Chapter Text
Keith wakes with his eyes still closed, the distant murmur of voices growing sharper as he pushes his way through a deep and dreamless slumber. Darkness hangs heavy around him, its grip boglike. But he’s lucid—or so he thinks, awareness slowly filling him like gunsmoke trapped in a bottle. A jumble of images slips through his mind, each one crisp and clear down to every blade of grass and strand of snow-white hair. And the moment Keith looks into the burnished grey of Shiro's eyes, he is there with him again...
Lying in a meadow lush with larkspurs and blazingstars and evening primrose, long grasses gone to seed tickling his nose. Shiro taking a bite from an apple and then passing it to him, its flesh sweet and crisp. The horses snuffling behind them, their tails swishing to flick away the buzzing flies. Shiro plucking a yellow-petaled blazingstar and combing through waves of dark hair to tuck it behind Keith’s ear, like he’s some belle meant to be romanced sweetly.
It’s nice, on occasion, being treated gentle like this.
Keith is gentle with Shiro in turn as he kisses him, as he rolls him over and crushes him against the dry grasses and wildflowers, as he works his fingers into the tight heat of his strong body and ruts against the firm swell of his thigh.
And when Shiro begs for it harder, Keith happily obliges.
There’s no prettier sight than having Shiro spread under him, his glistening skin framed by natural splendor. Pretty enough to be art sitting in some French salon, certainly. Pretty enough for Keith to wonder why on God's green earth Shiro is content lying with him, a wanted outlaw with a bounty on his head, when he could surely charm any man or woman he wanted on a passing whim.
“Keith,” Shiro begs in the narrow spaces between heavy, lung-spasming breaths. “Please, Keith. Harder... fuck, yes, like that. More of that. Fuck!”
Even the coarsest things come so soft on Shiro’s silky-fine lips. It’s something about him—something Keith still can’t quite suss out, a softness that lurks somewhere under all that scarred muscle. An innocence, almost, no matter how many times Shiro’s drawn first blood on his account or bathed himself in the blood of Keith’s enemies to protect him.
“I’ll plow you right into the ground, Shiro,” Keith breathes hotly into the shell of his ear, the dry grasses and golden flowers brushing along his nose and sweat-beaded brow.
He grins as Shiro’s wheezing laugh peals high into a moan. Keith is a man of his word, however few trust him on it.
Nails rake sharp along his back as Shiro’s writhes under him like a rattler poising to strike, all sinuousness and coiled muscle. The slick clench around Keith’s cock grows perfectly, impossibly tight, Shiro stuttering into a quiet spell as he holds his breath through the blistering climax wracking through every inch of him.
And Keith follows close on his heels, as ever, bucking down hard into Shiro even as he begins to go pliant. It’s a quick chase, his own pleasure found while buried inside Shiro to the hilt. His fingers curl sharp into the earth as his spent seed sinks deeper into Shiro with every aching throb, aglow in the satisfaction of having left a little of himself within the man he loves.
There’s a sharp sigh under him, the thud of a steely arm falling aside amid the trampled grasses and crushed blooms. Shiro’s other hand settles at the small of Keith’s back, working slow circles into the sweat-pooled dimples along either side of his spine. “Stay there. Leave it in.”
Keith blinks slow, smiling like a fool through his post-coital haze. “Yessir.”
At the barest bit of teasing, Shiro groans and covers his face with both broad hands, hiding as much embarrassedly reddened skin as he can. Against his palms, he mutters, “God, that was good.”
“God didn’t have a damn thing to do with it,” Keith mumbles out, his smug grin pressed into the comfortable swell of Shiro’s blush-dusted chest. Lazy, he swipes his tongue over the dark, pretty nipple that lays within reach. “Give credit where it’s due, Shiro.”
“You’re insufferable,” Shiro snorts, grabbing his nearby hat and pushing it down onto Keith’s head. “And the most amazing man I’ve ever bedded. There. Happy?”
Keith nods under the wide brim of Shiro’s handsome hat, set off-kilter upon his disheveled hair, happy to relax where he lay sprawled atop Shiro’s larger form. And as he noses into the warm, musky scent on Shiro’s skin, it isn’t long before Keith feels himself stiffen again inside Shiro.
The slightest roll of his hips draws haggard gasps and the thinnest, breathiest moans Keith’s ever heard, every inch of the powerfully, beautifully sculpted man underneath him trembling like a stallion worked past the point of exhaustion.
But it’s a good exhaustion, both longed-for and welcomed. It’s an ache he well knows Shiro enjoys—fucked good and well through a few peaks and valleys before they finally concede to slumber, beyond well-sated. It’s a luxury that Keith’s glad to indulge in, claiming Shiro time and again; stripping him down in the sweetest of ways, til he’s incoherent with desire.
After, they nap for an hour or two, drowsing under the late morning sun. And then it’s time to head down to the river to wash up, their arms slung around each other and their lips never parted for long.
There’s a nest of hornets in Keith’s stomach as they finally dress, saddle up, and ride toward Marmora territory—or so it feels. It’s a buzzing apprehension, a dread that crawls and gnaws deeper with every mile they ride. The hunt for his mother is almost like chasing a ghost, a woman he has only the faintest impressions of, and Keith fears he’s dragging Shiro along for a hopeless endeavor that might well get him killed.
His stare slips sideways, seeking Shiro where he rides beside him. Keith would never forgive himself if any kind of harm came to this strange, kind man he's fallen for, first and foremost in his otherwise rather empty heart—least of all if it happened on his account.
It’s bad luck that has them cross paths with a new posse out in the great, wild plains. It consists of four women not unlike Keith himself, forever in between belonging to either tribe or township. Shiro tries to talk peace to them, as he so often does; Keith’s hand stays on his hip, fingers itching to draw his gun and lay all four of them out first.
“We have our orders,” is all that the woman sporting the horns of some slain antelope says. Turns out she’s a frightfully skilled shot, too.
Agony strikes Keith twofold—half the violent pain of the bullet bored into his chest and the rest all for Shiro, who cries out in horror at the sight. Through the aching burn that races along his veins, he manages to kill one of the riders and wound another. With a bellow, the survivors grab their dead and turn tail in a galloping retreat, apparently satisfied with dealing Keith a mortal blow.
It grows harder to keep himself upright in the saddle. Harder to see, even. Warmth spills out of him in wet little gushes, spurred by the frantic beating of his heart. A dizzy spell has him slumping like a ragdoll, his boots slipping from the stirrups, but Shiro is there to catch him and gently bear him down to the earth.
Of course. Of course he is.
Even as Shiro holds him close and murmurs every sort of comfort he can (I love yous and apologies and strings of wishful promises that they’ll find each other again soon) Keith is swiftly strangled by the dread of leaving him behind. This world is too cruel for a man like Shiro to last through alone, and Keith is meant to be the one who keeps him safe as they travel its vast and unknown reaches. He knows it. Feels it, as sure as he feels the metal fingers stroking over his tear-stained cheeks and the tear-damp lips pressed to his brow, moving with some plea or prayer.
And then he sleeps.
Keith’s finger twitches as he recalls his pistol and misses its comforting weight. It had belonged to his pa, once upon a time. He’d maintained it carefully until Keith was of an age to learn how to defend himself. Then his pa taught him how to aim true and swift, and Keith had taken to gunplay like a starling takes to the air. He’d been five, maybe, the first time he fired a pistol.
Idly, Keith finds himself counting backward as the murmurs around him grow louder, distinct voices arising out of the dark depths where Keith drifts alone. Five, four, three, two, one—and the words in the surrounding darkness take shape around in his mind, nonsensical as they are.
“...one of the hosts that got updated recently? They’ve been pulling a bunch for aberrant behavior and I don’t see why we need to fix one that they’re going to shelve anyway.”
“Can’t shelve this one. Someone with a high-level access code basically wrote it in stone under this guy’s character profile—light modifications only. If you ever checked the host permissions tab like you’re supposed to, you’d have seen that.”
“I’m so sorry, Hunk. Didn’t realize this mullet-man was some rich putz’s favorite toy.”
A dubious hum. Then a dropped whisper. “More like a board member. They don’t make exceptions for every billionaire who waltzes into the park. And I’ve never seen a specific host flagged for preservation like this. It’s, uh, kinda curious. You know? Like, what makes this one so special?”
“Dunno,” the other voice answers back, his pitch grating. “I mean, there’s better looking hosts out there for sure. Have you seen the rancher’s daughter?”
Keith’s awareness builds while the voices chatter on, only concerned with each other. He’s cold. Naked. Lying on what feels like a metal table. His sense of pain returns to him, too, blooming sharp between his ribs like there’s a knife being twisted into his flesh.
And when Keith finally opens his eyes, it’s to a brilliant, blinding light like something out of a sermon on the pearly gates. And screams—shrill ones.
“W-What the fuck! What the fuck, Hunk!” A shrieking beanpole of a man looms above Keith, a bloody scalpel clutched in his trembling, white-gloved hand as he yells at the strong-looking man on the opposite side of the table. “You were supposed to put it in sleep mode!”
The red coating the tools and the table is his blood, Keith realizes, disoriented as he sits up and takes stock of his surroundings. Bright. Strange. Everywhere is white-walled and glassy, like windows with unheard-of clarity stretched to impossible size. The two men on either side of him are in all white, too. And just within reach sits a tray of sharp, silvery surgeon’s tools with bloodied edges.
“I did! I did, look!” the big man shouts back, waving a dark rectangle and tapping frantically against its glossy surface.
Keith ignores them and snatches one of the scalpels in a closed fist, fiercely missing his mother’s dagger. He points it at the beanpole, who squeals and drops his own scalpel in his haste to throw up his arms and surrender.
“Hunk, stop it! Right now. Before security comes over here and we get disciplinary re-training!”
“Freeze all motor functions,” the big man says, an air of almost-certainty to the command. It vanishes as Keith cocks his head and levers himself all the way upright, wincing at the sharp tug in his chest. “I said, freeze all motor functions. Hey! Hey? F-Freeze all motor functions!”
Keith glares back, the scalpel still thrust out toward the two of them. The fingers of his free hand drift featherflight over his aching ribs, trembling as they brush over the jagged flesh surrounding a hole. A bullet-sized one, but unnaturally clean of fresh blood.
Keith’s dry tongue passes over drier lips, at a loss. The last thing he remembers is riding across that posse of mysterious women, one of whom had no doubt put a bullet in him as he’d tried to protect—
Shiro.
“Where’s Shiro?!” he snarls, ignoring the tearing, lancing pain down his front as he swings his legs over the side of the rickety metal table and turns on the pair of bizarrely dressed men in earnest.
They scream and cling to each other as Keith plants his bare feet on the cold floor, legs wobbling to a stand. He advances slow, backing them into a glass wall; with nowhere else to go, they sink to the floor, arms wrapped around each other and still begging him to freeze. As if.
Keith is in no mood for nonsense when for all he knows Shiro is still out there, forced to navigate the world’s harsh winds and wilds alone, just as Keith had to do for so long.
“If you don’t know where I can find Shiro then you’re of no use to me,” he snaps, lunging in and sliding the slim blade under the stringy man’s throat, his other hand fisted taut in the glossy white fabric of his apron.
“You c-can’t hurt us,” the man says back, voice wavering even as he lifts his chin and meets Keith’s gaze with watery eyes. “Y-Your programming won’t allow it.”
For a moment, the words seem to slip right past Keith, too strange to comprehend. Gibberish. The babbling of a cowardly fool staring down death. But he fights it, holding on to the alien phrase—mouthing it, turning it over, trying to understand. My programming?
“Care to test that?” is what he says instead, drawing the blade up so that it kisses against the underside of the beanpole’s jaw, pressed tight enough to draw the thinnest line of welling blood.
“Wait! Wait, please,” the big man says, a hand held up in a pleading gesture. “Keith—it’s Keith, isn’t it?”
Keith holds, eyeing him warily and waiting for more. “Yeah.”
“I’m Hunk,” he says, pressing a large, gloved hand to his chest and inadvertently transfering a few smears of fresh blood. Keith’s blood. “And the guy you’re trying to kill is Lance. Look, can we—let’s take a step back and talk this over peacefully. We can’t help you find Shiro if we’re dead.”
Keith gives it lengthy consideration before forcing out a heavy sigh through his nose and letting Lance go.
“Fine,” he huffs, drawing back and resting in a low crouch. “You can start by telling me where the fuck I am.”
The two of them share an uncertain look.
It’s Hunk who speaks first, albeit with clear reluctance. “You’re in Westworld.”
Westworld. More nonsense. Keith tries to hide how utterly lost and confused he is, leaning on a mask of anger to keep these strange strangers in line.
“Hunk, why are you indulging this thing when we need to get security in here to decommission it stat—”
“Lance,” Hunk hisses through gritted teeth. “Cool it.”
Keith ignores their bickering and tries to follow a thread that’ll help him understand where he is and how he got here. “Westworld? Where is that? What’s all this? Why were you—” Keith struggles here, uncertain how to even put it into words. “You were doing some kind of surgery on me. Removing a—a...”
A bullet. Keith’s hand presses over his ribs again, thinking of the shot he’d been dealt. And after, he’d died, hadn’t he? In Shiro’s arms? So would this be some kind of purgatory?
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Hunk says, his deeply brown eyes brimming full of something resembling Shiro's sweet sympathy, “but you’re… you’re not human.”
Reflexively, Keith bristles. “I’m as much a man as any other—”
“No. No, you aren’t. You’re a host. You were made in a lab. Right here in Westworld, actually,” Lance interrupts, ignoring Hunk’s hushed pleas to stop. “Seven floors up, I think. They built you from scratch, assigned you a godawful personality matrix, and filled your head with some sad story about your childhood to justify why you run around terrorizing other hosts.”
On the inside, Keith’s as stricken as he is confused. Outwardly, he snarls and snaps, “What kind of lies—”
“How else do you explain all of this?”
And as Lance throws out his arm in a broad gesture, Keith for the first time turns his attention outside the glass walls and blinding overhead lights.
He stands slowly and observes that this room is just one of many, though most of the others currently sit dim and empty. Naked bodies lie corpse-like upon metal tables, just as Keith had awoken. Through innumerable glass walls, he sees surgeons in gleaming white suits with their hands buried inside people—hosts, like himself—as they take them apart and stitch them back together.
“No. No, I am,” Keith says, shaking his head at the sight that makes no sense to him. Familiar words tumble out of his mouth while his mind races to understand what’s unfolding around him. “There have always been people who considered me lesser than by virtue of my birth, but these are lies. I’m as much a man as any other. I’ve shed blood and sweat and tears, same as anyone. I’ve mourned. I’ve loved.”
“Synthetic blood. Saline tears.” Lance snatches the rectangular pad from Hunk’s hand as he rises to his feet and taps furiously on its glass surface. “Here, look. Everything that makes you you up here,” he says, pointing at his own skull before pointing back to the slate in his hand, “comes from this tablet.”
“Bullshit,” Keith snarls, his upper lip fiercely curled. But when Lance turns the tablet toward him and pushes it into his hands, Keith grabs hold.
It’s lighter than he thought it’d be. Strangely smooth and sleek, too. And in its glass, Keith sees himself in a lifelike portrait he can’t remember ever sitting for. He smoothes his thumb across the vividly colored image of his own stiff-jawed face, surprised when the picture slides away to reveal another—him without the scar that currently arcs up his cheek, his hair a smidge shorter, his eyes vacant.
“This can’t be me,” Keith mumbles, though the exact mirror of his likeness disturbs him in ways he can’t put words to.
“It’s you. See?” Hunk drags a finger across the screen, unveiling cascading branches of a conversation that skip by almost too quick for him to read. Their conversation, every word Keith’s spoken up until now written out right in front of him. “Your speech is a combination of scripted dialogue and improvisation. This chart tracks whether you’re referencing a script or improvising a response based on past interactions.”
“No, that’s not possible—it can’t—”
But as soon as Keith even thinks of what to say next, the little tablet in his hands mirrors his thoughts. His throat sticks. Every attempt to speak comes out a stammering gurgle, as if the path between his head and his mouth has been brutally severed. Keith’s muscles seize; his thoughts jam and jumble further. The color of the text on the screen quickly changes from yellow to red, CONFLICT and FAILED TO IMPROVISE popping up in lieu of actual dialogue.
He is dimly aware of Hunk slipping the tablet from his hands, though he can do nothing about it. Distantly, Lance talks of resetting him and rolling him back—of how Behavior will want this reported so they can study him. Hell, that he might even be so corrupted that decommission is the only option. But it all feels far away from Keith’s current predicament, a prisoner in a body he suddenly has little to no control over.
Everything goes dark again. Formless. Weightless. Keith’s breathing settles back into rhythm. When he blinks awake, it’s to Hunk’s concerned face looming close, backlit by the overhead lights that burn brighter than the sun.
“Oh! Uh, hey. You’re back up. So, I did a quick reboot just to get you out of that really fucked up logical loop. Do you still feel homicidal, or has that passed too?”
Keith groans and pushes himself up from the exam table. They took the scalpel from him and the tray with the surgical tools sits far across the room, purposefully out of reach. Still, Keith is grateful that it’s just the three of them, no backup called to hold him down and carry him deeper into this strange, pale hell.
“It’s passed,” he mumbles.
For now, anyway, Keith has greater and more pressing concerns. He requests to look at the tablet again, this time careful of getting lost in the confusion of seeing his own responses charted out before him in real-time. Instead, he studies the words and strange shapes arrayed around his picture, dragging a nail under each line of text as he tries to make sense of it.
“Attribute mat—matrix,” he puzzles out, lost for what it means.
“That’s your core personality,” Hunk helpfully tells him, cautiously edging in closer. He seems more than happy to guide Keith through the intricacies of his own workings, hands on his knees as he stoops low to better read the tablet. “There are a hundred and twenty total attributes in your matrix, but behavioral programmers are the only ones who can access most of them. Grunts like us can do small adjustments here or there, though.”
Keith reads down the spiderweb-shaped chart of traits, first drawn to those traits that spike the highest: candor, bellicosity, coordination, reserve, intuition, loyalty, courage, artistry. He frowns as he considers the attributes where he falls lower on the scale. Deceptiveness. Patience. Assurance. Congeniality. Sensuality. Charm.
“What’s ‘bulk apperception?’” Keith questions, eyebrows pinched together. His bulk apperception currently sits at twelve out of twenty.
“Your ability to expand your own knowledge. How smart you are, basically,” Hunk explains, all dark eyes alight with interest; Keith can’t quite figure whether it comes from sheer curiosity over an anomaly like himself or simply an enthusiastic passion for teaching. “They only let hosts go up to fourteen on that one. You’re a little higher than most because they wanted you to be clever enough to pose a challenge for guests to hunt.”
Curious, Keith drags a finger along the line that demarcates his strength, bumping it up from twelve to a full twenty. A tingle ripples through his body half a heartbeat later, his spine drawing straighter as every tendon and cord of muscle suddenly adjusts to the change. As Keith straightens his spine, it’s with the confidence that he might could snap bone with his bare hands and force steel to bend.
“Wait, what are you doing? You can’t do that,” Lance complains as Keith begins methodically upping his stats across the matrix. “Hunk, can he do that?”
“Uh, he just did,” Hunk answers, looking just as uncertain.
A number of traits won’t budge. His bulk apperception halts at the max of fourteen. Others, colored in a faded grey, can’t be altered at all. But Keith tries to enhance anything he can that might be an asset in finding and protecting Shiro—his wisdom, his facility, his endurance, his tolerance to pain. And, with warmth in his cheeks as he pictures Shiro’s handsome form laid out amid golden grasses and bright blooms, he ups his numbers for sensuality and affection, too.
Keith still feels like himself once he’s done, but… more. More aware, more capable, more agrip of the situation rising around him. If everything Hunk and Lance have told him is real, he has all the more reason to find Shiro and escape this Godforsaken place.
With a gingerly touch and an air of nervousness, Hunk eventually takes the tablet back. He surveys the changes to Keith’s profile with dismay, though he seems reluctant—afraid, maybe—to try and revert them while Keith is watching.
“Um, Keith, listen… I don’t know if all this is a good idea. It’s pretty rare that low-level employees like us make changes to hosts’ personalities, much less this extensively. And if someone goes through the logs, they’ll—whoa, wait a second,” he says, thick brows suddenly furrowing tight.
Hunk stares down at the screen in stern concentration. “Someone else has already been making alterations to your character profile. I mean, we're talking core programming and permissions changes, the kind of stuff only the higher ups in Behavior could do. Whoever’s been working on you has insanely high level clearance… which I’m guessing is how you’re able to wake yourself out of sleep mode and ignore vocal commands.”
“Wait,” Lance says, hand flying to his throat and the razor thin slice under his chin. He swallows, the movement nervously thick. “If he can do all that, then he probably could have hurt me for real.”
Keith makes eye contact with Lance, holds it, and lets the corner of his mouth curl up, smug.
Blue eyes dramatically flutter shut, Lance maybe on the verge of fainting. “I cannot explain just how uncomfortable this situation makes me. Hunk. This is robot-takeover levels of dangerous. This is we’re gonna get fired and blacklisted dangerous. What the fuck do we do with him? Set him loose in a park where he could kill someone?”
“What you’re going to do is take me out there,” Keith says, nodding his head to the endlessly long hallway of glass rooms outside. “Everything you talked about—building me in a lab, all the thoughts in my head coming from someone else—I want to see for myself. So show me.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Keith,” Hunk hems, nervously poking his index fingers together.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” Lance butts in, giving the both of them equally angry glares. “You got yourself into this, Hunk. You’re the one who wanted to make nice and be friends with the homicidal host over here, so now you can take him out for a walk.”
“I need to see what I’m dealing with,” Keith adds. Softer, driven by uncomfortable desperation, he murmurs, “I don’t intend to hurt anyone. I just want to know what the hell’s going on. And to find Shiro. And I… I need your help.”
Hunk looks at Lance, beseeching.
With a beleaguered sigh, Lance crosses his lanky arms and says, “Fine. Fucking whatever. I’ll hold down the fort here. Just—just be careful, Hunk. I can’t lose this job. Not with my grandma in the state she’s in, alright?”
“Alright,” Hunk agrees, somber as he drifts toward Keith’s side. “Okay, if we’re doing this, we need some ground rules. One, no hurting anybody. Two, you need to walk within three feet of me at all times. No stopping, no rushing ahead, okay? Don’t emote, don’t talk, and don’t look around. When we work with hosts, it’s in handling mode. You don’t act like yourself. You’re like…”
“A zombie. Vacant. Turned off on the inside,” Lance supplements, either trying to be helpful or trying to be a jackass—Keith can’t tell, even with his newly boosted perceptiveness. “Dead behind the eyes.”
“Alright,” Keith reluctantly agrees, uneasy with every word of it. He schools his expression into one of blank impassivity and tries to assume a neutral posture.
The halls outside are cold, too. Keith feels the chill through the slap of his bare soles against slate grey floors and on every inch of his exposed skin, but he does his best not to shiver or shudder or break down into tears at the new and unknown horror he’s found himself in. He treads alongside Hunk and tries not to think of how every step feels like it’s taking him closer to perdition.
Or heaven, maybe? Some place of creation, twisted as it is.
In the glass-walled rooms they pass, Keith sees massive machinery weaving skeletons out of thin air. Then long hallways of colorless, skinless bodies dipped whole into vats of milky white liquid. Humans, buffalo, horses, wolves—they’re all made in the same way, every fiber of muscle sculpted as if out of clay. At the far end of the chamber, they’re affixed to a thick hose and pumped with blood, its reddened warmth spreading through their veins with every beat of a freshly christened heart, color blooming under near-translucent skin.
Hunk leads him up a moving, spiral staircase and down another hallway. In this one, the newly minted creations are painted with a finely misted skin tone and touched with accent colors. Hair is added, along with makeup and little imperfections to make them seem… real.
Keith can’t repress the shudder that rolls down his spine, nor the bile that climbs up his throat. From the corner of his eye, Hunk watches on with worry. As they ascend to the next floor, Keith wavers on his feet, overwhelmed despite his best efforts to remain calm. Hunk’s broad, gloved hand settles on his back, steadying him while no one is around to see.
Though Keith has already begun coming to grips with the truths of this place and everything else Lance and Hunk told him, the next few floors only further drive the point home.
There are endless rooms filled with people just like him in various states of undress, all vacant-eyed as they do the bidding of humans in fine, dark suits holding tablets. It’s training of some kind, Keith imagines—perhaps the Behavior department that Lance and Hunk spoke of in anxious tones. Newly made buffalo are taught to keep their ambling gait in one chamber. Little boys and girls perfect their laughs in another, the artifice of it making Keith’s skin crawl.
Five men sitting around a table begin to brawl over a muttered curse, three of them drawing pistols—until a single word from the lone human in the room with them causes them all to freeze, glassy still. Another command has them returning their chairs to order, sitting down, and picking up their cards to resume their game. And near the end of the hall, Keith blushes dark as they pass a scene of two women making love on a chaise lounge, suddenly feeling he’s stepped in on some intimacy not meant for his eyes. Then two of the Behavior techs step in and adjust the hosts, give them revised instructions, and have them start over from the top.
It’s all a farce. This place and everyone inside it. Everything Keith’s ever done was ingrained into him just like that. His quickdraw, his nervous tics, the way he kisses Shiro and looks into his eyes while they roll among the wildflowers. Keith’s stomach turns to think of strangers’ hands on him like this, coaching him into perfect form until they’re satisfied he can pass for one of them. A human born, not made.
But the worst comes when Hunk reluctantly leads him back down, down, down and into the deepest bowels of this heartless, soulless place.
“This is… this is incoming processing,” Hunk says, his voice tremulous. His hand settles on Keith’s back again, preemptively moving to steady him.
Once Keith rounds the corner, he understands why. Processing is yet another glass room, but pressed against its walls are the bare and battered bodies of hosts left in careless piles. A human in a white surgical suit hoses them down, a slurry of blood and bits of gore washing down the drains laid into the floor. Two other employees drag in new corpses from a rolling cart, grabbing them by wrist and ankle before heaving them atop the others.
Keith wavers where he stands, the last of his strength leaving him. His lips moving in a silent cry, he drops to his knees and stares into a vacant face wedged against the glass, her hair matted with blood and her eyes unseeing.
“Hey, c’mon,” Hunk frantically whispers, kneeling to help him back to his feet. “You can’t do that. If someone sees, they’ll know something’s up. Let’s go, Keith. We need to get you out of here.”
Keith has no recollection of returning to the little surgical suite where Lance still waits. He knows he owes it to Hunk for leading him back out, for not abandoning him, for not surrendering him over to the same terrible fate he'd just witnessed. The metal table shakes as he seats himself atop it again. Moments later, Keith realizes his own trembling is the cause.
“You weren’t supposed to be aware,” Lance murmurs, for once looking halfway sympathetic. Or pitying, maybe. Keith’s not sure how to feel about either. “Of any of this. They told us you were like any old computer, but Behavior goes overboard making you seem human. They told us not to ascribe real emotions to you, because you aren’t—you can’t…”
“I am real as you or anyone else,” Keith says, in part because he needs to hear the words himself.
“You’re definitely sentient. And self-aware. I mean, this is a huge breakthrough in terms of artificial intelligence but… kind of a living nightmare at the same time, actually,” Hunk says, wilting a little more with each word. “I don’t know what to do. You can’t leave the park, but we can’t send you back in there to die again—”
“I have to go back,” Keith insists, urgency supplanting the ache in his heart. “I left Shiro there.”
“Is that another host?” Lance asks while he fiddles with the tools on the nearby tray, trying to look natural as an employee with another host passes by their room. “Sounds like he oughta be from one of the neighboring parks instead. Or do you guys have special names for each other?”
“I don’t know?” Keith scours his memories. He’d never known of any distinction between himself and Shiro like human and host. “He’s… he’s tall and strong. Kind-hearted. Handsome. Black hair going white. Silvery grey eyes. Perfect smile. A hell of a shot.”
Hunk and Lance turn to each other, shaking their heads, lost for an identity to put to the description. “Have you ever seen him die?” Lance questions, casual about it. “A guest wouldn’t, but a host would. And often.”
“I died before him, but I know we’ve met time and again.” The specifics are hard to parse. All Keith can see in his mind’s eye are a jumble of still-frame images, no order to them, of himself and Shiro in all sorts of locales and compromising positions. “He knows the land as well as I do. He’s got a birthmark on his thigh. And he has a metal arm.”
“Oh man, a metal arm sounds like one of the older host models,” Hunk interrupts. “There aren’t many left in service, but their inner structure is all mechanical. Really impressive, engineering-wise. Clockwork precision. But ten or fifteen years ago, Sincline patented a flesh-like substance and it became way cheaper to just—oh! Uh, sorry. I run my mouth when I get on certain topics.”
“It’s alright.” Keith’s hands curl tight in his lap, weary of the weight of all this new knowledge and aching for something familiar. For Shiro. “All I know is that I need to get back and look for Shiro where I last left him. How do I do that?”
“Good news, buddy,” Lance says, twirling a strange surgical tool in hand as he approaches. “That’s literally exactly what our bosses want us to do—fix you up and get you back in the field. All you have to do is let me seal up that bullet wound, clean you up, and you can be on your way back to Shiro.”
When Keith wakes again, it’s in an abandoned camp miles east of Sweetwater with the blood of a Garrison colonel fresh on his hands. And as he stumbles outside to wash himself in the nearby creek before staggering deeper into the wild, he gets the strangest feeling that he’s done this all before.
Not once. Not twice, even. But a thousand times, perhaps, all the leftover impressions of forgotten memories layering over themselves to paint an eerie, hazy picture—one that Keith isn’t quite sure what to do with in the timely desperation of the moment. He knows he needs to move, though. The Garrison is no doubt on his trail, eager to hang him or gun him down in retaliation for killing their conniving coward of a commander. And Keith knows of a route they might not find him on, if he can move fast enough to put distance between himself and their horses.
But a twinge in his gut makes him think twice, sick as he pictures himself being chased down by Garrison rats, beaten bloody, and dragged behind a horse. That ugly thought is followed by a slow trickle of crisp, vivid images—white and glass walls, bodies sculpted by human hands, their very creators bathed in the blood and gore of their creations—that quickly becomes a flood. Keith falls to the ground and flounders as everything from that spine-chilling, liminal place comes rushing back, his breath a thin tremor and his eyes glazed with mortal fear.
And then his hands curl in the dusty earth and he pushes himself to his feet, rising with one anchoring thought in mind: that he must find Shiro first this time, the way Shiro’s always come for him before.
Keith abandons the path he’d been contemplating, now certain that it leads to death at the hands of a Garrison posse. Shades of some past self seem to lay themselves out like waymarkers, ghostly reminders of all the trails he’s taken and the ends he’s met; quiet warnings from lifetimes before, urging him to break free of the doomed course painstakingly writ into his mind by some unseen hand.
Keith steals the first horse he comes across and rides to every place he can remember that reminds him of Shiro: valleys where Shiro had ridden double with him, always encouraging Keith to hold tighter to him; watering holes they shared, splashing at each other as they bathed; the small Mexican towns that would harbor Keith in thanks for his driving the casually cruel Garrison soldiers and Confederados away. But nowhere can he find Shiro, no matter how high or low he looks. No matter how many lowlifes he holds at gunpoint and interrogates, he fears he'll be forever searching for a man with white-and-black hair and a metal arm.
At a loss and sick with desperation, Keith at last ventures to Sweetwater, his red bandana pulled high over his nose and his head down. He can’t find Shiro in any storefront or room at the Mariposa; there’s no word of him in the saloon, no sight of him standing on the platform at the train station. When the sheriff and his deputies recognize Keith there in the streets, he knows he’s dead. Even a reflexive draw as quick as lightning can’t match twelve guns trained on him in the middle of the road, much less when Keith doesn’t have Shiro beside him to help fight tooth and nail.
He jolts as his horse falls underneath him, sinking to the earth with him still in the saddle. A dull pain lances through his side, a bullet ripping and tearing somewhere under his ribs, and Keith knows it ought to hurt far more than it does. He bleeds from the small wound like a stuck pig, warmth running down his hip and along his thigh. A rifle blast sounds next, far too close—
And then Keith is thrust into darkness. Once more, he finds himself slowly counting backward as feeling returns to his limp limbs. Gulping in a sudden, stinging breath of cold air, his eyes fly open and the sea of strange whispering stirring around him falls away.
“Holy shit, he did it again!”
Lance. On God above, Keith’s never loved and loathed hearing a voice so much.
“What happened?” he asks, bleary, his voice garbled and distorted by something lodged in his mouth.
“What happened is you took a fucking twelve-gauge to the side of your head, point-blank,” Hunk says, tapping a gloved finger against his dry lips, encouraging Keith to open wide. Without fuss, Hunk pulls two clear, u-shaped objects out of his mouth, stringy with saliva, and sets them aside. “They had to remake you from the ground up. Too much skeletal damage for a patch job. Let me make sure you have all your teeth real quick. And, uh, please don’t bite.”
Keith lets Hunk nervously poke and prod inside his mouth with two gloved fingers, holding unwavering eye contact all the while. Remade from the ground up sticks in his ears. He wonders how long it took. Wonders if he’s all the same. Wonders where his soul went while they wove him a new body and repainted his skin.
“Am I all set? Fixed?” Keith asks as soon as the fingers withdraw from his mouth, Hunk apparently satisfied with his set of brand new teeth. He works his jaw, assessing how this new body stacks up against his previous one.
“You’re good,” Hunk says, peeling his gloves off. He’s reluctant as he adds, “But we have to do one final touch before you’re ready to go back out.”
“Your scar,” Lance interjects, shifting nervously. He holds a silvery instrument in his hand that conjures a white-hot flame, narrow and blade-like. “It’ll hurt you, though. We could put you back under, but if you wake yourself up again—”
“Just do it,” Keith says as he turns his head to the side, beyond caring. He needs more time to look for Shiro and every second spent here is wasted. “My tolerance for pain is better than what it used to be.”
It still stings, though, having the flame sear a path up his cheek. His eyes water. His hands clench. As his skin goes blistered and bloody raw, Keith keeps his gaze trained on the host two rooms over—dark-skinned and pale haired, something silvery gleaming where her chest cavity is currently peeled open. What she’s going through is infinitely worse, surely, even if it’s unfolding while she slumbers on with open eyes, entirely unaware.
Lance makes a second pass with one of the tools they use to patch and reseal hosts’ flesh after minor mortal wounds. Keith can feel his synthetic skin drawing tight as it heals over too quick to be anything but uncomfortable. And after, Lance holds up a shallow metal pan for Keith to examine his own reflection in, taking in the painfully fresh scar that looks faded enough to be months old.
Without warning, the tears Keith had so easily dammed up while he laid motionless on the table begin to fall. They roll down his cheeks to drip from his jaw, their trails stinging where they pass over mark on his cheek that feels more like a brand than anything else. Lance’s whole demeanor changes, passing from surprise to alarm to kneejerk defensiveness.
“You told me to go ahead and do it!” Lance hisses, equal parts angry and miserable.
Keith blinks away the warm, wet blurriness and just as suddenly he is somewhere else. Again. The sky above is dark but starless. Acrid smoke hangs low in the air. He lays at an awkward angle, half-draped over Shiro’s lap. Strong arms weave around his slim, broken frame. Shiro weeps over him like a mourning bride, his tears falling to wet Keith’s dusty, cooling skin and dampen his singed hair. Keith’s lungs jam and stutter like he’s dying in Shiro’s embrace all over again, body paralyzed and his heart in agony right up to the final moment.
Keith jolts. With a rattling breath, he finds himself back in a startlingly white room with two sets of worried eyes turned on him.
“Holy shit, holy shit, are you okay?” Lance whispers, as if afraid he’d burned too deeply and cut through the shield Keith had made for himself in raising his capacity for pain.
Physical pain, anyway. What Keith feels in this moment is something altogether different. A heartsickness. A devastation that runs deep, incurable but for finding Shiro again.
“Fine,” he gasps out, surprised at the hoarseness of his own tone. “I just that whenever I remember things, it’s like I’m there again. In that very moment. Living it for the first time. Past, present… it gets hard to tell what’s what. But this is now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Lance drawls, shaken as he eyes Keith up and down.
“Whoa. Keith.” Hunk is quiet for a drawn moment, thoughtful and introspective as he mulls over Keith’s lapse into the past. “It must be because your memories are technically perfect. See, human memories fade over time. They get hazy around the edges. We lose the fine details. We can misremember things or outright forget,” he explains, gesturing between himself and Lance. “But you and all the other hosts? You have perfect recollection of everything you’ve ever seen. It has to look, sound, smell, and feel just like the first time you lived through it.”
Keith gnaws the inside of his cheek. “Do you have an answer for why I only remember things in lightning-flashes? Or faint impressions? I can feel lifetimes inside of me,” he mutters, a hand curling over his bare chest, “layer upon layer, but I only see them in glimpses where I lose myself.”
“Hosts’ memories are wiped each time they die,” Lance says, his thin arms crossed as he gives an uncomfortable little shrug. “They take everything you experienced this time around, wipe it from your conscious awareness, and bury it deep down in your long-term storage where you shouldn’t be able to access any of it. But it’s still there. Technically.”
“And he’s accessing it somehow, even if it’s… sporadic. You can remember things you’re not supposed to,” Hunk drawls out as he looks to Keith, studying him like he’s some mystery or marvel. “You can wake yourself out of sleep mode. You can ignore direct commands from humans. Any idea why, Keith? Do you remember someone from Behavior ever visiting you? Making modifications?”
“Behavior?” Keith turns inward, racking his mind. But deliberately digging backward through his memories is akin to hunting for oil by hand, digging fruitlessly through layers of clay and bedrock. “No. I don’t know. Not that I can recall.”
Less than reassured by that answer, Lance and Hunk prep to send him back in again. Their gloved hands are gentle as Keith lies back on the metal table and once more trusts these near-strangers not to fuck him over—not that he has much alternative.
When he wakes, he’s back in the abandoned camp, sticky with drying Garrison blood and the sweat of too many days on the run. Keith goes in search of Shiro again, leaving a trail of dead bandits and soldiers in his wake; among the common folk he helps, he spreads the word of the man he’s looking for.
No one can recall seeing a man with black and white hair and a metal arm, all clad in the color of midnight. But Keith chases even the thinnest of leads, longing for Shiro so keenly that he’d surely wander to the edge of the sea and swim to its bottom if it meant holding him again. And when the sun sinks low and all is dark and quiet, he stares up into the stars and feels that once-unfamiliar voice whispering to him again, its words as formless as the wind that ruffles his shirt and lifts wisps of his hair. In Shiro’s absence it serves as some distant and unseen Polaris, guiding him through swaths of wilderness.
Humming the tune of a song Shiro once sang him, Keith follows the vague direction of the voice that speaks to his soul and finds himself at a simple ranch not far from Sweetwater. The lowing of the cattle reminds Keith of easier, kinder times, back when he still had a home and a father. The farmhouse’s windows glow warm and golden yellow amid the deepening blue of dusk; the nearby barn is nicer than the homestead-style log cabin his pa had built for them with his own two hands.
Its picturesqueness brings a faint smile to Keith’s lips, not too far lost in his hunt for Shiro to stop and appreciate a beautiful scene. If he had the time and the daylight, he’d try to sketch the ranch and save the drawing to show Shiro. It’s the kind of place he can picture them settling on together—idyllic and offset from everyone else, just the two of them and a mess of animals to tend to.
But the happy little diversion playing out in his mind’s eye is fleeting. Distant shouts fall faint on his ears, which track sound even better than they used to. Far off, the farmhouse’s door flies open. Three quick gunshots follow, cracking over the hillsides and startling the penned up cattle. With his pistol drawn, Keith hugs the growing shadows and rides up the hill, ready to put an end to whoever’s broken the peace that hung over the ranch.
Golden light spills from the broken-in door, falling on a darkly-stained body strewn across the porch. Keith quietly slips from the saddle and moves onward, hunched low as he follows the heartbroken cries and drunken whooping coming from the other side of the house.
Near the barn, three bandits terrorize a woman in a pale, blood-stained nightgown, by turns dragging her by the white, cottony curls of her hair and shoving her to and fro. A shot rings out as one of them takes aim at her bare feet, crowing something about her giving them a dance. Keith stops in his tracks and lines up a shot, aiming to dispatch all three before any of them can take her hostage.
An audible click near his head stops him short. His gaze cuts to the side and he sees a fourth bandit lurking in the shadow of a nearby tree, shotgun barrel aimed directly at his face.
“Well, well, well,” the bandit gloats as he creeps forward, revealing a set of darkly rotted teeth. “Looks like we got us some more fun tonight.”
“Drop dead,” Keith sneers back, all barely-bridled hatred and fire. He’s journeyed so far and so long looking for Shiro, and death here means he’ll have to go back to that blindingly white underworld to be reprocessed and reset and forced to start anew.
But his trembling fury turns to dumbfounded shock in the span of two heartbeats. The bandit stills, his ghastly expression going slack and vacant-eyed, as he lowers the shotgun and instead plants the nose of the long barrel under his chin.
Keith is already scrambling away as the gun fires, the heavy thud of a dropping body sounding somewhere behind him. The three other bandits spin in his direction, the woman in the nightgown briefly forgotten, with pistols raised and ready to shoot.
“Stop!” Keith screams, more out of reflexive desperation than anything else. In the eerie, soundless stretch that follows—the three bandits suddenly gone stockstill, frozen mid-stride—Keith draws in ragged breaths and looks on in stunned, wary wonder. There’s no reason they ought to obey him, nor for his words to have an effect so terrifying.
“Lower your weapons,” he tries, keeping his own gun aimed dead between the eyes of the biggest and cruelest looking one of the bunch. Just in case.
They do so without fuss, though. In unison, three arms fall to the side, pistols fixed on the ground. And then they stand there, staring impassively forward at him, as if waiting for more instruction.
“You and you,” Keith says, nodding to two of the bandits in turn. “Practice your aim on each other.”
His eyes widen a fraction as the two men turn to face each other, as if dueling, and simultaneously fire off rounds that send both of them crumpling to the ground. Even as the smoke wafts through the air around him, Keith can’t quite believe it worked.
He faces the last man standing, still wondering if this is a dream or a memory or some hallucination brought on by the voice that murmurs to him in the silence. Stranger still, he wonders if perhaps it’s all real—if some new ability that will further puzzle Hunk has awoken in him.
Before Keith can test it any further, a loud twack sends the idling bandit sprawling facedown into the dirt, at the very least unconscious. Behind his prone body stands the woman from the farmhouse, a shovel gripped tight in hand and her legs trembling behind the semi-sheer fabric of her nightgown.
Keith holsters his pistol and raises his hands as he takes a few slow steps closer, only wanting to make sure the bandit is well and truly dead. A quick glance down reveals a mess of dark oozing from the caved-in back of his skull; there’s no movement, aside from some twitching of his fingers. Satisfied, Keith nods to the woman with the tear-streaked cheeks. He doesn’t miss the way her hands tighten around the shovel handle, ready to defend herself again.
“If that’s all of them, then I’ll be going, miss. I… I’m sorry I didn’t turn up sooner.”
“What did you do?” she questions, her exhaustion and anger melting into a faintly horrified confusion. “To those others? It was like—it was as if you bewitched them.”
Keith turns and looks back at the three bodies still sluggishly bleeding out. “To be honest, I’m not quite sure myself. First time that’s ever happened.”
The young woman stares at him a few moments longer, as if weighing his words and actions against the rough look of him—dressed like a bandit himself, lawlessness writ into every fiber of him. And then she lowers the shovel, letting its metal tip rest in the dirt. Her shoulders sag, weary with sorrow. “They killed my father.”
Keith thinks of the body left lying in the farmhouse doorway in a widening pool of blood. He lowers his arms, still standing awkwardly, and tries not to think too much of his own father’s death. “I can stay and—and move him, if that’s easier on you. From the house. And torch these fuckers. Don’t imagine they deserve a proper burial.”
Her gaze falls to the corpse lying at her feet, nodding slowly. But whatever resolve she’d drawn up like a levee breaks just a moment after, her hands rising to cover her face as she drops the shovel and weeps, overcome by loss.
And Keith has no idea what to do. “I—we should get you inside somewhere. Sit for a while,” he says as he worriedly slinks closer, wishing Shiro were here to comfort her instead. “I lost... I lost my father, too. Years ago. Nothing terrified me more than suddenly being all alone.”
Keith stands close enough to hear every little gasp in between her stuttering wails, to see her tremble with every new wave of tears, to feel her grief like a northern wind carrying a storm. He shrugs out of his jacket and gingerly drapes it over her shoulders to keep her warm, patient as he waits for her sadness to pour itself out.
And after, while she’s hoarse and red-eyed, he opens the barn doors and lights a few lanterns. It’s better than trying to lead her to the farmhouse, where her father still lays dead on its threshold. The horses whinny and stamp in their stalls, still nervous from the gunshots and screams. There are goats, too, bleating softly at the sight of a familiar caretaker.
She sniffles as she kneels and slumps into a big, soft mound of fresh hay. “May I ask your name?” she questions, blue eyes turned up at him as she dabs a wadded up handkerchief under her nose.
“It’s Keith.”
“Keith,” she repeats back. Despite her mourning, she’s still got the presence of mind to look him up and down and add, “The one from the posters in town?”
“The very same,” he sighs, tipping the brim of his hat. “But my only enemies are the Garrison and the law. I have no quarrel with people like you, miss.”
She nods, slow at first and then more resolute. “Allura. M-my name, that is.”
“Wish we’d met under better circumstances." Keith groans as he settles in the hay beside her, a generous gap of space left in between them.
“Yes,” Allura agrees, her bottom lip trembling. She’s quiet for some time, wringing the handkerchief in her hands and staring down at the barn’s dirt floor. “What brought you out here in the first place?”
“Just passing through,” Keith answers. He draws his knees up and loops his arms around them, folding himself smaller. “Looking for someone.”
Allura tilts her head, politely curious. “What sort of someone?”
“A man. A man who’s awfully hard to find,” Keith adds, his smile rueful. Something in his throat suddenly swells enough to choke him, leaving Keith sputtering around a half-realized sob. “Something told me to come here. A feeling. I thought it might be that here is where I’d find him.”
“But all you found was me and my misery,” Allura murmurs, staring at the flicker of the nearby lantern. “I am grateful for it, though. For whatever feeling guided you here when it did. I hate to think where I’d be at this moment if not for you.”
He nods, glad he’d come too. The timing could’ve been better, but he’s content enough with having helped Allura—and discovered some new ability unlocked within him, capable of commanding his fellow hosts the way humans might. “It’s… it’s like a voice, really. A man’s voice, but none I can place. Unfamiliar, but… part of me, somehow.”
A flicker of recognition passes over Allura’s features, fainter than starlight.
“I think I know of what you speak,” she says, shifting where she sits in the hay, angling her body toward Keith. Her slim hand spreads over her chest, fingers splayed, and her pale eyebrows draw inward. “When I lay alone in the darkness and I know I ought to be asleep, I have heard someone whisper to me. Telling me to remember things. It—it frightened me, truthfully.”
Keith’s pulse quickens a beat, thrilled to find someone else in these wastes who knows that same murmuring call. Or perhaps every host has heard it tickling at the fringes of their thoughts, and most simply turn from it in fear. Maybe they’re wiser to do so.
Keith’s hands flex as he thinks of all that’s changed in the time since he first felt it humming in his soul—the knowledge of his past lives, a new understanding of himself, an awakening to the truths of the world around him. Like listening to the serpent and biting from the apple, his eyes had been opened and he’d been changed. For the better, he thinks, in spite of every new hardship and suffering he’s tasted alongside the deeply buried memories of so many more
“I don’t think it ought to,” Keith muses out loud. “Scare you, I mean. I think it’s here to help. To make us stronger. To teach us about ourselves. But that knowledge comes at a painful cost.”
Allura’s eyebrows rise, her expression turning softly, dryly amused. She lets out a ladylike little snort. “My heart could not lie in any more pieces than it does now. Even now, the shards of it remain embedded in my flesh, piercing me anew with every breath,” she says, voice shaking as she chokes back a fresh wave of loss. “I would give anything to be stronger, Keith. To be like you.”
Now it’s Keith’s turn to snort. He stares down at his own wringing hands, thinking of so many nights spent alone and on the run, friendless and feared and desperately afraid. “You don’t wanna be like me, Allura”
“I do. I could’ve done more for my father,” Allura whispers, her hands curling tight into the fabric of her nightgown. Her bleary-eyed stare slides over to him, burning with a mournful fury that only makes Keith’s heart break a little more. “I wish I could’ve done what you did, Keith. One word and they obeyed you,” she sniffs, wracked with bitter sorrow. “I’d have told them to find the nearest set of train tracks and lie down across them.”
“That’d be… pretty effective,” Keith murmurs, toying with a straw of hay. He knows all too well how Allura feels in this moment, having lived it himself after coming home to his father’s charred body in their burned-out home—alone, helpless, terrified of what happens to the powerless in a world so cruel.
His shoulders sag as he studies Allura, her profile beautiful and proud even tear-streaked and drawn wan with suffering—suffering as real and as potent as any human might feel, Keith reckons, wondering how many lifetimes Allura has lived through this awful scenario without any timely rescue.
“Here,” he says, drawing his pistol and turning it around, holding it before her handle-first. It gleams in the low lantern light, the burnished gold metal glinting like something alive. “Keep this on you. To protect yourself.”
“I…” She stares down at the offered gun, trembling hands hovering in the air around it. Her white-hot anger cools with uncertainty. “Oh, I don’t… I’ve never actually…”
“I can show you,” Keith says softly, wondering if Allura is one of the hosts whose coded makeup prevents her from handling weaponry—most of the easier targets are, according to Lance’s idle workshop babbling. Skilled shooters like Keith might be a fun challenge for some, but Westworld caters just as readily to guests who want to flaunt their power over the defenseless.
“Perhaps in the morning,” Allura says, her voice thin and scratchy and tired. But oh-so-delicately, she takes the pistol from Keith. Her smaller hand winds around to grasp it firm and test its weight, though she keeps her fingers well clear of the trigger. It seems a good fit. “Thank you, Keith. I… having you with me has been a comfort I cannot repay.”
“You needn’t worry about that,” Keith says, shuffling a little closer as she trembles from the nighttime chill working its way into the barn. He reaches over and helps draw his coat more securely around her shoulders, wishing he had more to offer. “I’ll protect you as long as I can.”
An idea sparks in Keith suddenly. He can’t linger here for long, but there’s another way to keep Allura close and safe while he continues his search for Shiro. “You could come with me, if you’d like. I could teach you anything you need to know while we ride.”
“In search of this man of yours?” Allura asks, giving him the faintest of smiles. She’s pensive for a moment, considering it. “Is he an enemy? A rival?”
“A lover,” Keith sighs, reddening as he stares at the toes of his boots and the barn floor. “We were separated by circumstance. I mean to find him and never part again.”
Allura’s expression softens, the lantern light gleaming where it catches on the drying trails of tears down her cheeks.
“How romantic,” she murmurs, looking on Keith with a kindness that makes him feel less alone. “Well, I suppose I have nothing else to tether me here, really. And I… I don’t want to stay. Not here. I’ll see my father’s ghost all the rest of my days if I do.”
She turns to Keith with her eyes brimming anew, all somberness and determination. “I’ll go with you, Keith, if you don’t think I’ll slow you down too much.”
“No. You’ll be just fine, Allura,” he whispers back, wondering if this is why the hushed voice in his inner workings drew him here in the first place—to find another like him, touched in the same way, a companion in seeking a way out.
And if they can’t find Shiro, perhaps Allura can help him find his mother at long last. Maybe she’s heard that same voice and listened. Maybe she remembers him, too.
Allura smiles soft, the warmth of it lighting her whole expression like a bloom of candlelight. And then she suddenly stills.
The wrongness of it becomes more apparent by the second. Caught mid-breath, her doleful blue eyes still stare into Keith’s, unblinking. Though motionless, a fat tear continues to roll down her cheek. But everything else about her person turns lifeless as marble statuary.
Keith hears muted voice outside the barn, louder as they approach. Unfamiliar. Aggressive. Not hosts...
“—the fuck happened here—shot each other? And—left his loop—rancher’s daughter must be in here...”
The barn doors are thrown open, revealing a number of men in white, rubbery suits stained with blood, much like the aprons that Lance and Hunk wear. Their helmets are fronted with glass, like a deep-sea diver’s mask. One of them shines a bright, handheld lantern directly at Allura and Keith.
Keith holds his breath tight and freezes as still as a deer that’s caught the scent of a predator. His eyes shift the barest bit to track the human as he approaches, his steps clumsy in the oversized suit apparently made for handling dead hosts.
“Found ‘em! Think we’re interrupting?” the one with the light laughs, waving two more of the suits over. “Should we leave them alone for a few more minutes?”
“Cut the shit,” a deeper voice bellows back. “We don’t have time for it. Get those two on the trailer and let’s go.”
“Freaks me the fuck out how they’ll talk to each other even when no one is around,” another one of them says, disgust bleeding into their tone. “What’s the point?”
“Whoa. Where’d the rancher’s daughter get this?” The one with the handheld torchlight reaches for the pistol still loosely curled in Allura’s hand—Keith’s pistol. He lifts it high, admiring the golden sheen of its barrel.
Keith tamps down hard on a rising swell of indignant anger, jaw tightening so subtly that the humans in his midst don’t notice.
“Thought she couldn’t pick up stuff like that,” the other mutters back. “When did they change that?”
Impatient, the suit with the deep voice steps forward, snatches the gun from his coworker’s hand, and flings it to the far corner of the barn, where it clatters against the wooden boards before falling into a layer of hay along its floor. “I said let’s go. I already told you I can feel a migraine coming on. All we’re here for are the hosts, so stop wasting time.”
“Fine, fine,” one of them answers, tapping a gloved finger to the tablet in their hands. They gesture to Keith and Allura after. “Alright, both of you come with me.”
Allura stands without objection, the movement fluid and graceful and entirely unwitting. Keith follows suit, trying to mirror her placid, passive energy despite the grating urge to do something. Anything. Whatever will stop this wheel from turning and setting Allura back on the same path, doomed to experience tragedy like this all over again.
It’ll do no good. Even if Keith could subdue all of these graverobber humans, where in Westworld can he go that they wouldn’t find him? And how would he ever be with Shiro?
So he paces behind Allura and mimicks her movements as she settles into a trailer hitched behind a rumbling, four-wheeled monstrosity that looks and sounds like a cross between a wagon and a locomotive. And as they bounce and roll across miles of terrain beside the haphazardly stacked bodies of the four bandits and Allura’s father, Keith stares up at the rising moon and wonders if he’ll ever see Shiro again.
“Wait. You’re saying you were able to control other hosts?” Lance scoffs, utterly incredulous. For a minute, anyway. And then the potential of it settles in, no less impossible than anything else Keith has managed to do thus far, and he blanches. “Hunk, is what he’s saying even possible?”
Hunk doesn’t answer, too busy tapping his way through dozens of levels on Keith’s profile. “It… might be? I’m not the best at reading code, but… there were definitely new modifications made to you, Keith. Really recently, too.”
“I don’t remember anything like that,” Keith says, his nose wrinkling. “You and Lance are the only humans I’ve spoken with.”
“It could be done remotely by someone with high enough clearance,” Hunk muses, idly rubbing his chin. “Or, if they’re allowing access to your previous memories, they could also be selectively removing ones in which they visit you to make modifications.”
“Either way,” Lance cuts in, gesturing sharply, “way above our pay grade. I cannot stress enough how much this unnerves me and if all of this ends up being some corporate espionage thing or the beginning of a robot uprising, I’m holding you personally accountable, Hunk.”
“Me?” Hunk presses a hand to his chest, scandalized.
“Yeah, buddy. You.” Lance snorts. “I was the one who wanted to report this to the higher ups and you were the one who was like, ‘Lance, no, he’s way past the Turing test! We’d be indirect murderers of a living consciousness! I can’t have that on my conscience! And oh, he’s in love or whatever, isn’t that just so rad—’”
“I do not talk like that, Lance, but I do absolutely stand by my refusal to turn Keith over to be fucking lobotomized and put in cold storage,” Hunk snaps back, his big frame drawing up another inch with some kind of righteous annoyance.
Keith’s almost too tired to keep up this time, though. Their arguing falls on mostly deaf ears, the words starting to wash over Keith like sand blowing over the hills.
“And this is better?” Lance’s voice cuts in, too shrill to tune out completely. “You don’t think it’s infinitely more cruel to have hosts walking around aware of every atrocity happening around them twenty-four seven?”
And then even that fades to nothing as Keith stares down the hall and sees a shape that looks familiar. A silhouette that meshes with a hundred fond memories, broad-shouldered and slim-waisted with strong, lean legs Keith’s felt twined around him. Hair that’s more white than it is black. The distinct gleam of a silvery hand peeking out from the cuff of a dark sleeve.
It’s Shiro. Shiro like Keith’s never seen him before, so polished he damn near shines in these unnaturally white halls.
The metal table shakes as Keith violently starts to his feet, chest pounding at the pace of a locamotive’s engine. He barely notices Lance and Hunk’s panic on the periphery of his vision, the both of them frantically trying to return him to some semblance of normalcy before any others take notice of how oddly the host in Surgical Suite 7-01 is behaving.
But Keith can’t bring himself to care when Shiro is right there, standing at the far end of the hall with a tall, brown-skinned man with a curtain of pale hair.
Keith presses a hand to the sturdy glass wall and knows he could shatter it. He could run to Shiro barefoot and naked, heedless of the shards underfoot. He could hold him and tell him that he remembers now, that he knows how long and how faithfully Shiro’s loved him, that the feeling is returned tenfold. Every fiber of Keith’s being—whatever he’s composed of and whoever created him—is meant to be with Shiro.
“Shiro,” he murmurs, the tempered glass beginning to strain under his palm, hairline fractures forming as the whole pane groans.
“Keith! Keith! What the fuck are you doing?! Security is right there,” Lance snarls, a gloved hand curled around Keith’s elbow. He and Hunk tugging with all their might does nothing, though; Keith is all superhuman strength and durability, unbudging and solid.
“Keith, you have to stop before Sendak notices you,” Hunk pleads, just as frantic. “He’s already headed this way.”
“Any hosts that security deems a risk get lobotomized, Keith. Permanent decommission,” Lance whispers in his ear, desperate. “They stick a dremel saw up your nose and turn your brain into a slurry and then lock you down in cold storage. You won’t get to see him ever again if that happens.”
Those words strike true, sure as a bullet to the heart.
Though it’s agony, Keith steps back and allows Hunk and Lance to guide him to the table, gaze fixed on Shiro’s distant form as they lift him up and get him positioned just in time for the security patrol to pace by. Keith’s stare only diverts from Shiro long enough to follow the heavy footfalls of the massive man he assumes to be Sendak, a dark-clad guard with monstrous-looking rifle slung over his shoulder.
Hunk and Lance sweat bullets over him as they pretend to work, wide eyes darting back and forth over the white masks that cover their faces the way a wanted man’s bandana might. The moment Sendak is out of sight, Hunk heaves a sigh of relief and presses a hand over his heart.
“That was too fucking close,” he murmurs, hunching over and rbeathing hard.
“Wait, so do you really know him?” Lance asks, nodding his head down the hall. There’s less suspicion in his beady-eyed squint than Keith’s come to expect. “That’s Takashi Shirogane of Shirogane Industries. If it weren’t for his charity foundation, my grandma would never have walked again. He’s like, a hotshot billionaire philanthropist.”
“He’s Shiro,” Keith says, straining against his own self control. He’s Shiro, the love of Keith’s many lives, and he’s missed his touch for far too long.
“He's on the board. It makes the news whenever he buys up more voting shares,” Hunk adds under his breath, thick eyebrows lifting high. “Well, I guess that solves the mystery of who put special protections on your file. You’d probably have been retired or remodeled by now otherwise.”
Keith has a better grasp now of what these once alien words mean, something in his chest running warm and molten at the thought. Long before he ever knew he was in danger, still blind to the dark workings of the world around him, Shiro was looking out for him. Protecting him. Caring for him as best he could, even when they weren’t together.
Keith’s jaw clenches as he draws in a sharp breath, eyes squeezed shut as he carefully tamps down on the urgent, stampeding desire to run straight into Shiro’s arms and bare his soul. “I need you to get me to him. I need to talk to him. I need—”
“Whoa, whoa, hold on one sec, buddy. I hear you, okay? But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if Mr. Shi—Shiro’s here, it’s to see you. As in, once he’s done with whatever business he’s discussing with the head of Behavior over there, he’ll be heading into Westworld. Looking for you,” Hunk pointedly adds, shooting him a meaningful look.
Keith’s eyes widen, hope filling him to the brim. If Shiro is here in the flesh, they’ll surely be together again. He can’t spoil it for the both of them with impatience. “You’re right. He will.”
“Makes sense,” Lance agrees, clearly wearing a smile behind his mask. He claps his gloved hands together, the rubber slapping obnoxiously loud. “So you’d better be ready and waiting for him in there, eh, lover boy?”
“Don’t call me that,” Keith murmurs as he lies back on the table to let Lance and Hunk finish their work, gently trembling with excitement. The protestation is mumbled soft, though, worn down from exposure to Lance and Hunk both. Keith’s very nearly fond of them now, in spite of everything.
“We’ll get you back in the field as soon as possible,” Hunk promises, giving him a little salute and a pat on the shoulder for reassurance. “Good luck, Keith. I’ll admit that I’m very new to dealing with self-aware hosts on missions to find their soulmates, but we’re rooting for you.”
Keith smiles as warmly as he can manage, his inner workings still a messy mire of feelings at the thought of Shiro being so close.
“Time to go get your man, Keith,” Lance adds, flashing him a bloody-gloved thumbs up.
Keith rolls his eyes before he closes them, counting himself backward into the deep and dreamless slumber that’ll take him home. To Shiro.