Sentinel Keith - Tumblr Posts

keith in ur header looks so ominous, is it an au?

It is! I first drew that when planning a sheith longfic that I started two years ago, but I set it aside for a bit of a rewrite as my plot ideas got bigger. And then even bigger. 👀 I haven't returned to it yet but it's still percolating.

It's a dystopian AU where sentinels and guides are taken from their families and trained in military academies to be future pilots in an unending war. Keith has seen what Coalition forces are really doing to people on the border worlds—making mindless drones out of all those who oppose them—just like they did to his father.

Keith and Shiro are both unusually gifted as sentinel and guide respectively, so they're matched from a young age. Try as he might, Keith can't bring himself to hate Shiro. Hell, by the time they both come of age, he can't help but love Shiro, but neither can Keith forget what those soldiers did to his family.

Keith keeps his thoughts carefully guarded, painful as it is, leaving Shiro in the dark about his plans. It's for his own safety. Keith throws his sentinel activation trials on purpose, hiding the truth of his abilities, so that he'll be sent away from the academy. Only then can he strike out on his own and find out where they're holding his father. The plan will cost him Shiro, sabotaging everything they have and their future happiness together, but it's his father. He has no choice.

Of course, nothing goes according to plan.

When the war slams them back together years later, Keith doesn’t believe in second chances, just his own abysmal luck. He thought leaving would protect Shiro, but what if he was wrong from the start? What if his ‘choice’ was no choice at all, and it steered them both right into a trap engineered by a mastermind who knew Keith's secret all along?

There’s nothing Keith can do to change the past, but deep down he knows he’ll never let Shiro down again, no matter what it costs him.

Featuring:

slowburn estranged childhood friends to lovers, broken betrothal, second chances, sensory overload feels, empathic bonds, subverted soulmate tropes (but still very much sheith inventing love), prickly keith who pretends not to care about anyone but himself but is actually the most devoted friend in the whole universe (so, canon??), actual sheith conflict, loads of tension, not just the sexual kind, actual plot, weird alien ships that can only be operated by sentinel/guide pairs, weird world building, space opera vibes, the Coalition is basically every "evil empire" trope ever but under the guise of being the good guys, the enemy is a scrappy band of freedom fighters incl. Krolia and other BOM members, also the Holts are very important in this one incl. bigtime keith & pidge friendship, seriously they are kind of gremlin besties and I love writing those parts.

In other words, the story I have in my mind for this could fill a whole fucking trilogy but I just have to have to make time if I’m going to actually do that. 😂  

And of course I have that one friend who thinks it’d be better if I made OCs and wrote original fiction, but idk. This WHOLE STORY stemmed from one simple what-if that I cannot separate from sheith? Like, I can’t. I wouldn’t know how.

My original thought was:

Keith would burn the whole world down for Shiro. I really believe that. So what would it take, what circumstances would be required, for Keith to burn down everything he has with Shiro in pursuit of something else? What else would he never give up on?

What would it take for him to believe he couldn’t do what he needs to do with Shiro? What would force Shiro to watch him go, knowing he can’t follow?

And what would it take for them to fix everything that was broken between them?