rome

poor willoughby...

(60k+ words, 19 chapters)

Keith was a bit touch-starved. Or maybe attention-starved. Intimacy-starved, really. He constantly felt like he was in a desert, crawling, parched, and weak toward his next fix. But his whole upbringing didn’t really provide him with the tools to figure out how to ask for any kind of affection.  And now, he was in the middle of nowhere in space, stuck with six people he could sometimes barely look in the eye.  ~ Keith's struggles with forming connections with his team. And his successes.

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(3.9k words)

Keith knew it was weird. He’d been ashamed of it when he first started doing it. He’d tried suppressing it for a while, ignoring this weird need he had for it. When he finally looked into it, he found a bit of comfort in knowing he wasn't some freak. That it was something people did as a coping mechanism. When he first brought it up to Lance, he also thought it was weird. He had heard of it in the context of kink, but not a non-sexual thing people just did. He couldn't quite wrap his head around this not being a fetish or kink that Keith was trying to subtly approach and Keith didn’t know how to explain it either. Keith quickly felt too embarrassed to even continue the conversation.  He was starting to regret ever bringing it up. But it had to be done. Because Lance had been joking and teasing a little too close to the sun as of late.