Work Text:
Make You Banana Pancakes (pretend like it's the weekend)
One
The first time Lance tries to make a pancake he is seven years old and it’s Mother’s Day. Val is a big meanie who didn’t want to get up early to make their parents breakfast in bed and Jamie threw things at his head when he tried to wake her up to help him. Carly is just barely five and useless but he lets her mix stuff anyway because he’s a good big brother like that.
This cooking thing is hard, though. He doesn’t remember there being so many steps when Mom made breakfast. Admittedly, most of what he remembers about the Mom-makes-breakfast process is getting dragged downstairs by Val and wrestling with Jamie over prime cartoon-watching real estate in the living room and watching Animanics re-runs in a pile on the living room floor until Mom appears in the door, her arms full of food and calls them into the kitchen. So yeah, he could have missed some important steps or two.
Or three.
Or a lot.
Step one, getting the ingrediants should have been easy. But the Bisquick mix is on the very tippy-toppy shelf of the pantry and even with Carly sitting on his shoulders they’re too short to reach. So he climbs up the shelves and tosses it down to her. She doesn’t catch it. The box hits the floor with a powdery thud and he winces. Well. Ok, Mama can clean the mess up when she sweeps later.
The milk jug, while not being so hard to get, is heavier than he expected and somehow the cap gets unscrewed when he’s pulling it out of the fridge and milk sloshes everywhere, including onto Carly, who, while big-eyed and pouting about the whole affair, is really a remarkably good sport.
The less said about the eggs, the better. There were several casualties.
Lance can read, he can, but he had a hard time focusing in school sometimes and sometimes words don’t make quite the right shapes when he looks at them the first time, so he has to go over the recipe a few times just to make sure he’s got it exactly perfectly right. He’s glad it looks pretty simple. Two cups Bisquick mix, two eggs, one cup milk. Easy peasy.
It is not easy or peasy. Whatever peasy means. Lance doesn’t know. But he’s pretty sure whatever it is, it’s not what happens next.
In short, Lance and Carly make a mess. It was mostly ok until the eggs. The Bisquick was more powdery than he expected and poofed out everywhere when he tried to scoop it out of the box and there was definitely some on the counter but he’s pretty sure it was still okay anyway. The milk is still heavy and slosh-y and there are spills but not big ones. Not really. But Carly drops the first egg he gives her and when Lance takes over he’s too enthusiastic about cracking it and the egg goes ‘splat’ in a way no egg should. It takes a few tries before they have some eggs worthy of The Mixture.
Mixture mixed by Carly, Lance hops onto a stool in front of the stove and pours it into the pan, which doesn’t seem to like the new addition. It crackles irritably and Lance tells it to shush because his moms are sleeping and he doesn’t want the pan to wake them up. He then waits just like the box told him to, until he can flip the pancake.
It soon turns out pancake-flipping is way harder to do than movies made it seem. Lance figures a spatula might be a good idea for the next one. He also wonders why the pancakes seem to be so stuck on the pan. The movies always made it seem like they slid around a bit, or at least flipped when they were supposed to. Weird.
The first pancake is a dud in the sense that it’s half stuck on the pan - half splashed everywhere. Lance decides to try again. Maybe if he waits a bit to flip them, they’ll solidify a bit.
And this is how his Mom and Mama are woken up on Mother’s Day to the fire alarm screaming in the kitchen, only to find two of their children covered in egg yolk, milk and a liberal dusting of Bisquick pancake powder. Carly starts sobbing the minute the fire alarm starts, but Lance beams at them, standing tall and proud of his stool, in front of the stove and smoking pan.
“Happy Mother’s Day! We made breakfast!”
And so began Lance’s long and sad history with breakfast food.
…
Two
Lance doesn’t know why his Grandma has to be here. He is nine years old and he has very definite opinions on where Grandmas belong and it is not in the kitchen, ruining Pancake Sunday.
Now, ‘ruin’ is a strong term, but Lance feels perfectly justified using it because that’s exactly what Alice McClain is doing right now and it is Wrong. He narrows his eyes to show that he’s on to her shenanigans but her back to him so she doesn’t really get the full impact of his look.
She’s lecturing Mom on healthy eating and something called the Art of Zen Living which sounds absolutely terrible to Lance’s nine-year-old ears.
“Pick something up, anything, anything at all, Meggie, and if it doesn’t give you joy in ten seconds, toss it!”
“Try it on one of the kids!” Mama yells from the living room and Mom huffs.
“I am not Zen-Living our children, Esperanza!”
“For example, Meggie,” Grandma is still lecturing. Grandma is also distracting Mom from making pancakes. This is unacceptable. Lance sips his juice mutinously. Mom hasn’t even begun the pancake-making process yet. Lance is on his second cup of juice. Grandma is still lecturing, Mama is still laid up in the living room.
Mama is indirectly the reason Mom is being lectured on the merits of Zen Living right now. Mama tore some kind of tendon in her knee – Lance isn’t 100% sure which one or what a tendon even is but he nodded when Mom explained it anyway – and she’s been recovering from surgery the past few days. Grandma is here to ‘help around the house’ while Mama ‘recuperates’ but in Lance’s opinion she doesn’t seem to help much, more just rearranges stuff in weird ways so he can’t find anything. She put his toothbrush in a drawer. Because it wasn’t tidy sitting out on the counter. Lance couldn’t find it so he just didn’t brush his teeth for two days. When Mom found out she was mad, but Lance still thinks she should have been way madder at Grandma than him. It was her fault he couldn’t find his toothbrush, after all.
Anyway. Pancakes. Lance doesn’t have any. Because Grandma won’t stop talking. And she’s even tried to convince Mom to not make any. Because pancakes ‘aren’t healthy’. Lance doesn’t think they need to be ‘healthy’. Grandma says her weird green smoothies are healthy but Lance thinks they look like evil potions. The kind that witches try to trick you into drinking but turn you into frogs instead of helping you finish your quest.
Carly’s stomach grumbles beside him and Lance is Decided. If Mom won’t make pancakes, Lance will. He is willing to make that sacrifice.
Chugging the last of his juice and thumping the cup on the table decisively like a hero in an old movie, he hops out of his chair and makes for the cupboard.
He makes less of a mess this time. Only one egg is preemptively crushed and no milk is spilled. But the batter is way too thick and the first pancake is burnt on both sides but uncooked in the middle. Luckily his Mom intervenes before he can try again, although Lance is pretty sure he could have gotten it right the second time.
“Lance! What were you thinking?”
“I looked at the pancakes on the Bisquick box for ten seconds and they gave me joy,” Lance says with his most disarming smile. For once it works. His mom laughs until tears form at the corners of her eyes.
He’s still stuck cleaning the kitchen once she’s recovered but it seems worth it. Maybe he should try this Zen Living thing.
…
Three
“Hunk. I want pancakes.”
It’s three in the morning. Lance is nineteen, not nine, but he still has yet to make a decent pancake.
“Lance, it’s three am. Where are you going to get pancakes?”
“I dunno.”
Silence unbroken but for the swish of textbook pages.
“Hunk, where do I go to get pancakes at 3am on a Wednesday?”
“Not this dorm room,” his roommate says without missing a beat.
“Hunk.”
“Lance I don’t have ingrediants for pancakes. Or a kitchen.”
“I bet you can make pancakes in a microwave.”
“You definitely can’t.”
“And there’s a convenience store a block away…Huuuunk. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That I need to block your access to WikiHow?”
“Nope~” Lance practically sings as he bounces off his bed, studying forgotten, phone in hand. “Pidge is down. Allura offered to drive us to an all-night grocery store. Miiiicrowave paaaaancakes, Miiiiiiiiicrowave paaaaaaaaaaancakes.”
Hunk sighs, “Why is Allura awake at three am?”
Lance shrugs, “She’s in med school. Pretty sure she never sleeps.”
Hunk’s face is one of tragic resignation. “I found a recipe for how to make a pancake in a mug.”
“In the microwave?” Lance asks with a hopeful eyebrow wiggle.
“Yes. God help us all.”
Lance whoops emphatically and bounds downstairs, a weary Hunk trudging at his heels.
“Why is Allura offering to drive us but not volunteering her kitchen? She lives in an apartment,” Hunk points out.
Lance tips his head to the side, considering, “I think she just wants to know if microwave pancakes work.”
For the record, microwave pancakes may work, but the burnt-on pancake mix in the dorm microwave is probably still there years after Lance and company graduate.
…
Four
Lance is so screwed. And not in the fun way. A smile flickers across his face at the thought of Last Night but he shoos those thoughts away. No, now is not the time to think about incredibly hot sex with his incredibly hot boyfriend. Lance is twenty-five, has still not figured out how to make basic breakfast food staples, just spent the night with his afore-mentioned incredibly incredible boyfriend, woke up first and in a rush of social anxiety, snuck out of bed to dither in the kitchen about whether or not it’s proper hookup etiquette to make your significant other breakfast when you are actually in your significant other’s home.
Frankly, Lance would have been better off just going back to sleep cuddled against Keith’s chest like he’d originally planned.
But Lance has a bad habit of making things unnecessarily complicated from himself because Lance has a Problem.
And Lance’s main problem at the moment is the mess he’s made out of Keith’s normally pristine kitchen. Lance is pretty sure Keith doesn’t cook much. The bulk of the food in his kitchen can be eaten raw or with very minimal preparation. But his kitchen is always spotless because for such a mess of a human being, Keith is weirdly tidy. Or maybe he’s so minimalist that he just doesn’t have enough stuff to have clutter. Lance is pretty sure he only spotted one set of utensils and dishware in the cabinets. Which is kind of sad, really.
Either way, Keith’s kitchen now looks like a breakfast bomb went off in it and not in a good way. Not since he was an actual child has Lance made such a mess out of pancakes, bacon and eggs. He’s considering calling Hunk and begging for help. Or maybe attemping microwave mug pancakes again. But wait, Keith only has one microwave-safe mug. Lance will have to grab some from his place. But what if Keith wakes up and sees the mess before Lance gets back? What if Keith breaks up with him over this? While this is not the biggest mess Lance has made in the course of a relationship, it’s definitely one of the worst-timed. This is a turning point for them as a unit. This had to be special. And not special in the ‘oh god, remember when…’ kind of way.
Lance is stuck to the floor. That is the only explanation for why he hasn’t moved for the last minute or so. He continues to not-move even when he hears feet on the stairs and sees a hair head of deliciously touseled dark hair wander into the kitchen on his periphery. Only now instead of a symptom of overwhelming panic Lance’s stillness is just a terrible playing-possum deer-in-the-headlights defense mechanism. This is what prey creatures do when they’re hoping an airborne preadator doesn’t see them and feast on their flesh. Keith is the eagle-hawk-falcon-owl-really-pissed-off-raven in this scenario and Lance is the mouse.
Except. Keith doesn’t seem to register the disaster zone his kitchen has turned into? He just walks in, makes for the coffee pot, completely silent, pours himself a cup of coffee, takes a sip, makes a face when it’s too hot, then takes another sip to tell it who’s boss. Lance is confused. Lance is wondering/hoping/fearing that Keith somehow didn’t notice him. Is Lance that forgettable? Is Keith selectively blind until his coffee kicks in? WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW???? Lance needs to know, dammit!
But then Keith, taking another long drag of coffee, walks over to where Lance stands, still frozen. And then Keith does the impossible. Or at least very improbable. He reaches an arm around Lance’s waist and tucks himself against his side. “Found you,” he mumbles into his coffee, fluffed-up hair brushing Lance’s cheekbone.
Lance’s heart may implode. “Uh. Morning, honey. I made breakfast?”
Keith huffs a sound that might be a laugh. In inscrutable Keith-Speak. “No, you didn’t.”
“Hey, I tried.”
“Hmph. Sit down. Have coffee. I’ll make something.”
So clearly Keith doesn’t speak in sentences longer than three words in the morning. Lance sits down anyway. He reaches for Keith’s coffee and whines when Keith flicks him between the eyes and pulls his coffee out of reach. “Get your own.”
Lance later finds out that soup and breakfast food are basically the only thing Keith can cook that doesn’t involve an open flame and a campfire-like thing and salvaging the breakfast-pocalypse wasn’t really all that impressive. But in that moment there is nothing sweeter than Keith raising a skeptical eyebrow at Lance’s food catastrophe and saying, tone dry, coffee mug still practically glued to his hand, “You’re lucky you’re pretty,” as he scrapes burnt-on batter off of the erstwhile pancake pan.
He tastes like coffee and peppermint toothpaste when Lance leans over to kiss him.
…
Five
“Lance. What is this?”
“Protein pancakes!”
Keith stares at him like he’s lost his damn mind. And then follows that very evocative look up with an emphatic “Have you lost your damn mind?”
Lance is twenty-seven and has the Best Idea Ever. “You remember all that protein powder you and Shiro got free samples of from the gym?”
“Yes.” Keith is staring at him like he can somehow x-ray Lance’s brain with his eyes and learn all his secrets.
“So I was on the internet – ”
“Didn’t Pidge block you from the wifi?”
“Hunk gave me their password again.”
Keith doesn’t verbally sigh but his eyes make the gesture for him. “Okay.”
“And I found a recipe online for how to make pancakes out of protein powder and rolled oats!”
Keith pokes Lance’s creation with a very judgmental finger. “Why are they pink?” he asks plaintively, “Food shouldn’t be that color.”
“Plenty of food is pink!”
“Pinkish-greyish-brown. Food should not be pinkish-greyish-brown.”
Lance huffs, “Come on, be adventurous, babe!”
Keith gives him a look that would be more at home on the face of a rescue shelter puppy. “Do I have to?”
“Hey, I thought you were Mr. Bold and Impulsive!”
Keith’s eyes cut to the, admittedly greyish-pinkish ‘pancakes’ like he’s considering a very different impulsive decision. Something more along the lines of throwing them at Lance’s face.
“Please?” Two can play at the puppy-eyes game, buddy.
Several expressions warp across Keith’s face.
“Come on, babe, for me?” Lance twists the knife.
Keith grimaces and Lance can see the moment he caves in his shoulders. He breaks a piece off of the ‘pancake’. There are chunks of rolled-oat poking out from the body of the ‘cake’ where he ripped off the chunk. He sticks it in his mouth, chews, swallows and sighs.
“It’s not…the worst thing I’ve eaten.”
“Yay! Bare minimum achieved!” Lance cheers and presses a kiss against Keith’s cheek as a reward for his good behavior.
Keith rolls his eyes and catches the back of Lance’s neck, reeling him in for a real kiss. When they break apart, noses still almost touching Keith says, deathly serious, “But please don’t make fake pancakes out of crappy strawberry protein powder regularly. Or again. Ever again.”
Lance knock their foreheads together lightly, “Spoilsport.”
Keith gives him a grave look, “Realist.” He pauses, brows pulling together thoughtfully, “Hey, wanna invite Shiro and Allura over for dinner and see how many Shiro forces himself to eat in the name of good manners?”
“I like the way you think, babe.”
…
One
Lance figures out Keith’s secret a few months after the Breakfast Incident. Keith’s making breakfast food, again, because he’s an addict and needs to seek professional help and a cookbook. Lance is cutting up fruit and arranging the pieces in aesthetically pleasing ways because Keith has banned him from the stove. Lance would like to point out that he’s not that bad at cooking. Pancakes are just his kryptonite. His tragic supervillian backstory. His greatest failure. His…whatever maudlin cliché you can come up with.
Behind him he hears a soft huff-hiss. Almost like…no, that’s impossible. Lance checks in anyway.
“You ok, babe?”
“Yes,” Keith says a little too quickly.
Silence, then another abbreviated huff-hiss.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Lance abandons the fruit to come peer over Keith’s shoulder as his boyfriend flips another pancake, huff-hissing in pain as the grease (grease? Lance may be a Pancake Failure but he’s pretty sure grease burns aren’t par for the course here) flicks out of the pan to bite at his forearms.
“Are you sure?” Lance asks from his new spot right next to Keith and his boyfriend growls and tenses.
“What are you doing? You could burn yourself.”
“Well, you keep burning yourself and lying about it so I’m here to investigate!”
Keith makes an unintelligible noise under his breath, “I’m fine. Really.”
He removes the pancake from the pan and places it on a waiting plate and then…adds vegetable oil to the pan? In large quantities? Keith. No.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lance yelps, “No wonder you keep burning yourself! That is way too much oil, Keith, even I know that!”
Keith rolls his eyes and pours a new blob of batter into the over-greased skillet, dodging the drops of oil this spits up. “I didn’t have enough butter. And I’m out of cooking spray.”
“So the logical choice was vegetable oil?”
Keith shrugs, “If you put a full layer in the bottom of the pan it basically turns into a fryer.”
Lance blinks once, twice, three times. Then it hits him and he starts laughing hysterically. “You. You are just as much of a kitchen disaster as I am!”
Keith furrows his brows and tips his head at him. “Yeah? We know this.”
“No, no,” Lance is still laughing, “But we always had this between us – your inexplicable ability to make amazing breakfast food – my inability to make a basic pancake.”
“I wasn’t aware this was preying on your mind,” Keith says dryly, but his lips are quirked up like he maybe thinks Lance’s spazzing is cute.
“But now I know, you’re just like me!”
“Um. No. I never set the fire alarm off in the kitchen.”
“Yeah, right, you told me you tried smoking for like two weeks before you set the fire alarm in your apartment off and Shiro caught you and scared you out of it.”
Keith blinks like he’s surprised Lance remembered this piece of information at all, “I told you that story?”
“Yep,” Lance pops the ‘p’, “And now we have more in common than mutual histories with the kitchen fire alarm.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We are both bold culinary improvisors whose exciting choices don’t always pan out perfectly but whose resolve never wavers nonetheless!”
Keith doesn’t seem to know hows to respond to this and as he’s struggling to find the words to encompass how he feels about Lance’s statement – including that awful ‘pan’ pun – the pancake currently in the pan begins to burn and the kitchen fire alarm starts to wail.
Lance gesutres to the heavens with a bright smile on his face. “See?”
Keith just stares at him for a long moment as he disposes of the charred remains of the pancake and turns off the stove. Finally, culinary accessories disposed of, he returns to Lance, taking his head between his palms, tilting it downward to press a kiss to Lance’s forehead. “You…are something else.”
Lance is willing to take it. “Love you too. Welcome to the pancake-ruiner club. Current membership – two.”
“Please don’t start calling our relationship Pancake Ruiners Anonymous.”
“Too late.”
They eat the fruit Lance so generously sliced and arranged for breakfast instead. The fruit is fresh and sweet and juice gets everywhere. They’re a mess, just like the kitchen. Lance has definitely smeared a good bit of nectarine juice on Keith’s face, Keith throwing bits of mango peel at him in retaliation. It’s – Lance giggles internally at the pun as he reaches across the couch to poke Keith’s thigh with his foot, Keith reaching out to irritably capture Lance’s foot with his free hand even as Lance dances it out of the way – really very sweet.