Somewhat Clear

deerna
somewhatclear

Rating: SAFE
Fandom: Voltron Legendary Defenders
Relationship: Lance/Shiro, Keith/Lance/Shiro
Tags: Cryptids AU,
Wordcount: 2421
Notes: This is heavily influenced by this bunch of posts on tumblr I found years ago that detailed why Seattle was the best place for cryptids to live. I had plotted a whole thing with a road trip and Keith being trolled by local cryptids, but it never really went past the draft stage. I found it again a few days ago and I felt sorry for this unfinished miserable mess, so I fixed it up a little and gave it a new dress. It's weird but I like it. Enjoy. Partecipa alla seconda settimana del COWT per la M3. Prompt: Dov'è.

Summary:
After his father's death, Keith develops an obsession with Seattle. He's convinced his mother is there. He goes looking for her; he finds the truth about himself instead, and maybe love.

Excerpt:

Before he knew, Keith had built himself a life in the city. He had two or three jobs depending on the week, an apartment, roommates. Crushes. Butterflies in his stomach. The original reasons for which he had come to Seattle seemed so distant, so trivial.

Cryptids didn’t exist. He didn’t know if his mother had been from Seattle, really. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, aside from a life for himself.

{ read on AO3 | read here }

Rainy days at the end of summer were special when Keith was young and lived in the desert with his dad. They prepared a pitcher of cold lemonade, spread a big map of the States on the kitchen table, and pointed the finger at different cities all across the country.

No matter which city Keith pointed at, his father always had a story about it: he would spend hours on end telling him about the road trip he did when he was young and stupid, about the people he met, about the adventures he had.

Sometimes Keith hoped to get stories about his mother, but no matter how long his father talked and talked, his eyes twinkling, only the pouring rain and Keith’s chuckles as background noise, he never said anything about her.

From time to time, Keith would point at Seattle, and his father’s eyes would soften, his mouth would flatten. “Well, there is something about Seattle”, he would say, after a long pause. “That’s all I can say on the matter.”

Keith never cared if the stories were true or not. It was their ritual, their thing. Something else to pass the time, to forget that they were alone against the world, and Keith wouldn’t have had it any way different.

After his father’s death, Seattle became somewhat of an obsession for Keith. No matter how many excuses he tried to come up with, there was nothing sane about it. He spent every waking second of his life reading about the city whenever he wasn’t working, whenever he wasn’t trying to save money to move out of that damn desert.

It got worse after he found the box. A regular shoebox, stored under the desk in his father’s studio, filled with hundreds of pictures of a city swallowed by a fog so thick it seemed alive. No defined people, just buildings, blurred outlines and opaque smudges walking around on sidewalks, sitting on benches, looking out at sea, always in the rain or in the fog, as if the sun never shone. Mysterious little numbers in his father’s messy print on the back of each pic that weren’t dates nor coordinates.

There was something about Seattle, he was convinced about it. He drove to the city to look up information in the library, on the internet, anywhere he could find mention of the city. Photography books, tourism guides, things to see and to do in the city — pretty normal stuff. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for.

He listened to the rain falling in the middle of the desert, and he kept investigating.

The last piece of the puzzle unexpectedly cropped up while he was dicking around and clicking aimlessly on the internet, bored with everything and with himself. He’d started reading articles about taking pictures of supernatural creatures and where to spot them, and he inexplicably found himself scrolling through an old, eye-searingly ugly forum board about cheesy sci-fi movies. On the third page of a heated flame about which city was more likely to host under-cover aliens, a few pictures under some user’s signature caught Keith’s eyes: three shots of a foggy city, captioned with strange numbers and a link, spelled in unreadable characters.

Keith had never clicked faster on a link.

The Seattle Cryptids Board was a well-modded, surprisingly well-designed forum full of people who claimed that cryptids were real and lived among humans, and that Seattle was full of them. A gallery full of pictures, diligently captioned with their own progressive numbers, supposedly offered evidence of it, although Keith didn’t really distinguish anything besides fog and blurred shapes; dozens of threads detailed the best techniques to capture a cryptid on film, the best cryptid-friendly recipes, and bite-sized guides on how to recognize the signs that you were talking to a cryptid disguised as a human.

He registered to the website before he could stop himself, well aware that he’d gone past the edge of sanity a long time ago. He just wanted to know if these people knew his father, he told himself. He smothered the genuine curiosity and the fascination he felt with a pillow made out of guilt.

A few users immediately fell in love with the pictures from the shoebox; even through the shitty library scanner, they were higher quality than anything ever posted in the site’s gallery.

Keith felt proud even though he wasn’t the one taking them.

He started saving up before the idea of the road trip to Seattle was fully formed in his mind, as if he already knew he was going to need that money at some point.

He worked two jobs during the week and fell asleep with the phone on his pillow, the Board blinking at him in the darkness as the conversations went on without him. He ended up taking a few classes to learn how to properly use his father’s camera, with their encouragement, and fell in love with the art. On weekends he took pictures at parties and weddings to make a few more dollars, and by the end of the year he managed to scrounge up enough to buy a battered hover bike that was probably older than him.

After the shortest two years of his life, which were spent working and fixing the bike until its engine purred like it was brand new, Keith was ready.

The first week in the city felt like a dream; Keith spent it touring around the city with his camera like he was sleepwalking, half-remembering streets and views from the pictures in the shoebox. They were simultaneously familiar and strange, like a distant memory.

Used to the desert hot and dry air he thought he would have suffered from the foggy, humid atmosphere, but he felt incredibly alive instead, like he had been dying of thirst for months and had finally taken his first sip of water.

He wanted to walk up to people and talk, and ask questions; he wanted to know why it seemed like he’d known them all his life and why nobody was weird about it.

There was something about Seattle.

The diner was just around the corner and Keith didn’t even remember exactly how he got there the first time.

He does remember seeing Lance, tall and lanky in a blue apron standing behind the counter with his back to the door, singing to himself, still a stranger. He remembers the restaurant being empty at ass o’clock in the morning, the feeling of being underwater, close to passing out. He thinks he was hungry. Tired from all the walking he did in the middle of the night.

He’d dropped in the closest stool and made Lance startle at the noise of its legs scraping the floor. The singing stopped and Keith’s mind cleared. Lance’s fingers were elegant and long, pressed against his own mouth, muffling an unintelligible apology.

He’d ordered pancake and coffee, hoping that sugar and caffeine would kick him back to life, and had watched Shiro come in, a big shock of white hair on his head, a scar on his nose and a too small grey peacoat buttoned wrong on his torso. He’d looked dead on his feet, the hospital smell clinging to him, but Lance had greeted him like he’d parted the fog and brought out the sunshine.

Keith hadn’t known how fucked he had been back then.

Sharing an apartment with Lance and Shiro was sort of adventurous at first: they lived on a completely different timeline, with their night jobs, and they were both big on privacy and rules; but they were also fun and friendly and Keith felt warm around them. Like when he’d gotten to Seattle first, he had the feeling he’d known them for a long time even before they actually met.

He didn’t know how happiness could be found in a freezer full of neatly labelled Tupperware containers, but Keith felt it.

Before he knew, Keith had built himself a life in the city. He had two or three jobs depending on the week, an apartment, roommates. Crushes. Butterflies in his stomach. The original reasons for which he had come to Seattle seemed so distant, so trivial.

Cryptids didn’t exist. He didn’t know if his mother had been from Seattle, really. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, aside from a life for himself.

He kissed Lance one evening while they were drinking on the couch, watching some dumb movie on Netflix with the audio off, trying to come up with their own dialogue lines and laughing.

It was Lance’s night off, Keith didn’t have to work on the weekend and they were waiting for Shiro to come back from his shift. It felt sleazy in hindsight, but Keith was just drunk and a fool.

Lance had stopped his wandering hands before they could roam further, pushed him away with an apologetic grimace.

It’s not a no, he tried to reassure him, we need to talk to Shiro about this, but Keith’s mind was spiraling already with regret and mortification because he always ruined everything he touched, he was just a desert kid who didn’t know how to behave.

He locked himself in his room and didn’t come out until he had to go to work on Monday. Thankfully, it wasn’t hard avoiding people who mostly lived at night and slept during the day.

On Thursday, Shiro bit him. He grabbed Keith by the shoulders and sank his fangs in Keith’s neck, deep and confident. Lance kind of yelled at him afterwards, and Shiro looked distinctly sheepish and regretful, but Keith felt pretty calm about the whole thing, sitting on the kitchen chair and staring at the wall.

Tendons made a noise when they were pierced. It was such a fascinating thing to learn. There was no pain, just noise. Squelch. A strange shfweep that resonated down in his gut.

His fingers were really funny shapes, they looked like spiders.

I didn’t think it would hit him so hard, he’s a halfae after all.

I don’t fucking care if he’s the second coming of Christ, Shiro! What the fuck where you thinking?

I wasn’t thinking.

Shiro was pouting. It was kind of hilarious. Keith chuckled. They looked at him like they were surprised to see him sitting there, although they had been the ones telling him to. As if they hadn’t been talking about him all this time. It was alright, though. Keith didn’t mind.

Keith at that moment didn't do much of anything, really.

Listen, I panicked. I didn’t want him to start screaming—

Oh, so you enthralled him? Wow, Shiro.

He’s not gonna remember anything.

What if he does? He is a halfae, after all.

We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

The frozen whole human leg that had been in the freezer earlier that day kept thawing in the sink.

Friday was a very complicate day for Keith. Even if he didn’t remember what happened (which he did, in gruesome detail, thank you very much) he would never forget the hangover from hell that he got afterwards. Not only his stomach was getting turned inside out like a glove, but it felt like his brain was being squeezed out of his nostrils.

He was too miserable to be shocked. He was rooming with two vampires, so what?

Not a vampire. I’m merfolk. He’s the one who bit you, remember?

Keith glared at Lance; he wasn’t feeling charitable enough to distinguish between flesh eaters right in that moment. Lance coughed awkwardly and shut the hell up.

There was something about Seattle alright, and that something was cryptids every-fucking-where. Everything made too much sense all of a sudden: how Lance stopped singing as soon as he realized Keith was in range, the fact that they worked night shifts and categorically refused to do things during the day unless it was peak fog out, Shiro’s double shift at the morgue and ER.

There was nothing handier than medical disposal services to keep anthropophages well fed.

Even after the accident, Keith refused to move out. He wasn’t afraid of them, and it was maybe the scariest part of the whole ordeal. Could he be in love with two beings who literally killed humans like him in order to survive?

(We don’t kill anyone, you know? We just need human flesh from time to time — you’d be surprised how little amputated arms and legs and discarded organs are missed by people once they’re separated from their bodies — same thing for blood, really….)

The answer was apparently yes; there was something about Lance and Shiro that just screamed trust us at his deepest instincts.

He started going out of his way to conform to their sleep cycle, to spend more time with them, to know more about their culture. Keith got to meet the other cryptids that lived in the area — which turned out to be a lot more than he would’ve ever suspected. Pidge, who ran a 24/7 IT service on the third floor, was of fae descent, with a knock for technomancy; Hunk, who worked as a cook in the same diner where Lance had shifts, was a wendigo; there was a pub for cryptids-only on the next block and most humans at Shiro’s hospital knew about their existence and didn’t give much of a shit about it — they were convenient, in a way or the other. Kept the pests at bay.

Keith eventually demanded to know what the hell a halfae was and Shiro and Lance looked at each other, dubious and hesitant, before telling him because well, not many people didn’t know about their ancestry, like Keith was ignorant about his.

Also it’s sort of a rude word, please don’t say it outside the house unless you really mean it.

They’d recognized him by smell, they told him. Non-humans have a distinct aura about them.

Non-humans live much longer than regular humans and are harder to kill, to poison, to contaminate. Keith tried to get drunk for the first time in his life to prove them wrong, and failed.

Shiro offered to find his mother in a quiet voice, strangely colored eyes glinting in the darkness.

Keith refused. He cut himself on Shiro’s fangs, begging him to enthrall him again, to let him forget for a while. The vampire held him as he sobbed in his shoulder.

That day Keith slept between two monsters and never felt safer.