Chapter Text
The Exile has requested a spell.
The Exile?
Yes. He has requested to be given legs and smooth skin.
He wishes to become human.
Yes. How shall we proceed?
Give him what he desires. Give him their language and knowledge of their modes of transport.
But, Leader-
Do not question me, Witch.
It is not of your character to be so resilient in matters concerning him.
Are you calling me soft?
I am calling you merciful.
I am not. Give it to him, to be taken away.
How? With a limit? Do you wish for him to go learn the ways of the Weird and come back to cause uprising?
Perhaps, with a deadline. Although we do not want him back.
What are you saying, Leader?
Take his memories of our world. Make him- fully human. And then, when he has accustomed himself to their ways, bring him back.
He will not remember anything before being turned into a human. He will, most likely, die.
We shall be counting on that.
Lance has a problem.
He refuses to talk about it in depth, of course (but what else is new?), but in case anyone is interested, these are the current happenings of his life, in order: 1. a merperson tried to eat him 2. he tried avoiding his problems 3.everything came to bite him in the ass, and 4. he proceeded to try and teach English to said merperson.
Because, you know, that’s just how he rolls.
So far, his summer vacations are much more eventful than he could have ever imagined (or wished for). He can only really hope it doesn’t get any worse, and as the days go by and he doesn’t return to the ocean (or even the shore, and it may be time to admit that he may be a teeny tiny bit scared of what or who he may encounter), he can actually start believing the bullshit he’s been feeding himself since two weeks ago, when he was ready for a normal summer and destiny decide to fuck with him- you know, as it does, apparently, and it may be the gods trying to play some kind of shitty prank on him or he just has really, really bad luck. Either way, he doesn’t like it much. Or at all.
He muses on his way downstairs, about silly Gods and the impossibility of a romance between his mental image of Life and Death, down a plethora of steps that make his toes hurt a little- their house is big, and Lance would be surprised were they talking about anyone else but Shiro and his loaded family.
(No, seriously. There’s a private beach. And a Jacuzzi ).
He smells fish and cinnamon as he approaches the ground floor, and it’s something quite odd to smell at eight in the morning, but he’s had worse. He yawns on the last step, and walks into the living room in all his half-assed glory with a witty greeting ready at the tip of his tongue… and then.
Oh boy.
Now that he thinks about it, he really shouldn’t have spoken too soon. If there’s anything that’s been taught to him over the course of his twenty-two years of life, is that early celebration is the worst curse one can lie upon themselves; Never mind that he never ever would speak about his crazy hallucinations of pretty boys with slimy tails with anyone, of course, but he kind of wants to smack himself and the entire universe when he sees his dreams laid out on the couch: wet, confused, and, by the looks of it, very much naked.
“Um?” he says intelligently, his brain wiped clean and a heavy rock of déjà-vu settling in his stomach when Keith turns towards his voice and screams a little.
“ What ?” he tries again, and there it is once more- Keith keeps staring at him, his eyes not quite as yellow as they were when they first met, his skin and throat smooth and milky.
And he has legs.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” he asks, throat dry and staring at Keith’s toes as if they were going to grow into twenty tiny little slimey and disgusting tails.
“You know this guy?” Hunk asks him, and when Lance finally snaps (partially) out of his state of utter shock and general ?!??!- ness, he notices all his friends are there- Pidge’s on the corner mumbling over their computer, and Shiro’s staring at him and Keith on intervals, and Allura and Coran are bent over Keith with scary-looking medical instruments at hand; everyone turns towards him when Hunk speaks, and the only thought Lance has then and there is I went crazy .
“W-what? No! I just meant- he’s naked!”
Lance had a plan. Honest.
“Oh,” Hunk says, and there’s some kind of exchange between all of them but Lance that has him wondering how long they’ve all been here. “Pidge and I found him by the shore a few hours ago. We were testing out this new drone-y thing that’s supposed to glide over water and sand alike in order to-”
“Hunk,” Lance says. “To the point?”
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, we were retrieving our rover and we found it right beside this guy, who was like, completely unconscious? I had to give him mouth-to-mouth, it was gross- no offense, man-” he turns towards Keith, who raises his eyebrows but says nothing- “But you taste like fish. Anyway, he coughed up a lotta water and I think seaweed, but then he fall back asleep so we brought him here and called Allura,” Hunk points behind him, and Allura waves. “And now we’re here.”
Lance nods along. “Thanks, man,” he says, with a small frown. “He okay now?”
“He will be,” Allura answers him, this time, and Coran nods beside her. “He has slight hypothermia and memory loss, but otherwise he’ll live. I still think we should get him to a hospital, though.”
Lance frowns at that and turns towards Shiro, now, who looks guilty and in turn looks at Pidge. “Me too,” he says with a raised eyebrow.
“We can’t,” Pidge interrupts. “We don’t know who he is. No IDs, no internet presence, no birth certificate. It’s like he doesn’t even exist,” they continue, not looking up from the screen for a millisecond.
“So he’s one of those internet-free weirdoes, big deal. We should dump him in the police station and be over it!” Lance says, and then he accidentally meets Keith’s eyes, which look disappointed, betrayed, and slightly confused.
“Don’t talk like I’m not here,” he says, his voice rough and wet, his vowels curved and his k s and h s harsh, like if he wasn’t used to speaking them. “Please.”
They all turn towards him, apologetic.
“You speak?”
Lance feels blood rushing into his face at the completely blank stare he gets in return.
“Dude,” Hunk says, and Pidge shakes their head, a snicker escaping them at the expense of Lance’s idiocy.
“This is Keith!” Shiro says, his voice too high, like if he were trying to break the awkward moment that is the entirety of Lance’s existence. “Keith, this is Lance.”
“I know,” Keith says, voice still monotone, still weird, still everything.
Lance shakes his head. “It’s too early for this,” he decides, and doesn’t quite look at Keith when he says, “Dude, you’re confused. Just go home. I’m going back to bed.” And without any more preamble but a lazy salute, he turns around and fucks right off, up the stairs, and into the room he shares with Hunk.
What the fuck.
His thoughts are an orchestra of the same sentence, with variety- fuckity hell, dammed fucking fuck, what the flying shitty fucks?- and he can’t help but have his theory of Keith being no more than a crazy illusion caused by dehydration a little closer to validation.
And yet, there’s still something fishy about all this.
How could have he made up Keith’s face, for one. Of course, minus all the ugly scales and pale eyes he looks so much better, but the Keith from his dreams (???) is still very much the Keith currently not dying on their couch. There’s also the issue of convenient memory loss, and that creepy-ass I know that sounds less like a badly-executed Star Wars reference and more like an incredibly mind-fucking trip.
Oh hey. Maybe he was on drugs.
But no- he may be cool and all, but he’s sure he wasn’t high that night, or the other day. He knows what he saw.
It all makes his head hurt a lot. Or maybe that’s the pungent smell of fish left out for too long in the sun.
It reminds him of his grandmother, somehow, and how the poor woman couldn’t cook to save her life. He remembers that one time she’d wanted to cook some kind of fish and thought that leaving it out to dry on the sun was the best course of action, and how the house had smelt like rotten shit for days on end, afterward.
He shudders at the thought.
He sighs, then, and feels like a complete dickhead, for some reason; he takes a look outside, at the odd, fluffy clouds and periodic water, and suddenly is hit on the dick by a hard wave on nostalgia.
And he didn’t even live by the coast.
He shakes his head. No time for shitty thoughts, he decides, and then goes to put on his swim trunks because if Keith is here (And he’s real, Lance saw his weird-ass hair and hands from the corner of his eye as he rushed past on his way out of the house) then there’s nothing to eat him out there in the water.
Or at least nearby. Obviously there is some monster ready to have him as its next snack, deeper in the mysterious void that is the ocean, but he already knew that. It’s hard having Shiro as a roommate and not hearing about this week’s Creature From Hell (aka the bottom of the sea floor, apparently).
He would, personally, find it an honour if one of those blobfish things were to eat him (never mind that they would not be able to take him whole or at all).
So yeah. He is fine. He’s not going to be eaten alive anytime soon, and he would like to thank God or whoever is out there for that.
Or, at least, he hopes so. He’s not sure if he should, but he does.