Chapter Text
Shiro is screwed the moment he stupidly hands his phone over to Matt during lunch so that he can look up a meme Shiro apparently needs to see. He’s too busy picking at his cafeteria tray disappointedly to think about what he’s doing—it was supposed to be Taco Tuesday, but instead he’s looking down at the saddest slab of vegan meatloaf he’s ever seen.
“Shiro,” Matt says. “What’s this?” He turns the screen to Shiro so he can see what popped up when Matt opened the internet browser.
All the life drains from Shiro’s body.
“Nothing,” Shiro hisses, snatching his phone back. “No, you saw nothing.”
“I saw your search history,” Matt says gleefully. He looks about three seconds away from jumping up and flipping over the cafeteria table out of excitement.
Shiro ignores Matt, who’s repeatedly chanting oh my god under his breath, and swiftly deletes his entire search history, closing six separate tabs in the process, and then he deletes his entire browsing history for good measure. The only incriminating thing left is the name of the website he commits to memory before snuffing it out of existence.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” Matt whines. The look on his face is so aggrieved that Shiro almost—almost—feels bad, but then Matt keeps talking. “As your best friend slash confidant slash love guru, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you’re looking at engagement rings!”
Shiro glares, face hot. “Shut up! I swear it’s nothing, okay? I was just—curious.”
Matt laughs disbelievingly. “You’re curious.” He wipes at the corner of his eye. Shiro isn’t convinced he’s really crying, considering that Matt Holt is both a supreme liar and a little shit. “And this has nothing to do with Keith?”
“No,” Shiro says, trying to make his voice firm and intimidating, but still quiet enough that no one can tell something is going on.
“Then why the sudden interest in engagement rings three months before you’re going into space?”
“It’s not an interest, or anything, I was just curious,” Shiro maintains. He stabs his fork into the meatloaf and tries to chew what tastes mostly like a dry ball of pureed oats. Shiro hasn’t lost a stare-off like this in any of the years since he’s known Matt, and he’s not about to give in now.
Matt rolls his eyes, and Shiro barely resists to urge to say ‘I win.’ He’s not going to be petty today.
Finally, Matt shakes his head, grinning. “I can’t believe you’re gonna marry Keith.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” Shiro swiftly denies, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one could be listening in on their conversation. “I’m not planning anything, and there’s nothing happening. I was just curious.” For some reason, he’s convinced himself that if he just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again, Matt will eventually come around, and they’ll forget this ever happened.
“Well, I know that’s a lie, because that’s exactly what you said when I found out you were looking at the application process for the Kerberos mission,” Matt says dryly. He jams a French fry into his mouth thoughtfully, leaning both elbows on the table. “Please tell me you’re not being an idiot about Keith again.”
Shiro narrows his eyes, slightly caught off guard. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Uh, I’m talking about the literal hearts in his eyes anytime you two are even in the same room as each other? Actually, both of your eyes. It’s disgusting how much you two love each other, I’m pretty sure if you said you wanted to drop out tomorrow to run away and raise alpacas he would follow you without even asking why. Like—” Matt stops, staring at Shiro in shock. “Dude. Are you kidding me? Do you not know about this? I know for a fact we went over this in the two and a half years before you got the guts to ask him out.”
“We’ve only been dating for four months,” Shiro says. It’s a perfectly logical objection, especially since he’s definitely not thinking about getting engaged. “I’m leaving soon. It wouldn’t—he wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t what?” Matt challenges. “Wouldn’t follow you to the edge of the solar system if he could just get his hands on a ship to take him there? Shiro. My buddy, my pal, my man, you’re an idiot.”
“No one proposes after four months, okay?” Shiro says, trying his best to shut this conversation down so he can jump straight to pretending it never even happened in the first place. “Especially not when they’re leaving for Pluto soon.”
Matt shrugs and returns most of his attention to his large plate of fries and assorted dipping sauces. “I mean, yeah, you’re absolutely right that it’s completely insane to even think about proposing this soon, but in case you haven’t noticed, Keith is pretty insane too. Plus you’ve known each other for three years, anyway, it’s not like you just met.”
“He’s not—” Shiro starts to say, but . . . he is well aware that Keith occasionally practices home invasion scenarios in his dorm room and sleeps with a knife under his pillow every night for quote-un-quote self-defense, and while that’s technically against Garrison regulations about personal weapons, Shiro isn’t going to be the one to report him. “That’s not the point, okay? I’m not planning to—to propose to Keith or anything like that.”
Matt snorts inelegantly, rolling his eyes at Shiro. “Whatever you say, man. But if you elope without bringing me along to be your best man? We’re over.”
***
Shiro doesn’t consciously start looking for engagement rings. He hears one of the students in the ethics class he TAs for squealing over her new diamond ring one day with an excited group of friends gathered around, and it just pops into his head that he has no idea if there are engagement rings out there that don’t come covered in gracefully inlaid diamonds and precious metals. He stops to congratulate her all the same as he hands back their quizzes before class, and it is a beautiful ring, white gold with a sizable diamond set into a circle of tiny amethysts. The gems look like a flower, and the metal is wrought to look like curled up branches.
“She proposed on my birthday, and amethyst is my birthstone,” Vera explains, smiling brightly as he peers at it. He can tell, immediately, that while the ring is important to her, the love shining in her eyes isn’t for the rocks at all.
“It’s mine, too,” he says to her, and somehow her face gets even happier. “Congratulations to you both.”
He glances at the ring one last time as he steps away, and it’s truly gorgeous, but something about it strikes him as not quite right, whatever that means. Almost—
But the officer teaching the class walks in then, and Shiro puts it out of his mind as he gets back to work and quickly takes the final quizzes over to the students straggling in the door last minute. It’s not really worth spending his time on.
(Maybe, privately, he thinks this because he knows Keith would scoff at the sight of a delicate diamond ring. Maybe.)
So later that night, as he’s pulling out a stack of truly terrible papers from that same ethics class, he sees the name Vera Figner on top of the stack, and a more concrete question finally settles in his mind. What other kinds of engagement rings are out there?
He looks it up. It’s just unattached curiosity and the desire to procrastinate on work—he has no expectations or plans, and Shiro truly, genuinely doesn’t have a particular agenda in mind.
But then he finds out you can buy a ring made of meteorite. And, he’ll admit this to himself but never to Matt, that’s what makes him stop thinking about rings as a general concept. That’s the point where he’s sitting alone in his room, working at his desk, vaguely regretting not snagging a couple of sugar cookies from the cafeteria after dinner. And he thinks instead about putting a ring on Keith’s finger.
It’s just—directed curiosity.
***
“So why does Matt keep laughing every time he looks at me?” Keith asks the next night at the gym. He’s spotting Shiro while he lifts, and the question startles Shiro so much he nearly drops the weight over his head.
“Uh,” Shiro says intelligently, looking up at Keith with wide eyes. “I don’t know.”
Keith stares back with a raised eyebrow.
Shiro sighs and shakes his head, starts up his reps again. “He’s just being Matt. Don’t worry about it, he’ll get over it.”
Keith doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that, so Shiro re-focuses his attention on his work out. His arms are aching from how long they’ve been in the gym and his breath is starting to come out as harsh pants instead of a smooth, controlled flow. Wordlessly, Keith helps him lift the bar back onto the rack and Shiro closes his eyes for a minute while his breathing returns to normal. He opens them to Keith’s bemused face staring down at him, standing at Shiro’s shoulder on the side of the bench with his elbows propped up on the bar and half of a grin flickering across his mouth. Shiro’s heart makes a gallant attempt at beating its way out of his chest.
“See something you like?” Keith asks.
Any sort of witty comment dies on Shiro’s tongue as he takes a moment to softly trace Keith’s face and commit it to memory again. As excited as he is about the mission, Shiro hates that the next two years of his life are going to be confined to staring at Keith only in the precious few pictures he has of him and getting to send only the occasional text transmission back to Earth. Matt keeps making grumbled noises about rigging up a better communication system, but so far the known laws of physics are keeping him firmly in line.
“What are you thinking about?” Keith says, lifting a hand to carefully smooth Shiro’s damp bangs away from his forehead.
“The laws of physics,” Shiro says softly, “and the fact that they’re going to be keeping me away from you for the next two years.”
In a rare response, Keith actually blushes; Shiro just catches a flush spreading across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose before Keith snatches his hand back to drop his head into his arms and groan in embarrassment. “You’re the worst,” he whines, refusing to look at Shiro.
Shiro laughs and sits up, glancing furtively around the gym to make sure it's really as empty as he thinks it is, and he swings his legs around so he can pull Keith to him, his hands tugging at Keith’s hips until he finally relents, stepping into the vee of Shiro’s legs. He’s still refusing to look at Shiro, though, head stubbornly tipped up toward the ceiling.
“Baby,” Shiro says, nuzzling his face against Keith’s stomach in a way that he knows Keith thinks is ridiculous and cute in equal parts. He smells faintly like the gym mats they sparred on earlier.
“You’re ridiculous,” Keith says as his hands come up to Shiro’s shoulders, finger tips digging into the hollows right behind his shoulder blades that always get sore after a workout. “What am I going to do with you?”
Shiro hums into the massage and leans back so he can look back up at Keith, glad to find that Keith has finally relented now that the redness is gone from his cheeks. “Keep me around, maybe?” he asks, already back to cataloguing Keith’s face. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
“I think you might need to have a conversation with the laws of physics about that,” Keith says dryly, but his face is gentle and his fingers are softly rubbing up and down the back of Shiro’s neck.
“Maybe they’ll make an exception for us and I’ll come back to spend every night with you.”
Instead of answering, Keith’s head dips down and he presses his lips against Shiro’s just for a moment, as soft as a butterfly’s wings. “You’re sappy today,” Keith whispers against his mouth.
“Excuse you, I’m sappy every day,” Shiro says before he pushes forward, pressing into a long, slow kiss that steals his heart away.
Eventually, Keith pulls back, breathing hard. His hands have come up to cradle Shiro’s face, and his thumb strokes side to side over Shiro’s bottom lip as he presses their foreheads together. “Curfew is soon,” Keith murmurs finally. “We should go shower.”
“Or,” Shiro says lowly, leaning his mouth closer to Keith’s until they’re sharing air, “we could take advantage of the fact that no one else is here.”
“You’re terrible,” Keith says, barely vocalized, and he leans in to capture Shiro in a fierce kiss. It’s rough, unhurried, and Shiro moans low in his throat as Keith crowds closer to him, one knee coming up to rest on the bench next to his hip so they’re pressed together tightly.
Again, he breaks it all too soon, and Shiro curses under his breath, gaze caught on the sight of Keith’s wet, shiny lips curling up into a smirk.
“Come back,” Shiro says, working his fingers through Keith’s hair, grown out slightly from its close-cropped crew cut, so he can reel him back in, but Keith turns his face at the last second. His mouth slides hotly down the line of Shiro’s jaw, teeth nipping at the soft skin just underneath. Shiro is starting to sweat for reasons completely unrelated to the fact that they’ve been at the gym for nearly three hours now.
Eventually, Keith makes it to Shiro’s ear, and it’s all Shiro can do to keep from letting out a full-throated moan when Keith drags his teeth right against the hollow place underneath his ear. He’s playing dirty—he knows exactly what that does to Shiro every single time, and he can only be thankful that he’s already sitting down because his knees are shaking, one hand buried tightly in Keith’s hair and the other grasping desperately at his waist to keep them pressed together.
“You should come shower with me,” Keith whispers, and Shiro nods eagerly. In that moment, he would do just about anything Keith asked of him.
***
Shiro makes it back to his room five minutes after curfew with a dark bruise blossoming on the juncture of his neck and shoulder and a dopey smile on his face. He tried to convince Keith to stay the night, but Keith had pointed out that Shiro had an early appointment in the morning and he had no desire to be woken up before six, especially considering that neither of them would get much sleep if he stayed over.
Keith is so smart about these things. Shiro is so in love.
He falls back onto his bed with a sigh and spends a moment contemplating the ceiling in the darkness. His head is filled with thoughts of Keith, images of him laughing over Shiro as he pins him to the training mat, and he replays the sly look Keith had given him when they walked into the locker room and found it just as empty as the gym had been. Briefly, Shiro mentally apologizes to whoever owned the locker he had kept Keith pressed against, but they cleaned up and it’s not like anyone will ever know.
He fishes his PADD out of the nightstand drawer without looking, flopping his hand around until it hits what he’s looking for. He has to squint his eyes against the sudden brightness of the screen as it boots up, the Garrison’s logo flashing at him.
A notification pops up—thirty-two new emails—and he clears it without looking at them, mind already too preoccupied to try to deal with late night requests for extensions and tutoring. He glances furtively at the door, as if somehow he thinks someone (Keith) is going to hack the door lock and let themselves in to try to set their eyes on what he's looking at.
Shiro pulls up the jewelry website he keeps going back to and stares at the tab at the top labeled “Engagement Rings.” Matt's attempt at giving advice, unhelpful as it had been, echoes around his head. He's right—even thinking about this, about proposing to his boyfriend of four months, is absolutely absurd. He and Keith have barely even talked about what's going to happen to their relationship when Shiro leaves because they had been only dating for a month when Shiro got the news.
All the same, a hot, visceral tide of emotion rises in Shiro's stomach every time he thinks about Keith wearing his ring, waiting for him, for two years while Shiro does the same thing on the other side of the solar system. It's possessiveness, yes, but it's longing, too. It's saying that he doesn't care that they're young and reckless because this is more important than doing what's proper or expected—Keith is far more important.
And privately, Shiro thinks even if maybe they didn't work out—even if Keith met someone while Shiro was gone and found the person who really made him happy, happier than Shiro could—that would be okay. Shiro would still want them to have this for as long as possible.
His eyes skip over the price of the rings. They’re expensive, but the advance he received from the Garrison for the Kerberos mission is more than enough to cover the costs without a payment plan. And they’re beautiful—one is a sleek, contrasting band of platinum and titanium joined by a strip of inlaid meteorite. When he looks at the next one, Shiro itches to see the slim black band wrapped around Keith’s finger, but only for maybe a day or two before Keith inevitably realizes that he would much rather wear it on a chain around his neck.
Shiro loses himself in a fantasy, for a minute—imagines himself coming back from Kerberos, stepping off the shuttle right into Keith’s waiting arms. In his imagination, there’s no hesitation or uncertainty, and Keith lifts Shiro’s hand to his lips and presses a kiss there, right in front of everyone, the tenderest gesture. Two years, Shiro will think, and he’ll say with tears in his eyes, “I’m home, baby,” and Keith will haul him in and crush their mouths together like he’s starved for it, and that’s when the photographer snaps the picture that will run with every headline about the return of the Kerberos crew, and—
And maybe Shiro will drop to one knee as soon as Keith lets him breathe. Maybe Shiro won’t have a ring with him like he planned, but he won’t be able to stop himself, so he’ll take both of Keith’s hands in his own and stare up at him helplessly, because Keith is more beautiful than any sight Shiro has seen in their solar system. He won’t really know what to say, but maybe that won’t matter, because Keith will just know. He’ll know.
Maybe all Shiro wants is a happy ending.
Shiro closes the pages, wipes the history, and shuts his PADD off with a decisive tap. He stows it back in the nightstand and gets under the covers, curling onto his side and tapping his fingers absently against the bruise on his neck.
Maybe. Maybe not, but maybe.
***
Shiro wakes on Saturday morning to his alarm going off at an awful hour. There’s a meeting for the Kerberos mission at 8 a.m., though it’s beyond him why it was scheduled for such an ungodly time. Keith grumbles in his sleep next to him, but doesn’t wake up. When Shiro sits up and swings his legs out of bed, Keith snuffles and rolls further onto his stomach so he can bury his face deeper into the pillow. Shiro’s heart melts, and he scrambles for his phone to take a quick picture. It’s grainy in the dim light, but he can make out the slightly upturned point of his nose and his half-open mouth.
Shiro spends another moment staring down at him sappily before a thought worms its way to the front of his mind, and he bites his lip, considering. There’s no time like the present. Right?
Slowly, Shiro leans forward so he can slide open the drawer of the bedside table. Every rustle of the blankets or scrape of his hands makes his breath come faster, and he watches Keith’s face like a hawk to make sure that he doesn’t start to wake up. He read an article about this, but he’s not sure if he’ll be able to pull it off without rousing Keith.
He pulls out a pad of green sticky notes and carefully folds one so that it tears easily into a strip that’s only about a centimeter wide with the strip of adhesive on the top. Turning back to Keith, Shiro holds his breath and carefully slides his hand under the sheets to pull Keith’s hand out. Keith’s nose twitches and scrunches up, but he doesn’t pull away, so Shiro leans even closer and gently starts to wrap the paper around Keith’s finger.
Of course, that’s when Keith wakes up.
“Sh’ro?” he grumbles. Shiro freezes, caught, and desperately tries to think of a way out of this.
“I’m just getting up, baby,” he says, attempting to keep his voice soothing.
Keith’s hand twitches and the paper crinkles. “Whassat?”
“Just a note for when you wake up.” So, so carefully, Shiro extracts the paper from his hand and distracts him with a kiss against his fingers. “Go back to sleep, I’ll see you for lunch.”
Sighing, Keith mumbles out something that sounds like an affirmative and sinks back into slumber. Shiro doesn’t dare press his luck, so he quickly whips out a pen and scrawls a quick ‘Study hard! Love you’ with a little smiley face at the bottom and presses it on the pillow next to Keith’s face.
Shiro must still look vaguely haunted by the time he showers, dresses, and makes his way over to the meeting room, hoping that this is one of those meetings where they provide huge carafes of coffee and plates of donuts and fruit.
“What the hell happened to you?” Matt says. He’s waiting for Shiro outside the room where his father is gathered with a couple other senior officers.
“I don’t want to tell you,” Shiro grumbles at him.
“Did lover boy not give you a good morning kiss before you left today?”
Shiro shushes Matt quickly before someone hears. “Shut up.
“Shirooooo,” Matt whines, throwing his arms around Shiro’s shoulders and clinging to him. “I need to know.” He attempts to shake Shiro from side to side. “C’mon, you’re my best friend, my man, you gotta tell me.”
This is so stupid. Shiro knows it’s stupid, but he’s seriously considering telling Matt the truth. Matt, who can and will make fun of him until literally his last breath. Their entire relationship was founded on snarky comments and creating chaos and this is exactly the kind of drama that Matt loves to mock him for.
Whatever. In for a penny, and all that.
“Keith woke up while I was trying to measure his ring size this morning,” Shiro says in one quick breath. “Please be quiet about it.”
Matt’s face goes through some truly intense contortions as he brings both hands up to cover his mouth. “No,” he says.
“Yes. I played it off so I don’t think he knows, but for the record, I’m blaming you for making all of this happen.”
“This is so not my fault,” Matt says. “But man, I wish it was.”
“I was just looking before you came along and put all these actual ideas in my head,” Shiro argues, but his heart isn’t in it. He rakes one hand through his hair in frustration. “Fuck, this is just distracting me from everything important that’s actually going on in my life right now.”
“Thinking about getting married is way more important than another meeting about the fucking launch day ceremonies,” Matt says. Shiro doesn’t completely disagree with him, even though he knows he should. “Don’t worry, though. I’ve got your back here.”
“Wait,” Shiro says, realizing his mistake. “Matt, no, you can’t get involved, okay?”
But Matt is already giving him finger guns and sliding through the half open door into the meeting room, a shit-eating grin on his face. The fucker.
Shiro takes a minute to compose himself by staring hard at the ceiling and trying to do that thing his old yoga teacher taught him about setting intentions, but right now, the only intention he can think of is strangling Matthew Holt so he can’t do anything else to Shiro’s life.
***
“So what was this meeting about?” Keith asks once they’ve all sat down to lunch, him and Shiro on one side of the cafeteria table and Matt across from them. It’s their normal seating position, but Matt keeps smirking randomly. Shiro is going to develop a twitch.
Shiro says, “Mostly it was about scheduling and the intensive training we have to go through two weeks before launch. It isn’t what I expected.”
“What, don’t they just stick you in a zero-G suit for two weeks and then say let’s go?”
“I’m pretty sure half the shit on there is just because Iverson is an asshole and wants us to suffer, I’m not gonna lie,” Matt says.
Keith looks confused. “Like what?”
“We have survival training, for one,” Shiro says. “But it’s not wilderness survival, it’s similar to the training covert ops go through. I don’t know how useful it’s going to be while we’re on a frozen rock, but Iverson actually called me an idiot when I pointed that out.”
Keith laughs. “Didn’t he used to be a spy or something?”
“I think so; it’s probably why he’s so paranoid about it.”
Matt shrugs as he chews on a giant bite of baked chicken. “But there’s a lot of other stuff too, like first aid and engineering. We don’t really have a dedicated mechanic on board, so I’m going to be the main expert on that because I took a lot of engineering classes. Shiro and dad will be able to help, though.”
“That’s cool,” Keith says.
“Yeah, I texted my sister to tell her that I’m head engineer and she’s so mad. She keeps telling me I should take her with us so someone with a brain can be in charge of that,” Matt says, laughing. “Dad told me I gotta get her a present before we leave. I’m thinking about getting her jewelry or something.”
“How old is she?” Shiro always forgets that Keith has yet to meet the infamous Katie Holt, possibly the one person in the universe who’s smarter than both her dad and brother. It’s actually a little terrifying to think about her and Keith becoming friends.
“Ugh, don’t make me think about it. She just turned fifteen, and she’s totally brilliant already.” Matt sighs. “Have you seen those decoder rings they make? I was gonna save that for her birthday or something but then I realized I’m not gonna be around for the next two birthdays, y’know?”
Keith’s mouth twists wryly. Shiro doesn’t think Keith notices the way he shifts closer until their thighs are pushed up against each other underneath the table.
“That sounds perfect for Katie,” Shiro says softly. Carefully, he puts a hand on Keith’s thigh just above his knee.
Totally oblivious to the sadness that’s settled over Keith, Matt continues. “The only problem I’m having is I have no idea what size ring she is.” He sighs, looking troubled for a minute. Shiro can’t describe the certain dread that comes over him when he sees Matt’s eyes flash, but it’s too late to do anything. His best fucking friend is about to betray him. Shiro curses his life.
“Say, Keith, you have pretty small hands,” Matt says in the most fake innocent tone. Keith actually looks mildly offended. “What ring size would you say you are?”
***
Shiro heads into town after lunch to run errands while Keith studies for a sim test. Usually they go together, but this time Keith had pressed a kiss to the side of Shiro’s head once they got back to Shiro’s room and told him to have a fun afternoon while Keith got his work done without any distractions, the mood mostly recovered after Matt’s idiocy.
“Are you calling me a distraction?” Shiro teases, leaning into Keith.
“Hmm,” Keith says, and he looks up under his lashes and runs a hand down Shiro’s chest to stop just above the button of his pants. “Something about you.”
In the end, it takes Shiro an extra twenty minutes to get out to the hangar where his hover bike is, but he leaves the Garrison feeling a lot lighter than he had waking up that morning.
He hits the grocery store first, stocking up on Keith’s disgusting junk foods and his own clearly superior ones. A walk-in appointment at the barber’s only takes about twenty minutes to get his sides and neck touched up, and then somehow he’s standing in front of a jewelry store.
This is a terrible idea.
Fucking Matt Holt is the reason Shiro now knows his boyfriend’s ring size.
Shiro hovers in the doorway for longer than is probably polite to the salespeople eyeing him from inside, but eventually he gathers his strength by reminding himself that he is, in fact, an adult, and is allowed to walk inside of a jewelry store with no ulterior motives.
“What can I help you with today, sir?” a salesperson asks as Shiro approaches the first jewelry case.
“Um,” he says, scanning the rings presented there. They’re all very . . . delicate and thin, like if you hit someone in the jaw while wearing one, it would break under the force. “I’m looking for a ring. Uh, thinking about looking for a ring. Something—less sparkly?” He waves his hands vaguely at the case, not sure how to explain that if he’s going to seriously consider buying a ring, it needs to be able to withstand a fistfight.
“An engagement ring, sir?”
Shiro flushes red from the top of his forehead all the way down to his feet and scratches the back of his head awkwardly. Somewhere back at the Garrison, Matt is probably laughing his ass off suddenly for no apparent reason as he picks up on Shiro’s embarrassment from seventy miles away. “Uh, I guess so.”
“Over this way.”
Shuffling awkwardly to the back of the shop, Shiro finds himself in front of a display of more plain bands. He stares down at them, uncertain.
“Have you considered what color metal you want?”
“Black,” he says without hesitation. “Or dark gray, maybe, but he likes wearing black.”
The jeweler unlocks the back of the case and slides out a selection of rings placed in a velvet tray to place them on the glass countertop between them. “Tell me a little bit about your partner, perhaps, and we can start from there?”
But Shiro is already shaking his head, eyes landing on a pattern he recognizes only because he’s been staring at it online for weeks. “Tell me about that one,” he says, pointing to it. The salesperson’s mouth twists in a way that might be judgement, but Shiro doesn’t really care.
“This one,” they say, plucking the ring out and holding it up to Shiro, “is a titanium band with a textured meteorite inlay.”
Shiro only spends about forty-five minutes in the store, ostensibly looking at rings he’s not planning to buy while his mind runs circles around the fact that he’s buying his boyfriend of four months an engagement ring.
He doesn’t know if it’s instinct or impulse, if there’s a higher power guiding his actions or just his own determination, but he sees a ring—the ring—and something inside him settles, like a box teetering on the edge of its shelf has been pushed back into place. He leaves the store, wallet a couple thousand dollars lighter, and the little black box in his right jacket pocket feels like it’s burning.
***
Shiro gets back to the Garrison mid-afternoon. He stops by his room to drop off the junk food, toiletries, and other assorted things, and then has to exercise every bit of his strength of will to keep from sprinting straight to Matt’s room down the hall. He only manages to hold himself back for fifteen minutes of staring at the ceiling above his bed.
“Matt,” he says lowly, knocking on the door. “Matt, I really need to talk to you, please be home.”
The door slides open with a hiss. It’s dark inside, heavy curtains drawn over the windows despite the fact that it’s beautiful and sunny out today, and Matt is hunched over his computer, a blanket thrown over his shoulders like a cape. The overhead light is dimmed down to its lowest possible setting. Matt nods briefly at Shiro in greeting, says, “Give me a sec,” and proceeds to type at a rate that Shiro secretly believes is humanly impossible, with the acknowledgement that every single one of the Holts that he’s met could reasonably be part robot.
Shiro sits on the bed and waits anxiously.
“Okay,” Matt finally says, spinning around dramatically in his chair to face Shiro. “What’s up? You look like you’re about to vomit, please go back to your room if you’re going to do that.”
He takes a deep breath. “Don’t freak out,” Shiro warns.
Matt cocks his head to one side. “Okay, I’ll admit I’m mildly concerned now. What did you do?”
Wordlessly, Shiro pulls his hand out of his coat pocket and unclenches his fingers from around the box to hold it out to Matt, watching his face slingshot wildly from confusion to maniacal glee.
“Oh my god. Holy shit, oh my god.” Matt snatches the box out of his hands and flips it open, jaw dropping open before a look of complete and absolute triumph flashes over his face. “I can’t believe it! I knew it, the whole time, and you told me I was wrong. I set this up for you today, you should be fucking writing me into your will right now.”
Shiro laughs halfheartedly and settles his chin in his hands. “What d’you think?”
“Well, this is really nice—meteorite here, right?” Matt leans back towards his computer and holds the ring up in the light. “What metal is it?”
“Titanium.”
Matt snorts. “Of course it is.”
The tips of Shiro’s ears burn, but he says, “I thought he might like that.” He absolutely tried not to think about the symbolism when he bought it, but it was so incredibly obvious that it was a lost cause to ignore—titanium is the strongest metal, after all, and it makes up most of the ship that will take him to Kerberos. Mildly sentimental, but Shiro hopes it's not overly so.
“Oh, he’s gonna like it,” Matt says. “Hell, if he doesn’t I might beg for your hand myself, Shiro, damn. This is nice. And surprisingly meaningful for someone as dense as yourself.”
“Hey,” Shiro says mildly, but doesn’t really bother to defend himself. “Are you going to tell me I’m nuts again?”
“You’re absolutely nuts, but it sounds like you already know that.” Matt goes quiet for a second as he places the ring back in its box and closes it gently. “That’s not the question I know you want to ask me.”
Shiro huffs, takes the ring box back, and flips it open to run his thumb over the smooth metal. “Do you really think he’ll say yes?” he asks, hating how small his voice sounds.
Matt sighs heavily. “Aw, hell, Shiro, don’t get all maudlin on me now, you’re supposed to be cooler than this.” He gets up from his chair and sits next to Shiro on the bed, throwing one arm around his shoulders. “You and Keith have been weirdly perfect for each other since the day you set eyes on his scrawny little shoulders back when we were all but wee cadets.”
“They’re not scrawny,” Shiro protests, though he’s not above admitting privately to himself that he loves the way Keith’s body is so much more compact than his own.
“Love is blind,” Matt drawls, elbowing Shiro to shut him up. “What I’m trying to say is that you two, no matter who else is in the room or who you’re trying to pay attention to, have your own little orbital pattern going on. Everyone knows about it, too, because you idiots are literally the opposite of subtle. So of course he’s going to say yes. I already told you, he has little hearts in his eyes every second you two are so much as in the same building as each other. It’s absolutely disgusting; if I wasn’t already your best friend I’d drop you in a second.”
Shiro stares at him for a second before bursting out laughing. “Did you just threaten to break up with me?”
“Hell yeah I did, you deserve to know the limits of my love,” Matt says, collapsing dramatically back onto the messy covers. “You wanna hang out until dinner?
Shiro throws himself back on Matt’s bed in response. Somewhere between laughing about their escapades as second-year cadets and spit balling ideas about how to subtly drive Matt’s dad crazy while they’re all up in space together, Shiro’s eyelids grow heavy and he gives into sleep.
He wakes to the frantic, hyped up clacking of Matt’s computer keys, a comforting sound that harkens back to their days as sleep-deprived cadets when they used to do exactly this before dinner almost every day. Except the beds were a lot smaller and the mattresses thinner, so Shiro is happy to report that life does actually get better after graduation, even if the cafeteria food is still nearly unbearable.
His phone vibrates underneath him, and he lifts his hips up to dig it out of his back pocket.
Dinner? the text from Keith reads.
waiting for matt, should be 30 mins
I’m coming over before I kill my roommate.
Shiro raises his eyebrows at that, and says to Matt, “Keith’s coming over. He’s having another fight with his roommate.”
“Better give me the ring,” he says.
Shiro hesitates for a minute just to roll the box around in his hands one more time before he throws it to Matt and watches him squirrel it away in one of his desk drawers, hidden under some sort of tool set that Shiro isn’t sure the function of.
“My lips are sealed,” Matt says, winking at him before pulling his blanket more securely around his shoulders and returning his attention to his work. He doesn’t even glance up when Shiro gets up to answer Keith’s knock at the door.