Chapter Text
Keith doesn’t have any memories of his mother. She and his father were not soulmates. In fact, Keith wasn’t even sure his father had had a soulmate. He wasn’t sure who could have put up with that disaster for any longer than they’d had to. And Keith should know. Keith had to put up with that absolute fucking disaster for way too long.
Whenever somebody asked him about his father, Keith always just flashed back to a simpler time: on a farm, in Texas, his father trying to teach him to shoot a rifle. He wasn’t good at it, but Little Keith was a scrappy street fighter and his father wanted him to know that a gun was a good weapon to bring to a knife fight.
Keith, who had been ten at the time, had still not hit a single can after two hours of aiming and firing and clearing his ears of the massive BANG. “I don’t want to do this,” he snapped, throwing the gun on the ground.
“You’ll get it,” his father said, although his voice sounded like someone was sawing on his vocal chords. “You’ll get it. Just - pick up - pick - ” Keith had started walking back to the house. “Keith, get back here. Keith! Pick up the fucking gun and - ”
“I’m fine without a fucking gun, Dad,” Keith snapped. “I don’t gotta have a gun.”
His father sighed and reached out to Keith, grabbing his shoulder and turning him around. “Listen, son,” he said. “My old man had this saying, and it went like so: You’ve just gotta grab life by the tits and give it a great big milking.”
Keith was abjectly horrified.
“It means you’ve just gotta pick up that gun and get to shooting,” his father said. “You’ll get in a lucky shot at some point, even if you never make another shot for the rest of your life.”
So yeah, Keith’s father sucked massive balls. But that lesson - just pick up the gun, shoot it, and at some point, you’re bound to get in a lucky shot - has stuck with him for his entire life. It’s just - Lance -
Lance is the opposite of a lucky shot. Well, Keith supposes, he’s (fuck this) one-in-a-million , his soulmate, the team’s incredible sharpshooter, but Lance is just so The Opposite Of Keith and his stupid attack-whatever-moves strategy. Lance strategizes . He picks up his gun and thinks, and breathes, and aims, and every shot is a lucky shot. Every shot hits a can.
But like it or not, Keith is consciously adapting a strategy to fix this, and that strategy is to pick up the gun, shoot it, and hope that he gets in a lucky shot.
He stops outside Lance’s door first, hoping to find Lance in his room, but it’s all dark, and Lance isn’t in his bed, so Keith walks out, the doors hissing closed behind him.
He checks the kitchen, but Lance isn’t there. His soulmark is pounding. It’s literally glowing through his t-shirt. It knows something’s up.
“Calm the fuck down,” Keith says to it. “You know what I’m about to do. Fuck off.”
His soulmark does not say a single word back.
“Useless shit,” Keith grumbles, and sets off for the observation room.
And of course Lance is there, sitting in his PJs on the massive windowsill, staring into the stars slowly passing by. His hair is a mess between curly and straight, and part of a face mask is caked on the side of his face, near his hairline. Keith’s heart is beating out of his chest, and suddenly, Lance looks up, like he knows Keith’s there.
“Hey, man,” Lance says quietly, trying to unobtrusively run his fingers through his hair and straighten it out. “What’s up?”
Keith nods to the windowsill. “Can I - can I sit?”
“‘Course,” Lance says, pulling his knees closer to him. “What brings you to my humble abode?” He makes a sweeping gesture at the stars and smiles at Keith. Keith just feels himself smiling back. It’s like he can’t not .
Keith folds himself in front of Lance, with his knees tucked up under him, and unfolds a slightly crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “I wanted to give you this.”
Lance takes it from him, frowning slightly. When he realizes what it is, his cheeks dust pink. “Is this… one of my post-it notes to you?”
Keith blushes. The note that Lance wrote says, There’s no gravity in space, but I’m still falling for you. “Uh - I - there’s - look on the back.”
Lance turns it around, and reads it, and then reads it again. And then he looks at Keith, and looks down at the note, and reads it again, and then looks at Keith.
“Wha - Ke - you - is this - a - did y - ” he says, and stares at the note again. Keith can’t help himself, and he laughs, covering his hand with his mouth.
Nope, that’s the wrong way around. Whatever. Lance is looking at him like Keith’s the stars outside. That’s what matters. And now he’s scrambling forward, the note on the floor, and cradling Keith’s face in his hands. Keith may or may not lean into it a little bit. “You--!!!” he says, and his eyes gleam like the crystals of the Balmera. “Are you serious? Do you mean it?”
And Keith can feel his face heating up underneath Lance’s smooth palms, but he’s smiling bigger than he’s ever smiled in his life, and he nods, and Lance just melts, settling down in front of him. Keith’s hands pick their way to his lower back, and he interlocks his fingers there. Lance strokes a thumb across Keith’s cheekbone.
“I really, really want to kiss you,” he says, and Keith is helpless .
“It was just a little-!” he tries, but Lance lunges forward and kisses the tip of his nose.
“Please,” he says. “You know pick-up lines are all I have in this life. Just -- ”
Keith rests his forehead against Lance’s. It cuts him off mid-sentence and the air between them braids like fire. “Well, now you have me, too.”
Lance makes a little choked-up sound, and presses his lips to Keith’s.
It’s so soft, and so gentle, and Keith feels like starlight and the blue of luminescent sea creatures and the glow of embers in a fireplace at one in the morning. Lance feels like light against Keith’s skin and his lips, and Keith smiles into the kiss and then Lance is smiling, and when they part, it doesn’t feel like they’ve gotten farther apart at all.
“Wow,” Lance says. His eyes gleam and Keith just instinctively moves toward him again, laying a tiny kiss onto the corner of his mouth.
“Lance,” he says, Lance sighs and wraps his arms fully around Keith, pulling him close, and Keith goes willingly.
“Keith,” Lance murmurs, and he doesn’t need to say anything else.
Keith glances down at the post-it note on the floor. From here, he can barely read what it says, but he already knows. He mulled over those words a thousand times before writing them down.
They’ve got a long way ahead of them. But Keith trusts Lance. And before he jumps in for his lucky shot, he knows Lance will be there to steady his hands.
//
hey, lance, are you a knife, because I want to keep you close to me and not give you up