Chapter Text
Keith couldn’t believe Shiro had seen through him so easily.
He’d tried to hide it—he really had, and he’d thought he’d been doing a pretty good job of it. He didn’t snap at anyone or brush them off. He didn’t even push back when Lance made a remark about how his mullet had somehow grown even worse while he was off with the blades—but, according to Shiro, that had been his first clue. The second was when Shiro went to give Keith his obligatory ‘welcome back’ hug as he exited his pod, and Keith clung onto him for a considerably longer time than he usually did. The third clue had come now, when it had already been over two days and all Keith had done since he’d come back was hide in his room or train himself to exhaustion, alone.
Now that he’d been caught out, Keith’s face was flaming red in embarrassment, indignation, and a fair amount of shame. God—what the fuck was wrong with him? He couldn’t believe Shiro had gotten him to admit to this—again. He’d been doing so well—it’d been almost a year since he’d even thought about it.
This would’ve been the most mortifying conversation Keith had ever experienced if he hadn’t already had a similar one with the older paladin at the Garrison nearly three years ago.
“You’re jealous of the preschoolers at the blade base.” Shiro said. It wasn’t a question.
Keith could only hang his head in shame. That was all the answer Shiro needed.
It was so stupid—but it was true. Keith had been doing so good for such a long time—being constantly surrounded by war on all fronts could really occupy a person’s mind. It took up a lot of space in his life. There wasn’t time to act like a child when he was supposed to be defending the universe.
Keith had been like this his whole life. He didn’t know why. He was embarrassed and ashamed of it, but that hadn’t stopped him from acting on it for the first time at the Garrison when he’d finally had a room all to himself. Had privacy for the first time in his life. He’d maybe gone a little overboard back then—but he’d been suppressing the urge for years, and it was just so…comforting.
Something about it just felt right to him. It made him feel safe, for once. Protected. Good. It gave him a sense of warmth that had been missing from his life for a very long time. It was the greatest coping mechanism for stress Keith had ever had, and now he could finally use it.
It was just his luck that Shiro ended up walking in on him one night, sitting on the floor of his dorm in the softest pair of pajamas he owned, coloring in a crude picture he’d drawn of him and Shiro flying into space together on a rocket ship, and nursing a too-small pacifier he’d pocketed on his way out of his last foster home. It was simultaneously the worst and best night of his life.
It was the worst because he’d nearly burst into tears at the shocked look on Shiro’s face when he’d barged in, and then there was the fact that he had to explain to someone—someone he actually looked up to—what the hell was wrong with him. But Keith didn’t really have an explanation. He didn’t know why acting like a little kid made him feel so nice inside. But he didn’t want to stop—it was one of the only things in Keith’s life that gave him any sense of safety and security, and it was something he could control. He begged Shiro not to tell anybody. Begged him not to think Keith was weird and leave him behind like everyone else. Keith didn’t know what he would do if he did.
But Shiro, as kind and earnest as he ever was, had been not-so-surprisingly open minded. He knew Keith had had a less than ideal childhood, to put it mildly. He’d had to grow up so fast. Too fast. The more Shiro thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense in his head. Of course Keith would feel like this—his childhood had been rife with hardship and abandonment. It wasn’t hard to understand. If Keith had decided somewhere along the line that he wanted to relive his youngest years in a different way—a way that was gentler and kinder and more appropriate for him—Shiro wanted to support that. Keith deserved the world in his eyes. If he wanted to redo his childhood, then Shiro wanted to help. He wanted to make sure that this time around, Keith would be safe, and supported, and loved like he always should’ve been. And in all honesty, it was nice to see the younger boy treating himself with so much care, for once. It almost pained Shiro how distressed Keith was because he thought the older man would think of him as some kind of freak. It was quite the opposite.
And that was why it had also been one of the best days of Keith’s life. From there on out, he wasn’t alone anymore. That wasn’t to say there weren’t bumps in the road, or that Keith was immediately comfortable with letting Shiro into that part of his life. It took time. Sometimes Keith still felt ashamed about this part of himself, or guilty. Sometimes he felt like he was burdening Shiro, like he was making the older man take care of him when he asked if he wanted to come over certain days. Really, that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In fact, Shiro wished Keith had come to him more often back then.
But there had been lots of good days too. Days where Shiro would come over and play with Keith to his heart’s content. Keith would hug him and cling to him like a monkey. Shiro would pick him up, maybe swing him around a little, and kiss his cheeks. He’d ruffle Keith’s hair and give his sides a good tickle every once in a while, just to hear him laugh. Keith’s new favorite place to sit and color was snuggled up warm and cozy in Shiro’s lap. Shiro would color with him, or just wrap his arms around Keith’s waist and hold him tight. Sometimes he’d blow a raspberry on Keith’s neck and Keith would giggle and squeal in such an unabashed way that Shiro had never heard from him before. It did something funny to his heart, seeing him so happy and uninhibited for once.
Sometimes Shiro even came bearing gifts—usually in the form of stuffed animals or new toys. The way Keith’s face lit up was pure gold. By the time Shiro had left Earth, Keith had ended up with a whole bin full of crayons and blocks and toy trucks and planes. Shiro spoiled him to no end—it was the first time in Keith’s life. It made the younger boy’s heart feel full in a way it never had before. He almost didn’t know what to do with all the pure-hearted joy inside him. He didn’t know how to thank Shiro.
But then he’d gone to Kerberos. Disappeared. Keith had gotten expelled from the Garrison. Then in the span of twelve hours, after a year of solitude in the desert, Shiro came crashing back down to Earth, only for them to be turned right around and launched into space again, thrown head-first into a millenias-long war. It was almost like old times in Keith’s life, where every day felt like a battle just to survive. Keith didn’t have time to give in to his immature, childish desires anymore. Not when people’s lives were at stake.
Shiro just thought maybe Keith had gotten over it. That their times at the Garrison had satisfied that little missing piece of Keith’s heart, and now he just didn’t feel the need to regress so young anymore. Keith had been happy to let him think that. Shiro tried not to let his disappointment show. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t miss their time together, especially with the way Keith was so trusting and carefree when he was little. Something he never was nowadays.
He was secretly delighted to find out Keith had never actually moved on from those desires. Not that Shiro would ever tell him that.
Keith himself, though, was just still so embarrassed. So ashamed. How pathetic did he have to be to be jealous of a bunch of snot-nosed toddlers? He didn’t want to be, but he couldn’t help it. It had blind-sided him.
Honestly, Keith had assumed lately that he’d gotten over it too. Turned out it was just really easy to repress those kinds of feelings when there wasn’t anything to remind him of why he wanted to be one of those snot-nosed toddlers so much. Part of him wished he’d never stumbled into the childcare wing of the blade base.
Truly, it had been an accident. Keith was supposed to have a meeting with an officer he’d never met before to discuss his upcoming mission—she’d called him to her office, and Keith had gotten lost trying to find it. The base felt like a giant maze sometimes, with its odd layout and overwhelming number of floors. There were even corridors in between floors. Unmarked rooms with one door separated into two by a curtain. Really it was a miracle anyone found their way anywhere. At least, that was Keith’s excuse.
But in the midst of searching for her office, he’d somehow ended up in a section of the base with an unprecedented number of children. He hadn’t even known there were children on the base, but he supposed that it made sense. Lots of blade members were married—of course some of them also had children. Families.
And someone had to watch over their kids while the grown-ups were away on missions. Educate them. It only made sense that there was also a school in the blade base, similar to the way the Garrison had an academy.
At first, Keith hadn’t thought anything of it. He’d been a in a part of the base with the older students—maybe high schoolers. Or middle schoolers? It was hard to tell sometimes; Galra were so big. Either way, they didn’t seem much younger than him. But the farther he walked down the hallway, the younger the kids seemed to get.
Keith was all fine and dandy with that, honestly, until he got to the end of the wing. He couldn’t ignore the big windows lining the wall, and the room beyond seemed huge—it was so much bigger than all the classrooms he’d just passed.
The way it was set up was so obviously some kind of daycare. Even through the dimmed lights, Keith could see there were bright, cheerful decorations all over the walls, including artwork by children who clearly had yet to develop any fine motor control. There were posters displaying the Galran alphabet and numbers one to one hundred. Keith didn’t know enough Galran to read what the other posters said, but they were written in a colorful, fun font with cute cartoon characters on them. There were a multitude of toys and books and art supplies scattered all throughout the room. A wall lined with coats and cubbies with little backpacks and shoes shoved inside. There was even a whole entire playground with slides and swings and seesaws. God, when was the last time Keith had been on a seesaw? Had he ever?
But the thing that had oddly broken through Keith’s carefully controlled defenses was the fact that it was also clearly nap time. All of the kids were laying on cots, or on futons on the floor, wrapped up with soft blankets and pillows. Some of them were curled up with stuffed animals or dolls, dozing gently. Others suckled softly on pacifiers as they slept, if the soother hadn’t fallen out of their slack mouths. Some of them drooled, completely unaware. There were even younger, smaller children dreaming away in cribs and cradles. They looked so calm. So peaceful. So happy.
Keith’s heart clenched with envy.
He wanted to have nap time, too.
He was so screwed.
After that, Keith couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though he’d had a mission to focus on. It just wouldn’t leave his mind. He was jealous. He wanted to be like them. He wanted to be happy and taken care of and not have a single worry in the world. He wanted to play. He wanted to make friends. He wanted to prove he could behave himself and be praised by his teachers when he was good. He wanted to be fed when he was hungry and put down for a nap when he was tired. And he was so, so tired.
The worst part of it all was that Keith couldn’t just be jealous, either. No—he had to be bitter about it, too. He was bitter that these kids were going to grow up surrounded by friends and family who loved them and get everything that Keith never had handed right to them. It wasn’t fair. Why did he always get the short end of the stick? Why couldn’t his childhood have been that nice? Since becoming a blade, he knew he was part Galra—what if his mother had taken him instead of leaving him and his dad in the dust? Did the Empire have good daycares? Could he have had this all along?
It was all so unfair, and complaining about it made him feel just like the whiny, unloved little kid he didn’t want to be any more.
He’d thought maybe if he avoided that part of the base for the rest of his time there, maybe he could forget about it again. He had no such luck.
Even after his mission, his mind was still occupied with all of these feelings, and the funk had followed him all the way back to the castle-ship, where Shiro had sniffed the truth out of him like a bloodhound.
It was humiliating.
“I know, okay!” Keith sighed dramatically, agreeing with Shiro’s assessment. “And it’s fucking embarrassing, so can you please just let me be pathetic in peace?” He asked.
“Keith, you don’t have to be embarrassed. And you’re not pathetic.” Shiro said gently. “It makes sense that you’d feel deprived after everything you had to go through as a kid—it’s not a bad thing. Plus, I bet it’s been a really long time since you got to be little, huh?”
The tips of Keith’s ears burned. Fuck—now Shiro was embarrassing him. That didn’t mean he wasn’t right, though.
Keith just shrugged half-heartedly, trying to hide from the older man’s knowing stare, but Shiro saw right through him. Again.
“Well, we’ll just have to do something about that, then, won’t we?” Shiro proclaimed, looking mischievously at Keith before tackling him back onto his bed and poking at his ribs until Keith was howling with laughter.
Damn him for being so ticklish. Keith swore he’d murder Shiro if he ever told another soul.
But, despite the tickling, Shiro actually had a whole different idea brewing in his head.
Luckily for him, Kolivan was only a phone call away.