Chapter Text
Keith was forced into the room by giant men twice the size of him, his legs dragging across the floor. He could barely feel his legs scraping the ground, his bare skin scraping the cold cement under him. The sound of one of the men slamming a door open with haste startled him. His arms were held painfully tight in their hands, and his eyes tried to flicker open but they stung from the blood trickling from a wound on his head.
“This one was close you fucking moron, what the hell were you doing?!” One of them screamed. Keith was in and out, his head moved violently with the jarring tugs of the men on his arms. He was flung down all of a sudden, his hands hitting the cement ground hard. He moaned, his fingers curling on the ground to feel for anything he could grab onto. He didn't like the cold, he was already cold.
“The fuck! He's only kid! How da shit was supposed to know!!” The man spoke in a deep, broken Czech accent. That's right, he was only a kid but that didn't mean he couldn't still get these bastards hung up and laid out! Keith wanted to move so bad, to attack, to defend. He couldn't though. He couldn't bring his bruised muscles to hold up his battered body from the ground. He knew he was in bad shape, and this was his worst case scenario come to life.
He’s been captured. Damn. And he was so close to infiltrating the main bases defenses on his own. He’d waited, gathered intel for so long, planned his strike and acted when he saw the time was perfect, when things looked in disarray and no one was expecting it.
An image flashed in his mind. Shiro looking down at him, disappointed but always so understanding. Telling him he couldn't do these things yet, that he had to be patient and trust the system. Shiro would take care of it, he promised.
But Keith didn’t wait.
“Don’t worry, we took care of little weasle-” The brooding, thick Czech accent was thrown off by a loud yelp, and more followed, drowned out by a huge explosion somewhere close to Keith. Stone pieces flew over him, smashing into his already limp body on the ground and raining dust and debris around him. Cement shrapnel scattered across the floor, skidding past where Keith could hear.
“What! Sound alarm!” The English words stopped and switched to frantic Czech, the monsters around him clearly distressed from what sounded like a surprise attack. Keith heard more smashing, a fight somewhere to his right. The sound of something whipping through the air, grunting, then the collapse of a person into the rubble on the ground. Men running with heavy boots forward, trying but failing it seemed to hold their own.
Keith had no clue what was happening but there was something trapping his leg there on the ground, and he could only move his fingers at this point. The blood was still coming out of his nose and the wound on his head, and his eye wasn’t opening for him. He groaned, shifting his body, dust falling from his sweat caked hair onto the ground and into the bloodstains beneath him.
Screams, gargles of death, more bodies skidding onto the floor. Then silence. Keith was losing consciousness and panicking, trying to move, shifting but not being able to grasp at anything to pick himself up.
Someone was running towards him. Then he felt the heavy, painful pressure on his leg lift off him. He could barely hold on anymore. Someone was saying his name but he could only hear ringing in his ears. He lost the feeling in his hands, and his eye opened up to see the blurred face of someone with short black hair in a uniform he recognized very well. Then, everything went dark.
*****
7 Years Later
Keith knew why he was called into the conference office as soon as he walked into the door. He already knew damn well he had been reported to the head of his task force operation for disobeying direct orders. This wasn’t his first rodeo and of course it wouldn’t be his last.
He used his magnetic badge to gain access into the main office space, the heavy oak and steel reinforced door gliding to a close behind him. In front of him was a gorgeous black glass desk complete with all the works- tall, dark shelves wrapped around, high end tech, large and commanding chair in the center of it all.
And last but not least was the man standing over facing the dark glass window in the high ceiling room, hands behind his back in a common posture Keith knew he donned well. Keith relaxed his stance as soon as he stepped into the room.
“Listen, I know what you’re going to say already.” Keith wanted to get it over with and stepped closer to the desk. Apparently Shiro wasn’t too happy this time with him though.
Shiro turned around, his shoulders still square and his eyes tired. “If you know what I’m going to say, why do you make me have to say it?” He said, throwing back at Keith a common rhetorical question. Keith felt bad. “We’ve been through this so many times. You have to clear your head and take things slowly, Keith. I know, you mean well,” Shiro went and leaned on the front of the desk, crossing his leg over the other and his arms in front of him, “but there has to be order to missions, and to actions on the field.” He looked at Keith to answer now.
Keith pouted. “You know what I can do but you always have me on the back of the defense squads. I can do more than that, you know that!” Keith had gotten riled up like this many times before, and it always landed on the same thing. Keith wanted to do more, he was tired of being on the lesser squads in task force operations.
Shiro signed. “Even if I know that, your actions show plenty of proof otherwise and I can’t just change the minds of Roundtable and you know that. They see you, going off, and even if sometimes you give us results its still insubordination in their eyes Keith. And you know that.” Shiro looked at him with soft eyes even when he was supposed to be laying in on him, as requested from the Roundtable.
Keith frowned, having a pretty good picture of those Roundtable morons who liked to make decisions without ever getting involved, without ever actually having the blood on their hands. He has a couple opinions about them, none of which were good.
The Roundtable controlled every sector of their special ops task forces along international and national lines. The organization they worked under was born of blood and war, to restore order to a crumbling society that had found out about the existence of alien races and demanded answers. The world had been a dark place, and some of the brightest leaders and most experienced military personnel gathered with the intention of placing a blanket over the eyes of the many while attacking the lethal alien, or Aboriginal, races on Earth territory. The organization they created was completely hidden, an underground operations force that recruited in secret and outside of high order executive regulations.
What was restored by them to deteriorating infrastructures and madness was lost on the mindless people living their days, unaware that everyday people lost their lives to a war that they were blind to. People like Keith, who wanted national awareness, not just a small task group pretending the world was too weak to handle itself.
Shiro brought him back to the issue at hand, going to stand next to Keith and putting a hand on his shoulder in solidarity. Keith looked up at him. “They don’t know how it works in the field, they send us in like dogs to do their work.” Keith grumbled, shifting his position now and walking away from Shiro so he wouldn’t have to look at his empathetic, pitying facial expression.
“Even so, we have our orders. It’s hard, I know, but we have to control ourselves out there. You trust me, and I know you can do better than this. Your gift, it's useful. And I know it can be painful for you to just sit by when you know certain things are going to happen before even we do, but be patient.” Keith crossed his arms, remembering seven years ago. He frequently acted on impulse and yeah he got hurt, and Shiro knew that. But if Keith could stop something catastrophic from happening, or save someone even at the cost of himself he would take that risk.
Shiro let the silence fill in the air, feeling Keith’s defiance. Keith didn’t say anything because he never promised that. He couldn’t, not yet.
Shiro stood up. He went back over to the desk and grabbed a black screenless telecommunicator, then flicked his wrist and produced a blue laser projection above the communicator. Shiro moved his hands, touching the projection and changing the screen. Keith watched images whiz by before Shiro stopped on a common image of a mission objective file. Shiro looked at Keith now more formally.
“Besides having to get on your case about what happened yesterday at Balaze Bay…” Shiro started, making sure Keith recognized he was still very much in trouble about the incident, “I wanted to go over this with you in private. This is what happened after you left your squad to infiltrate and take down the small outskirt regime that had broken off from it’s main group.” Shiro pulled up picture after picture of explosions, bombs, buildings destroyed, people on the ground, children crying. But Keith knew it wasn’t to show that he fucked up. No, they were running to safety, in the arms of task force operatives that were running in to save them, to get them out of there and get them to safety where they would have protection again. This was after Keith had gone in alone and put down the main alien’s leader.
“We saved 95 people that day as a direct result. No one denies that fact. But you see this?” Shiro pulled up another file, a file he read as “Immediate Remand” in big, bold black lettering across the top. Keith’s eyes widened and he finally understood how serious this is.
“Because of what happened, the Roundtable wanted to send you back to the training squadrons, or even to the secretarial positions. They don’t trust you to be out here, even when you have saved people’s lives Keith. You get it now?” Keith stared at the cold words, taking a moment to look at the file. He stepped closer, reading it. The words “insubordination,” “degenerate,” “undisciplined,” “a burden to the sector tasked to” rang in his head. They were serious, they wanted him out now. He finally played himself too much.
Keith looked at Shiro, his heart dropped low in his stomach. “They’re not serious right? I acted when I knew what was going to happen! They can’t look at the results and think I’m some wild beast, Shiro!” He was so shocked, so angered by it. Always looking at him as a statistic, something to be controlled, that’s all the Roundtable wanted, always. Shiro looked at Keith with sad eyes.
“This is the report they wanted to put in today. I may have hacked the servers and changed a couple of things around, with some help of course.” Shiro finally gave a small smirk and Keith breathed a sigh of relief. Shiro’s small flash of happiness faded and he walked up closer to Keith.
“This is serious though Keith. Eventually they are going to bench you, and you would have gotten nowhere. You don’t want that, I don’t want that. Your father…” Shiro’s words dropped off. Keith felt the impact anyway just from those words. His eyes glazed over and he formed a wall so fast for those nagging feeling in his chest. Shiro caught it immediately and continued on.
“You have amazing skill and no one denies that but reign in that wild nature of yours sometimes, ok? There’s a chain of command, and I’m always here for you. You know that better than anyone.” Keith looked into Shiro’s dark eyes and nodded. He knew that, sure, but he had no clue what it was like to be him.
Keith got the picture, and Shiro saw that much. He went over and put the telecommunicator back on his desk, then grabbed a shiny black folder. Keith raised an eyebrow, and his interest piqued when Shiro held it out for Keith to take.
“This is your new partner. Say hello to Lance McClain.” Shiro smirked again just as Keith blanched.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”