#keith fics

  Chapter 1

    “Did your massive IQ get you in trouble again?”

   The words at the first thing you hear as you step through the door of the foster home you had been cooped up in for nearly two months now, occupied by the all-so-friendly Ann Marie Park who insisted on asking the exact same question every time you walked into the kitchen.

    It was exhausting. Sitting down at the kitchen counter and reminiscing on the most-likely-awful day you had just charged through. You never lied about it – the only reason you were in the foster system, from the loose papers you had stolen and memorised from the offices when you were 5, was because your mother and father couldn’t handle a child genius.

  That was the label they had put on you in black and white ink, on official papers. Even at the age of five the words hurt. Reading about how you had crafted an entire doll house when you were three year olds, how you were speaking in full sentences by seven months, how your intelligence had scared off the people who were meant to be with you at all times.

   Today was no different.

   School was the same old, pointless array of regurgitated information that you saw as common sense. Your notebooks were filled with the same old, stupid doodles that were the only thing that kept you from collapsing from both boredom and the exhaustion that waking up at 6am brought upon you.

   You slump down against the counter after tossing your bag carelessly against the sofa that was littered with your foster-siblings own school work which he was clearly struggling to get through. Patrick hissed at you as your bag barely whizzed past his head, nearly knocking him out cold.

    “Teachers get so butthurt,” you find yourself mumbling, a loose reply to the question Ann-Marie had asked you. “I corrected Mr Blanchard on his spelling today and got deemed disrespectful. An absolute joke.”

   Ann-Marie sighs, placing a steaming cup of tea in front of you. You instinctively push it away, your brain already going through every single thing that the second-hand kettle would be pouring into your cup.

   “What did he say to you?” Ann-Marie asks.

   “He said I had no right to shout out in class and that my input was unnecessary. He then proceeded to give me a detention.”

   Ann-Marie sighs, letting go of the breath she was holding in. She was clearly expecting the final piece of your story – the detention. The detention which you seemed to be assigned every other day all because of the fact that you didn’t feel things in the way others did. Your sky-high IQ, your label of genius wasn’t all it was cut out to be – your emotional effort was way too low, meaning you very rarely knew when to bite your tongue and keep quiet. The idea of being scolded didn’t scare you like how it scared other kids, meaning you said whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted and would only react whenever the punishment was given to you.

    “What time do I have to pick you up at?” Ann-Marie asks.

   “I don’t plan on going, Ann-Marie. It’s was unfairly given to me by-“

   “I’m telling Mr Blanchard you said that!” Patrick wails from behind you. You turn in your chair, eyebrow raised as you look at the boy behind you – half your age yet he still managed to be the only one who could grind your gears in the way he did.

   “You can tell Mr Blanchard all you want – I won’t be there to see his facial expression.”

   Ann-Marie grumbles, grabbing your arm to snap your attention back to her. You turn back around in your stool, take a handful of grapes from the fruit bowl and proceed to pop them in your mouth one by one.

   “You’re going whether you like it or not. The only way we’re gonna break the surface with you is if you see what the punishments are really like.”

   You raise your brow, speaking through a mouthful of grapes. “Break the surface? Ann-Marie, my own parents couldn’t handle me whenever I was an infant. There’s no way a detention is going to suddenly boost my EQ levels.”

   “What are EQ levels?”

   “Be quiet, Patrick.”

   Ann-Marie shakes her head at you, her beady blue eyes glaring directly into yours in the way they always did whenever she was giving you a warning. You simply shrug, leaning back against the stool, wanting nothing more than to just get up and leave. Being around people brought up your lack of emotions. It exposed you against your own will, and the only way to soothe it was by being on your own.

   You wanted to be on your own.

    “You’re going,” Ann-Marie repeats, more stern this time. “I’ll call up the school and find out what I need to find out, and then you’re going to sit through that entire detention whether I have to handcuff you to that chair.”

    “That’s actually a form of hostage capture and-“

    “Y/N!” Ann-Marie hisses. “Enough. Now, go upstairs and get out of those clothes. Dinner will be in an hour.”

     If I break out of her grip in exactly five seconds, and run by lunging, I could be out the exit door in no time.

    Ann-Marie yanks your arm, silencing your overactive thoughts as she drags you through the hallways of the high school you were sure you had escaped for at least another two days whenever you had left on Friday.

   And yet here you were – trapped in the confines of your foster-mothers arms, wading through the empty halls whilst the teachers smile at you as they pass, pretending they didn’t make your life a living hell. They had Ann-Marie fooled. You could tell by the way she chirped up every now and then, commenting on how, “Polite these people are!”

   It made you sick, quite frankly.

   “You know they’re only smiling because you’re the one keeping their bills paid, right?” you comment, not bothering to lower your voice.

   Ann-Marie groans, tugging on your arm again. “This is what I mean, Y/N. You have absolutely no filter.”

    “I didn’t tell you that you yanking on my arm is only making me stumble even more, so I think I’m improving. Can we go home now?”

   Ann-Marie doesn’t even reply as she turns the corner, coming face-to-face with Mr Blanchards ICT room. The computers line the wall, none of them on bar the big monitor that sits high and proud on Mr Blanchards desk.

   You scowl upon seeing his small head popping above it, him immediately flashing a large grin at Ann-Marie who gives it right back. He even has the nerve to smile at you – you simply roll your eyes, folding your arms and leaning against the door.

    You would never understand people who did that. Could change personalities completely within the space of two seconds, all depending on who they were talking to. Perhaps it was your low emotional levels, but you treated everybody the same. It was just how you worked.

    Ann-Marie and Mr Blanchard spoke for a good few minutes before Mr Blanchard finally turns to you and asks you to take a seat. You grumble out a, “Thank you, good sir,” before stowing off to one of the desks in the centre of the room. You set your bag down, pull out your notebook and get to doodling – just like you did every lesson.

    You had been caught most times. The teachers always noticed the way your pen moved back and forth at a fast pace, a clear indication that you were colouring rather than actually writing. You took great pleasure in showing them the notes you had already jotted down from nothing but memory. Their faces would turn blank and they would hand to you their favourite comment they used on every smart kid:

   “Your notes can’t be correct if you jotted them down so fast.”

   You didn’t mind. You got even more pleasure as you watched them read over your notes to see that they were even more detailed than the ones they had written on the board. You had even gone as far as to provide detailed examples, and continue on with the topic long before the teacher had a chance to teach you the criteria.

    Clearly, though, not all teachers appreciated having somebody smarter than them in their class. It belittled them.

    The clock ticks by with you subconsciously counting the milliseconds, just like you always did. An hour of silence between you and the teacher was enough to make you feel like you were going mad –

   But that silence was abruptly cut off at exactly 3:27pm. You had counted.

   The door to the room swings open, and even Mr Blanchard shoots upright in shock at the sudden disturbance. You had noticed a shift in his demeanour at around 3:20pm, with him continuously looking at the clock, pouting to himself before looking back down at the paper work on his desk.

   Apparently the boy in red who was currently wading into the classroom was the reason behind Mr Blanchard’s confusion.

   “Keith,” Mr Blanchard exclaims, standing up almost immediately. “You’re late once again.”

   Keith.

  You nearly gape as you look at the student in front of you – in your year, you knew. He had been the end of rumours for months now. Keith Kogane, photography student, good boy gone bad for a reason unknown.

   You had avoided him at all costs, not seeing the point in wasting time on a friendship with somebody who would clearly do nothing but drag you down this school year. You had even gone as far as dropping photography club – a class and a profession which Keith Kogane was known for.

   Taking pictures was his specialty, and he didn’t hide that fact. His camera hangs limply around his neck even now, even though it’s off and there’s hardly anything to capture in this dimly-lit room with simply computer monitors around the place. His black hair is ruffled messily in the back and slicked neatly in the front, his red jacket stained with a yellow sauce you can tell is mustard.

   Had he stopped at the cafeteria before he got here?

  “Sorry,” Keith utters in response, and you’re surprised at the lack of hostility in the apology. He almost sounds genuine.

  Mr Blanchard’s eyes soften as Keith ducks his head down, kicking the door shut behind him and stepping into the room. You watch him closely as he takes a seat at the desk opposite you, immediately putting his head back down, his nimble fingers delicately holding his camera.

   Mr Blanchard opens and closes his mouth for a moment, clearly wandering what to say to this boy who was so well-known amongst the school and yet he walked alone through most of the day. You had only ever seen him with people during lunch hours. After that, he disappears into whatever corner of the school he finds most aesthetic to lose himself amongst pointless pixels.

   Eventually, the teacher gives up, shakes his head and exits the room completely. Not before giving you a stern look of warning which you give back just as sternly – and then the door has shut behind him and the only two people in the room are you and Keith, alone.

   In silence.

   Your eyes never leave him. You sit, leaned back against your chair with your eyes focused on him, unable to focus on anything else. He just seems to strange. So far from what you expected him to be. You expected him to be like a rabid bull walking into detention – kicking chairs over and yelling about how Mr Blanchard isn’t his father and he can’t tell him what to do and spraying every curse word under the sun like profanity was his second language.

    But here he was in front of you now, eyes never leaving the small screen on his camera. The only noise in the room is the consistent beeping noise which comes from the device as he flicks through the photos he’s looking at. He seems so intrigued by them, and you find yourself half tempted to ask him what he’s doing.

   But that wasn’t you, was it? You didn’t care about what Keith Kogane was doing. Just because he surprised you this one time doesn’t mean you should jeopardize your school career by getting involved with him and whatever bad luggage he brought with him.

    You slide down further in your chair, pulling your hood on up over your head and deciding to lose yourself counting the tick of the clock again.

   Twenty minutes. Thirty seven seconds. Ten milliseconds.

  The time would pass by easily. It had to. You had your doodles here with you, an overactive brain to keep you company. Science and maths was a lot better company than the man sitting across from you.

    Nineteen minutes. Fifty five seconds. Fifteen milliseconds.

  You could ignore him just fine. The fact that he was currently breathing extremely heavily was nothing for you to care about. You had never spoken two words to him before. He was nothing to you.

   Nineteen minutes. Fourty six seconds.

  There was no reason for you to want to know more about him. No reason for you to ask him about the rumours that went around, inquiry him about how he had gone from a straight A student to somebody who very rarely even showed up to class.

    Eighteen seconds. Fifty seven seconds. 12-

  “Son of a bitch!”

   You nearly yelp, your eyes darting up from your lap to click onto the pair of brown ones which are currently flying around the room in a frantic search for whatever the boy had just dropped.

    You had heard the clatter but it hadn’t startled you as much as Keith’s voice had.

   You straighten up in your chair, letting your hood slip off of your head as you do. Keith barely acknowledges your existence as he roughly pushes a chair out of his way so he can duck under the table.

   “What are you doing?” you find yourself asking.

   Keith doesn’t look up. He doesn’t even reply to you. He simply keeps cursing lowly under his breath, his hands feeling up the floor.

    You stand up slowly, looking over the top of the round table you’re sat at. “Did you drop something?”

    “No, I’m just crouching on the floor because my arse got tired sitting down,” Keith shoots back. He looks up at you, rolls his eyes as if you were the stupidest human being on the planet. “What are you even doing here anyway?”

    You raise a brow, shocked and intriguied by this sudden change of attitude. You couldn’t help but chuckle at yourself – how you had thought for one minute that maybe the rumours were all false was beyond you. With an IQ of 160, you thought you’d have caught on by now that high school rumours held a lot more tact that TV gave them credit for.

    “I’m in detention too, smart ass,” you reply. “That’s usually the reason why students look miserable whenever they’re forced into school on weekends.”

   Keith rolls his eyes, letting out a small scoff at the corner of his mouth before he goes back to searching for the mysterious object he had dropped.

    You aren’t entirely sure what to do or say afterwards. Do you help him look? It seems, morally, like the correct thing to do, but your lack of said morals was hard to fight against. He had treated you like shit for no reason, so you would do the exact same thing to him and not regret it.

    You fall back against your chair, fold your arms over your chest and quietly hum to yourself, letting your head swing back to look up at the ceiling. You can feel Keith’s eyes glaring at you as you hum, clearly getting irked by the small noise you’re making – that was your plan. You knew how the human brain worked. You had known how the human brain worked since you were 7 years old. Little noises that you had to strain to hear were what your brain was attracted to. Your brain wants to pick up on the small noises, even if you aren’t entirely keen on trying to listen to them.

    You had lowered your voice to just that perfect level, knowing full well it would drive Keith mad.

    And it had, apparently.

    Keith slams his hand against the floor, shooting out from under the table with tired and annoyed looking eyes. You smile at him, stopping your humming for a moment.

    “Can you be quiet? This hour is already gonna drag for me, and you’re really not making it any better.”

   You shrug loosely. His comments did nothing to you. “I’m not here to make your hour any better. In fact, I think detention is the only place where it’s acceptable to make a persons life hell.”

    Keith’s eye twitches. “Are you serious?”

   You smile, nodding.

   Keith shakes his head, hollowing out his cheeks. “You don’t happen to be the child genius chick everybody goes on about, are you?”

    Your smile fades, a twisting feeling pinching the inside of your gut at the two words which shouldn’t have gone together. They crossed his lips so easily – he didn’t even seem shocked, and yet the two words brought back memories that you had forced down over the past few years.

   You cough and look away, suddenly feeling uneasy. “I don’t-“

   “IQ of 160 or something like that,” Keith continues. “God, you must feel some sense of superiority in this hell hole, don’t you? Smarter even than good ol’ Mr Blanchard.

   “His IQ isn’t difficult to challenge.”

    Keith scoffs. “I can tell. The old bastard caught me taking pictures of the tree outside his room and put me in detention for it. What a stupid reason, huh?”

    “I’d rather not talk about my intelligence, thank you. It’s quite a – uh – personal thing.”  

   Keith raises a brow as he lifts himself up off the floor. He wipes the dirt off of his black jeans, never taking his eyes off of you and suddenly it feels like the tables have turned. All because he had brought up the one thing you wanted people to forget about you – you were a certified genius. You had an IQ that was higher than anybodies this school had ever seen, and you couldn’t help it. Your brain had been overstimulated from a very, very young age and now you were forced to deal with the repercussions – trust issues, questions, teachers who despised you for the soul reason of you being smarter than them.

    You hated talking about it when you didn’t need to. Talking to people in general was a hard enough task for somebody who had zero emotional quota. Talking to them about the one thing that was enough to trigger something inside of you was even harder.

    “I go to school with you,” Keith says once he has stood up fully. You notice how he holds his camera protectively against his stomach as he speaks to you – a mark of denial. Perhaps he had some anxiety hidden beneath the tough-boy surface. “Surely knowing about your intelligence comes with the package of being a student with you.”

    “We don’t have classes together,” you point out. “Nothing but ICT and biology, and it’s very rare you even show up to those.”

    There goes that filter again, Y/N.

    You try to cover it up as quickly as you can. “But I suppose I shouldn’t be the one to talk. I’m not usually very vocal during lessons.”

   “Bullshit!” Keith nearly yells, startling you. “You’re constantly putting teachers in their place, aren’t you? I heard from my friend Pidge that you corrected Mrs Leech during one of her maths lessons once and you basically took over the class. That’s not something somebody with social issues does.”

    “I don’t have social issues as much as I have a low emotional quota.”

    “Please translate.”

   You can already feel the conversation gnawing away at your brain, an urge to put a stop to it taking over all over again.

     “It’s medical, so it’s none of your business.”

    Keith frowns, his fingers twitching against the buttons on his camera. Another marker of shock – was he surprised at your defiance?

    “Medical? Surely if it was medical, the teachers would have to let it slide. Yet here you are – in detention.”

   He made a good point. You lower your head to the desk again, tossing your hood on over your bed-head which you had arrived with this afternoon.

    “If you don’t tell me what all of that means, I’ll just look it up for myself and figure it out on my own. Do you want me to be misinformed?” Keith questions.

    You groan. “I don’t even know you.”

    “That’s why we’re talking. We’re getting to know each other.” You hear the screech of a chair against the floor – all too close for your liking. You look up from the confines your arms had made for your head to rest upon, eyes meeting with Keith’s almost immediately.

   He had pulled a chair out to sit next to you – next to you. Usually, such an action wouldn’t bother you. You were always too lost in your own brain or too monotone that day to even care if somebody wanted to sit next to you. But there was something about Keith and the way he looked at you and the rumours that spiralled around his very existence that had you feeling even mildly uncomfortable.

    “I don’t usually talk to people, you know,” he continues. “You’d have noticed that when I walked in. People – they aren’t my strong suit – but I love a good interesting person. A person who can keep me entertained with whatever shit they want to talk about.”

     “My intelligence is mine, Keith. I don’t need to talk to you about it if I don’t want to.”

    “That’s right. But as I said, I do plan on just searching this all up and figuring you out for myself. You’ve been a mystery in this school for years.”

    Your eyebrow twitches in confusion. “What do you mean?”

    “People wanna know about you. The infamous child genius-“

   “Stop calling me that. I’m 17 years old.”

   “The infamous teenage genius, then-“

   You can’t help yourself. Before you can think rationally, you’ve slammed your hand against the table, silencing Keith. His mouth immediately zooms to a thin line, flinching back in his own chair as his social personality suddenly seems to melt off of him, replaced by the angsty kid who had walked in this room in the first place.

    But you were far from calm anymore. You were angry, the words that Keith spoke zooming around in your head at one hundred miles an hour, because they were the words you had grown up hearing in whispered voices down the hall of the foster home, people talking about how your parents couldn’t cope with the genius. Nobody could cope with the genius. Ego’s were being hurt left right and centre and the human race was far too stuck up to let that happen.

   Children aren’t meant to develop this quickly. Maybe she’s sick.

  Maybe she has a photographic memory. I heard that can ruin lives.

  They were right. But what ruined lives even more was whenever people diagnosed you with every illness under the sun instead of taking into consideration that maybe, just maybe, you were more than your god damn intelligence. You were more than your grades, or your above average test score, or your early acceptance to Harvard.

    You were sick and tired of hearing people label you genius like you were some animal in the zoo.

   Oh look! There’s the genius!

  Oh, hey! There’s the genius!

  The word made you sick, and hearing Keith say it over and over again without knowing just what it did to you was enough to make even you, an emotionless human being, snap.

    “Can you just be quiet?” you nearly yell. “This hour has been long enough without you nagging in my ear. I don’t even know who you are! So if you could please shut your mouth, it would be very much appreciated. Go take pictures of the scenery or something – just leave me out of it.”

   You gather up your school bag, slinging it over your shoulder before walking over to the far table, slumping down against the desk and ducking your head in your hands. This certainly wasn’t normal for you – you had a hard enough job of hacking into your emotions, let alone having somebody else do it for you.

    But that word brought up memories. It made you remember all those years that that was all you were to people – smart. Too smart for your age, they often said. They belittled you because you were too smart, and they would do the exact same thing if you were stupid. You had to find a good balance, and the rules annoyed you.

    Keith annoyed you.

   The world annoyed you.

   You just weren’t very good at processing that emotion.

     Never before had you been so aware in a class before.

   Usually, you only pulled yourself out of bed and to the classroom for the attendance record. If you’re attendance dropped below 65%, Ann-Marie would be getting a phone call home asking where I was. Which was why you even bothered.

    You put very little effort into the classes you attended – you didn’t need to. Sure, some were better than others. You were incredible at the sciences and maths, and needed a little brushing up when it came to technology and practical subjects, but you were good enough to keep up fairly good grades in all the classes you took.

    Biology was usually a breeze. You simply sat back and let the teacher ramble on and on about things you already knew – things you had known since you were 3 – and you jotted down any useful information every now and then. But most of the lesson was spent counting the ticking clock and doodling on the front of your notebooks at the back of the classroom.

    Today was different, though, because suddenly you were hyperaware of the man sitting two rows in front of you – black hair, red jacket, camera set at his side amongst his other assortment of class belongings.

     Keith had never sat so close to you before. He either didn’t show up to class, or he sat at the very front in the corner, by the window, where he would spend the lesson gazing out at the scenery. You often saw him after class, sprinting his way down the hallway because he had spent the biology lesson so inspired by the plants outside.

   You would never understand that side of things. Biology was a lot more important than photography, and yet he insisted on throwing the subject away for something that would only get him so far in life.

    But today he had showed up to class earlier than usual – still late, but earlier – and had taken the seat two rows in front of you. His eyes hadn’t drifted to the outside world once, and he instead was focusing firmly on the board in front of him.

   There had to be a bigger motive towards his actions. If six years of high school with Keith Kogane taught you anything, it was that he didn’t just change seats. You had seen him get in multiple fights with people just because he had walked in to see them sitting in his preferred seat.

    This was so unlike him, and you could only link up his strange behaviour to the conversation the two of you had had in detention the previous day.

     “Has anybody got any questions before I get into explaining the project?” the teacher, Miss Shaw, asks from the front of the classroom.

    Your jaw slackens whenever Keith’s hand goes up almost immediately.

   He never spoke out in class. Even a few of the students around you stare at him in mild shock, clearly bewildered as to what he has to say.

    “Yes, Mr Kogane?” Miss Shaw calls forward.

   Keith shuffles upwards in his seat, messing with his camera – an anxiety marker. The man clearly had some social anxiety within him.

    “Miss, I know this really has nothing to do with what we’re learning about, but I just want to know more about something I was researching yesterday,” Keith begins, and your entire stomach falls. “What does it mean if someone has a low emotional quota?”

   Miss Shaw raises her brow, pulling her glasses off of the bridge of her nose to look at Keith properly. She leans one hand against her wooden desk, veins popping out of her wrinkled arms as a small smile finds its way onto her cheeks.

    “Well, that is definitely more a question for your psychology teacher, but the basics around a low emotional quota means that the person struggles to feel emotions correctly. They often speak out of turn because they don’t care about consequences, or they struggle to form bonds with people because they don’t care about social life or other people.” Miss Shaw nods. Keith shuffles in his seat. You want to scream. “It’s certainly not the type of life you’d want to be living, Mr Kogane.”

   Keith nods. “And what are the characteristics of a person with a low EQ?”

    “Well, somebody who’s been abandoned in their life, somebody with trust issues, somebody who feels a little less than everybody else.”

    “Somebody with a high IQ?” Keith suggests, and that’s when Miss Shaw’s eyes spark up to meet yours, her suddenly catching on to what Keith is saying.

   But her smile doesn’t fade. In fact, it seems to only get brighter. She knows full well about your high IQ. Every teacher in the school knows about it. You were the student they didn’t know what to do with.

    “Correct,” Miss Shaw finalises, before shaking her head. She’s still smiling. She must think your public embarrassment is a joke – or maybe she thinks you don’t care. You certainly hadn’t given her any reason to care about your well being over the past few years she had been teaching you. Her lack of emotion towards you was equal to your lack of emotion towards life.

    She drops the subject, even if she is still smiling to herself. You let your eyes burn holes in the back of Keith’s head, hands clenching at your sides in an attempt to calm yourself down.

    Deep breaths.

  “Anyway, now that that is out of the way,” Miss Shaw continues. “I’m gonna read out the partners for the research project you guys will be doing for me this week and going on until the deadline. Please listen for your name.”

    You can’t listen. You’re trying to grab onto any and every way possible to calm yourself down, but you were so unused to this feeling of overwhelming anger that you had never needed to calm yourself down. You were so used to feeling absolutely numb that this need to grasp onto reality was rare for you, and you didn’t quite know how to do it.

    You zoned in on the ticking of the clock. Attempted to. Miss Shaw’s voice rang out over the top of it, making it incredible difficult for you to even catch a glimpse of the noise. The patterns were gone. Your brain was running haywire.

    And then-

   “Keith Kogane and Y/N L/N. You two will be doing a research project together on the animal kingdom.”

   Keith spins around in his seat, a large smile pulling at his lips that he attempts to hide from the view of the other students by pulling his hood around his head.