Chapter Text
Simply put: Lance McClain had zero tolerance for cold temperatures.
(He had even less tolerance for their enchanted space castle trying to kill them, but one nearly fatal experience with a cyro pod – and an airlock – had left him gun-shy. Understandably so.)
In his defense, he'd never really had to cultivate a thick skin where the cold was concerned - home was all white sands and salt on the breeze as the warm Gulf air ruffled the fronds of the palm trees. He'd only ever really left home to enlist in the Galaxy Garrison, and the rocky high desert surrounding the base was warm during the day – scathingly so during the summer, even. The nights tended to get cool, sure, but that was nothing proper attire couldn't fix.
Space, however, was cold, and the Castle – after taking on heavy fire from yet another do-or-die Galra fleet – had suffered a direct hit to its environmental systems while the particle barrier was redirected to lend more power to the forward weapons array. There was a more technical explanation as to how and why the damage was done, but Lance had a very effective Pidge and Hunk filter that took away only the key words required for comprehension as far as he was concerned. (e.g: Damage. Life support. Bad.) Landing on the nearest sustainable planet to cut down on the Castle's need to protect them from the unforgiving elements of outer space was their first order of priority while repairs were made. To conserve power, every 'unnecessary' circuit was cut back down to idling – and first and foremost amongst those circuits were the climate controls. The air was kept warm enough for survival, not comfort – and he was quickly becoming suspicious as to what their fellow Alteans found minimally necessary, at that. . . . because Lance was freezing.
The little heating unit Pidge had wired for him was doing next to nothing to ward off the chill on the air, it seemed. His breath still puffed in a noticeably vaporous haze, and his skin ran amok with goosebumps. He was wearing every piece of clothing he owned – which was slightly less than the shirt on his back he'd arrived with thanks to an impromptu shopping run courtesy of Coran, but still. He looked like a frozen mummy - a very attractive frozen mummy, sure, but a mummy nonetheless. His discomfort was getting harder and harder to suppress, even curled up in bed as he was, trying to ignore the world by blasting his music and pulling his sleeping mask down tight over his eyes . . . even when taking such tried and true measures, he was getting nowhere.
(Which was alarming, in of itself. His face required a solid eight hours of sleep – at least. He had to salvage what he could of the night cycle – and fast.)
One last violent bout of shivering catapulted his intention to move from vague consideration to a full-realized decision. He was done with this.
Lance initially only intended to slip down to Pidge's room and see if she could give his heater any more juice. Honest. But . . . her room was so far, all the way at the end of the very long corridor of rooms that all the paladins were housed in, and he already couldn't feel his toes deep inside his lion slippers. Lance despaired of making the rest of the trip without collapsing. In the end, he only passed by one door before feeling a (now familiar) flicker inside the part of his mind that was reserved for the Red lion. Keith was awake, he knew with a hazy whisper of intuition (after all, the strange connection between their minds was more like looking through a window when the blinds were drawn and the lights were low than anything more clear-cut) and just as miserable as he was.
Perfect. Well . . . perfect with desperate times calling for desperate measures, and all that. Lance would take what he could get.
He didn't even have to raise his hand to the door chime – the Castle read his intentions before he even fully formed the thought in his own mind. Quick, don't let the heat out! he 'thought' at the Castle anyway, and the door hissed closed just as soon as he slipped in.
It was unfair, Lance thought as he stood, gaping, just within the doorway: Keith's room was ten times warmer than his! The Castle clearly had its favorites, and its taste in paladins totally sucked.
The aforementioned Red paladin glanced up at him in surprise – with his eyes first going wide and then squinting to see him through the (admittedly) many layers of jackets and blankets he was bundled in. The surprise lasted for barely a second before Keith's brow furrowed and a more familiar scowl took its place. He was curled up on his own bunk with his comforter drawn tight around his shoulders. His knees were tucked up to his chest and his heater was as close to the bed as possible without it becoming a fire hazard. (They'd already been there, done that, and Lance never wanted to suffer Coran's fury like that again.) Sweat gleamed on his pale brow, but not from an excess of warmth – it was a cold sweat, Lance snorted to see. Of course.
“How long were you up fighting the gladiator 'bot before you got sick of it kicking your butt?” Lance asked. He was proud that his teeth didn't chatter.
Keith just stared at him for a long, long moment. At first, Lance didn't think he would bother with a response at all. Until: “I thought that sparring would keep me warm. But now I'm just tired.” The and still cold went unspoken. “What are you doing in here?” Keith changed the subject with a suspicious furrowing of his brows. “It's already bad enough that I have to put up with you during working hours.”
But Lance McClain was one child out of seven - with a whopping thirty-nine cousins to boot. He didn't rise so easily to such transparent bait.
“My room is cold,” he answered, ignoring the dig at his character. (Some people had no taste.) “I thought it'd be obvious.”
Keith gave him a decidedly unimpressed look. If he could have withstood freeing his hands from his cocoon of blankets, Lance was sure he would have gestured to the heater and back. Same here, his raised brow seemed to say. Lance may have heard a punctuating whisper of thought from his mind, only less polite.
“My heater's not working – well, not as good as yours is, at least.”
The look continued. Lance was going to have to spell this out for him.
“Pidge's room is too far,” Lance heaved a deep, long-suffering sigh to explain, “so you're going to have to do.”
And so, without further ado, he scrambled from awkwardly loitering by the doorway to burrowing underneath the covers on the opposite side of Keith's bed in one smooth, practiced maneuver.
“What the – Lance?! What are you doing?” Keith's voice had an oddly strangled quality to it, one that Lance did not understand at all. “Seriously, man, personal space!”
Lance huffed out a breath through his – admittedly still chattering – teeth, and rolled his eyes. “Honestly, I'm not doing this because I like you. So don't get confused.”
“Good,” Keith snapped. “Then we're on the same page. Get out of my bed!”
He sounded serious – unreasonably so; Lance was going to have to work fast to keep his place. “Aw, c'mon,” he gave his best cajoling not-quite-a-whine, “help out a paladin in need! My room is freezing, and I can't stand it any more. I think my nose is turning blue – blue, and not in a good way! I'm not appreciating the irony here.”
“Lance,” Keith closed his eyes, and sighed through his nose, “I'm giving you the next ten seconds to - ”
“ - could you please stop making this weird?” Lance didn't understand why Keith was the one who was frustrated. “I can finally feel my toes again. Why do you want to take that away from me?”
“Yes, your toes are freezing!” Keith agreed with a yelp. Lance unrepentantly refused to draw his feet away. “Could you please keep them to yourself?”
“And you're all bony angles and bad hair – but you don't hear me complaining! Because that would be rude.”
“I can complain all I want - it's my bed, in my room! Can't you go and bother anyone else? Wouldn't Hunk be a warmer choice if you need to cuddle? Heck, Allura, even - ”
“ - what? No – just no! Not Allura!” Lance's voice was a horrified squeak of sound at merely the thought. “I can't let her see me like this. She's honest to goodness space royalty – our very own Princess Leia. Seriously, dude, where's your cool?”
That drew Keith up short; he paused, even as his mouth still worked in quiet protest. He may have been the angry, emo porcupine of their group, but he was still privy to the bro-code. He had to have a heart underneath all of those quills – he had to! At least, Lance hoped he did – he truly was able to feel his toes again . . . just barely, but it was enough.
Distantly, uncomfortably even, he knew that back on Earth it would have been the toss of a coin between him crawling into bed with his older siblings, and waiting to have his younger siblings come in and bunk down with him on a night like this. Between thunderstorms and bad dreams and him just being the best brother ever, few of them ever kept to their own beds in the McClain household. Not really.
But that was then. There.
. . . here and now, some two dozen galaxies away from their good ol' Milky Way (he always had Coran show him where Earth was on the star-charts whenever they settled down on a planet) . . . well, he was really far from home. Really, really far from home.
As his thoughts tumbled down a path he normally tried to leash them from, something about the stiff, unyielding lines of Keith's body seemed to lessen - just slightly, at least. Lance scrunched his nose, wondering what had changed before - oh, the whole windows and blinds thing between them went more ways than one. Lance was still getting used to that. But . . . at least Keith was hesitating due to what he'd seen - he could definitely build on that.
Veradera, Florida, just outside of Tampa Bay, never got cold – not really, anyway. But he remembered one January, a few years before he left for the Garrison, when they had a freak dip in temperature – enough so that there were even snowflakes flurrying down from the dreary grey skies hovering over the ocean. Their house was old - it had character, his mamá was always fond of saying - but on top of their squeaky hardwood floors and old style arched ceilings, the decades old furnace was nothing to write home about. They'd passed that evening drinking his Tia León's chili spiced hot chocolate before all seven of them piled into Sofia's – the oldest of the McClain brood – bed to pass the cold night together. They'd been a tangle of arms and legs and heartbeats, and the memory alone was enough to spark a deep, contented warmth within him now.
Lance was clumsy to share it – but he tried to pull the window-shades up to let Keith see . . . if he cared to look, that was. The process was difficult without their lions to act as a conduit between them, when they were instinctively engrossed in the reaction and reflex of battle and needed to think as a single being, but Lance wasn't one to question his impulses when he had them – as always, he simply acted.
(Even so, he held a tight, expectant breath within his lungs without realizing it - not that he understood why, really. He could care less what Keith thought of him, after all. Honest to goodness.)
My mamá was a pilot too – cargo ships, though, not fighters, the thoughts spun without him consciously summoning them, one about the other, as entwined as they were to his heart. My dad is a wiz with numbers - he was a lunar air-lanes dispatcher back in the day; together, they run a small shipping gig now, and they don't do too bad for themselves. My oldest brother and sister are pilots too, working for the family business, but my youngest brother Aidan can already fly circles around us all – he reminds me a bit of you, actually; he can be a bit of a cocky little brat at times. It was my Abuela León who made me want to reach out for the stars, though – she sat reserve for the Uranus mission back in the day, but never got to fly past the Garrison's asteroid bases. My Tio Valdes has a restaurant on Seventh Street in Ybor City that I bussed tables at before enlisting, but everyone knows that my cousin Victor makes the best buñuelos – if you ask him nicely, he'll make them for special occasions during the year, not just for Christmas. He reminds me so much of Hunk that it hurts sometimes.
Then, there were things that were harder to define: such as how nine voices sounded when laughing together, or the glint in his mamá's eyes when her righteous temper flared up for her ornery offspring . . . or the gentle hum in the back of his father's throat when he was dispensing his 'life wisdom' to his children. His favourite color was the way the bright palate his mamá painted their house with combined with the soft woods and earthy decor of his father's Gaelic roots behind his closed eyes. If he inhaled too deeply, he could remember the way Elena – the first sibling younger than him – smelled when she came home from the hospital. He remembered how pink her blanket was; it was almost as bright as the yellow ribbons his baby-baby sister wore in her hair, no matter how old she grew. Then, there was the soul-blend of pepperoni pizza and rolling ocean waves and silly evenings of step-dancing to salsa music, while -
“ - who's the little one?” Keith's voice was soft to acknowledge the flow of memories – almost awkwardly so. “She's . . . kinda cute.”
Unexpectedly, it took Lance a moment to speak around the lump in his throat. It was easier to share some things without words, it seemed.
“Alicia . . . her name's Alicia. She's my youngest sister.” His voice was hoarse to his own ears, and he tried to swallow his rise of feeling away. He hadn't seen her in almost a year now – not since he went home to visit during the Garrison's last winter leave. The McClain baby she may have been, but she was growing up so, so fast, even before he left. Now . . .
. . . he remembered the way she had curled into him that cold winter's night, with her head of dark umber curls tucked in under his chin and her small limbs wrapped around his torso as if she were a monkey on its favorite perch. Little leech, he called her then, but he'd never bothered pushing her away. It felt good to be the older brother when he had been the McClain baby for so long. Alicia sent him the most letters of his siblings when he was away from home - with her big, ungainly handwriting and guess-work spelling, and he wrote her back as faithfully as he did his parents and abuela. He still sometimes did, in the deep of space, on the other side of the known universe . . . hopefully, someday, he'd be able to send those letters to her. He hoped that she knew that he was safe, and thinking of her - missing her, even as he protected her and everyone else he cared for, from an unthinkable threat. An unimaginable horror.
Just like Luke Skywalker, she'd say with her big brown eyes blown wide, and he'd scoff and respond: Just like Han Solo, you mean? Seriously, nene, as if!
Not that he could quite say anything of the sort to Keith – letting him sneak a look through his head-hole was one thing. Talking about it was something else entirely. He wasn't cold enough to put himself through that.
Thankfully, Keith didn't seem inclined to say anything else – instead he was quiet; pensive, even. Brooding, as per usual.
But, strangely, Lance didn't feel the need to tease his teammate for his reticence. Instead, it brought an odd sort of pang then, and he wanted . . .
. . . he caught only a glimpse of silence and empty rooms and an overwhelming sense of waiting. He saw a flickering book of families and homes, one after another, but couldn't catch one memory in particular before the pages paused on the light of some rich sunset spilling over a small, rustic cabin. The rays of the dying sun caught over a dark, curved metal blade, sporting a strange sort of symbol -
- but then the shades were drawn tight and Lance was no longer welcome to look. Keith pushed him away – almost possessively so as he protected his memories, causing a dull throbbing to pulse in Lance's temples from the abrupt severance. Yes, he definitely needed to leave this to Blue in the future. She knew how to handle Red.
It wasn't as if he wanted to look in the first place, Lance firmly told himself as he hooked his jaw. What Keith did and did not feel had no relevance to him; not one bit. The emotion churning in his gut was an odd, foreign one, however, and he didn't much care to put a name to it. He was slowly warming up, and that was all that mattered.
After a long, uncomfortable moment, Keith huffed out a breath through his nose. “I'm letting you stay,” he still sounded sour about it – but at least he was resigned in his defeat. Lance would take what he could get. “That doesn't mean we have to talk. So . . . relax,” he finished lamely.
And Lance, brother of six and cousin to many, understood an apology when he heard one. Something in his chest sparked for his understanding, then warmer than his body's slow thawing.
With a huff, Keith finally gave in and laid down, hugging his arms tight to his chest to warm his hands. Lance could still see his breath puff on the air, but the cold no longer felt unbearable – it no longer had the power to bite through his bones. Keith let loose a deep sigh, and though the other boy kept a careful space between them – seriously, he was making this so awkward – Lance thought that maybe he too was beginning to know warmth.