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Contrary to popular belief, Keith yearns for physical touch at almost all times. Shiro discovered this by accident and made a vow to himself to never forget it, which is why he’s always touching Keith and ignoring everyone else who interprets Keith’s perennially-raised shoulders with the kind of caution usually reserved for animal threat displays. It’s not a hardship, even if Shiro never previously considered himself a handsy sort of person. The way Keith leans into Shiro’s personal bubble is — “let me put it this way,” Shiro tells his therapist. “I got taken prisoner by a despotic empire, thrown into a gladiatorial ring, subjected to medical experimentation, and then strapped to a gurney and drugged by my old organization. I wasn’t exactly burning with the desire to get close and personal with anyone ever again.”
“You’re using sarcasm as a defense mechanism,” Enid points out.
“Right.” Shiro’s trying to cut back on that. It feels good to bite out a cynical response on instinct, but the meanness makes his gut and heart feel sour afterwards. “I didn’t think my body could feel good again, after all that. It didn’t even feel like my body.”
But then Keith touched Shiro’s shoulder during a sunrise, and it was all very picturesque and moving — and later, once he was ensconced in his own room on the castleship, the only thing Shiro could do to make it feel less like a cell was to jerk himself off. He did it angrily, used his right hand because it made him feel like he was being touched by a stranger, and partway through the pleasure washed over him and he remembered the way Keith put his hand against the blade of Shiro’s shoulder. Like gentling a wild thing. He came hard and his spunk got stuck underneath the plates of his hand, and he cried a little.
It didn’t feel like much of anything, at the time. But that was better than feeling bad, and it reminded Shiro that he wasn’t the only person who had spent the last year in the horror of loneliness. Years after that moment — after that series of moments, after that bitten-off sensation of coming in his fist and realizing that he was alive and didn’t actually want to die — Shiro has taken to touching Keith all the time. Keith always leans into it, has never once flinched from Shiro even after the failed murder-suicide pact Shiro’s clone had going for a minute there.
He logs off his therapy session and goes to stand outside the house, in the little garden. Shiro hasn’t bullied Keith into planting the garden, not exactly; it was more a series of suggestions that Keith went along with. Keith spends more time outside than Shiro does, and he’s there now, meticulously pulling weeds.
Shiro crouches down beside him. Their knees touch and Keith leans stickily against Shiro’s whole side, his long body sweaty and disheveled; there’s a lot of skin pressed up against SHiro’s skin, because both of them are dressed down and out of uniform. Shiro’s wearing his shortest shorts.
“Here,” Keith says. He holds up the first cherry tomato that’s ripened before some wild animal could eat it, presses the brilliant orange little fruit against Shiro’s mouth. It’s easy to open to that touch, to let the tomato slip past his lips.
Shiro rolls the tomato from one cheek to the other, licking the smudges Keith’s fingerprints have left on the glossy skin. At last he shifts it between his molars and bites down.
The flavor explodes. It’s bright and acidic and seedy, the texture wet and nearly unpleasant. Shiro almost chokes on the spit that floods his mouth, chews messily and gulps so he can laugh. “Juicy,” he observes.
“Yeah,” Keith agrees. He has a little smile on his face, his nose is dusted with freckles. Shiro loves him more than anything, and reaches out to touch Keith, to stroke the line of his face, rather than saying anything out loud.