( note: in light of extremely limited canon + events that were difficult to translate without brewing a tediously dramatic background -- see: mystic rock markings -- i've tried to build an au that skews towards the broader themes of what little we actually know about keith's history and character while incorporating the major game institutions. )

As far back as memory goes? Mostly Keith just remembers being hungry.

Orphans weren't scarce among the Tunnel Rats, and Keith never learned to milk it quite the way the other kids did. Gimlet-eyed, with pride stiff down his spine, he tore through job after job without success. Serving boy, newspaper hawker, errand-runner, beggar -- no matter the work, Keith was a brat who mouthed off at just the wrong moments, wound up brawling with the other kids, earned himself a kick and a grumbling stomach all the way back to his niche. Up to about age ten, Keith lived largely off the watered congee they'd spoon out of the communal pots for kids -- kept an eye out for the split wires and dripping pipes of the Old Town Tunnels, learned how to wake with the first shout and take off at a running start.

At ten, he discovered the Old Town junkyard.

Dumpster diving wasn't good work, but it paid -- there was always a local shop that'd trade a bowl or two for parts. They paid more, Keith learned, if the parts were clean, and better if he fished up more than nuts and bolts and disparate joints, and best if he strung some of the pieces together into an actual proper fit. It wasn't that he'd any gift for the work -- building would never be Keith's niche -- but he was getting too big to live off of scraps alone, and starving was a strong motivator. Keith learned from the few pawnshops and repairmen who'd buy from him; in their care, he grew into a gangling shadow, all chin and folded arms and jutting dark brows, hanging around the garages and stealing looks at the monstrous machines that they'd piece together out of the parts he brought to them. It took a year before they'd let him do more -- let him look at the undercarriage of a ship, replace an oxygen sensor, strip the solenoid valves for cleaning.

Once they'd let him in, of course, it took no time at all to figure out that Keith's interest lay not in enginework, but in what the engine could do. Patient mechanics learned to work around the snarls and angry kicks of a boy led out of a cockpit by the ear for the third time in a week. From there, Keith made his knack clear -- not merely for driving, but for pushing an engine, knowing the exact dimensions of whatever he drove, taking a corner-turn on a dime. The Old Town garagemen were inherently practical -- it wouldn't be bad to have a topflight pilot owe his spot to them. A mechanic called a client, who called a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend -- and after a barrage of tests and a much-begrudged entrance fee (with just a little extra to overlook an ex-rat's missing paperwork), Keith was unofficially enrolled at the city's cargo-runner academy. ("Don't figure you don't owe us that change back when you make your first commission, kid," the shopowner grumbled, and smacked him upside the head in congratulations.)

Keith did pretty well at the academy -- or a little more than well. Technically, cargo-runners would only ever shuttle between moons, if ever they made it off-world -- but the old testing standards had held, and Keith learned every word. Sheer, furious determination tore him through book after practice-book, through equations and lettering and a forest's worth of star-charts. He glutted himself on diagrams of old ships and instruction manuals, memorised every set of controls they pushed between his hands, and landed in his second-last year with only a few major infractions to his record. At seventeen years old, the academy promised him first pick of job placements after he graduated.

But Keith'd been lucky -- the garagemen had paid his fee, and with his scores, the academy had taken the rest on credit. Other runners'd had fewer resources on which to fall back. Discrepancies began to float up over the year: docked ships turned out with broken parts, though they'd never been signed out for practice; fuel dropped and rose in the engines; instructors lectured on breaking the bay locks for joyrides.

A brighter, more cynical eye than Keith's might have made the connection sooner: practice ships, after all, wouldn't be expected to carry the same pilot every time. Customs inspectors could hardly expect to memorise the face of every cargo-runner out on their first tour. Who'd bother worth to check the hull of an academy ship out on a practice jaunt, or to make sure that they came back within the trip estimation that they gave on departure?

In short: someone was loaning the academy's ships out to smugglers.

Born a rat, raised in a crowd of mechanics, Keith never quite learned strategy or subterfuge. On spotting the discrepancies and breakages for his favorite ships, he started to pick fights with the cadets who'd taken to loitering near the bay, and then with the few, well-placed instructors who defended them. In a reckless, desperate bid for proof, he broke into customs' records to collect the papers which proved that someone was sending the ships out without permission -- and was caught. Having their worst troublemaker hauled in by a crew of bored border-patrol officials was the academy's last straw. Keith had no connections, no citizenship papers, no last name -- but then, the academy didn't want too close a look at its own affairs, either. The compromise: six days short of his eighteenth birthday, Keith was booted from the school without one credit to show for years of work.

Call it sheerest luck that someone else was paying attention.

Within the week, a reclamation agent caught up with him. The academy, as it turned out, was the tip of the iceberg; it'd opened up an avenue for smuggling, and someone'd put a warrant out on the name at the very end of the chain. Keith had lacked the authority and the opportunities to chase; the agent lacked the right names, the sense of which ships had been signed out for tours where they shouldn't. It was a rocky, terrible partnership that resulted in a spectacular near-crash just outside the city. But the warrant went through, in the end, and Keith got the recruitment pitch that every Killjoy must've surely had at the start of their career -- with one extra line. Level up enough, the agent said, and he might even be able to afford his own ship.

That was a year ago.

By and large, Keith's backstory won't be released until next year at the earliest, so I'll be brief! What we do know about his background's limited to a patchwork of facts dropped throughout the reboot: on some nebulous future Earth, Keith was orphaned at a young age and recruited to the Galaxy Garrison.* There, he ranks up to fighter pilot class and washes out about a year before the proper start of the series. After his expulsion, Keith wanders for a time. Instinct draws him out to an outcropping in the desert riddled with enough bizarre ancient markings to make any conspiracy theorist's heart sing, and he takes up a shack close to it as he struggles to piece together the story of a giant blue lion.

Fortunately, a giant spaceship crash-lands nearby on cue, saving Keith from having to answer any hard questions about why riddling himself an answer to an anthropological puzzle's more important than living somewhere with decent running water.

The crash leads him to discovery of Takashi Shirogane, one of the crew members lost on the Garrison's mission to Kerberos to pilot error -- and, in short order, to a cave in the desert, which appears to have housed a giant robotic blue lion for millennia.

As it turns out, the Blue Lion begs capital letters: it's one piece of five, designed to form a space weapon to take on Zarkon, an alien warlord from Galra who's expanded his empire to encompass most of the known galaxy over ten thousand years. Its subsequent flight from Earth drags Keith, along with three space cadets and one newly-rescued pilot, back to the Castle of Lions and to Princess Allura, the castle's only survivor after ten thousand years of cryosleep. There, cadets and pilot and princess decide to battle the continued expansion of the Galra empire.

Cue space adventures! . . . which I am skipping in summary because Keith has no real character arc in any of it. He tags along, fights some things, and upsets every member of his team at least once. Their missions culminate in the Galra Empire's capture of Princess Allura, Keith's singlehanded challenge to Zarkon during her rescue, and the whole team getting split up in wormhole transport as they flee. Wikipedia provides a perfectly good rundown of the series; there's also the fan-wikia for another take.

(* The Garrison itself comes out as some hodgepodge of military and scientific interests -- the fan-wikia describes it as "a school where humans come to study space travel", but there's a strong implication that its students are taught actual combat skills (both hand-to-hand and basic weaponry), and 'fighter pilot' isn't really. . . reconciliable with the Garrison's space exploradora missions. On the other hand, let's be frank, nobody with Pidge Gunderson's hair would have ever flown in an actual military setting.)

- a bayard;
- two fanny-packs; (are they still called fanny-packs when they're not on your fanny?)
- a moderately ugly 90s-style red jacket whose collar doesn't roll down;
- a really ugly knife;
- relatively normal-looking gloves.