tw MCD, unrequited sheith, s8 compliant, emotional infidelity, koliveith, much grief (i did not mean to rhyme lol) grief sex? knotting? (first of all, i blame the writers' retreat discord. this gripped me by the nips and wouldn't let go until i got it down ilu all! here goes😘)
“If you need an ear to talk to, Keith. I’m here.” No, no he really isn’t. It’s just what everyone says when they’ve lost someone. Platitudes. Keith hears it in the flat of his voice, in its practiced cadence. He’s done this a million times.
But Keith’s heart is weak, worn, and battered. His walls are ruins. The part of him that died when Shiro said he did, that’s a ghost rattling around in his ribs can never harden against him, to anyone with his face.
“Thank you, Shiro,” he says, marveling when his voice sounds steady, detached. Not even tired. He must be in really bad shape. “I think…I just want time alone.” “Take all the time you need.” The call disconnects.
Keith turns in the little bunker. Kolivan is sitting on the austere mattress. This…is the most broken Keith’s ever seen him. With the Blades having nearly been wiped out a few years back, he can’t imagine the unbelievable pain his leader has gone through, but he thinks this.
This is the one that will break him. That will break them both.
Keith feels the gaping hole in his heart like a physical thing. He wants nothing more than to join his mother, to have been with her when the explosion took her out. He needs to touch him, to crouch over his mentor’s bent form and give him comfort.
The Galra are tactile creatures, Keith among them. He closes the space and buries his fingers in the fabric of Kolivan’s uniform. They still smell of ozone, burnt alloy, laser fire, and blood.
He clings tighter when he feels Kolivan’s giant frame shake against him, when his Blade sash soaks through with tears. Keith screws his eyes shut, willing himself not to cry along with him when Kolivan muffles his screams against his chest.
Kolivan loved his mother. They were on the verge of something new, loving, tender in the way Keith recognized in his father, in the way Shiro looked at him in long forgotten dreams. It’s terrible, how Kolivan’s wails and broken sobs can rend mountains asunder,
his tears and anger a raging river, and soon Keith is swept in the undertow.
Kolivan breaks when Keith presses his wet lips to his forehead, hands tangled in his matted brain long undone. The sheer need for paltry physical comfort in the yawning maw of grief has them peeling each other from their suits, touching and touching and touching.
Sobs and sniffles interspersed with the wet smack of kisses, the sound of skin on furred skin. They take from each other what they need, with half a thought about the needs of the other.
Or perhaps all the thought, because Keith and Kolivan know they’re a poor imitation of what their hearts desire the most. And yet despite that…
“Call me,” Keith whispers against Kolivan’s temple as he worships the plains of his stomach with his long tongue. “Call me by her name.”
Kolivan sobs. Keith looks so much like Krolia. His mother’s name sounds beautiful in Galran. Guttural, rolling, the sounds vibrate in Keith’s sternum as Kolivan ruts into him and knots. It hurts. It hurts in an empty way.
Like he doesn’t know how to mend the shattered pieces of himself back together so he fills and fills until he’s a mess. They both are. When Keith closes his eyes, lungs burning and head aching from all the crying, he feels Kolivan mouthing Krolia’s name against his shoulder,
spurting every so often as his knot takes its time to come down. He inhales the mingling scents of their sex, their sweat, and tears, and tries not to think about how he’ll never know how this smells like on Shiro. - end! -
@soyranger Mark me down as sad AND horny!!!!