling into Keith’s lap. He couldn’t even remember what he’d just been reading—something about the cosmos. Right? Damn. No use trying to push through this book—his mind was doing its slow spin, and his concentration was swiss cheese.

Pressing his lips together in annoyance, he looked up at the cat again.

The cat looked back at him, still flexing and unflexing its paws.

“Fine,” Keith said, closing his book. “I’ll call you Ian. Okay? Happy now?”

The cat did not respond.

The act of giving the cat a name, it seemed, solidified its place in Keith’s life. Ian showed up three more times that week.

The first two times were brief and inconsequential. Ian pawed at the door at seven-thirty in the morning one day, right as Keith was making himself some oatmeal, and wouldn’t leave until Keith cracked the door open to let him in. He padded aimlessly around the living room, sniffed Keith’s shoes, stuck his head in the space between the couch and the wall, then left. The next morning Keith spotted Ian’s fat face in his window as he got out of bed. He was gone when Keith stepped out onto the porch.

The third time Ian visited, it was a strangely chilly day. Keith had all the windows shut and the curtains closed, which he didn’t normally like to do, because it made him feel stiff and still inside like he might just spend the whole day in bed. And he almost did, too—would have, surely, if he hadn’t forced himself to get up and walk around the house a little bit to kick his brain into gear.

He needed to get something done today. Yesterday he’d found a spot not far from the cave with the strange lights that seemed to have . . . something to it. Hard to say what, but coming upon the spot Keith had felt a tug in his mind that compelled him to look around. There were a lot of animal bones scattered about, some half-buried and others laying plainly atop the sand. He called the place “the boneyard” in his head. It had been nearly dusk when he found it yesterday, so he hadn’t stayed long. He would need to return today.

And there was more, too. He wanted to reorganize his books—they were sitting in haphazard stacks under the coffee table at the moment. He didn’t like the look of them like that. Maybe if he straightened them it would straighten some of the clutter in his brain as well.

So he would go check out the boneyard, then come back and reorganize his books, then have lunch. Boneyard, books, lunch. The rhythm of the words—the existence of some sequence, even if it was small—comforted him as he moved around the living room area to scrape together his belongings.

“Meow.”

The sound startled him into a twitch, and he turned quickly, defenses raised even though he knew exactly what he would find.

Ian was sitting on a discarded sweater, feet tucked under his raggedy body. Keith stared at him for a few seconds with a frown before turning to the kitchen. He should just feed him, shouldn’t he? That’s probably why he kept coming back. Right, Ian first, then boneyard, books, lunch.

Ian’s footsteps were noiseless, but when Keith glanced over his shoulder, he saw that the cat had gotten up and was padding towards him, watching him intently. He was clearly anticipating a feeding based off of Keith’s proximity to the kitchen. Which maybe suggested that he wasn’t a stray after all—or at least, he hadn’t always been.

“You must be hungry,” Keith said conversationally. He moved to the fridge and opened it, pulling open the deli meat drawer. “I’ve got chicken, or . . . fish.”

Keith had never actually had tuna before, for some reason, which maybe meant that he shouldn’t have gotten a whole package of it the last time he was at the store. He was curious, that's all. He heard it was healthy, and made a pretty decent sandwich or salad (??). And also, incidentally, cats apparently liked it a lot.

Not that he was shopping for Ian or anything. Money was tight enough, and it wasn’t his job to take care of some random desert cat. He repeated that sentence to himself as he held the tuna and the chicken out at arm’s length, presenting them for Ian. “Which one?” he said.

Ian spared neither bag a glance and stared straight at Keith.

Keith puffed out his cheeks. “Tuna?”

Ian blinked, slowly.

“Tuna it is.”

Keith didn’t have anything approximating a cat food bowl, and it was probably bad form to feed Ian off the ground. The idea of letting a cat lick something that he would later put his food on made him itch, so instead he grabbed a paper towel, folded it into neat fourths, and spooned out a little bit of tuna on top of it like a plate. He had no idea how much a cat was supposed to eat. A spoonful was probably a good place to start.

He crouched to put the tuna in Ian’s reach. “There you go.” Keith watched, careful, as Ian crept closer to the paper towel. “Bon appetit.”

Ian sniffed at it, his chubby neck craning. His tail spun in lazy circles.

“Eat it already,” said Keith, impatient.

Ian gave one of the pinkish chunks a hesitant lick. Keith sighed through his nose and stood up.

Alright, so Ian had been fed. His checklist played in his head again—Ian, boneyard, books, lunch. Ian was taken care of. Boneyard, books, lunch.

Keith rubbed his hands together, frowning at the crumpled-up bandana still lying on the ground by the door. Boneyard, books, lunch. “Boneyard” could be further broken down into another checklist, this one of the items he needed before he could go: bandana, jacket, water, lock. He stooped to grab his bandana, tying it around his neck, scrunching his nose at its wrinkled inflexibility. He really needed to stop leaving it on the floor.

Jacket, water, lock. His gaze skirted his eating area, to the clothes mound that usually houses his jacket. Then his eyes pull to the clock. It was almost one. Were he still at the Garrison, he’d be finishing his second class of the day in—he checked the clock again—thirteen minutes. Then he’d be hauling all his textbooks and folders back to his dorm to study until dinner—five-thirty at the latest, but five-ten if he could help it. His schedule in those days had been unbudging. He’d liked it that way. Now he was neck-deep in sand and space and empty time, time that stretched in all directions, time so wide and limitless that it made him dizzy just to think about.

Jacket, water, lock. Focus.

He moved back to the kitchen. Ian was still eating, head bowed. He paid no attention to Keith pulling a bottle of water out of the fridge, as if he had already forgotten who fed him.

God, Keith wished he had someone. Just someone to talk to. His dad, maybe. Or one of the friends that Keith used to imagine for himself when he was little, kids like him who didn’t make fun of how he rocked his body or how he held his hands. There were kids like that in the world, he knew—had to be. Just none of them had ever appeared in his life.

They were nice kids, the ones he used to imagine. Sometimes they looked like him—messy black hair, big eyes, sharp features. Sometimes they looked like kids in his class that he wanted to be friends with but didn’t know how. Or kids that he saw on TV. These kids said things like Hey, Keith, is it true that hippos sweat blood? and they really did want to know, because they thought that Keith’s interests were cool rather than weird. And these kids didn’t always try to force Keith to play telephone or down-by-the-banks with them. Instead they let Keith read, or color, or do whatever he wanted to do, and if he felt like going and being social then they were okay with that, too. They were okay with Keith, in general, and everything that entailed. Not many people in Keith’s real world had been.

At that moment Ian hacked loudly on a chunk of tuna, startling Keith back into a seventeen-year-old body, standing in the middle of the kitchen in a desert shack. He looked at the bottle of water in his hands and wrinkled his nose at himself. Jesus Christ. At least there was some comfort in knowing that he’d always been this pathetically lonely.

When he self-consciously glanced at Ian again he found the cat sitting back, clearly done with his food. Their eyes met, and Keith got the feeling that Ian had been looking at him for some time, while he was busy spacing out. Keith looked him for a few moments, hesitant. His fingers twitched by his sides.

Would Ian let him pet him?

Keith took a few steps across the tile, crouched low, and reached to scratch Ian’s head. The cat jolted away from the sudden movement, and Keith’s heart clenched—he snatched his hand back as if it burned.

“Let me have this,” Keith said, quietly.

He tried again, this time giving Ian time to sniff his fingers first. It seemed to work—this time Ian let him scratch under his chin. He stretched his little neck out as far as it would go, and Keith’s fingers followed. A tension-bearing exhale rushed out through his nose. It seemed like forever since he’d touched another living thing.

“I guess you’re not so bad, Ian. You’re almost kind of cute, in an ugly way.” The cat’s eyes fell to contented slits. Keith felt himself smile a little. “You like being scratched here, huh?”

Ian started purring after a while, not minding that Keith had been scratching the same spot for the last few minutes, as if the repetition was comfortable rather than bothersome. Soon, Keith was sinking down to sit, folding one leg under his body while the other stuck out straight. Ian carefully stepped over the outstretched leg to nestle against his thigh. Once he’d settled, Keith happily picked up the scratching again. The expression on Ian’s little face made him laugh.

They sat like that until Keith’s legs were sore, long past the point that he had intended to get up and leave for the boneyard. And then they sat some more.

A week later, Keith had a bad day. He knew it was going to be one from the moment it began.

That morning, he woke up with the distinct feeling that he hadn’t truly gotten a restful sleep. For a moment, he thought that maybe the sound of his own voice had woken him—he knew he talked in his sleep sometimes, especially when he had weird dreams. But he couldn’t remember dreaming about anything at all.

Disoriented, he picked his head up off the couch’s arm and squinted at the clock on his radio. 4:22. In the afternoon? Had he slept through the whole day, somehow?

No. The sun was hanging low in the window, having just risen. It was morning. Keith pushed a hand through his hair, grumbled “Jesus” at his general state of dishevelment. He got off the armchair slower than usual. His limbs felt cramped, fingers stiff as he crossed out another day on his calendar.

The idea of going out for the day loomed in his mind. It seemed exhausting. Keith already spent so much of his time searching the desert, looking for—anything. A cause, an answer, a finish line. A direction. Maybe once he was only looking for something to fill his time, but now the unknown thing had mutated into something much bigger, much more nebulous and far-reaching.

Most of his days out in the desert were wandering days. Nothing days, Keith called them in his mind—days when he felt a pull in his bones but he couldn’t discern to where , in what direction, and his head filled with sand-dust and his feet grew heavy and angry red patches bloomed over his bare shoulders like the sun itself was trying to chase him back inside. He felt sometimes like the sun, way out there in space, was closer to any answers than he was—down here digging around in the sand like a child. On nothing days, Keith went back to his shack at night feeling exhausted and empty.

But there were other days, too, days when Keith stumbled upon something that resonated in the cavity of his chest, something that prickled in the back of his mind, something that seemed to scream this is important. This is what you are looking for. Usually the feeling was thin and watery, but it was still there , and Keith found that was much, much better than feeling nothing. Those were the days that left Keith light-hearted and hopeful, almost able to hear Shiro in his mind, saying what he always used to say when Keith was unsure of himself—You’re doing great. Trust your instincts. Keep going.

Yesterday he had had a good day. In the caves with the strange lights he found markings—pictures, though it felt strange to call them that. It seemed crazy, but they seemed to tell some kind of story. Something about ships. Something about an arrival.

He didn’t know what it meant, not at the moment. But he couldn’t keep it far from his thoughts. It was important; of that, he was absolutely certain.

To try and keep things clear, Keith kept tangible track of his progress as best he could. What had previously been an empty map pinned to a corkboard was now growing into . . . something. It was, if he were to be frank, a little maniacal. Keith had started purchasing sticky notes and sketching things in notebooks like a regular conspiracy theorist, plotting everything that he thought could be meaningful: half-buried animal bones, strange lights in caves, distant noises echoing across the rocks. Sometimes he just stood back with his hands behind his head and stared at his board and thought until his brain hurt.

This bad day was one of those times.

After eating and trying to read for a few hours, Keith allowed himself to be pulled into the jumbled mess of photos and scribbled notes. He stood for what felt like an impossibly long time, looking at the mess of his corkboard and trying to will it to adhere to logic. It wasn’t working. Pictures that he thought earlier seemed important now looked like random snapshots of desert scenery, and his own handwriting seemed illegible and borderline nonsensical. Nothing had direction. Nothing had sequence.

“I need a fucking drink,” Keith said aloud.

He went to the kitchen, wrapping his arms around himself. The shack was cold today. It was then, crossing onto the tile in his bare feet, that he was struck with the realization that today was October 23rd—his birthday.

Good God, that meant he was finally eighteen. Old enough to officially live on his own. And wasn’t it funny—wasn’t it just fucking funny that he was spending it like this?

Suddenly feeling heavy, he ripped open the fridge and grabbed the first can he saw. Beer wasn’t great for getting drunk to the point of mind-slowness, but Keith found that if he drank enough of it fast enough, it would still get him where he wanted to go. He got the impression that his alcohol tolerance was low. It was hard to know without friends to compare to.

“Happy goddamn birthday to me,” he said, and cracked open the beer.

It was gone within minutes. The taste crinkled his toes—it tasted like dust, and the carbonation was gross—but Keith choked it down right there in the kitchen. Then he took out another. His jacket had long been lost to the nebulous trash masses crowding his house. Friends. He had friends at the Garrison, didn’t he? A chewed-up fingernail slid under the tab. Pop. Ssss. Looking back now, he remembers some friendly faces, here and there. A girl with a round face and glasses that said hello to him sometimes, and did so for two years, even though he didn’t always say it back. A boy—an upperclassman, he thinks—that used to smile at him and ask him how his weekend had gone. And of course Shiro, straight-backed but with a gentle look whenever he paused to talk in the hallway, listening to Keith gripe about which classes were causing him problems, giving him advice on how to deal with the instructors’ infuriating little teaching quirks.

How many smiles made a friendship? How many hellos? There wasn’t an instruction manual for such things, not that Keith could find. He shuffled back to the living room. Thinking about his past close encounters with friendship hurt his mind almost as much as thinking about the web of loose ends pinned to his corkboard.

If any of those friends could see him drinking alone in his shack like this, they would scold him for it. What was he doing anyway? He wouldn’t find answers at the bottom of a Hamm’s, nor would he make sense of his corkboard through a drunken haze. To which Keith would respond (if such people existed) with a gallant fuck off, thank you, because today was his eighteenth birthday, and he’d gotten expelled from an institution which represented the only trajectory he could ever imagine his life taking, and he was angry, and he was lonely, and also his best and only friend in the whole world had gone to Pluto and never came back. So forgive him for making some dumb self-serving decisions every now and again.

Wrinkling his nose, Keith took a huge gulp, walking past the couch. He didn’t like to sit still when he got drunk—it made him feel constrained, like the world was pressing in on his edges. Instead he paced. Pacing made him feel good. He used to pace around his dorm room all the time. It felt like his body was finally moving as fast as his brain, and something about that equilibrium felt good in a way he wouldn’t really describe.

Shiro never made fun of him for pacing, even though he could have. It was a weird thing to do, he supposed. At least Keith’s families had always thought so. Not that what they thought mattered anymore. Not that anything mattered anymore.

Christ, slow your fucking roll, Eeyore.

For minutes and hours he drank, sometimes leaning against the wall, other times staring out the window at the dimming sky. He thought about friends and Shiro, and the Garrison, space and sand. The beer cans multiplied. Time wobbled.

His fourth—fifth?—beer was empty when he tried to take a drink from it, so he tried to go to the kitchen for another one. It was very suddenly hard to walk straight. His senses had narrowed, his eyes only focused on the air directly in front of his face, ears only picking up the sounds of his own clumsy movements. There was a fire uncurling in his stomach, and he could feel the sweat building under his elbows. God, and his head . . . he had too much. He shouldn’t have—he should’ve stopped earlier.

If only someone had been around to stop him. Someone to take the beer from him and say in a gentle voice, Hey, now, that’s enough. Other people had that for them, didn’t they? So why the fuck couldn’t he? Why wasn’t he good enough to have anyone? Why was he so goddamn lonely? Why did it feel like nobody at the Garrison had liked him—that none of his families could connect with him—that he felt like he didn’t belong anywhere, anywhere at all—

“Fuck this.” That was Keith’s voice, but it didn’t sound like it was coming from him. It sounded shaky and hoarse. He slumped against something—the wall, maybe. “God, fuck, fuck, fuck—”

Something scratched against the wood floor behind him. Something meowed.

“No,” Keith said, whipping around as fast as possible on his unsteady legs. Ian’s stupid fat face popped up over the edge of the coffee table anyway.

He must’ve crept in earlier, and hid out in the house somewhere for a few hours, and of course he chose now when Keith was teetering into a meltdown to show himself. Keith scowled. He stumbled back into the living room, snatched up a throw pillow and chucked it in the cat’s direction—which bowled over the plastic bottles and food wrappers on his table, sending them scattering everywhere like sparks from a firecracker that just went off, and it was loud and Keith cringed so hard it hurt and sat down fast before his legs gave out.

Fucking Ian.

“Go away,” Keith snapped, wrenching his eyes open. “Fuck off.”

Ian’s ears were still skewed back, but he was picking his way over to the couch, nimbly stepping over an empty chip bag. He jumped up onto the dented cushion, and Keith thought don’t you dare , and the cat patted his knee with a hesitant paw, and Keith thought fuck off, go away, stupid fucking animal , but his fingers still found Ian’s favorite spot to be scratched, right under his grotty little chin. Ian curled into his lap, heavy like a sun-warmed rock. Keith felt his face flush from the alcohol and an emotion he couldn’t place. His eyes were—hot. Water. No, tears.

He was crying. Fuck, this was stupid. Fuck, he was drunk.

“Why doesn’t anyone fucking care about me?” Raw hiccups ripped his voice to pieces. Ian bumped his hand with his head—Keith had stopped rubbing his chin. With a watery chuckle, Keith resumed his scratches, trying to blink his teary eyes back to clarity.

“I know,” he choked. “You do. I know.” He smoothed his thumb over the cat’s ear. “But it’s only because I feed you.” Ian’s eyes fell shut. He looked adorable and calm, as if nothing at all was happening, as if the world was silent and empty outside of Keith’s touch. Keith hiccupped again, envious, and ashamed of being envious of a cat. “Little asshole.”

God, what the fuck was he doing? What was he doing out here all alone?

He tried to box his roaming thoughts into some sort of logical sequence, but booze made his mind graceless. His head was a minefield. He needed to . . . to not think, at all, about anything. Ian was purring loudly—he latched onto that, narrowing his senses in on the vibrations it sent through his belly, the gentle hum in his ears. Maybe Ian was purring just for him.

And it was working. Slowly, the burning anxiety and sadness numbed. Drowsiness pulled at him, steeled by the alcohol still thrumming in his body. Keith let it win. He let his eyes fall closed, head lolling to the side against the back of the couch, and sleep chased him down in seconds. When he woke he was on his back and the ache was gone from his throat. Sunlight glowed in the windows, and Ian sat curled on his ribcage, flexing his claws in an alternating pattern, gazing out at something only his keen eyes could see.

It was a Thursday night that Keith left the shack for what he knew might be the final time—if not ever , than for a long, long while.

The whole week, he couldn’t stop looking at his calendar, at the day he had circled in blue marker—the day of the “arrival”. His eyes were drawn to it every time he glanced around the kitchen, and his mind had been unable to stray far from it as well. He found himself eating less and less. Ian’s visits became less frequent, or Keith was failing to notice him meowing at the door. Most nights he hardly slept.

And those bouts of sleeplessness were nothing compared to the anxiety of the daytime. He thought middle school was bad, but stressing out over bullies and awkward social situations was nothing like this. Keith really tried to function like normal—scraping oatmeal out of a plastic bowl, paging through his books of poetry, counting the freckles on the wooden floors while blues played from his radio like smoke from a flame. He went through every motion. The routine didn’t comfort him like it normally did.

He had to know what the “arrival” meant. It would explain everything, the lights, the drawings, the craziness filling his head like floodwaters. Keith was sure of that.

When the evening came, Keith shoved some more food in his mouth and packed a bag full of all the supplies he thought he’d need. He ran through everything he had at least four times. First aid. His knife. The . . . explosives. Those stung like burrs in Keith’s mental inventory. Nobody took explosives with them on a mission like this unless they were desperate, and Keith was . . . well, he had long since pushed past the point of desperation, into some frightening space of white-hot panic.

Of course he had. Christ. How long had he even been out here, looking for nothing out in the desert? Seven months? Ten? A year? This “arrival” was all he had anymore. It was an anchor. Something real, and tangible, and external to himself, for the first time in such a very, very long time.

“Let’s go.” His voice came out rough, and he cleared his throat. He was in the doorway, shoulders hunched, already aching. The bag across his back felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. “No time like now.”

But there was something at the back of his mind stopping him. He stood in the doorway for a long few seconds, clenching and unclenching his hands, willing himself to move and not quite sure why he wasn’t able to. Then, on a whim, he glanced back at the living room.

Ian, who hadn’t shown himself in three days, was slowly padding across the floor towards him. His tail flicked out behind him. Keith stopped, frowning, and carefully set his bag back down.

“This is kind of awkward, huh?” He pressed his lips together. “You got me right when I was leaving.”

As silly as it was, Keith felt a pang of genuine guilt, looking down at Ian’s fuzzy face. Like he was being caught doing something he wasn’t meant to be doing. It was a strange thing to feel after spending so many months alone—or, well. Almost alone.

“You’ll be okay without me,” Keith said to the cat. “If I get arrested or something. Right?”

He presented his finger. Ian stretched his neck, nostrils flaring, as if he wasn’t good and familiar with the smell of Keith’s hands by now. Maybe he was checking to see if anything had changed. Maybe he could smell Keith’s anxiety, rolling off his sweat-pricked skin like fever waves. He hoped not. He knew he was being kind to himself, acting like being arrested was the worst possible outcome of tonight.

“Yeah, you’ll be fine.” Keith crooked his finger, scratching a spot right below Ian’s mouth. “You live for days out there without me feeding you. You must be doing okay.”

Then Keith straightened. He couldn’t help feeling something heavy settling in his gut. Something like finality. His mind spat out his list of supplies: first aid, knife, explosives. He had everything he needed; he was as prepared as he could possibly be. Swallowing, Keith gave the interior of his makeshift home—the dust-speckled couch, the bookshelf, the dirty soup bowls, the old tennis shoes lying under the table like a homeless dog—one last look-over. Just in case. I never did clean this damn place, did I?

Then his eyes fell to Ian, sitting there in the middle of his floor, blinking back at him without urgency. He didn’t look worried or like he was wondering what Keith was about to do. Really, he didn’t look out of place anymore. He looked like he belonged there as much as Keith did. Maybe they had a fair amount in common after all.

“Be a good kitty,” Keith said to him, and closed the door.