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“Keith, buddy?”
“What?” Keith blinks down at the figure in the yard below his perch. His eyes are hazy; whoever it is (the voice is Hunk’s, presumably the body matches) is reduced to a dark blob against the green grass.
“Why are you on the roof?”
“I have a day off.”
“Okay, dude, that’s nice but it doesn’t explain pretty much anything.”
“Lance isn’t home.”
“Also true, good to know you’re aware of these things.”
“I have the day off and Lance isn’t home and Shiro is at work.”
“Okay, so that last one is new…”
“I didn’t know what to do so I figured I’d read on the roof until I thought of something.” Keith’s eyes are clearing up; he can pick out Hunk’s shape and the general color sceme of his clothing against the green grass now.
“…I have a lot of questions about your decision-making process that I think I’m better off not getting the answers to.”
Keith nods, conceding the point, “Probably for the best.”
“So…do you want to do something?”
Keith tips his head to the side, “I’m not a dog. I don’t need to be walked and exercised regularly.”
“I know that, dude, but I have the day off and Pidge is off at some expo and Lance isn’t here so…”
“So you thought you’d ask the weird guy on the roof of your house?” Keith’s tone is dry and he realizes belatedly that it might have come across as a little too bitingly sarcastic. “I’m trying to be funny. Not mean. If that wasn’t clear. Sometimes I’m an asshole.”
Hunk actually laughs, “You’re funny, dude, don’t worry. But a little mean too. It’s all good.”
“That makes no sense,” Keith says flatly (although it actually does, kind of).
“Anyway, I figured you’d be a little lonely without Lance around and thought I’d see if you wanted to hang out.”
Keith hums absently, “Do you ever think about the fact that hundreds of years from now the books that survive from our era will need to have footnotes for readers to understand colloquialisms like ‘hang out’?”
“Not really, but I’m definitely going to be thinking of that off and on for the rest of the day.”
“Hmm,” Keith hums, “I guess I’ll go with you. It’s too bright to read now anyway.”
“How long have you been on the roof?”
“Too long.”
“You have weird hobbies, buddy.”
…
“I was not expecting pottery to feature in my day,” Keith says flatly.
Hunk shrugs, “I told Shay I’d come by her studio, but since she’s busy I figured I’d work on this mug I’ve been trying to get right for a few weeks. You don’t have to paint anything if you don’t want.”
“You’ve spent weeks on the same mug?”
Hunk ducks his head; “It’s more like I’ve spent weeks hanging around Shay’s studio…”
Keith blinks, “Shit. Lance was right. You can’t tell him, he’ll never let us live it down.”
“Us?”
“I’m complicit in this emotional trainwreck. He’s been trying to set you up with Shay for like a year.”
Hunk chuckles, “Well, it’s probably for the best he didn’t. We kind of already know each other – Shay and I, I mean. Although Lance and I already know each other too.”
Keith whistles between his teeth, “He’s going to flip out.”
“That’s another phrase there’ll be footnotes for in the future, isn’t it?”
“Yeah…”
They sit in contemplative silence for a moment before snapping out of it.
“Okay, how do I paint pottery, Hunk?”
“You really want to try?”
Keith narrows his eyes, “Challenge accepted.”
“That wasn’t an…okay, here, you pick a piece over here…and then colors…”
…
Keith did not anticipate mug-painting to be this difficult. Admittedly, he’d never attempted mug-painting before, but all things considered, he’d figured it would be fairly easy. You take a mug and slap some paint on it in a vaguely aesthetically pleasing way. Not too terrible, right.
Wrong.
Keith doesn’t know how, but he’s pretty sure his attempt at a mug looks like rainbow-colored vomit.
Hunk is more generous. “It’s…inventive?”
Keith glares at it. “I’m gonna add more colors.”
“Um. Are you sure that’s…wise?”
Keith narrows his eyes decisively, “If I make it ugly enough I can call it modern art.”
“I don’t think that’s how modern art works.”
Keith turns his frankly intense gaze on his friend and says, voice completely serious, “This rainbow vomit mug is a piece of my soul now, Hunk. It’s an evocative, expressive interpretation of the human experience.”
Hunk stares at him and for a long moment they’re staring blankly in each other’s general direction as paint drips from brushes momentarily paused in mid-air. Then Keith raises his eyebrows, inviting Hunk in on the joke and he laughs explosively, all the built-up tension of the last – incredibly weird – several seconds bursting outward in an expression of frank, astonished joy. Keith grins like a cat, if cats grinned smug, please grins with their faces instead of through their general demeanor and goes back to his rainbow catastrophe.
“Now Lance can’t make fun of it.” Hunk says, realization dawning.
“A piece of my soul, Hunk,” Keith says, totally deadpan, without looking up from his project. He pauses, momentarily comtemplative and says, “Shiro will probably still make fun of it, but Lance will spend at least a week trying to figure out if I’m serious about the mug being precious to me or not.”
Hunk chuckles, “He’s too focused on being supportive to make fun of my…” he gestures at his mug, which is not looking any worse than it was, but not looking any better, really. Mostly it’s just various shades of yellow. Hunk doesn’t know a whole lot about modern art, but he’d venture to say his would probably qualify in that category if it had any intrinsic meaning beyond ‘hey, I really want to talk to the pretty girl running the paint-your-own-pottery studio but I need an excuse to be there so here we are’.
Keith elbows him and oh, there she is.
Shay is just as lovely as ever walking over to their table (in the back, away from rowdy, paint-splattered children – this is a popular spot for families on the weekends). Her short, dark hair is tucked behind her ears today, showing off her signature heavy gold hoops earrings. Her warm bronze skin is is few shades darker from the sun – she told him last week that she’d been out hiking with her brother a lot since he’s back in town – and her hazel eyes are bright. Her smile is as bright as ever.
“Hey guys, I didn’t expect to see you here today.”
Keith shrugs, “It was this or the roof.”
Hunk elbows him because he’s pretty sure Keith is trying deliberately to be as weird and off-putting as possible. “We’re the only people in the house with the day off so we figured we’d stop by.”
Shay’s smile, if anything, gets brighter, “That’s so nice, I love seeing familiar faces around here.” She glances over her shoulder before leaning in a little and lowering her voice, “And frankly it’s nice to have some more adults in here. It’s birthday party season and we’ve lost a whole shelf already to accidents.”
“Please don’t put money on us not breaking anything,” Keith says, dead serious.
“Keith is not going to break anything,” Hunk speaks over him, “Because Keith is a good friend who is going to focus all his destructive impulses on making that mug as colorful as possible.”
Keith actually snickers at that before dragging his expression back to blank deadpan. “I’m actually trying for quantity of pain over quantity of colors at this point, kind of an impasto thing. Like Van Gogh, but with no artistic merit.”
Shay hums thoughtfully, “I’m sure you can justify it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s all about finding symbolism,” she says completely seriously, “Use it to tell a story. What does it mean to you?” There’s a twinkle in her eye and she shoots them a tiny smile that says she’s not just in on the joke, she’s taken it hostage and won’t be ransoming it any time soon, “For example, this combination of…grey and white could mean anything from an oncoming storm to redemption…”
Hunk spends the next ten minutes trying very, very hard not to laugh.
…
They leave the pottery studio a little more paint-splattered than before, with plans to pick up their fired mugs in a few days. Keith’s is in fact, as hideous as promised. Hunk managed to get the all-yellow thing to work and actually pulled off a pretty decent swirly patterny…thing. It’s not horrible, at the very least.
“What next?” Keith asks and…he actually seems like he wants to know. Hunk and Keith’s friendship is weird. It’s one of those things where they’re almost always in a group and if not a large group than typically a Hunk-Lance-Keith trio where Lance basically acts as a human bridge/filter/interpreter between them. It’s not like they don’t like each other, it’s just they’re used to having Lance as their point of contact. They’re connected through Lance and that’s how it’s always been. Up until today their one-on-one interactions were pretty limited. It’s a little weird to be realizing all over again after three years of friendship that you actually, genuinely like this person.
“Uh,” Hunk thinks rapidly, what are they doing next? His stomach growls. Okay then. He can work with that. “Um. Okay, this is gonna sound super weird, but how do you feel about appetizers?”
Keith raises an eyebrow. “I thought that was a fake word until I was fifteen.”
Hunk blinks, temporarily sidetracked, “How?”
Keith shrugs, “Seemed kind of fake.”
Hunk shakes his head, “Alright. Cool. So. Okay, when me and Lance first came here for college we spent the first semester going from restaurant to restaurant trying different appetizers. We wanted to figure out what was good and the best way to try a bunch of restaurants at once was to get one appetizer at each until we got full.”
“Seems time-consuming.”
“And expensive. We were super broke by the end of the semester.”
Keith nods, he’s catching on, “But now you’re a real adult with a real job. And real money.”
“Exactly.”
…
It was good while it lasted. Five restaurants in, Hunk got into an argument with the chef over how to make molten lava cake (an argument Keith is pretty sure is going to reappear on YouTube in a few hours) and they were kicked out.
Keith’s just happy to have not been the one starting fights and getting kicked out of places for once. He still offers to punch the guy, because he’s a good friend like that, but Hunk tells him no, it’s okay.
Keith walks out with the plate of cake and no one stops him, though, so maybe just keeping it a verbal fight was a good call.
…
Hunk is pretty sure he and Keith are actually friends now. Not that they weren’t before, of course, but they had always been Keith-Lance’s-partner and Hunk-Lance’s-bff. They were connected by varying degrees of Lance. Now it’s more like they’re just…buddies. Or something.
Keith is staring at him with a quizzical expression on his face and Hunk glances over at him. They’re walking back to the house, the afternoon sunlight staining everything gold.
“What?” Hunk asks because subtle never seems to work on Keith.
“Are we friends now?”
Hunk almost laughs at that, but stops himself. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Huh,” Keith tips his head to the side, considering, “That’s new.”
“What’s new?” Hunk isn’t really sure he wants to know what’s new here, Keith is like a Pandora’s box of weird and occasionally depressing anecdotes that just make Hunk feel like he needs to supply this poor kid with free cookies for life and maybe a pie.
Keith shrugs, “I didn’t really have friends before you guys. Just. People I knew. And I always kind of figured you were in it for Lance more than me. Like, I didn’t think you hated me, but, I don’t know. It was nice having someone to hang out with today.” He’s staring at the ground, shoulders a little hunched up and oh man, now Hunk’s sad for him. The free cookies for life offer is a legitimate possibility here.
He settles for a friendly shoulder-bump that almost knocks Keith off the sidewalk. “You’re our friend too, buddy. We don’t just put up with you for Lance. You’re our friend. We like having you around.”
Keith offers a little twitchy smile, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Be glad it’s me, though. Pidge would have punched you for doubting the power of friendship.”
Keith laughs at that. “Pretty sure I can take her.”
“Pretty sure you’re wrong, but that’s okay. You can think that,” Hunk offers generously and Keith actually tips his head back to laugh.
…
Lance is home when they finally get there and basically bursts out the front door of his and Keith’s half of the house like a yappy dog let of its leash. “Where have you guys BEEN?” he demands, launching himself at them like a flailing human missile, “I was so bored.” Hunk guides his friend’s momentum away from him so Lance ends up mostly in Keith’s woefully unprepared arms. They end up just falling over into the grass and wrestle like children or maybe puppies for a little bit (if Lance is the yappy dog, Keith is the confused German shepherd that doesn’t really know what’s going on or why this thing is in its face but is willing to roll with it anyway). It ultimately ends when Keith shoves a protesting Lance off of him with an exasperated “Get your elbow out of my face.”
Lance flops over to lie on the grass on his back, limbs starfished in every direction. While his elbow may no longer be in Keith’s face, one hand is definitely draped over his nose and mouth and a finger looks like it’s jabbing him in the eye. Keith growls in annoyance but doesn’t roll away. Sometimes Hunk looks at his best friend’s healthy, fulfilling adult romantic relationship and feels a little quietly jealous that he doesn’t have something like that yet. But then he actually looks at what these two idiots do with themselves and figures that maybe he dodged a bullet. From what he’s seen, marriage makes you actively insane.
“Sooo, what’d you guys do today?” Lance drawls, now poking an irritable Keith in the cheek while his husband tries to slap the offending hand away while kicking at Lance’s shins as Lance squirms away, all the while refusing to get off the lawn and stand up like the grown-ass men they are.
Yeah, Hunk’s gonna hold off on that stable committed relationship thing if it makes you act like this. And by like this he means like preschoolers.
“Made modern art and got thrown out of a restaurant,” Keith finally pins down the wrist of the hand that’s poking at him and glares at his spouse. Lance sticks his tongue out at him then winks and flips their hands around so now they’re holding hands as aggressively as possible.
“Guys, can you at least stand up like grownups?” Hunk sighs.
Keith and Lance trade looks and what might be several paragraphs of thoughts and opinions through eyebrow twitches alone. Ultimately, Keith rolls to his feet and drags Lance – now deadweight – with him. Lance eventually pops upright but then leans all his body weight on Keith’s back. “Happy now?” Lance asks over Keith’s shoulder.
“Yes,” Hunk says as Keith rolls his eyes and pats Lance’s head semi-fondly.
“Soooo, tell me about your adventures,” Lance demands, bouncing away from Keith, grabbing one of his husband’s hands and dragging him towards the house.
Keith shoots Hunk a look over his shoulder “Has he always been like this?”
“Trust me,” Hunk says fondly, “this is his version of chill.”
…
That night, curled up in their bed, Keith tells Lance “So I think Hunk and I are friends now.”
Lance rolls his eyes, “Duh.”
“No, I mean, actually friends.”
“And I mean, ‘duh’,” Lance says, but his voice is kind, “Of course you’re friends. And no, its not just because of me. Never has been. You know how many assholes, creeps, and losers Hunk has run off for me? Until I met you I had terrible taste in significant others. People took advantage of me all over the place. Luckily, I had a best friend with a great instinct for people. And he’d always help me if I needed it. I was so scared to introduce you to Hunk and Pidge because I really liked you and I thought Hunk’s super senses might pick up on something I didn’t want to know. But they liked you. When I asked him what he thought of you after you’d gone home he said ‘He seems like your kind of crazy’ and when I, mortally offended as I was – ” Keith laughs softly at that, “Demanded to know what that meant he told me ‘your kind of crazy, you know, the good kind, like you’. So that was both offensive and really sweet.”
Keith smiles at him and cuddles closer, the two of them, warm and together will never stop being his favorite thing. “Yeah, but that’s basically us anyway.”
“Crazy?”
“Offensive but sweet.”
“I take offense to that.”
“Okay, sweetheart.”
“Oh my god, begone, you pun-making wretch!”
They laugh their way to sleep.
…
A few days later, when Hunk goes by the studio to pick up his and Keith’s mug monstrosities he sees a string of numbers written on the bottom of his in green Sharpie along with the words ‘Call me – Shay <3’. He puts the number in his phone after he sends a photo of the finished mugs to Keith. It’s gonna be a good day.