#desertkeithweek

[slouph]

Born from Desert & Stars 🌠

[pareefae]

I usually don’t post sketches but eh.

Day 1 of @desertkeithweek: Provisions

So, since they live in future there sure are towns around huh? He buys food from one of those cities and one day he finds a kitten by accident.

[edelwary]

@desertkeithweek has started and it was supposed to be my time to shine but guess who forgot whoops ? 

ANyWayS Day 1 ! Provisions ! Aka its 3 different canned good or take out from the city twenty miles away, no inbetween. 

[damnspacebois]

HC that Keith's dad was a little bit of a doomsday prepper (like in the sense that he knew one day the Galra might turn up and try and enslave the earth), so he taught Keith a bunch of survival skills, like how to find and purify water, how to conserve body heat, make a fire, that sort of thing. He also hid a bunch of non-perishables out somewhere on the property. It was a bit extreme and it made Keith’s classmates make fun of him even more, but at least they were prepared for whatever happened.

Flash forward several years, and Keith’s out at the shack again and running out of money for supplies. The water thing isn’t too much of a problem, but he hasn’t got proper access to food and what little he has is rationed as much as he can. He’s not 18, not old enough to access the funds set aside for him, and it’s not like he can go crawling back to the Garrison after taking out Iverson’s eye. 

And then: he remembers. His dad’s old stock. He digs it up, and lo and behold, there’s enough there to last him until his birthday, or nourish him enough that he could go out looking for more. 

For the first time in a long time, he feels just a tightness in his chest as he thinks about how his dad is trying to keep him alive even in death blessed.

[strangeroseart]

Day Three: Climate

Dust storms aren’t fun to deal with when you live in an old shack with a lot of cracks; though, duck tape works wonders.

[failed-the-vibe-check]

Past and Future

(Originally supposed to be part of @desertkeithweek​ but I didn’t finish it in time!)

[blackbaeyard]

Hoverbike

Keith had thought he was ready, but now, lifting the heavy tarp away, he realized he wasn’t. Maybe he never would be.

It had been nearly a month since the world had received its last bit of news of the Kerberos crew. Nearly a month since the words “pilot error” had been carved into Keith’s mind, nearly a month since Keith had punched Iverson and ditched the Garrison.

Nearly a month since he’d last ridden the hoverbike, or even had the courage to look at it.

Shiro’s hoverbike, initially. The one he’d given to Keith to learn with, then to take care of while Shiro was up in outer space. Keith had ridden it a couple times since Shiro had left, but he hadn’t touched it since the Garrison’s announcement. It had remained in storage, until now.

Keith had avoided riding the hoverbike as long as possible, and although he didn’t necessarily want to, he needed to. The shack was low on provisions, and he had to go to the next town over to get some supplies. He couldn’t walk there, get what he needed, and carry it all back. He had to take the hoverbike.

Steeling himself, Keith climbed on and started the engine. The familiar purr made his heart ache. Driving the hoverbike seemed impossible without the man sitting astride him. Keith didn’t know if he really believed that Shiro was dead. He had faith in the man, faith in his skill, and knew that if the Kerberos crew were dead, it wasn’t because of any ‘pilot error’. Regardless, he hadn’t been able to get any more information out of Iverson, so it was all he had to go off of. A part of him knew that Shiro was still out there somewhere, but another part of him mourned the man nonetheless.

Riding with Shiro had been the absolute best feeling Keith had ever known. The adrenaline rush wasn’t anything compared to the way Keith felt with Shiro at his back, his laughter drowned out by the wind as Keith pushed the bike to its limits, kicking up dust in their wake. More than once, Keith and Shiro had outrun the Garrison’s perimeter patrol Jeeps to sneak off after curfew and take the bike for a spin, or even just to park it somewhere and stargaze. In fact, they’d done it quite often, often enough that Keith was amazed they never got in trouble.

It had given Keith something to look forward to day in and day out, though, other than the seemingly impossible promise of exploring the endless expanse of space.

With Shiro missing from the picture, riding the hoverbike lost most of its appeal. His trip into town was short, uneventful, and so was the ride back.

But after he’d dropped off his things and drove back to the storage shed, it didn’t feel right to put the bike away just yet. He’d barely driven it enough to warm it up. Shiro had entrusted the bike to him because he knew Keith would take care of it, and although it wouldn’t gather dust or start rusting in the shed, Keith knew that in order to keep it running right, he had to put the bike through its paces regularly.

With a sigh, Keith turned the bike around.

He didn’t stop to let himself think. He just revved the engine, punched the gas, and drove.

Flying through the desert at such high speeds was still as exhilarating as it had been the first time Keith had done it. He’d never tire of the thrill of it, even missing Shiro as he was, and it wasn’t long before Keith found himself grinning into the wind, taking every sharp turn and steep drop-off the canyons offered, not caring where exactly he went, just moving on instinct alone. He knew this place like the back of his own hand, and he had missed it nearly as much as he missed Shiro.

Piloting had become as integral to his life as Shiro had, and losing Shiro had been devastating. Keith hadn’t realized until now that, although it was bittersweet, he couldn’t lose piloting too. He hadn’t wanted to stick around at the Garrison, where Iverson lied to his face and everyone pretended everything was okay, but he could still do this. He could still drive the hoverbike.

For Shiro.

It’s eleven more months before Keith feels it again: that heart-pounding, gut-wrenching exhilaration of driving the hoverbike with Shiro riding alongside him. Shiro’s unconscious this time, held up by the shortest of three Garrison cadets who Keith hardly recognizes, but it’s Shiro. It’s Shiro, alive and, if Keith can outrun the Garrison’s Jeeps one more time, safe. He can already tell that Shiro isn’t the same, but there’s enough left of the man that boarded that shuttle for Keith’s pulse to pound in his ears and his breath to rattle in his chest every time he stops to look at him. It’s Shiro, and Keith is whole again.

They had to leave Earth rather suddenly, but Keith thanks the stars that he remembered to put the hoverbike away properly before they had left. It hasn’t rusted at all in the time they’ve gone, but the engine sputters a bit when he turns the ignition. A few more tries and it flares to life.

They’re not the same people they were when they left. They’ve changed so much in just one of Earth’s rotations around its Sun, but the hoverbike is the same. If the bike were sentient, it would not recognize the men that now sit astride it. They hardly recognize themselves, but they are confident in the presence of each other.

Shiro wraps his arm around Keith’s waist, and Keith punches the gas.

They’re together again, and that’s all that matters.

[worldofcopperwings]

“Oh hi there little fella, where did you come fr-- dude, wtf?” o_o

For @desertkeithweek day two: wildlife.

(just a quick doodle; I remembered this gif from Tangled and this happened. I swear it made perfect sense in my mind ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

[getoutnowash9]

Day 2: wildlife

[starboy--arts]

I’ve had this made for a while, but @desertkeithweek gave me the perfect opportunity to post it.

Desert Boy: A Keith Playlist

Power Hungry Animals - The Apache Relay

Everything Stays - Rebecca Sugar

Infinitesimal - Mother Mother

Lost Stars - Keira Knightley

Burning Pile - Mother Mother

The Cocoon - A Normal Lost Phone OST

Islands - Hey Ocean!

Buddy - Willie Nelson

Bonus Track:

Ghosting - Mother Mother

The cover art belongs solely to me. The songs are in a rough chronological order, depicting his journey and changes during his year as a desert hermit. Please don’t hesitate to critique/discuss with me!

[slouph]

Laws of the Beast by Tagteamme

A surprise birthday commission for Zan @phaltu​ from Jojo @Arahir & Lia @otasucc​! Love you babe!! You are so lovely and I wish you the most wonderful day!! 💖💖💖

[justheretobreakthings]

The Heat Was Hot and the Ground Was Dry - Chapter 1 (Horse With No Name)

Written for @desertkeithweek - Day 1 (Next Chapter) Read on AO3

The shack wasn’t exactly much of a home. When Keith had first opened the door to shack, he had behind greeted by a flood of dank heat humidity from the shack having sat idle for so long, baking in the desert heat, and the rattling air conditioning unit was taking its time getting it back to livable temperatures. The place has been dusty as well, and sandy. The windows and doorways were supposed to be pretty much air-tight to keep the dust and dirt out, but it seemed that a good bit had managed to seep in through whatever cracks it could find during the interim years since Keith had last been there. The place was almost bare of furnishings, and the few posters that functioned as personal touches on the drywall were so faded he could no longer tell from looking at the what they were originally supposed to depict.

To be fair, it wasn’t supposed to be a home. It was supposed to be a workshop-slash-storage area. His dad had cleared out a good portion of the shack to store shelves and boxes of books and papers and haphazardly stack monitors and equipment from that repurposed electronics store the next county over. For work, his dad had told him, for a project. Keith had no idea what the work had been, and hadn’t been particularly interested, not back when he was a kid.

The rest of the shack was used to pile high the sort of things that probably would have gone into a garage or shed if the house had had one and had started gathering dust from disuse even when Keith’s dad was still around. Hardware and tools, spare parts for the hoverbike, outdated electronics that his dad was sure he could still recycle into something useful someday; the shack was insulated well enough that they wouldn’t get warped beyond usability in the heat. And a stock of food, non-perishables in tightly sealed tins.

When he’d asked his dad what those were for, he’d simply replied, “Just in case.” Keith had left it at that. He idly wondered now if the “just in case” had included, “Just in case you get kicked out of school and have nowhere or no one to go to, and you’re feeling a little peckish.”

The house proper used to have some of these tins in the pantry as well, but those were long gone now. Them along with the house itself. Arson, the police had said. Culprit: person or persons unknown. It was a shitty answer, but it was the only one they would offer Keith.

The only furniture in the shack was a couch, the kind with a stiff metal frame and flat cushions that you would find in an office or a waiting room. It was far from an ideal bed, but Keith supposed it would have to do.

It wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go.

He was relieved when he flicked the light switch to the shack to see that the power was still working here. The little solar unit outside that was source of electricity for the shack had been practically obsolete even when his dad had first installed it, and Keith hadn’t been certain it would have held itself together all this time. He would have to test and see if he could use several of the outlets at once without it overcharging, but he was optimistic. In this desert sun, the panels had plenty to power them. Thank you, Arizona.

The first thing Keith did after starting up the air conditioning was decide he ought to get started on cleaning. The dust and sand had to go first. He located a push broom in one of the storage piles, right in the back corner, its handled propping up an old AM/FM radio that was balanced on a sagging cardboard box.

On a whim, he decided to grab the radio as well. Might as well; there wasn’t exactly much by way of entertainment here. He hadn’t really given much thought to how he was going to occupy his time out in the desert – he had been a lot more focused on just finding somewhere to go and hoping that the state would let him slip through the cracks again enough that they wouldn’t notice he still had months to go before he legally aged out of the foster system. He would much rather spend the rest of his life in a run-down one-room shack than another few months in one of those group homes.

The sound from the radio speakers crackled a bit, but otherwise came out fine. It took him some time exploring the dials to find a station to listen to, though. Most of the frequencies were just white noise. AM and FM radio stations weren’t nearly as common as they used to be, and probably would be gone entirely if enough radio enthusiasts weren’t still around to cling to them for the sake of nostalgia.

There were a couple of news and talk radio stations that he passed over immediately. He knew exactly what was going to be on them – the only thing that the local news had been talking about for days: the Kerberos mission. The Kerberos Tragedy, some of the media outlets were calling it. And Keith was sick of hearing about it.

The first music station he found was a country station, and Keith would rather have dug his eardrums out with a screwdriver than listened to that.

He finally settled on a station that was halfway through playing “Smoke on the Water” when he turned to it. Classic rock, he figured, confirmed when the song faded out and “Edge of Seventeen” started up in its wake. Wasn’t his favorite genre, but he didn’t dislike it either. He could probably acquire a taste for it.

He let the station play as he swept and dusted, pausing to cough when he kicked out a particularly bad cloud of the dust or dirt. There was no dusting spray he could find, and no mop. Sometime he would have to make a trip out to town to pick up what supplies weren’t already in the shack, but it could wait.

Once he decided he had sufficiently cleared off the surfaces of the shack’s interior, he went outside to get a drink. He had to crank the slightly rusting pump several times before it started gurgling up water from the artesian well below the ground – he didn’t know if the shack was just too far away from town to use the reservoir or if it had just been more convenient not to have to worry about water bills, but as a kid he’d gotten by just fine solely on well-water. He took a drink from the spigot and then ducked his head under the water flow, sighing at the relief of the cool water after the heat of the shack.

He would have to figure out how to get that pump to work for him as a showerhead. There were some pipes in the shack’s storage, and he thought he could probably fathom up some way to fashion a make-shift shower stall if he partitioned off this area around the pump.

That would be a project for tomorrow, though. He shook the dripping water out of his hair and went back inside, ready to get a start on sorting through the piles of junk stored up here and figuring out what he could use and what should be cleared away.

The music was no longer playing when he entered, and instead the two deejays were engaging in some sort of between-song banter. Keith tuned it out as he went about his work.

Or, at least, he tried to, until one particular phrase caught his attention.

“ – petition going around to have statue made for the crew of the Kerberos mission,” one of the deejays was saying.

“A statue,” the other one said. “See, I like that. If I went to outer space and died, I’d want a statue. And I’d want them to build it out of those rocks they brought back from the moon when they sent Apollo up there.”

“You want a statue made of moon rocks,” the first one laughed.

“Well, why not? It ain’t like they’re doin’ anythin’ with them but lettin’ them sit in storage or somethin’.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re using them for, like, science.”

“‘Like, science’, you’re so eloquent.”

“I’m a poet.”

“Sure you are. Listeners, if you call now we’ll send you a poetry anthology by Electric Eddie, only nineteen-ninety-nine.”

“All profits go toward building Bennie Jay a statue out of moon rocks.” The second deejay snorted.

Keith gritted his teeth, but he kept up with his work. They were local deejays, of course they were going to talk about Kerberos. At least they’d be getting back to playing music soon. And at least they weren’t badmouthing Shiro. Keith certainly wasn’t crazy about the fact that they were being so blasé about the event, but he would take that over listening to someone lament over the ‘pilot error’ that had supposedly brought the mission down.

“You know we’re legitimitely going to get someone to start lobbying to make the Kerberos statue out of moon rocks now, and it’ll be your fault,” the first deejay said.

“The Kerberos statue that probably isn’t even happenin’.”

“They won’t care, stuff like this brings the crazies out of the woodwork.”

“Ooh, speakin’ of, I don’t know how much you’ve been following social media the last few days – ”

“Little to none.”

“ – but the conspiracy theories have officially gotten into full swing,” the second deejay continued.

“Oh, well, naturally. So what’s the conspiracy, did the Garrison fake the Kerberos launch?”

“Oh, nah, nah, this time there’s a cover-up. We’ve got a good chunk of people sayin’ that the Garrison was lyin’ about what caused the mission to fail.”

“You don’t say.”

“So, dependin’ on who you ask, either they’re coverin’ up the fact that they built the ship wrong to try and protect their reputation, or they had planned for the mission to fail all along as some sort of tax scheme.”

“A tax scheme.”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell kinda tax scheme would that even be?”

“I dunno, I didn’t come up with that. But hey, you gotta admit, if anyone were gonna figure out a way to do that and cover it up, it’d be the Galaxy Garrison.’

“Oh, yeah, you’re right on that mark. Do they have any research going on that’s not ‘top secret’?”

“Nope, all real hush-hush. They’re the big exclusive secret hideout in outer space.”

“Space CIA.”

“Space CIA, that’s it.”

“So tell me, Bennie, which theory do you subscribe to?”

“Neither, I’ve got my own theory.”

“And what’s that?”

“Just a sec.”

There was a rummaging sound, and after a moment the first deejay asked, “What are you doing?”

“Startin’ up the next song.”

“But you said you – ” He stopped as a piano riff started playing, and then burst out laughing. “Okay, you heard it here first, folks. The Kerberos mission failed due to alien abduction.”

“You owe me ten bucks if I’m right,” the second deejay said.

“Will do. Here’s ‘Come Sail Away’. Enjoy.” He finished right as the singer started up, and the deejays went silent while the song played.

Keith sighed, releasing a tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in his shoulders. It seemed maybe he wasn’t the only one who wasn’t satisfied with the ‘pilot error’ explanation the Garrison had given. Sure, he was being marked ‘crazy conspiracy theorist’, but at least he wasn’t alone.

He half-listened to the music as he focused on rearranging the storage piles, catching just a couple of phrases of the lyrics.

“I thought that they were angels, but to my surprise They climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies.”

Keith had never understood prog rock.

He ended up working well into the night, the sun already set by the time he stood back from the piles of storage which he’d sorted meticulously by function and usefulness. There was more space now that the shack was organized, leaving the area feeling just a little less suffocatingly cramped. And he could take better stock of his inventory now; he figured he had at least a few weeks before he would have to find a way to buy more supplies.

He realized only once he had finished how worn out he was, and he flipped the light and flopped right down onto the couch. He didn’t bother with a blanket. The air conditioning was working, but it still wasn’t cool enough in the shack for him to want to sleep with bedcovers.

It wasn’t until he had settled onto the couch that he realized he had left the radio on, the upbeat rhythm of “Listen to the Music” bouncing off the walls, the only sound in the shack. For a moment he debated getting up to turn it off, but he ultimately decided against it. He was already in his sleeping position, and he wasn’t up to moving it. He opted instead to just fall asleep to the sounds of the radio.

“That was the Doobie Brothers, celebrating the anniversary of the release of their fifth studio album Stampede on this day in music history,” the deejay said – Electric Eddie, Keith was pretty sure this one was. “And we’re gonna keep the soft rock theme going for the next half hour. Here’s America with a transatlantic hit from their debut album – I think you know the one.”

A guitar started strumming, a little slower and softer than the previous song, and Keith closed his eyes and let the crooning voice of the singer act like something of a lullabye. The tune and lyrics went in and out of his head as he faded, but he knew this song, so he didn’t really need to pay attention to catch the words.

“You see I've been through the desert on a horse with no name It felt good to be out of the rain In the desert you can remember your name 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain”

He was asleep before the song ended.

[olivepatio]

Day 2: Wildlife

[damnspacebois]

HC that, after the war, after everything that comes from it and the adventures that spawn, Keith goes back to the desert. It’s not for long. He has a life now, people, and isolation isn’t good for that; he needs to be reachable. But he does go back and just ... contemplates everything.

This is, really, where it all started - where he started. He was born to the desert, under its clear skies and dusty air. He grew up in it. It raised him in ways he never thought possible, gave him hardship and heartache and everything that goes with it, but it also gave him hope. The stars glimmering in its night sky gave him his path, and almost dying in the heat built up his backbone, and the long lonely nights showed him what he needed to become the person he truly was. 

It’s bittersweet. Without the desert and all that came with it, he never would have lost his dad, but he also would never have met his person Shiro. He never would have run away from the Galaxy Garrison but he also never would have joined it in the first place. He never would have found Blue and left for the stars where they were constantly being attacked. 

He never would have found the war, but he also never would have found his home. 

A lot of what happened because of the desert hurt him, but he’s grateful for it. Without it, he wouldn’t be who he was, with the incredible family he had and the amazing adventures they’d gone on together, and that’s something he would never change. 

And so with a final goodbye, he goes back home to his people, leaving the desert behind for now.

It never leaves him.

[strangeroseart]

Day Seven: Free Day

Home

@desertkeithweek

[meoqie]

During his year alone in the desert, Keith ponders life, death, what it means to have a purpose, and how swiftly things can change without warning. He also encounters birds, bugs, and bewildered 7-11 employees.

It's a time of flux, suspension, and adjustment. He reflects on what defines him, and what is just peripheral.

One chapter for each day of Desert Keith Week 2018

Day 3: Climate