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There is someone in his spot.
This is not exactly unusual - it’s a city library, and even at the young age of ten, Sam understands the concept of a public building well enough, especially with the frequency in which he finds himself here.
What is unusual is that the someone is a kid that he’s never seen before, and he prides himself on knowing all of the children who like to frequent the library.
Sam would consider himself friends, or at least on good terms, with the majority of them, and seeing a small shape curled up in the beanbag and clearly alone doesn’t sit right with him. It is easy to slip his hand from his mother’s and march over to the fluff of black hair, bent over a book.
He pauses to try to read the cover. It looks fancy. There’s a brief moment of bitterness - Sam is the smart kid in the group. He can tell that it’s a work of fiction, one several years more advanced than what Sam has seen some of the teenagers at the library reading.
Regardless, he pokes the boy and then says brightly, “Hello!”
The kid jumps, and he barely catches a flash of something skittering across his face, before he closes his book and blinks up at him curiously, shaking dark curls out of his purple eyes. “Hi.”
“I’m Sam,” he says, sticking out his hand. “What’s your name?”
“Keith,” the boy replies quietly, blinking at his hand in apparent confusion. Sam lets his arm fall, unbothered by the lack of reaction.
“Hey, Keith,” he continues easily. “What’re you reading?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer, easily sliding himself into the remaining space next to Keith, and looks over the book’s cover again. Keith lets him, no small amount bewildered.
It’s unfamiliar, but then again, Sam has always liked math a little more than fantasy. He likely wouldn’t be able to recognize it no matter what. His mother had tried to get him to read fairytales for years, but he’d always prefer to read about the latest scientific developments. He knew she thought he was strange for it, no matter how much she loved him.
She eventually gave up regardless and started taking him to the library so he could read more of his books.
“It’s a space story,” Keith answers softly, reminding Sam abruptly of the question he’d asked. “There are aliens and spaceships.”
“How do the book’s spaceships work?” Sam says excitedly. “Does it say?”
Keith shakes his head. “My dad likes to talk about space, though. He used to be a pilot.”
“Woah,” Sam says. “He around?”
Keith nods hesitantly, violet eyes flicking towards a tall, older man reading a book calmly near the back of the library. “That’s him.”
“Cool,” he says, and Keith looks almost surprised. “Did you hear that they’re building a third lunar base?”
Keith shakes his head, and there’s a gleam of intrigue in his eyes. “What happened to the second one?”
Sam shifts, crossing his legs and leaning forward excitedly. “So, here’s the thing, the old lunar base is good, but like, there’s a storage problem. They keep food in this room, but it isn’t sealed because it’s near the docking area, and they need-”
“- a series of open seals and vacuum seals in order to land safely,” Keith cuts in, drawing back at whatever he sees in Sam’s face. “I like space.”
The sharp tang of bitterness he’d felt earlier doesn’t resurface. He waits, expecting the frustration, because he’d worked for his unofficial title as the science kid. It hadn’t come as easy to him as he would’ve wanted, but he was still good.
There isn’t any of the negativity he’d been expecting, though. And it’s probably how obviously uncomfortable Keith is at his silence that decides for him.
Was he… was he not allowed to talk about space? That was really sad, actually.
“Me too,” he grins, although a more accurate statement would be that he simply likes physics in general. “So you know what I’m talking about, right?”
Keith perks up, eyes lighting, and nods. “The room was built next to an open-air seal instead of being protected by a vacuum seal, right?”
“Yeah, and so now they’re redesigning the whole place, and they decided it would be just easier to build a new one.”
Sam gestures with his hands, mimicking the shape of the new lunar base to the best of his ability as he speaks, and Keith starts giggling, trying to understand the random moves he makes and failing. At some point, Sam falls off of the bean bag, and Keith follows moments later, collapsed with laughter, where Sam’s mother finds them.
“Hey mom,” he says, grinning brightly. “This is Keith.”
She sighs, patting his head indulgently, and smiles gently at Keith. “It’s nice to meet you.”
The boy bolts up, almost knocking Sam over. “It’s an honor to meet you, too, ma’am!”
“Mom’s not a ma’am,” he complains, sitting up properly. “Anyway, he’s my friend now.”
The friend in question stares at him, wide-eyed, almost as if he can’t process what he’s hearing. Sam just stares back. In terms of stubbornness, a Holt will always win.
Sam’s mother, easygoing as always, simply accepts this with a nod. “Well, Keith, I’m sorry but Sam will have to be going now. We’ve got to get home.”
He pouts. “I just met Keith! Can’t we wait just a little bit longer?”
“I don’t think you’d want to hold up Keith, either,” she says gently. “We can always come back another day.”
“I can be here in a week,” Keith says hesitantly. “Probably.”
“Alright,” she says, looking down towards Sam. “Do you want to come back in a week?”
“Yeah,” Sam replies immediately, nodding vigorously. “Definitely.”
Keith ducks his head at that, hiding his face with his hair, but Sam is confident that he caught the barest hint of a smile right before.
The next time they meet is in the library again. Sam’s mother and Keith’s father meet properly and end up retiring to a section of the library where they can keep an eye on their children.
Keith shows up with papers rolled up under his arm, and when Sam asks, he proudly spreads them out to show maps and blueprints of the old lunar base.
“My dad’s been retired for a while,” he says, “but when he was a pilot, he was around while the Garrison was building the second base. And he was a pretty good pilot, so they let him keep some stuff.”
“Woah,” Sam says. “The second base was built a really long time ago.”
Keith shrugs, mild discomfort flitting over his face. “I guess.”
“Anyway,” Sam continues, pretending not to see the relief on his new friend’s face, even though he doesn’t get it, “this is so cool. You’re so lucky.”
Keith smiles again, small but bright, and excitedly points out his favorite spot on the maps, which Sam vehemently disagrees with. The observation deck is definitely cool, but the core of the base is way more interesting. It’s powered by the most advanced tech that humanity has!
Keith’s unimpressed look does not help, and Sam spends the next ten minutes doing his best to convince his new friend that the core is better than the observation deck.
Honestly - on the deck, you can see Earth and space, true, but you could see that even from their planet, or an ordinary piloting mission.
The lunar base cores are only found on the lunar bases. Nobody’s built them anywhere else.
“I’m going to build something even better,” Sam tells him confidently.
It’s been his dream for years. Not specifically the lunar cores, but simply to do something groundbreaking. Something no one else has done.
He told his mom once that he’d build Earth’s first base deep underwater. Or perhaps on planets they haven’t reached yet, like Saturn.
“Oh yeah?” Keith responds. “I’m going to fly the furthest into deep space anyone ever has.”
They stare at each other, neither willing to be the first to break eye contact, before Sam blinks in realization. “Those aren’t even competing things.”
“You’re right,” Keith agrees, before quieting. “Not like I’m gonna get to be a pilot anyway.”
Sam tilts his head. “Why not?”
Keith shrugs. ”Dad says it’s not safe.”
It puzzles Sam - piloting may not be the safest career there is, but technology has really improved over the past decades, and planetbound piloting disasters are nonexistent now. Even pilots that make trips between the moon and back have a track record of next to no accidents.
There really isn’t any reason for piloting to be any more dangerous than most other jobs, but Keith’s eyes are downcast and he’s pretending like Sam can’t see the very obvious way the bean bag is screwed up in his fists. Sam may be young and impulsive, but he’s still not going to bother Keith about it when he clearly doesn’t want to talk.
He just made a new friend. He's not going to mess it up.
So he changes the subject, and moves on, and they spend the afternoon in their corner of the library, and Sam doesn’t bring it up again.
It becomes a routine. Sam has yet to find out what school Keith goes to, or where he lives, or anything of that sort, but every weekend he goes to the library and finds him already there on the bean bag, curled up away from the center of the room.
They don’t always talk about the lunar bases. Sometimes they just pick out books and read them, nudging the other to show them a section once in a while.
Sometimes they just talk. Sam likes to speak of what’s going on in his life, and tells Keith about all the drama going on at his school.
Keith always listens, wide-eyed, reacting with surprise or laughter at the appropriate moments.
It’s… nice.
Sam has friends outside of Keith, sure. He sees them all the time. But he can tell that Keith doesn’t, and that means he has to be twice the friend to make up for it.
And it’s not like Keith isn’t a good friend - he really, really is. Sam doesn’t know a lot of people quite as fascinated with space as the purple-eyed boy is, and it means that not a lot of people can follow his rants about astronomy and the physics of the universe. He knows that he's seen as a little bit of an oddity to be so dedicated to academics, but Keith doesn't think like that at all.
Before he can realize it, he’s looking forward to his library visits twice as much as he used to. His mother recognizes it and smiles at him, before asking if he’d like Keith to come over at some point for a meal.
His agreement is loud.
The day that Keith and his father knock at their door, Sam had spent the entire day buzzing with energy, barely managing to concentrate on his homework, easy as it may be.
When the doorbell rings, he’s down the stairs and throws the door open in moments, eagerly dragging Keith into the house with seconds to spare.
He vaguely hears his mother’s apologies as he pulls Keith up towards his room, and Keith’s father responds with laughter, saying “it’s alright, they’re quite young.”
Sam wants to say that no, they’re ten already, and then abruptly realizes he doesn’t know Keith’s age.
He pauses, turning around to look at Keith, who looks like he’s been through a tornado from the look in his eyes. Ah. Maybe he was just a little too forceful.
“How old are you?”
Keith blinks, taking a second to respond. “I think… nine?”
Sam elects not to comment on I think. Who doesn’t know their own age?
It’s not important, anyway - what matters is that he’s older. His triumph must show on his face, because Keith pouts and mutters shut up under his breath.
“Okay, doesn’t matter,” he says, remembering why he’d dragged Keith up here in the first place. “D’you wanna see my telescope?”
Keith’s face lights up, looking for all the world like Christmas came early. “You have a telescope ?”
Sam grins and nods. “We can see Saturn with it.”
“That’s so cool,” Keith says in awe. “We don’t have a telescope, and the library one isn’t very good. You can barely see the base on it.”
“Let me show you, then,” Sam says proudly, and turns to bring Keith towards their roof.
They lose track of time, that way, trying to beat each other on seeing who had more constellations memorized. Sam’s not quite sure how long they spend up there in the chilly fall weather, taking turns with the telescope. By the time Sam’s father calls them down for dinner, Keith’s nose is bright red from the winds and Sam had been failing to warm up his ears for the past twenty minutes.
The meal is just as good, like always, and they continue their conversation, ignorant to the looks their parents exchange.
Before he can realize it, the dinner is over, and Keith has to leave. Sam pleads with his parents, but it doesn’t work, and he ends up at the doorway, waving at his friend until long after Keith is out of sight.
“Was it nice?” His mother asks, a smile on her face like she already knows the answer.
Sam nods so quickly he’s half-afraid he’s going to break his neck. “Yeah! Can we do that again? Please?”
She just laughs, ruffling his hair. “Of course.”
Spending time with Keith is easy to the point he barely realizes when months pass until he absentmindedly points out that it’s nearly Halloween, and his friend responds by mentioning his birthday had passed a couple of days ago.
Sam startles from his position on the rooftop, nearly banging his head on the telescope in his hurry. “When was your birthday?!”
Keith blinks at him slowly, stretched out in the sunlight like a cat. “Couple days ago, I said. The twenty-second.”
“Your birthday has already passed, oh my god,” he says in horror. “I didn’t even get you anything!”
“I don’t really celebrate my birthday,” Keith shrugs. “It wasn’t important.”
“Yes it is,” Sam insists. “C’mon, we’re going to do something about it.”
Keith rolls his eyes, but doesn’t protest when Sam drags him down the stairs. Good. Sam had learned over the months that Keith very frequently forgets that people actually care about him and would refuse any types of gifts. However, if one is persistent enough, he wouldn’t do anything.
Sam is a Holt. He’s quite good at being persistent.
He’s a little less good at planning birthday parties, especially when his friend doesn’t even want one, but that’s where his mother comes in and offers to drive them to their lake house over the weekend.
It’s an amazing idea - Sam knows Keith has lived in the area his entire life and has probably never even seen a lake. Besides, he’s stupidly athletic for a nerd. He would definitely enjoy the opportunity to go swimming.
And, of course, Sam’s right, like always. When he proposes the lake house getaway, Keith’s eyes widen and he bolts up so quickly that he smacks his head against the wall.
“That’s insane,” he hisses quietly. “I can’t do that!”
“What do you mean,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. “Am I not allowed to go to my own house now?”
Keith sniffs and looks away. “You know that’s not what I meant, don’t be stupid.”
“You know who’s being stupid? You, because it’s your birthday gift,” Sam replies, sorely tempted to try to physically shake sense into his friend even if it wouldn’t work. He thinks it would be very cathartic. “It would be mean to say no.”
Keith sighs, black strands of hair falling into his eyes, but Sam knows he’s won. His friend’s quiet fine is just the confirmation.
His mother is glad to hear it, and Heath Kogane also seems happy that his son agreed despite the aggressive pouting and sulking.
It doesn’t matter, anyway, for the week passes by too quickly regardless. Before he realizes it, Sam is in the car beside his friend, bags packed and thrown in the trunk.
“It’s a long ride,” he promptly informs Keith, “so I’m going to sleep.”
Keith blinks at him, stiffening, before he nods. “Okay. It’s so pretty, though. You don’t want to look?”
Sam tilts his head, following the direction of where Keith is looking, to try to see what his friend does. “What are you talking about?”
He’s not sure he understands what Keith’s saying. It’s just a bunch of forests and a tiny river, winding alongside the road, and open skies. Certainly not anything as special as what Keith makes it sound like.
Then he pauses, abruptly recognizing the idiocy of what he’s thinking. He knows Keith has never left the region before – one of his reasons for bringing him out here was to show him the lakes! Sam doesn’t even know where Keith lives, but it’s definitely either in Plaht City or not far.
The wide expanse of forest? The long stretches of rivers alongside them?
He doubts that Keith has ever seen anything like it before. His wonder is completely understandable.
Turning to his friend, who’s glued to the car window, eyes flicking through the landscape, he suddenly feels bad. Sam loves their lake house. He loves being able to go all the time. It must be hard, for Keith, to always be in Plaht City, isn’t it?
“Do you not like being in the city?”
Keith turns around, staring at him. “No? I like the city. It’s fun.”
“But aren’t you always in the city? Doesn’t it get boring?”
“Me and dad live in the desert,” Keith says. “We don’t go to the city that often.”
He needs to stop saying things that completely re-route Sam’s brain, because what does he mean by living in the desert? The desert is known for being practically uninhabitable save for the Garrison compound, and even then, Sam’s heard that it’s incredibly difficult to adjust.
(To be fair, Sam heard this from classmates who heard it from siblings, and perhaps the excited retellings of a fifth grader aren’t the most accurate.)
To think of a father and son living there, alone, is unthinkable to Sam, except Keith wouldn’t lie. He figured that one out early – his friend simply refuses to lie. He’s not even sure if Keith realizes he’s doing it or not, but one thing is sure: if Keith says he lives in the desert, that means he lives in the desert, insane or not.
“That’s really cool,” he responds, because it’s true. “I’ve never been.”
“D’you wanna come over, sometime?”
It’s nearly silent, characteristic of Keith, but the question itself is not, nor is it something that Sam would have expected. He’s ten, not an idiot, and he can tell that Keith is shy, so he’s never asked.
He just figured that it wasn’t important, difficult as it was not to pry.
The answer to Keith’s question, however, is easy. “Yeah, of course!”
Keith turns away, looking back out the window, but he’s smiling. This time he’s not even trying to hide it as much.
Sam curls back up in the seat, leaning his head against the side of the car, and closes his eyes. He knows Keith won’t mind the silence, being a surprisingly quiet kid for someone so excitable, and he wasn’t lying earlier when he said the ride was long.
They’d gotten all they needed out of the conversation, anyway.
Sam wakes up slowly to his friend’s voice. Stretching his arms, he yawns as his eyes attempt to focus. It doesn’t work, which informs him that his glasses fell off at some point. Their blurry shape appears somewhere in his peripheral vision, allowing him to put them on and look up at Keith, who’s gently nudging his shoulder.
“Hey,” he says. “We arrived.”
Sam blinks the remaining sleepiness out and looks past his friend to see the garage of their lake house, elegant wooden walls unchanged as always. Through the open door comes the last few rays of orange sunlight before night falls.
Unbuckling his seatbelt and gracelessly tumbling out of the car, Sam snatches Keith’s arm and grins. “I gotta show you everything. ”
“Not yet,” his mother’s voice says from somewhere in the garage. “Help me unpack the car first.”
Sam sighs, but the two of them make their way to the trunk and drag out their bags. His mother unlocks the door, gesturing for them to make their way into the house with a reminder not to track dirt in.
He drags Keith upstairs with the excuse of showing him where he could stay, gesturing for his friend to drop his bag by the door, before he continues onward.
“We don’t have a telescope on this roof,” Sam says, “but I think it’s just as cool.”
He helps Keith up the ladder, settling down on the edge, and watches Keith’s reaction.
In their house in the city, the roof is flat and allows them a view of the rest of the neighborhood. In the lake house, the sloping roof tiles allow for a beautiful view of the forest around them, and just to the left, the clear glass blue of the lake.
Especially now, just at the end of sunset, the water glows with flaming colors and the trees are bathed in golden light. Sam may be a huge nerd, but he’s not uncultured. He can recognize the beauty of the scene.
Beside him, Keith is open-mouthed and wide-eyed in awe, drinking in as much as possible. His eyes keep flicking around, even twisting his body to try to see everything visible.
“You like it?”
Keith turns to him, incredulous. “Of course I like it! This is so pretty, Sam, oh my god. You’re so lucky.”
Sam puffs out his chest, grinning widely. “You’re welcome.”
It’s only minutes later, however, that the light starts to fade and the sky begins to darken. With one last glance, Keith turns to climb back down the ladder, looking up at his friend.
“We should sneak out after,” Sam whispers. “It’s really nice at night. We can see way more stars than in the city.”
Keith nods enthusiastically. Ha, Sam knew that this was a good idea.
Attempting to teach Keith to swim had been an… experience. He is talented athletically, as expected, but living in the desert his entire life means that he refused to go into the chilly October water, insisting that if Sam was going to make him cold, he had the right to drag Sam out into the desert in revenge.
Which is how Sam finds himself sweating to death and overheating, desperately trying to cool down with the Koganes’ fan, in the middle of May.
This is not fair, and Keith’s non-stop laughing is not helping matters.
“Are you going to just sit there being mean or are you going to tell me why you wanted me to come over?” Sam snaps. He’d feel bad about being rude, except it’s way too hot out to even think about it.
Keith snorts again, but gets up, pulling out several heavy objects wrapped in paper. “You wanna be a scientist, right?”
“Yeah, engineer?”
Proudly dropping the objects onto the table, oddly reminiscent of him doing the same thing with lunar base blueprints all those months ago, Keith gestures for him to open them. “I know I’m a little late, but I asked my dad if he could get some Garrison stuff for your birthday. They might not like him, but they agreed.”
Sam relinquishes his position in front of the fan to take a closer look. He tries not to tear the wrapping paper too much but fails, revealing a series of professional-looking textbooks. Flipping open the first one, he chokes at the signature on the inside cover.
“Keith.”
“Yeah?”
“This belonged to one of the greatest Garrison scientists ever. This is insane.”
Keith just blinks at him. “So you like it?”
“Do I like- yes, oh my god,” Sam sputters. “This is the coolest thing you could’ve gotten me.”
Keith smiles, tension bleeding out of his shoulders. “I feel like I only ever get you old Garrison things, though.”
“And that is totally fine,” Sam replies immediately, already skimming through the pages. A lot of the concepts are unfamiliar to him, but he has time to figure them out. “I love this stuff.”
“Okay,” his friend says, nudging the other books towards him. “They’re all pretty similar. You can keep them.”
Sam’s head snaps up. “What do you mean, keep them? Aren’t they Garrison property?”
Keith shrugs. “Yeah, but they’re my dad’s property now.”
“How did he manage that? These belonged to, like, the most important engineers and all.”
“A while back, they tried to sneak into his land and steal some of his stuff,” his friend says casually. “So now he can get them to do stuff for him by threatening to sue. He’s got proof.”
“Keith, what the heck. Your family is crazy.”
He just shrugs again, apparently unphased by having one of the most powerful organizations on the planet hold a grudge against his father. “Anyway, the books are yours.”
Sam is torn between snatching the books close to his chest or just returning them. Keith’s his friend whom he cares very much about, but also apparently an idiot, if he doesn’t see the value of what he just got.
He’s eleven. He probably shouldn’t be given the books used by the people who built the Mars base, nor the reference books written by high-level Garrison scientists.
But one look at Keith’s face, eyes locked on him and expectant, and he knows he can’t decline them. It’d be cruel, and it’s not quite hot enough outside for that.
“Okay,” Sam says finally. “I can’t even - thank you so much.”
Keith grins widely, nearly vibrating with excitement. “You’re welcome!”
Why does his friend have to be so nice? That cannot be fair. Normal people aren’t usually more excited to give gifts than receiving them!
Sam pauses. To be fair, not a lot about Keith is normal.
He’s not going to complain, though, not if it gets him lunar base blueprints and phD-level records and notes.
“Keith Keith Keith I just checked,” Sam says, stumbling over his words in his hurry, “I got my growth spurt. I’m tall now.”
“I haven’t.”
His friend’s not wrong – Sam realizes that he’s pretty sure that Keith looks the same as he did two years ago when they first met. He… really hasn’t changed much.
That’s kind of sad.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Sam replies. “You’ll get taller someday. Not taller than me, though.”
Keith flinches, opening his mouth to say something, before seeming to think better of it and snapping his jaw shut, opting instead to just shake his head. “Nah.”
“No to what?” Sam says, mildly offended. “Don’t you dare get taller than me. That’d be so embarrassing.”
“I’ve been taller than you for the past years,” his friend responds.
“Yeah, and that’s why I’m not going back to that!”
“Okay well you’re not going to have a choice.”
“Excuse you- ”
They take Keith to the Garrison museum upstate for his thirteenth birthday.
It’s for one reason only: the flight simulators available to the public, not found anywhere else in the country. Sam’s mother had it booked for months, ever since hearing from her son about how much Keith dreams of being a pilot.
Like he’d known would happen, Keith does the best out of them all. In fact, Sam thinks he might’ve even broken a record.
Stumbling out of the simulator, dazed, Keith looks up at him, eyes glassy.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” his friend says quietly, giving him a small smile. “This is… wow. That was amazing.”
Sam nods slowly. “Are you sure you’re good?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, Sam. I just never thought I’d be able to do that.”
He tilts his head, confused. “Garrison exams are next year. Why not try out? You’d definitely win.”
Keith snorts, but it’s choked up. It sounds more like he’s about to cry again. “That’d be nice, but I can’t.”
Sam accepts it without pressing further. Keith isn’t making any sense, but he doesn’t want to upset him any further. Sometimes he says unexplainable things and doesn’t elaborate. Sam has long learned to simply move past it.
“Okay,” he responds. “Do you want to go look through the rest of the museum? I heard they have some mission photos and even hardcopies from decades ago.”
Keith nods, flashing him a grateful smile and wiping the tears from his eyes. “Yeah.”
Sam just hopes that one day, Keith would be okay with telling him what’s been bothering him all these years.
He knows that’s not how his friend works, though.
Sam enters the eighth grade in the fall, and with it, becomes eligible for the Garrison exams. Keith, homeschooled by his father and still refusing to try out, simply watches him study as emotional support.
It isn’t very conducive towards his peace and quiet, however.
“You should totally become a pilot,” Keith says, rolling onto his back on Sam’s bed.
“When have you ever seen me express interest in flying,” he responds flatly, trying to memorize the paragraph in front of him.
He’d definitely gained an advantage over the others from Keith’s textbook gift for his eleventh birthday, kept securely in his room and opened frequently for study. And yet the requirements are far, far higher than he’d expected.
Which is what led to him hunching over his desk, attempting to learn as much as possible for the test itself. He doesn’t know why his friend is here – it’s not like Keith’s doing much except talk to him.
He likes hanging out with Keith, don’t get him wrong, but Sam’s not exactly doing anything interesting.
“C’mon, don’t you wanna go to space?”
“Nah,” Sam replies, brow furrowing as he mouths the scientific terms underneath his breath. “I see the photos and videos sent back. That’s good enough for me.”
“Now you’re just trying to piss me off on purpose. I know you think it’s cool.”
He snorts, finally looking up and twisting around to make eye contact with his friend. “And I know that you know that I need to study.”
“You have four months, Sam. You’re literally like the smartest person I know. You’re gonna do great,” Keith says. “C’mon, talk to me about what the Garrison building is like.”
“Your father was literally their top pilot.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Ah, the mysterious feud between Heath Kogane and the Galaxy Garrison that Sam has yet to uncover the reason for. He isn’t completely sure if Keith even knows how dangerous it is to have them as enemies, but seeing how carefree he is about Sam’s potential enrollment, perhaps he simply doesn’t care.
“Okay, okay,” he answers. “We really didn’t get to see that much, though.”
“That’s fine,” Keith says eagerly. “I don’t mind.”
They turn fifteen, and with it, the question that's been burning in his mind for nearly five years can’t be held back anymore.
It’s an ordinary day when Sam asks. He doesn’t want to corner his friend, doesn’t want to make it feel like a big deal, so they’re relaxing near Keith’s house. He had driven them up the rocks with the hoverbike to a beautiful view of the desert, stretching out in an infinite expanse.
Sam’s pretty sure that Keith can’t legally drive, but it doesn’t really matter. He’s not giving up this view, and anyway, Heath has definitely done far worse.
Neither of them say anything for a while, simply enjoying the few moments of peace, kicking their legs over the ledge. These moments are rarer and rarer for Sam as the Garrison curriculum’s difficulty rises, although he wouldn’t change anything about the choices he’s made.
He almost doesn’t want to ask. He knows Keith is private. Wary, even.
But they’ve known each other for half of a decade – Sam’s not an idiot. Of course he’s noticed.
“Why do you look the same as you did two years ago?”
Keith stiffens, spine locking straight and eyes snapping to him. He glances towards the hoverbike parked behind them as if contemplating whether he could physically avoid the conversation. Like an idiot.
“Come on, Keith,” Sam says quietly. “It’s been five years, but you don’t look fifteen at all.”
“Have you considered,” Keith replies, voice strained and shot with nerves, “that maybe I just look young?”
Yeah, of course he’s considered. There have been people that simply look very different from their actual age before, like that fifty-year-old Chinese woman he’d heard about who looks twenty.
But that doesn’t make sense for Keith to look so young. He lives in the desert, in a wild climate. That’s not exactly the most conducive to stopping the aging process. And Keith may be half-Korean, somewhere distantly related to the Chinese population, but he’s pretty sure genes alone can’t slow down his aging.
Also, if that was the case, Keith wouldn’t be acting so fucking shady.
Sam doesn’t respond to his friend. It’s an answer, in and of itself. If Keith tells him that he just looks young as shit, he’ll leave it alone. He doesn’t want to lose his closest friend.
But they both know that’s not it.
Keith sighs, slouching over the cliff’s edge and half-heartedly kicking at the air. “Yeah, fair. C’mon, you’re smart. Figure it out.”
Sam looks over at Keith, dejected in a way that doesn’t suit him at all. “You don’t look identical to how you did when we were ten. I checked the photos.”
“Stalker,” Keith mutters, but there’s the faintest undercurrent of humor that lets him know he hasn’t fucked up their relationship too much.
“You look pretty much the same as to how you did two years ago, though,” he continues, tilting his head. “I mean, aside from cutting your hair and all.”
Sam chances another look at his friend, who’s looking at him, a mixture of amusement and fear in his eyes. So he’s close, then.
He runs through the info he has and then blinks, turning to Keith. The math is actually far easier than he thought at first. Huh.
“You age at half the normal rate, is that it?”
Keith’s lips quirk up into a smile, irony evident in his expression. “I’m twenty-five years old.”
“Holy shit,” Sam says instinctively, mind immediately going through all the different possibilities of what this means. He forces it down, reminding himself that his goal is not to alienate his best friend. “That’s – wait, you’re twelve?”
Keith grimaces. “I have no idea. Physically, that’s my best guess. Mentally I’m probably older. I definitely don’t feel like I’m twelve.”
“Holy shit,” Sam repeats.
“Yeah,” Keith sighs, casually swinging a leg off the ledge. “It’s from my mom.”
“Your mom?” Sam really needs to remember how words work and stop repeating things.
“Mm-hm,” his friend says, looking out over the desert, eyes lost in memory. “She crashed a couple miles out from the house. Dad found her and helped her while she healed, and, well, they had me. Then she had to leave, take her fixed ship and go.”
It takes a couple of seconds for Sam’s mind to reboot. For a moment, he’d immediately understood what animated shows are always trying to convey whenever they’d play record scratches during surprising moments for comedic effects. He could practically hear the screech.
“Keith,” he says, hushed, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice, “are you telling me that you’re half-alien?”
His friend looks over at him and smiles again, self-deprecating. “Yup. You made second contact, buddy.” He pauses. “I mean, I don’t know if it counts. I’ve never left Earth.”
Suddenly, everything about the Koganes makes sense.
Keith’s father’s long-lasting animosity with the Garrison? Completely understandable – of course the Garrison would want to investigate what looks like a meteor crash but could theoretically be more. Being on Heath’s property, the man shooed them off, but they’d held grudges ever since.
Keith refusing to join the Garrison? Sam did just that, and he had to undergo their very, very, very detailed medical tests. Even the slightest abnormality could’ve tipped them off, and that’s obviously not a risk either Kogane would’ve wanted to take.
Keith’s obsession with outer space and piloting? Who wouldn’t be obsessed with deep space with the knowledge of entire other civilizations out there? His friend is part-alien, of course he would be desperate to learn more, go further.
Sam realizes, a chill pricking down his spine, that Keith had been raised separately from an entire half of his heritage. That he knows that his mother could be out there, but he would never be able to find her, save for if she ever decides to return.
It’s heartbreaking, and far, far more important than whatever technical questions Sam might have. Keith is still his friend, first and foremost, and it couldn’t have been easy.
Carefully, he lifts an arm, watching Keith’s face. The surprise on it hurts just as much.
What, did he think Sam would sell him out to the Garrison, on something? They’d known each other five years – it doesn’t change anything about Keith.
Resting his arm around his friend’s shoulders, he suddenly feels terrible about all of the times he’d told Keith to try out, or complained about Garrison work, or said that space was boring, joking or not.
“I’m sorry, Keith.”
“What are you sorry for?” Keith says, voice just a little too thick for the casualness he’s going for. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It couldn’t have been easy, though.”
“Yeah, well,” Keith says, straightening and furiously drying his eyes. “You’re here and not trying to dissect me or anything. That’s good enough for me.”
“Wha- Keith, you’re my closest friend!”
“I know,” Keith snaps, before softening. “I know. Thank you. It really… it really means a lot to me.”
Sam smiles. “Thanks for telling me.” And then he hesitates. “We’re okay, right?”
Keith’s eyes flick over his face, searching, and he acquiesces with a sigh, relief visibly bleeding through his posture. “Yeah.”
“We’re okay?”
“Yeah, we’re okay.”
(Keith is a little less okay with Sam’s constant barrage of questions, but he’s forgiven, and in his defense, he figured he deserves to know if his friend is secretly green.)
He’s at the Garrison when he gets the news. It’s during his lunch break. His phone buzzes in his pocket, the one he hacked to go unnoticed by Garrison scanners so that he could still text his family – and his friends, of course, although he usually only talked with Keith.
[Honey, we have something serious to tell you. Can you call? - Mom]
Something in his chest drops, heavy and sinking like stone, and he realizes it’s his heart. Sam stands up, his tray clattering ungracefully to the table, and he thinks he makes some excuse to his team, stumbling into the cadets’ bathroom.
There’s no one else inside, which is good. He presses call.
“Hi, darling,” his mother starts, and her voice is just off enough to worry Sam even further.
“Hey,” he says, “what happened?”
There’s a pause. “I’m sorry, Sam, I want you to know that it was completely an accident-”
“What happened?” He repeats, and there’s a rising sense of something he can’t quite identify. Panic, maybe. Probably fear, too.
“Keith’s father… it was out in the desert. The most recent heatwave, they think. He got very, very sick, and he was already so old.” His mother’s voice is quiet, solemn, unbefitting of the kind and jubilant woman he knows her as. “He… didn’t make it.”
The words ring in his ears. Heath Kogane is – was, Sam tells himself, the shift jarring and foreign – old. He couldn’t keep up with Keith’s aging, or more accurately, he couldn’t slow down enough. He was old, but he was kind, and good, and certifiably insane, but in the fun way, in the way that had him teaching Keith and Sam how to hotwire cars on dusty Saturday evenings.
He stutters out something about Keith. His friend idolizes both his father and his mother, Sam knows, and for good reason, from what very little he’d heard of them both.
The hesitancy with which Sam’s mother responds does little to abate the anxiety curdling in his gut. “We only found out because Heath had an appointment that he missed, and the doctor went to go see if everything was alright, and found him in the house."
“And Keith?” Sam’s voice cracks. “Is he okay?”
“...There was no sign of him,” his mother says finally. “They’re saying he’s gone, too, somewhere in the desert. Sam, I’m so, so sorry.”
There’s a ringing in his ears. The gray floor before him is swirling, mixing with the white walls, darkness creeping in the edges of his visions.
Gravity shifts, and for a moment, he can’t feel his knees or feet. His head feels heavier than it should, and he’s struggling to stay upright, up and down spinning uncontrollably.
Catching himself on the edge of the sink, Sam does his best to answer the words he knows his mother is saying, but none of them register. There’s sound there, but no shape to it.
That’s a good phrase. There’s no shape to it – no shape to his vision, no shape to his hearing or feeling. His mouth feels dry. He thinks he drops his glasses on the floor, thinks he hears a crack. Absent-mindedly, he recalls that he needs to replace them, anyway.
His ears begin to clear, and he gains enough presence of mind to understand his mother’s worried voice over the phone. She tells him he’s allowed to take time off – as much as he needs, she says, grief is difficult – and he responds with something, probably an affirmation. He’s not completely sure what he said.
Sam hangs up, and mechanically goes through the process of hiding his phone in his jacket pocket and picking up his glasses and putting them back on. His body doesn’t feel quite right, knees still too weak and hands too shaky for the engineer he’s supposed to be.
His bag is still packed in his dorm. He was supposed to go home for the weekend, visit his parents, visit Keith.
Even the mere thought sends something sharp lancing through his chest. He’s… not going to be able to do that anymore, will he?
The idea of going back to the busy cafeteria, to sit down next to his teammates and pretend nothing has happened, feels ridiculous. It feels like letting the Garrison win, which is stupid, because he knows, logically, that the situation is completely unrelated to their enmity.
Sam wonders who will own the desert property now. He hopes it’s not the government – they’d just hand it over to the Garrison. There isn’t anything of interest there anymore, he knows, despite how much it hurts. It still feels wrong, though, to let them have it. Like giving up.
Keith loves - loved, damn it, he’s going to have to keep reminding himself of that, won’t he? - the desert. Had spent days dragging Sam around, reaching definitely illegal speeds on the hoverbike, all to show him the cliffs and valleys and that one small oasis they’d ended up resting at for hours.
His mother’s words come back to him, her voice saying gone, too, somewhere in the desert, and all he can hear is his heartbeat hammering in his ears, pulsing somewhere in his throat.
Sam is still dizzy and yet he can’t stop walking. The thought of his lunch, still unfinished on his tray in the cafeteria, makes him feel sick. He can barely process anything past the nausea and the unrelenting need to get away.
When he looks up, he’s at the Garrison’s cadets’ garage. He chokes out a laugh, bitter and hazy, at the sight of their hoverbikes lined up neatly.
He thinks of Heath Kogane and his long record of jacking cars and wonders briefly if their red-and-white hoverbike was stolen from the Garrison. They look nearly identical. The thought is reassuring, somehow, but vanishes just as quickly as it came.
Sam stares at the bikes, an idea creeping into his mind. It’s a stupid one and he knows it.
It’s also exactly what Keith would’ve done, and it’s that thought that solidifies his choice. Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s taking out a hoverbike and wiring it with half-forgotten lessons from Keith’s father. It comes to life with barely a touch, special keys completely bypassed. The familiar whir of the ignition, one so often heard in afternoons with the Koganes, nearly dissuades him.
He still gets onto the bike just as an officer rounds the corner and spots him. Sam can’t quite recognize him with the distance between them but he still feels an inexplicable sense of disappointment for Garrison security. He’d been here for, what, ten minutes already? It may be mealtimes, but still.
It’s far too easy to rocket past the officer, making a series of quick turns he’d somehow learned from Keith’s reckless driving, ignoring the shouts rising up behind him.
He doesn’t breathe until he’s well into the desert, the red-stone cliffs he’d become so accustomed to rising up beside him.
Sam doesn’t dare to go to the Koganes’ house. He thinks that if he does, he wouldn’t be able to leave, and then he’d get caught. He doesn’t want to go back, not yet.
Gone, too, somewhere in the desert, his mother’s voice says again, except this time it isn’t a condemnation but instead a direction.
Keith’s half-alien and sturdier than any human Sam’s ever met. A couple days in the desert wouldn’t be great for him, but he’d survive it.
And - and Sam needs to know, too. Gone means we don’t know what happened , he’s seen enough of Keith’s favorite true crime series to know that. It doesn’t help that there’s a thread of anger buried beneath everything else, anger at Keith for leaving.
Sam’s not an idiot. In fact, he’s been called a genius rather frequently, although it doesn’t usually carry over to emotional intelligence. Regardless, he knows that logically, if everyone’s saying the Koganes are… not here, anymore, they’re probably right.
Perhaps if he stopped to try to calm down, the situation would break past the swirling cloud of emotions to him. But he somehow is in a contrasting state of numbness and desperation, and the idea of thinking about what’s happening is terrifying.
It’s far, far easier to just drive. He doesn’t have Keith’s skill with the hoverbike but he knows enough, and it’s easy to dip between the rising hills and rock ledges. Sam doesn’t know where he’s going, but that doesn’t matter for once.
Just for a moment, at the top of a cliff, sand stretching out in every direction before him, he thinks he can understand Keith a little better. Thinks he can understand the wistful looks Heath Kogane had every time he spoke of his past piloting.
Thinks that it would be easy for him, too, to simply keep going into the desert, and never look back.