Chapter Text
His roommate doesn’t really talk much.
Nobody gave him any details beyond the basics--promising candidate for the program; advanced in flight; Keith Kogane, twelve years old--but Adrian’s smart enough to use his eyes and ears and figure out the shape of the gaps left.
The kid doesn’t have much to unpack, just a grimy yellow backpack with about two outfits inside and a folder of papers that Keith shoves away out of sight before Adrian’s really even registered what it is. There’s nothing personal, no toys or stuffed animals, no electronics, no books. He shows Keith the storage space on his side of the room anyway, the empty drawers, the fake-wood wardrobe, but it seems sort of--cruel, almost, when he has next to nothing to put inside.
“You want a tour?” Adrian asks, gesturing at the door uncertainly.
“They showed me already,” Keith says. It’s more words than he’s put together at once in the last half-hour since Iverson dropped him off here. He’s inspecting his bed, fingering at the blanket and sheets, peeling both back to look at the mattress underneath. Adrian vaguely resents it: what does he think he’s going to find, bugs? But Keith seems satisfied with whatever he finds, or doesn’t find, because he climbs up onto it and curls up on his side, his back to the room.
“...Cool,” says Adrian. “So like… you know how to get to the mess, and about the rec room and the bathrooms and stuff?”
Keith ignores him.
“Okay,” Adrian says under his breath. “I’m gonna… They, um-- I sent you a message? On the tablet they gave you? So if you need anything…”
“Fine,” says Keith.
It’s a clear dismissal, and Adrian lets himself out into the hallway, trying to reframe the retreat in his head as anything but running away from the pissy twelve-year-old who now owns his dorm room.
---
And that’s about how the first month of their cohabitation goes.
---
Keith's an ideal roommate in a lot of ways. He's quiet, he's clean. He comes and goes at reasonable hours. He doesn't bother Adrian when he's trying to cram two hours of homework into forty-five minutes. He doesn't bother Adrian at all.
And it's fine.
It's a little like sharing space with somebody else's cat: indifference more than antipathy, hostility only when invisible boundaries are breached. It's fine; it's a little bit lonely but it's fine. Adrian learns quickly to mind his business, to not ask too many questions, to leave well enough alone, and gradually the wary silence his roommate exudes loses its weight. The quiet between them becomes peaceful--almost companionable, Adrian likes to think.
It's the coldest part of winter when it begins--not that it ever gets really cold, not like in North Dakota like Adrian's used to, but what passes for frigid in the New Mexico desert. There's a different energy to the students as a body right before a holiday break, more reckless, more inclined to test the rules, and it's one of the final days of the semester that Keith comes back to their room, quieter than usual and carrying himself gingerly.
“Hey,” Adrian offers when the door shuts behind Keith. Lately he's been getting--not exactly conversations, but exchanges out of Keith.
Keith doesn't respond, or even seem to have heard Adrian. This isn't terribly uncommon, so Adrian leaves it be, but he watches from the corner of his eye as Keith shucks his uniform jacket and drops it on the floor, then crawls into bed with his back to the room.
This is unusual.
Adrian hesitates, debating silently with himself, then finally gets quietly to his feet and picks up the jacket where it fell. “You okay?” he ventures, hanging it off the corner of Keith's headboard.
Keith's shoulders sort of jerk under the blanket, like he's been caught off guard. “‘M fine,” he mumbles without looking around.
“You sick?”
“I'm fine,” says Keith, louder.
Adrian shifts uncertainly from foot to foot. Something is wrong, he knows Keith well enough at this point to be certain, but he can't quite put his finger on the shape of it. Keith is shivering under his blanket, though, and that's something he knows how to fix.
“Want me to go get you another blanket?” he asks, reaching out to tug lightly at the thin fleece.
Keith surges to life, whirling on him with such furious suddenness that Adrian takes a step back automatically. “Fuck off,” Keith snarls.
“Okay,” Adrian says, showing his hands. “Fine, okay. Sorry.”
He retreats to his own side of the room, reeling with uncertainty: Keith's eyes had been red and puffy with tears, and he'd seen a discoloration like a new bruise on the underside of his jaw.
He has half a dozen teachers and supervising officers in his contacts. He scrolls through them all, considering, drafting a couple messages. In the end he closes the messaging app without sending anything. It might have been a shadow. It might have been an accident. It might have been any number of things, and he doesn't want to make an enemy of his roommate.
In the morning the mark on Keith’s face is darker, his movements more stiff. He holds himself like he hurts, and halfway through getting ready Adrian finally gestures at his own chin and asks, “What happened?”
“Fell,” Keith answers with such brusque readiness that Adrian knows it’s rehearsed. “I hit my chin on a desk.”
“Oh,” says Adrian. He doesn't really know what to do with such an unflinching lie. “When?”
“Class,” says Keith, and Adrian doesn't know if it's an answer or an excuse for how quickly Keith leaves.
Adrian stares at the door. He blows out a long breath and turns away, gathering up his tablet and notepad for class.
---
He doesn't say anything, in the end. He goes home for break, and Keith stays, and if Adrian thinks of him at all it's with a sort of vague pity and guilt. But they go out a few days after Christmas to make exchanges and pick up groceries, and Adrian finds himself looking at a rack of discount candy and gift packs, wondering if anybody got Keith anything. He doesn't know what Keith likes--but cookies, cookies are pretty safe.
“Oh, geez,” his mom says when he explains. “Put those back, we'll make him a plate at home. Homemade’s better.”
And so Adrian finds himself returning four days later with an absolutely enormous plate of cookies, because his family takes Christmas baking a little too seriously. He sneaks them in past the door sergeant without a pang of guilt and leaves them on Keith's desk, clearly labeled so Keith will know they're for him.
He's accidentally in the room when Keith discovers them, even though he would have preferred not to be. It's awkward, a little bit; he squirms into the corner of his bed and pretends to be very, very engrossed in his tablet. Keith pauses at the door as he always does, assessing the room like he’s entering enemy territory. His eyes go immediately to Adrian, to his still-packed duffle on the floor next to his bed, the new poster on the wall--and then, a beat later, to the plate of cookies.
Adrian holds his breath, watching from the corner of his eye as Keith approaches his desk. He stands there for a moment, very still, the label with his name in Adrian's sister's loopy handwriting held carefully between his fingers.
“Is--” he finally says, and turns to face Adrian. “Did… you…?”
“Oh,” says Adrian, lowering his tablet like he's only just remembered about the cookies. “Yeah, those are, they're from my family. My sister and I baked, my dad decorated. He's a-- he's in charge of pastries and things at a boulangerie back at home, that's why they look so nice. Um, I decorated the green ones. They still taste good though.”
He's talking too much. He shuts his mouth and tries not to wince.
Keith shifts his weight. His eyes dart away from Adrian and back, watchful, a strange, strange blend of hostility and vulnerability.
“I didn't get you anything,” he says abruptly.
“No, that's-- god,” Adrian says, flushing. “I wasn't expecting-- They're just cookies.”
Keith shifts again. He licks his lips nervously and glances at the plate.
“And there's nothing weird in them or anything,” Adrian adds. Keith's got a look like he expects there to be, and it's making Adrian bristle a little bit. “You don't have to eat them if you don't want them, I'll just--”
“No,” Keith interrupts. He doesn't seem to know where to look, and he finally settles on a neutral point at the end of Adrian's bed. “Um,” he says, and hesitates. “...Thanks.”
It comes out quiet, unexpectedly soft, and Adrian closes his mouth in surprise. “You're welcome,” he answers after a pause, mollified. “Try the-- the ones that look like little pies, they're my favorite.”
The tiny, wondering smile Keith wears for the rest of the evening transforms his entire face.
---
There's a shift after that. They still don't really talk, but Keith will glance up and greet him now when he comes back to the room, where before he'd only ever been silent and sullen. It’s still not really friendship, but it’s something a step closer.
And then Keith starts coming back with bruises again.
It’s never the same story twice, to his credit. He slipped and fell down the stairs. He whacked his head climbing into the pod for his off-site classes. A ball hit him during team sports. Adrian takes the lies for the barriers they are, doesn’t push past what Keith chooses to say--but there’s an uneasy doubt building in the back of his mind, a growing knowledge that something is wrong, something has to change.
Tomorrow, he thinks, and then the next day he thinks, if it happens again.
It happens again.
They keep Keith in the medical wing overnight. Adrian gets a glimpse through an open door of bruised pale skin, of Keith sitting small and hunched with his shirt off and his head down--and then the door is firmly shut and Adrian is firmly invited to leave, and nobody will tell him anything.
He stands in the hallway for a moment, staring at the door and choking on guilt. Then he turns around, and he walks until he finds a sergeant on duty, and he tells her everything.
She's kind about it. She listens long enough to get the gist, and then she radios her partner that she's going on break and ushers Adrian to the empty mess hall. She uses her card to get him a tiny cup of hot chocolate from the hot drinks dispenser, and she sits down with him to hear the rest.
“I should have said sooner,” Adrian says once he's given her everything he has, watching her swipe notes across her tablet's keyboard. “I thought it-- I didn't think it would get this bad? I don't know what I thought, I just-- I should've…”
“Yeah,” she agrees matter-of-factly. Adrian looks up at her, startled, and she gives him a sympathetic half-smile that doesn't quite make it to her eyes. “Probably should have.”
“I--” says Adrian, and stammers to a halt. It's an unexpected response, a break in the expected pattern: this is where adults normally comfort and console and say things like you couldn't have known, sweetie. He doesn't really know what to do with this, it sparks a defensive knee-jerk reaction in him, but he doesn't… have a defense.
He closes his mouth and stares down at his hot chocolate.
“You did good, though,” she says, “telling me now. I can get what you've told me added to his file. I think…” She pauses, tapping aimlessly with her fingernail on the tabletop. “Well. More information is better in any case.”
“Is he okay?” Adrian asks unhappily. “They wouldn't…”
She glances down at her tablet again, switching apps. “Got a concussion,” she says. “Looks like they're gonna check for broken ribs too. They'll probably keep him overnight. But he'll be okay.”
Adrian nods. He turns the paper cup in his hand in a careful, precise half-circle and confesses, “I don't know what to do.”
“I'm going to recommend that they find him some kind of mentorship situation,” she says. “For now, we'll keep an eye out, okay?”
“Okay.”
The sergeant considers him for a moment. She taps her tablet screen, and a moment later Adrian feels his own tablet buzz in his pocket. He pulls it out and sees that she's dropped her contact information to him: Sgt. Natasha Burns, her military ID picture small and unsmiling next to the name.
“If you got something to report,” she says. “Or if you need to talk. I had…” She pauses. “I know how hard it can be, reporting something your friend doesn't want known.”
Friend, thinks Adrian.
He doesn't correct her.