What we think, We become (Shallurklance)

8/10 - Flowers

Keith was never too good at cleaning. He preferred the idea of an organised mess, knowing where everything was yet it never being particularly orderly. In the Garrison, he never had time to keep his dorm tidy, and in the shack he never had the space. He wasn't Lance, who was used to clearing up after his many siblings, or Shiro, who was used to having to keep his quarters tidy, or even Allura, who had grown up in a tucked castle with maids following her every step. Habits of leaving clothes and belongings on every conceivable surface died hard, much to the chagrin of his lovers, and Pidge frequently wondered how he somehow knew where everything was.
Hunk couldn't judge, he was just as bad.
Needless to say, suddenly getting chucked into space and onto an alien castle where everything has to be kept spotless was a bit jarring.

So today, it said something when Coran asked him to help with the clean up the abandoned lower levels, consisting mostly of little used support team dorms and pipe filled maintenance rooms. Apparently Lance was busy introducing Allura to the wonders of dried goo face masks, Shiro was helping Hunk fix up black despite not even piloting it anymore, and Pidge, as usual, had made herself scarce at the mention of cleaning, which left Keith, and he wasn't going to let Coran just work away on his own.

When he found a rough, threaded bag full of what looked like plant bulbs, he was pleasantly surprised.

"Hey, Coran? What are these?"
The Altean turned on his heel, water from the cleaning bucket sloshing over the sides and onto the floor. "Sorry, what was that number four?"
"These. What are they?"
In Keith's hand was a small bulb, round and beige, and shiny in the strip lights of the hallway.
"Well," Coran mused, plucking the bulb out of his palm, "I'd say, well, I have no idea."
Keith paled. "You don't know?"
"I don't reckon its harmful though," he added as an afterthought, "why don't you grow one? I hear you humans quite like your horticulture!"
"Coran, I lived in a desert."

Coran didn't seem to hear that, instead bustling into a side room whilst muttering away about the proportion of anflax in some random planet's meerken. When he returned a couple of minutes later, the buckets had been replaced with a large plastic-style pot, full to the brim with weird, burgundy soil.
"This should do it," Coran instructed, stabbing what looked like a fork and a trowel into the top, causing soil to spill over the sides, "just keep them in here, water them every twelve Vargas or so, and you should have some nice plants on your hands!" He handed Keith the pot, and didn't seem to notice the way Keith sunk under its weight. "You wouldn't believe it, but I was quite the gardener in my day!" He opened one eye to look down at Keith. "Well, go on then!"

With that, Keith waddled away with the pot, walking as well as he could carrying something that he guessed probably weighed more than the team put together.

~

He ended up in his room, or at least the room he was originally allocated when he got here. It went pretty much unused these days, as he now shared Allura's massive bed with the other three, and nobody really went in it.
In other words, the perfect space to hide a secret garden.

It wasn't that he wanted to hide it, he thought as he got down on his knees and began to scoop out holes of dirt for the bulbs to sit in, it was more he wasn't want anyone else to know. Pidge would try and engineer the whole thing, whilst Hunk would insist that he grew vegetables and spices from planets that he hadn't even heard of. Shiro would probably order samples of the bulbs and the soil, just to make sure it was safe, and Lance probably wouldn't leave him alone about it. Allura would be okay, but she's tell the others, and then he'd have the exact same problem on his hands.

Okay, so maybe he was hiding it.

But he wasn't going to admit it.

The bulbs now sat snugly in the small dirt holes, innocuous in the white lights of the room. Keith sat back on his haunches and set the tools to the side, not caring for the dirt that was spread across the floor. It was messy enough anyway, dirt being joined by bulb peelings and torn-off pieces of the burlap-like sack, it wasn't like a little bit more was going to hurt.
Soon, he had emptied a water pouch over the top, standing and stepping away from the pot to look down at what he had spent the last Varga or so working on. Now the bulbs were covered up, it looked plain and unassuming, looking more like a random pot of dirt on his bedroom floor than something that he'd actually put work into.