Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

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“we did it before / and we'll do it again / we're indestructible / even when we're tired / and we've been here before / just you and i.”

— we got the power, gorillaz

• • •

Sometimes, when Keith looks at Lance in the light of day, parked planetside and sunning under a new and alien heat after hours of artificial fluorescents, his face tilted up to the sky just so—just so that he blooms a languid gold, just so that he looks more bronze than boy, just so that he tempts those of the Icarus-leaning persuasion—Keith is transported back to El Paso, Texas.

He’s twelve, maybe, and sitting in the dead-or-dying grass of his next-door neighbor’s backyard, surrounded on all sides by peyote and golden barrel cacti, and unnamed neighbor-boy’s got this look on his face, and it’s the moment before the knee-jerk fight-or-flight instinct settles under Keith’s skin like an internal itch, and somehow, despite the immaturity of it all, he knows he wants to kiss unnamed neighbor-boy like he knows oxygen is needed, but the kid’s mom is just inside and about to bring them Lipton tea and melon cubes and so he has to snuff out the urge, only he allows himself a last-minute look at the boy before he does, so he can remember the want after the fact.

With Lance, he never forgets the want after the fact.

And maybe that’s the real reason why Keith lets Lance drag him by the hand to some alien festival being thrown in honor of Paropecca’s summer solstice (the planet, named after its undead goddess of goodwill, has an axis of about 21 degrees and lies something like 100 million miles from the 5XY-3L4 star system’s sun, so the climate isn’t too far off from what Keith can recall of temperatures back on Earth, those lazy, sprawling days lost to the desert’s arid glimmer).

It’s not for any real conscious effort on Lance’s part that Keith finds himself so amenable to Lance's adventures and alien outings these days, really. Not now that they’ve been friends for a while—like actual, veritable, clothes-sharing, bed-splitting, secret-swapping friends.

It’s just that working with the Blade of Marmora has made the black hole of longing in Keith yawn wider than he thought possible and sometimes, when Lance isn’t preening under a pretty girl’s attention, he’s easily the most beautiful person in the immediate vicinity and Keith has always had something of a weakness for beautiful-looking boys. Case in point: El Paso, Texas, seven years past.

Case in point: today, right now, at this very second.

“And Hunk says they do this whole dramatic reenactment in the city square, with like, glitter masks and fake blood and a leaf-machine. Didn’t even know leaf-machines were a thing, but now that I’m thinking about it, how have we, as a highly intelligent humanoid species, not developed something like this before? We have snow machines, why not leaves? God, it seems so obvious now! You know what...I’m writing this down for when we’re back home.” Lance pauses, sensing he’s lost Keith during the endless chatter at some point. He turns to send him a sulky look that involves a lot of lower lip and puppy-dog eyes. “Are you even listening to me, tiny? I said fake blood. I thought you liked fake blood!”

“Uh huh,” says Keith, who is still staring down at their tangled fingers in a shivery daze.

This, he’ll never be used to.

He wonders briefly at Lance’s callouses, the worn hands of a skilled rifleman-turned-swordsman, and the way he seems to intermittently grip Keith’s hand harder every three seconds or so before easing up on the pressure, as if checking that Keith is still with him. Still alive and animate and not trying to sacrifice himself like some unhinged martyr. Feeling that patterned layer of dark-on-pale flesh, warm up and down.

Keith wishes he could slip his hand from Lance’s, remove his fingerless gloves by their velcro straps, then press their palms together again as if with hot glue, no leather to interrupt the contact, but he doesn’t want to risk Lance letting go for good.

He thinks for just that second he understands the look Lance had given him after Naxzela, when they’d stood paralyzed and several feet apart in the Red Lion’s hangar—Keith with his head bowed in shame, as if awaiting cosmic retribution for what he’d almost gotten away with, Lance with his eyebrows pulled low on his face, anguished and entreating and so silent Keith could cry, and did, and refused, biting back all his guilt by the molars of his mouth.

Lance’s face in that moment had been trying to ask Keith a series of questions he’s been running from all his life. Were you about to let go for good? How long have you wanted to let go, Keith? And Keith thought about saying, voice an out-of-tune tremor: if I’ve never held on, how can I let go?

But he knew then that it would be a lie. He's known for a while now. Since that first moment he realized he's been carrying a torch, or forest fire, or hydrogen bomb for Lance, at least.

Since that long-ago night aboard the castleship, when Lance had been lying crumpled and bloodied and half-dead on the floor, and Keith had offered him his hand, the both of them bathed in a dark purple glow. Keith, grasping at thin air and briefly so terrified of rejection he’d almost immediately withdrawn his hand. And then Lance had reached up and held on, vice-like, and he hadn’t let go. Not until Shiro peeled him bodily from Keith’s arms to arrange him face-up in the healing pod, and Keith had thought to himself...

He’d thought to himself many things that night. Those thoughts had eaten at him, a hungry, pitch-black murk. And so he knew then that this thing, this wildfire in him, colossal and unkillable, was not going to let go, at least for a while. It refused. And now they’re eight or nine or ten months out, maybe more—Keith has never kept tally—and his palms still hunger after Lance’s, with no less enthusiasm. 

It feels like Keith has been holding on by the tips of his fingers for so long. The memory of Lance’s leather glove against his is a shadow that trails Keith endlessly.

Now, Keith shakes his head and glances up at Lance, who is wearing none of the Naxzela anguish and all the happiness of a teenage boy free from his universe-saving duties, if only for the day. He says, “Wait, what? When have I ever said I like fake blood?”

Lance grins, eyes going smug, and he nudges Keith with their clasped hands, saying, “That time we had an Altean horror movie marathon and there was the whole scene with the blood squirting out of the girl’s ear and you choked on your juice with laughter for like, five whole minutes. Hunk timed it with one of Allura’s tickers. Remember?”

Yes, Keith wants to say, but why do you? Instead, he squints at the blue-eyed boy and mutters, “What the hell, Lance?”

“Hey, I remember things,” says Lance, and picks up the pace, now swinging his and Keith’s hands between their bodies like they’re a jaunty little coupling with several years of dating under their belts and not tentative friends just barely reconciling old rivalries with otherwise innocent hand-holding urges.

It’s all very confusing for Keith and not all that innocent on his end of things, by which he means, he’d be more than okay with holding Lance’s warm brown hand under very different, perhaps romantic circumstances. Not that he would ever in a million years admit to that out loud.

“You remember things,” Keith repeats dubiously and begins swinging his arm in time with Lance’s, till they’re a walking hazard linked at the hands and all kinds of Paropecca natives are shooting them dirty looks down the path they’re strolling. “Just not bonding moments?”

“Oh, this again?” says Lance, sounding put-upon, even though he’s smiling something lazy, something almost secretive. “Whatever, mullet, I’m over it. If you wanted to hold my hand again so bad, you could’ve just asked.”

Keith gapes, stuttering, “You—you’re the one who held my hand! I was only trying to help you up and you just sat there, smiling at me like—like some—”

“I’m just kidding,” Lance says sweetly, snickering when Keith scowls.

“You’re such an ass,” Keith says.

This only seems to further enthuse Lance because his grin goes impossibly brighter, like flicking on a hovercycle’s high beams, and then he’s saying, “Back atcha, Kogane,” before briefly letting go of Keith’s fingers to wipe his hand off on the seat of his jeans.

“Oh, uh. Sorry,” Keith says, flushing and ducking his head, horrified that he’s ruined this even through his leather gloves. “My hands—fingers—get sweaty when I’m, um—”

“Nervous? Yeah, me too.” Lance clears his throat, staring straight ahead at the seemingly never-ending cobblestone streets, painted pastel with circuitous designs, beyond which lies a maze-like system of drainage canals like tiny babbling brooks, arranged downhill so as to prevent flooding during Paropecca’s summer storms. “Don’t worry, over half of that was mine.”

“Oh,” Keith says, shoulders sagging in relief, and he smiles up at Lance, grateful.

Lance looks at him sidelong a moment, then away. He swallows, ears pink, and says, “You’re so annoying. Gimme your dumb hand so we can go find someplace to eat. I’m starving.”

“If you wanted to hold my hand so badly...” Keith teases.

Lance glares halfheartedly, snatching Keith’s hand up with a huff and yanking him further down the street, to the smoking food stalls and thickening crowds. He says, “Oh my God, shut up,” and Keith laughs, quiet and joyous, fingers warm around Lance’s.

• • •

It—whatever it is, this actual, veritable, clothes-sharing, bed-splitting, secret-swapping friendship—starts in earnest, he thinks, after the Naxzela incident.

Keith has only just docked his stolen Galra fighter inside the castleship per Shiro’s orders, and he’s staggering his way out of the cockpit hatch, damp at the brow and still badly shaken, when he realizes he’s landed in the Red Lion’s hangar out of pure instinct. What’s more: she’s resting frozen just across the way, atop her little platform. Her golden eyes are unblinking in the washed out light. She’s the only color in sight. A red wound among a sea of grey.

“Oh,” Keith says, stopping short in the middle of the cavernous room.

He lets his eyes travel the length of her, her hardware’s elegant lines, badly dented in places, red paint flaking in others, well-loved under Keith’s care, and now Lance’s. Her jaw is locked closed and raised in the air, mulish somehow despite the stillness. So like her. So like the old wallet-sized school pictures of Keith his father would use as bookmarks, bent and water-damaged at their edges and keeping his place in The Pearl, or Woman Hollering Creek, thrift store finds he’d shove under Keith’s clothes when they were too poor even for $2 novellas, how Keith posed in front of the camera like a child-soldier year after year, chin raised and often refusing to smile, his hair longer and more bedraggled the older he grew.

“Red,” Keith says, and then doesn’t know how to proceed beyond that.

It feels like that first moment they met all over again—Keith prodding at empty air and Red ignoring him, regal and arrogant at once.

Tonight, like the one so long ago, she says nothing.

He sighs, folds his arms, says, “Red, c’mon. Don’t look at me like that. You know better than anyone what it means to...to...look, I—I had no choice.”

At this, she lets loose a mournful growl, making clear her disagreement on the matter. The sound is distant but distinctly there, and it echoes inside of Keith’s head for a moment. It’s no longer the full-mouthed roar that used to lie dormant beneath his skin when they were wholly bonded and unbreakable.

Their mental link, here and now, is tenuous at best, a ghost of what it once was, and so Keith lets himself absorb the impact of her cry, weak though it is, inhaling all of her fear and misery and love. It feels like trying to cauterize a stray cat’s wounds with a broken lighter. She no longer belongs to him and tonight, his flames are weak things, barely-breathing creatures.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

She looks at him for several seconds that are forever-feeling, then abruptly levers herself low to the floor. Her mouth drops open unhappily and for a terrible, frightening moment, Keith thinks she’s forsaken Lance as her pilot in an effort to reclaim her original red paladin. But then, from her maw spills a familiar set of legs—long, gangly, unmistakable even through the paladin armor—and Lance is descending her ramp where her emergency lights burn a dull blue.

He stops a few feet from Keith, and his hands—gloved and long-fingered, clever and gunslinging—fly up to his helmet. He tosses it aside with a disregard that knocks Keith suddenly off-kilter.

“Lance?” Keith says, watching Lance’s helmet roll off. It disappears beneath Red’s belly.

Lance removes his gloves with his teeth, casts those aside like his helmet before them, and then he lets his eyes—blue as glass, as morning, as childhood lullaby—do the rest of the work for him. They roam Keith severely, as if searching him for signs of madness or destructive thought, like he has the power to uncover the markings of an orphan’s unraveling. The longer he looks, the more his expression seems to go pinched, brow knitting and eyes growing smaller, the line of his mouth deeply displeased.

Keith swallows and fights against urge to tug his hood up over his face, to hunch in on himself, to reveal the threadbare parts of himself, still tender and diseased, the places no one person has ever had the heart to look. Not his social workers or foster parents or grade school teachers. None of the friends he never had. Not his dead father or his absent mother. Certainly not the Blade of Marmora.

“Keith...” Lance whispers, and that, really, is all it takes to break him.

Keith drops his eyes to the floor. He digs his fingers into his hips through his Marmora armor, lowers his head against the immense shame coursing through his veins, beating at his brow. The guilt, like a dam giving way, seems to swamp him all at once.

“Keith,” Lance repeats, and he moves several inches closer, his boots dragging slowly across his hangar’s metal floors. “Look at me.”

Keith shakes his head no and yanks his hood up. He turns his face into it, lets himself succumb to the cowardice he feels in this moment.

He thinks: I've been brave for so long.

He’s been brave in the face of all his expulsions and failures, the illegalities he’s committed on behalf of everything he didn’t used to know, he was brave when he broke into a long-abandoned shack in the middle of the Sonoran desert the night he let himself wander the southwestern migrant trail that so many before him had walked during delirious, desperately-thirsting journeys into new countries, the night he thought for sure he was destined to die, bones going bleached and eventually unrecognizable, lost to the sand and the sun’s scrutiny, another unnamed corpse accredited to the US-Mexico border. He was brave when his shortwave radio announced that the last person left in the world that he loved was dead, he was brave for Shiro’s return, and he was brave yet again when Shiro disappeared from the Black Lion’s cockpit as though never there to begin with.

Keith has been brave his whole fucking life, it feels like. Right now, he just wants to be weak and afraid. Just for a few more minutes, he wants to say.

He runs a finger up his temple and watches his Marmora mask take shape, shielding his face from Lance where he can feel tears welling, uninvited, in his eyes. He takes two steps back, looks out at Lance through the apertures of his mask, skims over the readings displayed—Lance’s vitals look fine, but his blood pressure is steadily rising.

“Dude, don’t shut me out,” Lance says, taking four steps forward for the two he’s lost. Just like Lance, Keith thinks, with something verging on hysterical. “Keith. Please.”

Keith says nothing.

Lance moves to close the distance between them and Keith, fool that he is, lets him. Slowly, as if to wave a white flag, Lance raises his hands. They hover mid-air for a few seconds, uncertain as a baby bird's wings, almost in warning. Then Lance is reaching forward and gently palming Keith's mask. His fingers brush the glowing depressions, every rough edge and smooth plane. Without realizing it, Keith guesses, Lance skims a thumb across the place where Keith's mouth rests behind his false face.

Keith's breath hitches.

“Look at me?” Lance murmurs. “Just for a few minutes. Please, I—Matt told me—I thought—” He cuts himself off to recalibrate, swallows visibly. “I thought I lost you for a second there. And it was like...Jesus. Was any of it worth it? The rivalry, antagonizing you all the time, all of our dumb fighting. If I never got to see your stupid face again? I’d take it all back, buddy. Keith. Look at me. I take it back, I swear. I want a do-over.”

Keith squeezes his eyes shut and feels the first tear fall.

Lance lets his hands loosen, then slide low. They stop to rest lightly around Keith’s throat and then he’s pressing his forehead to Keith’s shoulder-plate. He whispers: “I’ll take everything back if you swear you’re never gonna try something like that again. Keith. Just let me in.”

With a shudder, Keith deactivates his Marmora mask. “I...” he says, the word scraped raw and hoarse from his throat. “I did what I thought I had to at the time. Got lucky, I guess. Stars aligned, or...something."

Lance lifts his head, makes a small noise of protest at what he sees, eyes glassy with unshed tears. He pulls Keith in by the waist, says, “C’mere. Just let go, buddy. You almost let go for them”—he says this (them) with revulsion and so Keith knows, instinctively, that he’s referring to the Blade of Marmora—“so...let go for me.”

Keith buries his face in Lance’s neck and stops swallowing at the lump in his throat. Eager tears roll down his cheeks, pressed warm and wet to the flesh at Lance’s jugular. “It wasn’t for them. It’ll always be for you guys. Team Voltron...the cause...it’s all I have.”

Lance pets at Keith’s hair with one hand, hums his sympathy, and uses the other to run a palm up and down Keith’s back in a pattern intended to soothe, but which only makes Keith want to drop unconscious in his arms. “Keith, we’re not the Blade. Do you get that? We don’t want your sacrifices. We just want you. Alive and well, I might add.”

“It’s death everywhere,” Keith mutters. “Wherever I look. Knowledge or death, victory or death. I’m just staring it down. Running from it...from who I am. This—it’s who I am, Lance.”

“It’s who we all are,” Lance returns, quiet and unflinching. “Keith, we’re...we’re all trying to outrun death. That’s kind of what it means to be alive, to be a part of this war. To be human, even. You’re human. Don’t forget that. But we don’t...we don’t run at it headfirst like you did tonight. That’s, I think, quite a big no-no in most other cultures. Your kooky Galra friends are just an anomaly.”

Keith laughs, and it’s soft and frightened-sounding. “When’d you get so wise?”

“Dunno. Musta rubbed off on me,” says Lance. “When you were our black paladin, I mean.”

“That’s false,” Keith mumbles. “I was always an idiot when I piloted the Black Lion.”

“Well, yeah,” Lance concedes easily, and it sounds like he’s smiling somehow. “But you were our idiot. And hey, I was always right there to keep you in check, wasn't I?”

“Thanks,” Keith says dryly, even though he’s smiling into Lance’s sternum and he feels exponentially lighter all around.

No longer like he’s wading through mud, or quicksand. Now, like he’s sloshing through a riverbed—there’s still that element of resistance, of tug-and-pull just beyond the flesh, but none of the density.

None of the backbreaking burden.

“Anytime,” Lance says.

“No,” Keith says, and he clutches at the small of Lance’s back, fingers tight. He lets those same fingers say what he can’t force past his teeth. “I’m—thank you. Lance, you’re—um. Just...thanks.”

Lance sighs softly and returns Keith’s sorry excuse for a hug, his arms a snug weight around Keith. It’s good, so good, he thinks, like he can feel leftover traces of Blue’s energy lingering behind each touch, the petrichor-scented trail she’d left Keith back in that Arizona desert.

Tropical, he recalls of her energy signature, and compassionate, and promising immediate answers. A mother’s touch, or her footprints in sand, god-like. Matriarchal, almost.

Keith had slept through every convoluted church service in every decrepit, ramshackle chapel his father whisked him away to during childhood—El Palacio de Dios in El Paso, Texas; Pilgrimage Community Church in Salem, Oregon; the Prodigal Life Church in New Orleans, Louisiana—only ever made an effort to pry his eyes open when a congregant handed him a paper-thin corn tortilla, ladled hot stew into his bowl, offered him a sip of the Blood of Christ from a plastic goblet.

He felt the distant brush of religion’s fingertips against his nape at times, but never anything stronger than that. In the desert, that first night he sensed Blue nearby and pulsing, it was like he’d found something worth believing in for the first time in his whole fucking life.

That’s what this—now—feels like.

Keith wants to close his eyes against the pressure until flesh fuses with flesh, until he knows only the feeling of Lance’s warmth, the smell of his sweat, his ebbing fear. He wants to throw himself into the boy’s roughest rivers. He wants, more than anything, not to have to let go.

Lance breaks the silence with a sudden: “Come back to the Castle. To the team.”

Keith shakes his head and uncurls his fingers some. “Lance...you know I can’t. I—I don’t have a place here anymore. Coming back would just ruin what you guys have been building, all your work with the Coalition. Besides, Kolivan...the Blade needs me. I can’t leave now.”

Keith feels Lance pulling back and has only a panicked moment to think to himself that he's an idiot, that he's ruined their flimsy connection just like he had with Red, severed as soon as it got good, before Lance is gingerly shoving him away. He stops there, though, holds Keith at arm's length.

Then, when Keith continues to stare a stubborn hole into the ground, Lance tucks an index finger under his chin, tilting it back just so—just so that Keith is helpless against Lance's clear-eyed gaze, just so that he's suffused in a rich heat, just so that color spills across his cheeks in an inevitable call-and-response.

“Then come see me,” Lance murmurs, and it makes Keith’s heart pound behind his breastbone. “Us, I mean. Once a week or something? Like mental health check-ins. We can just hang out, or...or go on low-priority, low-stress missions? Scouting, or flower-picking for Coran, or supply runs. Dumb stuff. Just...so we know how you are. I don’t want...I mean, we all miss you. And I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but...it feels like you’re not...not okay, Keith.”

Well, Keith thinks, a little weakly. He never really stood a chance, did he?

“I guess what I’m trying to say is...I want you to be okay again,” Lance confesses, hushed.

“Okay,” Keith says, right away. No fight. No refusal.

His life is a hell of a lot easier, he thinks, when he lets himself cave under all the ways he wants Lance’s luminous attention, and company, and friendship. All the ways he wants Lance, full stop.

“What? Really?” Lance says, mouth a small o of surprise. “I was...honestly prepared for a lot more resistance. I had a whole speech ready and everything. Are you like...forrealzies?”

“I don’t think that’s an actual word,” Keith says, wry.

“Whatever, I’m a linguistic genius and you know it.” A slow smile unfolds across Lance’s mouth. He looks off into the middle-distance, his mind already in a million other places. “Oh, dude, we’re gonna have all kinds of fun. Everyone’s gonna be so excited. Wait till I tell Pidge and Hunk! Shit. Wait, but—don’t you need to get Kolivan’s permission first?”

Keith scowls. “He’s not my dad, Lance.”

Lance raises an eyebrow.

“...I’ll ask him later tonight,” Keith mumbles petulantly.

Lance laughs, loud and vibrant and real, and hauls Keith back in for a second hug that makes him a little weak-kneed, and that’s when they hear the hangar’s elevator doors hissing open to allow four sweaty paladins and one rogue, rebel fighter entry. Reluctantly, Keith withdraws from the warm circle of Lance’s arms and together, shoulders brushing in ways that defy the predetermined rules of their relationship, they watch the team make their way over.

Pidge is the first one to make contact. As soon as she sets her sights on him, she stalks forth to catch Keith in a hug that very nearly wipes him out. “If you ever pull that kind of shit again, Kogane,” she threatens, teary-eyed, “I swear to God.”

Keith, having depleted all his tears and inner angst for the night, only manages a small smile in response. It’s just a weak tilt of the lips, but it must pass muster, because Pidge immediately returns it, flashing two crater-deep dimples at him.

“Missed you too, Pidge,” he says, to which she sniffs and mutters, “Idiot.”

Hunk and his blubbering bear hugs are next, followed by a rough jostle that only just barely meets basic human hugging standards from Shiro, and then Allura is hoisting Keith into the air like he weighs little more than a bag of feathers and squeezing the life out of him, muttering a long string of Altean profanities, and the rest of the group is laughing in surprised approval.

She sets him back down with a crestfallen half-smile, says, “We’re glad you’re alright, Keith,” and steps away to accommodate all the hungry eyes still passing over him and his uniform, as though they’re trying to upend the cool facade that fell into place the second he registered their presence, the very facade that Keith has only just allowed Lance a glimpse past.

The faint glint they’ve all got in their eyes in this moment, crude and prying as they examine him, feels far less kind than when Lance had, that gentle, understanding way he has about him, like when he looks at you he’s feeling you over for flesh wounds, wiggling at one of your loose ribs, worrying a cavity with a gloved finger, apologetic but carefully assessing.

No one has ever felt like Lance, he doesn’t think.

Feet firmly planted, Keith squints suspiciously at the motley crew arranged before him—his family, wild-eyed and invasive and beautiful in spite of all the ways they’ll never understand him or his strife—and mutters, “How come you’re all letting me off so easy?”

“Oh, we figured Lance already had all the real nasty angst covered,” Pidge says, shrugging blithely. “We don’t wanna overdo it or anything.”

Shiro crosses his arms, metal to flesh and bones, and frowns at Keith. His eyebrows are doing something furious and accusatory. “Don’t think this means you’re off the hook. You and I will talk more about this later,” he says, in his best reprimanding father figure voice, which has always sounded like a lesser version of his big brother voice, with more timbre and far less affection.

Shiro’s had to fill so many roles for Keith for so long, all at once—teacher, father, brother, friend. He has all his voices carefully catalogued, memorized by rote, and honed, ready to whip out at the drop of a coin for a scolding and a slap on the first, or mentorial instruction. For heart-to-hearts, many failed, or even just friendly ribbing, a rhythm as familiar to Keith now as desert footfalls, sand in socks, Arizona's new moons. 

Keith makes a face at Shiro, halfway to annoyed, says, “So, that’s it then? Are all future Keith lectures now being entrusted to Lance?”

“As Pidge said, we thought, perhaps...” Allura says, with equal amounts embarrassment and shamelessness, “...well, that a lecture concerning your recent bout of recklessness might be more well-received by you if it were coming from Lance. We know how much more...agreeable you tend to be, I should say, when he’s the one doing the admonishing.”

“Former right-hand man perks,” Lance says, a touch too smug.

“That’s...you’re...” says Keith, tongue-tied, then scoffs incredulously when Lance only smirks and waggles his brows back at Keith, as if daring him to challenge the notion.

“Yeah,” Hunk cuts in, scratching thoughtfully at his sweat-soaked bandana. “When we saw Red take off for the Castle in the middle of Lotor’s fourth dramatic monologue-slash-proposition—after Lance called him a 'space fascist with Party City hair extensions’ over the comms—we all figured he was on his way to give you the most agonizing heart-to-heart of your life.”

Lance tches indignantly, folding his arms across his chest. “It was not agonizing! And Lotor had it coming! Tell ‘em, Keith!”

“It was good, thanks,” Keith says. He exhales, then sends Lance a lopsided smile. “And yeah, Lotor has terrible hair, I guess.”

Lance blinks, crossed arms loosening, like he wasn’t expecting such an easy concession, even despite the fact that he’s the one who asked for it in the first place. His answering smile, slow to take form, is one of the most dazzling Keith has ever received, the way it spreads and fractures like light, from Lance’s bottle-glass blue eyes to the steep curve of his mouth.

Better even, Keith thinks, than the smile he’d gotten from Lance after Sendak’s attack on the Castle, and they’re not even touching this time. No clasped hands as an endlessly electrifying point of contact.

“Keith,” says a voice that does not belong to Lance and so Keith finds himself loath to tear his eyes away from the boy who currently grips his beating heart by its bloody core, till the owner of the voice lays a hand on Keith’s shoulder and forces him to look away.

Keith glances up at Matt, blinking away his confusion. “Sorry, what?”

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Matt repeats. He looks Keith over and smiles a little hesitantly. The gesture pulls at the pink scar tissue drawn down his cheek. “Sorry about...you know...having to tell everyone, considering. That’s all.”

“Oh.” Keith shakes his head, dispelling the Lance-induced daze, and returns the smile. He finds himself saying, “It’s fine, Matt. Uh...considering.”

This appears to relieve Matt immensely because he nods, head bobbing enthusiastically, and pulls Keith in for a hug that he barely has the proper presence of mind to return after so many full-body squeezes in so little time. He’s been hugged more times tonight that he has in his entire life.

“Okay, alright, point taken,” Lance is saying, exactly two seconds later. Keith sends him a befuddled look; he’s glaring at Matt, for reasons absolutely beyond Keith and the current state of his mental faculties. “That’s enough. Hands off, Holt! Keith is very fragile at the moment.”

“I’m not fragile,” Keith objects from over Matt’s shoulder, affronted. “I’m fine now!”

“Like chocolate, cream-covered Pocky sticks!” Lance says, voice rising. He tugs Keith out from under Matt’s hold by the hand, only to wrap his own around Keith’s shoulders, then addresses the room with a, “I should probably get Keith to a warm bed while you guys...I don’t know? Break bread with Kylo Ren 2.0?”

“I don’t need a warm bed,” Keith says, after which a jaw-popping yawn passes through him. He frowns down at his body, and amends, “I need to find Kolivan so I can talk to him about seeing you, Lance.”

Hunk coughs loudly. Shiro’s formerly angry eyebrows rise, turn soft and surprised. Pidge says, sounding far more flabbergasted than this situation warrants, “What? No way! Keith, you and Lance are seeing each other now?”

Keith shrugs. “Yeah. Every week from now on. Right, Lance?”

“Oh, man,” Matt says, in tones of apology. “Sorry if I overstepped with that hug, Lance!”

Keith raises an eyebrow. “What? Why would—”

Lance slaps a hand over Keith’s mouth. He says, “Oh, haha! Very funny, taking advantage of the boy with all the socialization of a baby deer!” He levels each person in the room with a look of mock-disapproval. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves!”

Keith peels Lance’s hand from his mouth and says, “Lance, I’m right here. And I’m nothing like a baby deer!”

“Tiny little desert lizard, then,” Lance allows, and he proceeds to tuck Keith behind his back, as though to shield him from each pair of snooping eyes. “Better?”

Keith purses his lips, then nods, satisfied with the verbal correction.

“Anyway,” says Lance, his palms pressed soft to the skin at Keith’s wrists, which tingle happily beneath the heat of him. “Matt, you and I will have words later. Pidge, wipe that look off your face. Hunk, I love you. Allura, good luck dealing with the crown prince of over-contoured noses. Shiro...uh...carry on, sir. Someone tell Lotor I said I could see his split-ends from halfway across the galaxy.” He aims a finger-gun at the room, then whirls on his feet and begins to steer Keith off. “Lance and Keith out!”

“Lance and Keith?” Pidge parrots, gleeful. “Since when—”

“Keith and Lance,” Keith corrects, rotating at the neck just in time to intercept one of Pidge’s more toothy smirks. Keith has no clue what this one means, but thinks to himself that it’s a welcome sight after so many minutes of teary frowns from his former teammates.

“Don’t encourage them,” Lance says lowly, right in Keith’s ear, inviting him into an inside joke Keith has spent his entire life locked out of, looking in from the outside at a vast sea of laughing children, none of whom ever attempted to include him in their jokes.

It sends his heart skipping, the knowledge that Lance would like to have him, here inside his joke, at his elbow, beneath the flat of his brown palms, just the two of them, and so, made sleepy and pliant by the inside-out warmth of Lance, Keith allows the boy to lead him off to the bedroom he abandoned long weeks ago. He stumbles inside in the half-dark, the glow of his emergency lights turning Lance into a long-faced phantom with black concaves for cheeks.

Lance nudges Keith into bed and makes quick work of his boots and leg greaves and chestplate, all the extraneous Marmora armor—in a way that reeks of easy intimacy, and it makes Keith wonder if this is what friendship feels like for the rest of the universe, if this is what he’s been missing out on for so long, if it’s always supposed to be this quiet and heartrending, if it will always make Keith want to tug Lance down with him—until Keith is stretched out on his bed in only his dark grey undersuit and Lance is looking him over, seemingly pleased with his efforts.

He moves to leave, till Keith catches his wrist.

Lance half-turns, his eyes dark and curious.

Keith wants to wrap an arm around his neck, wants to drag him in real close, wants to whisper in his ear about all the ways he makes Keith feel like he’s being flayed alive. Instead, he murmurs, “Lance.” His eyes flutter at half-mast, and he’s loose and cozy and exhausted, and Lance is his friend now. Keith almost gave his life tonight, but the universe refused it. They get a do-over. It all feels like a dream, or a memory he has yet to live, a backwards sense of déjà vu. “Thank you.”

I like you so much, he thinks, then swallows the thought.

Lance slants a smile at him. He turns his wrist around in Keith’s hand till their fingers are touching, brief and featherlight. “No need to thank me. Just get some sleep, buddy,” he whispers, and leaves the room.

Keith’s hand flops over in Lance’s absence, half-hanging from the edge of his bed, still outstretched and starving.

He doesn’t fall asleep for a long time after that.

• • •

Lance keeps his word. Seems, in fact, determined to make good on last night’s suggestion.

Not that this surprises Keith, in retrospect. Lance’s promises are not treasures easily broken, the few times Keith has watched them take shape, on old missions involving displaced, tear-stained aliens, or diplomatic outings that required Lance’s charisma and Voltron-backed guarantees, when Allura’s had fallen flat.

That this—their official do-over, or second attempt at friendship, if they’re counting their first fluke back on Earth—should end up being so uncomplicated, so easy and effortless, feels far less likely to Keith, given their difficult history. He decides to humor Lance anyway, if only for the entertainment factor.

When he receives an incoming plain-text transmission the following morning—at zero seven hundred hours, his clock informs—after he’s back on the Blade’s base, he peers down at the screen of his handheld, sees the name MCCLAIN, LANCE, and flicks the message open without thought where he’s still waking himself up, armor spread out and waiting for him on his sheets.

CALLED_CALLSIGN THIS IS CALLING_CALLSIGN MESSAGE NUMBER 001

ROUTINE TIME 2213855Z

FM MCCLAIN LANCE

TO KOGANE KEITH

GROUP NO COUNT

BREAK

hey! how are you? :D you ask kolivan about coming over yet? i was thinking you could spend fridays/saturdays with us from now on maybe? sat/sun works too! lemme knooooo!

BREAK

OVER

Keith blinks down at his screen, confused by the clutter of letters and numbers, trying valiantly to make sense of each line break. He licks his lips as it all finally clicks, huffs out a tiny breath, and pulls up his keyboard, punching in several words. Hits send.

Are you actually messaging me using military radiogram format right now?

CALLED_CALLSIGN THIS IS CALLING_CALLSIGN MESSAGE NUMBER 002

ROUTINE TIME 2213855Z

FM MCCLAIN LANCE

TO KOGANE KEITH

GROUP NO COUNT

BREAK

yeah :D

BREAK

OVER

Why

CALLED_CALLSIGN THIS IS CALLING_CALLSIGN MESSAGE NUMBER 003

ROUTINE TIME 2213855Z

FM MCCLAIN LANCE

TO KOGANE KEITH

GROUP NO COUNT

BREAK

LOOKS COOL!!!!!!!

BREAK

OVER

Lance.

FINE i’m done

Thank you.

did you ask kolivan or WHAT?

I was going to? At some point, probably.

didn’t take you for a procrastinator, kogane, especially since you seemed so eager to ask him last night

i’m very disappointed.

You try convincing a century old Galra rebel whose life motto is “knowledge or death” to let you have weekends off.

WHOA. KOLIVAN IS 100???

That’s just my current running hypothesis. I have a lot more.

They don’t tell you anything down here.

I bet this is what it’s like working in Area 51?

Oh my god you’re such a weirdo

can’t believe i was one-upped by a conspiracy nerd back at the garrison

First of all? I was right about the aliens?

LOOOOOL (LAUGHING OUT LOUD) OKAAYYYY

Don’t you believe in ghosts??

UH? YEAH???

wait

Do you.............not

No??

No substantial proof.

okay YOU KNOW WHAT...

no

nope

not getting into this with you right now

hurry up and talk to kolivan

I’ll talk to him later.

NO

NOW!!!!!!

Oh my god. Lance. What does it matter if it’s now or later?

well

you see................................

What did you do

why do you assume i did something!

So you didn’t do anything?

no i did

i really did

i did the thing so good, keith

me and the thing, we have just finished consummating our union

the thing is thoroughly did

done?

i done did it

the thing, that is

Lance

right, so...

me and Red MAY OR MAY NOT be waiting for you on ground level Zero

right now

at this second in time

presently

also, one of your blade buddies is currently eyeing me up like they want a ride on the McClain Express

Keith sits bolt-upright in his bunk, smile dropping off of his face. One of his gauntlets slides off the mattress, dislodged by the sudden movement, before landing on the floor with a muted thud. He stares down at his screen for several tense seconds, waiting for a JUST KIDDING! that never comes. Then the adrenaline kicks in and his fingers are flying across his keyboard.

What.

The McClain Express is the foremost mode of travel in the known universe, Keith

DID YOU BREAK INTO THE BLADE’S BASE

define........................break

LANCE. I NEED TO KNOW.

DID YOU BREAK INTO THE BLADE’S TOP SECRET BASE.

WHOSE LOCATION IS HIGHLY CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.

:o

DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT, LANCE?

i just looked you guys up on google maps ;D

LANCE

HEY! if you RECALL, i was there waiting up for you while u completed ur emo marmorite trials of death so it’s not like this is new information to me

I KNOW that, but someone could have followed you.

Red isn’t exactly inconspicuous.

That’s why we have designated escorts and shuttles for guests.

I’M A PALADIN OF VOLTRON, NOT A CHILD!!!!!!!

That’s debatable.

FUCK YOU I DON’T NEED A SHUTTLE THIS IS NOT DISNEYLAND AND I AM PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF BEING INCONSPICUOUS

Again, debatable.

(--_--)

ANYWAY!!

all i had to do was serenade allura with top 40 hits for 10 minutes straight and she immediately handed over the forbidden BOM HQ coordinates so you can tell kolivan to take it up with her if he has a problem with my visit

and THEN you can tell him to stick it where the sun don’t shine bc allura would absolutely DESTROY him in single combat if challenged

and THEN YOU CAN TELL HIM HE NEEDS TO RETHINK HIS BASE OF OPERATIONS BC THE CURRENT LOCATION IS REALLY INCONVENIENT FOR ME AND THERE WERE NO SPACE SMOOTHIES AVAILABLE ALONG THE WAY!!!!!!!! AND I’M THIRSTY!!!

Hm

BASICALLY the only reason we made it here in one piece is cuz Red (obviously) has experience navigating 2 black holes and a giant blue star

And when you got here they just..........let you in?

you remember how Red went all mad mama bear on BOM HQ the last time you were here with shiro?

and how it totally traumatized your many goth brethren?

and then they had to spend like, literal weeks on reconstruction and repairs?

Lance, we’re not goth.

And yes, I remember.

yeah well apparently they don’t forget stuff like that ‘cause as soon as we arrived, we were waved in

(Red didn’t even get to do her scary roar, which she is feeling extremely sulky about)

anyway

uuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhh...........

do you guys offer refreshments down here?

No...?

okay cuz i’m currently being offered alien hors d'oeuvres by the dude who was eyeing me up earlier, on behalf of “the tiny human one”

he says it was really brave of me to steal the red lion right out from under your nose like that

apparently he thinks you deserve to be knocked down a peg or two

omg what’d you do to this guy keith!!

HAHA didnt know there were any cool ppl down at BOM HQ!!!!

Aloud, Keith groans. He runs a helpless hand through his hair, mussing it further. Lance is absolutely going to be the death of him.

That’s Nerc.

Lance, don’t talk to him.

Don’t let him breathe near you.

He’s a menace.

Wait for me in the hangar.

he said you’d say that

Oh my god.

maybe i’ll take him home with me instead of you >:D

Oh

oh my god

KEITH I WAS JUST KIDDING

I MADE HIM LEAVE

I’M WAITING FOR YOU :,(

<33333333333333

What is that

what’s what?

“<33333333333333”

did you replicate that down to the exact number of 3’s

Yeah? For all I know, it’s another one of your coded messages.

you’re right it is

it means “see you soon”

Oh, okay

<33333333333333

That just feels counterproductive? It uses more characters than “see you soon”

Typing “SYS” would be a lot more efficient

This is like the Voltron chant all over again.

Lance, why do you make these things so difficult?

okay now you’re just making me feel bad

...

It doesn’t mean “see you soon,” does it

no :(

Yup. Should’ve called that.

YOU ARE ADORABLE, MULLET

WERE YOU RAISED IN A BARN OR SOMETHING?

My dad and I used to live on a farm for a while, yeah.

:O

REALLY? ME TOO!!!!!!!

we have some old land back in havana (ancestral)! my dad’s side of the family basically makes a living out of growing yuca

or cassava, i guess

it’s where i learned to ride my first horse!!!

i sort of split my time between their farm and my mom’s property in varadero

BARN BUDDIES <33333

Eyes round with wonder, Keith clutches his handheld closer.  

A little guiltily, he snaps a picture of his screen, nervous at the idea of losing this small, precious piece of information somehow. Then he realizes how pathetic he must look, hunched over his handheld and swooning, all because Lance has—probably thoughtlessly, nonchalantly, because that’s who Lance is, the way he’s fundamentally wired—imparted a piece of his family history to Keith. Like it’s insignificant, instead of maybe the most important gift Lance has ever given him.

Keith shakes his head, flustered, and hits the Caps Lock button.

OKAY STOP

YOU’RE DISTRACTING ME.

I’M LEAVING TO FIND KOLIVAN.

THEN I’LL MEET UP WITH YOU AND RED.

ROGER THAT....................THE TINY HUMAN ONE

oh my god I’m gonna kick your ass

OH YEAH? YOU AND WHAT LION

TOO SOON?

TOO SOON. ;P

(i was just kidding. red loves + misses you.)

seriously......whenever you’re ready to come back, keith

OVER AND OUT.

Keith shuts his handheld off and then just sits on his mattress in a dumb stupor for several seconds, face flushing belatedly.

Idiot, he thinks at himself, internal and vicious.

“Then come see me,” Lance had said the night before, quiet and earnest and blue paladin down to his bones even despite the Red Lion who sat not ten feet away, yellow eyes never once leaving her newest navigator, and Keith had let himself believe Lance meant it right up until he returned to the Blade’s base.

Then, made smug by the hypothetical idea of Lance trying and failing to initiate a friendship between the two of them, Keith had basked in a backwards, bitter sense of victory.

He’d thought...well, he’d thought, if nothing else, Lance would eventually wiggle his way out of the offer, maybe chalk it up to a lack of time, or their far more important moral obligation to the cause.

Only time’ll tell, he’d thought sleepily as he undressed last night, stowing his armor away and scrubbing at his face with a stale washcloth, and for a while after, he stood zoning out at his dresser, imagining all the ways this could go wrong, all the ways Lance might pull him aside and break it to him gently, all the many versions of, “I don’t actually want to be your friend,” that could theoretically leave Lance’s lips in the next week.

He could see Lance’s sheepish smile, crystal clear. “I may have jumped the gun a bit after Naxzela, samurai,” he’d say sadly, and maybe Keith would earn a pity pat to the shoulder for his weak attempt at masking the soul-crushing disappointment he’d feel in that moment. “They don’t call me ‘sharpshooter’ for nothing,” Lance would joke, and Keith would refrain from pointing out that no one ever called Lance ‘sharpshooter’ to his face, and only because he’d seen with his own two eyes the way Lance’s kill-shots landed—with death-dealing precision, even from vantage points seven stories high, or distances 1,250 meters long. “I wasn’t actually serious when I said you should come see me,” he might say, then add, a little regretfully: “Stuff like that just slips out after near-death experiences. No one ever really means it. You understand, right?”

Keith has never understood.

Words haven’t meant much to him since he was old enough to figure out what it is to traverse great distances alongside his father, the two of them couch-surfing to stay alive and pickpocketing whenever necessary. Often, he stayed up late to receive the man from a graveyard shift that had gone on too long, sometimes glaring at the door while nodding off, other times curling up by their battery-powered radio and falling unconscious to the ugly crackle, the distant hum of voices, the barely-there breath of another human pervading the room.

He still remembers waking up to static, the broken sounds of his favorite late-night radio show—Mac and Adley’s Extraterrestrial Quandaries and Other Midnight Queries—filtering in around his father’s work boots against linoleum, the way he’d lift Keith into his arms with a sigh, how Keith sometimes accused, “You’re late again,” in a sleepy mumble, how his father pushed his bangs back and mumbled, “I know, kid, let’s get you into bed, alright?” and that’s always when Keith slept the best, deep and dreamless, when he felt his dad’s weight on the pull-out couch or box-spring next to him, knew he could roll over without fear of falling.

Words, thinks Keith, are nothing but shadows. There one moment; gone the next. No tangible evidence left behind to track them by, to hold them to, aside from the memory in your brain, and even then, memory is fickle, frail, always changing. Memory can be used against you. Words can be snapped clean in half.

None of it can be trusted.

Despite this, he thinks on some level he must trust Lance. Enough to watch his hand rise and readily accept it. Enough that Lance’s words, when delivered just so—harsh and grating and unrelentless through the comms—cut through everything else and land, exactly like his kill-shots.

But even the awful, erratic level of trust he feels for Lance isn’t enough to override the warning sirens blaring in Keith’s head, filling him with preemptive dread. A failsafe designed to save him yet more disappointment.

And so that’s where he stayed for long minutes—at his dresser, head bent, skin rubbed raw and wet by his washcloth, until his bunkmate Seneev had tossed a pillow at his head and griped at him about human sleep cycles.

“I’m Galra too,” Keith had snapped. He bent to retrieve the pillow and chucked it back at her.

“And I, child, am exhausted,” she shot back, catching the pillow midair, the rolled eyes implied in the purple-pink half-light. “I can hear your frontal lobe working all the way from over here.” Then: a long, weary sigh and the gentle rustle that meant she was rearranging her body on her mattress. “It always looks worse than it is...is that not what you humans so often say?”

“No,” said Keith, as he climbed into the bottom bunk and tugged his sheets over his head.

She yawned and shifted around some more above him. A sharp shadow swung out, then fell near his face—her tail, dangling from the edge of her bunk’s metal railing. “Well, I’ve decided to say it myself, then. Whatever it is, it will make more sense under the starlight of day, I can you promise you that much. Sleep now. Contemplation tomorrow, Keith.”

He was able to fall asleep only after promising himself he wouldn’t be disappointed when Lance inevitably realized his mistake and rescinded his offer of friendship.

And now here Lance sits, initiating their conversations, divulging private family secrets, teasing Keith with none of the previous bite, none of the old venom, succeeding in his undertakings totally and completely. Like befriending Keith is the most painless task he’s ever attempted. Like it’s not even a task. Like it’s...like it’s some kind of privilege, or great pleasure, getting to suddenly take up all of Keith’s time. Getting to soak it up and turn it into something so sweet.

All at once, Keith is flooded with a giddy warmth. It’s terrible, and exciting, and further aggravates the state of his feelings for Lance, turning them into something sharper, more acute.

He thinks: fuck.

How is he going to make it out of this alive?

And then he’s on his feet, knocking yet more armor from his bed, searching for his Blade-issued boots, nearly stumbling in his haste to get them on his feet and only just catching himself one-handed against the doorway of his tiny, paramilitary-standard bedroom.

“In a rush to be somewhere, are you?” says a voice, with poorly-disguised laughter lurking beneath the words.

Keith looks up, scowl already pre-prepared for the occasion. “None of your business,” he says shortly, and rights himself.

Seneev smiles slyly, shoving past him and working her dyed braids into a complicated knot. They fall past her shoulders in a wine-red wave. She says, “Oh? Kolivan seems to think otherwise. Apparently, there’s a pretty little paladin waiting for you on the lower levels. He even brought the dreaded Red Lion. Everyone and their battle cruiser is clamoring for a look, but we were all sent away.”

Keith shakes his head through his thumping pulse, says, “I’m on my way to clear things up right now.”

“Your boyfriend seems sweet,” she says, the ridicule leaving her voice at once. She looks over at Keith as she rifles through the two drawers that have been allocated to her person, and which hold all of her belongings. “Nerc says you forbade the paladin from speaking to him. He’s feeling very insulted.”

Keith snorts. “Nerc is a pest and he’ll get over it. He’s just upset he can’t embarrass me in front of Lance—wait—we’re not—he’s not my—we’re just friends.”

“Lance,” she says, strongly accented in her mouth, as though she’s testing the word out on her tongue for any obvious kinks. She nods, satisfied. Asks, “You give all your friends your lion, just like that, do you?”

“It’s not like that,” Keith insists, as his cheeks begin to warm. He crosses his arms, a defensive habit he hasn’t attempted to correct since his first foster family and second social worker. “I didn’t give him anything. Red—she chose him on her own.”

“And kept him, too, it appears. Perhaps she sensed your affection for him, then,” says Seneev, “as I do in this moment.”

Keith scoffs, for lack of anything less incriminating to do. Embarrassed, he turns to leave, says, “I don’t have time for this—”

Her tail, a scaly and shimmering blue-violet, whips out, curling around his wrist and halting any further movement. “Keith,” she says, her scarred face abruptly serious. “A slice of advice: you cannot appeal to Kolivan with emotion. Tame your tongue, and wash down the anger. He is a creature of logic. Be sure to let him know you and your...friend...will be making yourselves useful elsewhere.”

Keith shakes his wrist free, then nods curtly.

Seneev sighs like she knows this is the most she’ll get out of him. “Debriefing at twenty-one hundred hours. I’m sure you won’t be missed during morning drills.”

“Got it,” says Keith, then pauses with one foot out the door. “Uh. Thanks.”

“Kiss your blue-red paladin for me, will you?” she says, smiling something wicked at him as she activates her four-eyed mask and tugs her hood up. She tilts her face at a devious angle. “And try to have a little fun while you’re out, hm? Sol knows you need it.”

He’s already out the door and rolling his eyes by the time a peal of laughter has sounded from their shared bedroom. It follows him for several feet as he winds his way down dark halls, past wall sconces whose flames glow a deep purple.

On his way to the nearest elevator bank, he passes a bevy of boisterous shoulders, though their whoops and crows do little to distract Keith from his current objective. Several swat at him along the way, whistling loudly through matte-black masks as news of Lance’s arrival spreads. Keith grits his teeth and trudges on.

One soldier in particular—Evit, who’s rail-thin and quiet as death—leans in on his way to the communal showers, says, low and cautious, “Kolivan was on his way down to Ground Level Zero, last I saw. Make haste, kid. Doesn’t look too good for you or your companion.”

“Shit,” Keith curses, easing into a casual jog as the last of the soldier’s jeers fade out.

He catches an empty elevator seconds before its doors click shut and quickly punches in the 12-digit access code for Level Zero, where all of the Blade’s most valuable vessels are kept docked. The keypad gives a beep in the affirmative and so begins his slow descent.

It’s a few long minutes after that before he’s anywhere near his desired level—a few long minutes that he mostly spends contemplating the consequences of Lance’s surprise drop-in, with varying degrees of worry. Then, when Keith has just about paced a restless hole into the floor, the elevator hisses to a stop.

He pauses there like that, waiting.

“Ground Level Zero reached,” a computerized voice murmurs. “Please hold for identity scan.”

“It’s me, Keith,” he growls under his breath, fruitless though it is.

“Excessive movement detected. Please hold for identity scan,” the voice repeats.

“Why do we have to—every time,” Keith says, holding still, face tilted up and scowling.

“Identity authenticated,” the voice confirms seconds later. “You may proceed, K234-8560.”

The doors part for Keith with a near-silent purr and then he’s peering out into the deserted, low-lit hangar. His eyes pass swiftly over all the unmoving rows of spacecrafts.

And then, there...Red’s monstrous girth, sandwiched between a small watercraft and Kolivan’s intelligence airliner. And lower, Keith thinks, as his heart rate climbs, leaning coolly against her foreleg, is Lance. Like an inverted reflection of the Naxzela Lance of last night. He’s without uniform, hands jammed inside the pockets of his green jacket, and he’s got Pidge’s old headphones on. He nods idly along to something Keith can’t hear, eyes trained on the untied laces of his left sneaker. His blue helmet, the only piece of armor he seems to have brought with him, is held reverently between hip and forearm.

Keith feels his breath catch at the sight and has to forcibly remind himself that he’s not staring down a desert mirage, that Lance won’t wink out of existence up close and at exactly the wrong angle. He’s real. Not a pipe dream. Real boy. Blue and breathing.

And beautiful, Keith’s brain adds, almost unwillingly.

“And beautiful,” Keith mutters ruefully as he approaches at a silent soldier’s tread, and then he has to repress a big, dumb smile.

Real. Lance is here and real and waiting for Keith and he’s so beautiful it almost hurts to look. Keith bites the inside of his cheek till he tastes copper.

Across the way, Lance scuffs the toe of his sneaker against the ground and starts up a jolly whistle, bangs in his eyes and head bent low, still completely unsuspecting. His hips begin a slow sway and then, without warning, he’s doing a doo-wop hum and murmur-singing in a voice that’s more than halfway decent, “Oh, what a day. Oh, what a day...hoooooooo. Oh, what a day. Oh, what a day. When we fell in l—AH! Keith!”

“Hey,” Keith says, and here, he can’t help the involuntary smile his mouth offers up. He only just manages to bite back a laugh. Without breaking eye contact, he stops Lance’s rolling helmet, where he’d dropped it during his scare, with the heel of his foot.

Lance shoves his headphones aside and the distant murmur of his music hits the air. What a lovely couple, someone croons, to dreamy scat-backing. Lance fumbles for his handheld, nearly dropping that too, and shuts his music off with wide eyes. “Uh,” he says. “Hey. You—you’re—you made it.”

“This is my current place of residence,” Keith says archly. “You’re basically standing on my front lawn. I could have you tried for illegal trespassing, you know.”

At this, Lance’s mouth twitches with the suggestion of barely-swallowed amusement. “Oh, yeah, ‘cause I’m so sure the Marmora justice system is super concerned with benevolent little paladins like me.”

Little, Keith thinks with an internal snort of laughter. He trails a look down Lance’s incessant legs, then back up, says, “You’d be surprised.”

Lance’s ears go pink. He laughs, but it comes out dissonant, awkward. Then he’s scratching his neck, saying, “Nice save there, by the way, with my…”

Keith looks down at the blue helmet still caught beneath the sole of his boot. Nonchalantly, he kicks it up into the air, as though it’s a soccer ball and not highly-valuable Altean technology, and catches it, mid-air and one-handed. He holds it out to Lance with a raised brow.

“Okay,” says Lance, slowly. “Now you’re just showing off, you little jerk.”

Keith grins and shoves the helmet into Lance’s chest, right over his beating heart. “Take it or leave it.”

Lance grabs hold and leans in, grinning back. He says, “I’ll take it. Thanks ever so much, teensy-weensy Keith.”

Keith’s eyes narrow and he holds on tighter, smile growing in size. “Two inches. Barely. And I can still deck you, I bet.”

“Mhm,” Lance hums, royally pleased. “I hope that helps you sleep at night when I’m allowed on the next alien super-coaster and you’re not ‘cause of height restrictions. And to think you have Galra genes on your side!”

Keith opens his mouth to hurl something back, desperate to continue with this line of banter, when someone in their immediate vicinity—someone who his senses have failed to pick up on, he thinks, cursing Lance for being so distracting—clears their throat. It’s a kind of throat-clearing at once familiar to Keith, one that his ears have become intimately attuned to in these last few months.

Keith shoves away from Lance immediately, wiping his face clean. He stands at attention, cheeks burning with a sudden and fierce shame. Shame, at having been caught out, playing the flirt for a former teammate on Marmora property. On Marmora time.

“Keith,” says Kolivan, with an edge. Then, disdainfully: “And you.”

The humor leaves Lance’s face like water down a drain. He stares over Keith’s shoulder, says, “Hey, back at you, boss. Name’s Lance, in case it’s slipped your mind. Your super cool, very helpful ally in this war.”

Keith shoots Lance a warning glance, but his blue eyes are trained on Kolivan and unshrinking.

It makes Keith feel a little funny, like Lance has absorbed some of his red paladin-brand fighting spirit through sheer shared-lion osmosis. He wonders if that’s scientifically possible, then makes a mental note to ask Hunk and Pidge about it at some point. But no...more likely, Lance has simply come into his own, without Keith there to witness it.

That, he thinks, hurts a lot more than the alternative.

“I don’t know the meaning of this visit, paladin—which, incidentally, is against Marmora protocol and could have been executed by way of video or plain-text transmission—but Keith has duties to attend to,” Kolivan says. “Tell me the meaning of this, or see your way out.” He pauses expectantly. “Well? What are your intentions with my soldier…? If you have none, it would be my pleasure to see you escorted home.”

“I...intentions?” Lance repeats incredulously, voice rising, and he takes two generous steps forward, like he’s all of a sudden spoiling for a fistfight. Keith intercepts him halfway to Kolivan, hands raised and ready. “You don’t own Keith. He’s his own person and he’s got friends elsewhere. You can’t just keep him here against his will. That’s not how a team works.”

They’re Shiro’s words, at their core, Keith realizes with a start, and coming out of Lance’s mouth, in that reedy, resentful tone of voice, they feel far more dangerous. Keith swallows at air, appalled. How long has it been, he wonders, since Lance last used that voice on him? And when did he stop?

“Friends have little to no place in war,” Kolivan returns, face stolid as stone. “Allies, perhaps…”

“Friendship wins wars,” Lance says, as though with his dying breath. “Friends keep you alive. Although, come to think of it, maybe you don’t know much about that, considering—”

“Lance,” Keith admonishes quietly. He grips Lance by the collar of his jacket, shoves him backwards where he’s shoving forward, his blue eyes intent on Kolivan’s considerable bulk. “Lance! C’mon. I’m supposed to be the one with a temper here, right? Deep breath. Think about who you’re picking a fight with.”

Lance inhales deeply through his nose and takes one last savage look at Kolivan. Then he blinks down at Keith, as though he’s just come out of a daze. He goes abruptly pliant beneath Keith’s palms, allows himself to be pushed the rest of the way to Red, till the two of them are under her fierce protection completely.

Red, for her part, immediately crouches low, hackles raised. He and Lance are thrown in shadow where her enormous head looms above them. She gives the ground her snarl and her eyes glimmer an unamused warning down at Keith and Kolivan both. Watch yourself, her face seems to say to Kolivan, and to Keith: be careful where you point your men.

It should leave a bitter taste in his mouth, he thinks, the manner with which she’s taken Lance under her wing—deeply possessive in that instinctual way Keith is with the small collection of people he’s come to let himself love. Instead, it brings a pleased warmth to his face, like he’s earned a cynical parent’s approval.

He shoots her a look, tries to say, I know, I get it. I want him safe too.

Red’s presence in the back of his mind simmers, then calms. Her back uncurls infinitesimally.

Relieved, Keith turns to meet Kolivan’s eyes for the first time since this exchange began.

“I know I have duties,” Keith begins.

Kolivan stares back, waiting. His face is a blank canvas. It’s something Keith’s always envied him—his ability to compartmentalize all the dangerous, red-hot feelings he has, from his responsibilities as a soldier and a general. His ability to wipe clean the remnants of those red-hot feelings, wherever they may shine through.

Keith has always fought to keep his mask in place. For most of his life, he’s been relatively successful at it. But there are always these tiny, awful moments when the excess bleeds through, when he knows his eyes have gone vicious, his mouth an open flame. When someone else is looking on, catching each of his secrets as they pass loudly and clumsily through him.

He’s still trying to figure out how to separate boy from soldier, or soldier from boy, where they’re joined at the hip.

“But Team Voltron needs me around,” Keith goes on, and he hides all the boyish yearning in his voice behind the soldier in him. “Not permanently, just...every once in a while. Physically, I mean. I can’t connect with the lions through video or plain-text transmissions. There’s maintenance to be done in person. The...the Black Lion still doesn’t trust Shiro fully, not since we got him back, and I’m the one she tends to defer to. Allura...she also wants me present, in person, for strategy meetings, to corroborate Blade blueprints with Voltron’s. Coran thinks the team needs extra combat training, too, and wanted me to see if I could come in for...demonstrations.”

A beat of silence.

“And your old team will substantiate these claims if I check in with them?” Kolivan says.

“I’m here to substantiate right now,” Lance snaps.

“Yes,” Keith says, ignoring Lance. It’s not a lie. His team would do anything for him, he thinks, heart squeezing painfully. They’ve let him go before and he knows they won’t hesitate to reel him back in, in increments, if it’s what he wants. “I’ll do my level best not to neglect my duties here. Seneev will tell me if I miss anything, and—and I’ll return immediately if there are any emergency missions or meetings that happen while I’m gone.”

Kolivan’s jaw pulses with what seems to be immense restraint. “How much?”

Keith blinks. Once, twice. “What?”

“Time. How much time do you need?” Kolivan asks. He sounds resigned. “Per movement, or phoeb.”

Keith says, “I—”

“Two,” Lance cuts in from behind him. Keith startles, turning to send him a wide-eyed look. In return, Lance winks, quick and fleeting. “Two quintants per movement, preferably consecutive. That oughta do the trick. Right, Keith?”

“Uh,” Keith says. He turns back to Kolivan. “Yeah. Yes. Weekends with Team Voltron would...um, be good. Adequate, I mean.”

Kolivan narrows his eyes, lets them travel suspiciously between Keith and Lance for several tense seconds. He says, “I’ll expect you back for evening debriefings. Transportation is not the Blade of Marmora’s concern. At the first sign that this arrangement has become a liability, political or otherwise, privileges will be revoked or you will be asked to leave the organization. Effective immediately.”

Somehow, Keith can sense the disapproval and protest radiating from Lance, so he reaches an instinctive hand back and presses his gloveless fingers forward till they meet t-shirt and flesh. He waits. A set of teeth clacks shut. Keith represses a smile and lets go.

“Understood,” he says, forcing all the excess inside him back and away.

Blank canvas, he thinks, and scrubs his face clean.

“Cool,” Lance interjects loudly. “Cool, cool, cool. So, are we good then? Everything cleared up? Will any extra wily Marmorites do me bodily harm if I choose to throw Keith over a shoulder and haul ass out of here now?” At the look Keith sends him, Lance grins and holds his palms up. “Totally joking, buddy. Not that I couldn’t lug a couple of you around these days—been doing a lot of weight training since you left, just so you know. Speaking of...remind me to challenge you to an arm-wrestling match when we get back to the Castle. For science. Um, after all the important, official-sounding business, of course.”

Keith quashes the dual-urge to grin back and roll his eyes. Blank canvas.

“A final word, before you depart,” Kolivan says, his gaze unwavering where it’s still fixed on Keith.

“Right. You can head up without me,” Keith says to Lance, who sends him a wary nod and waits for Red to lower her head, jaw falling open for him, before slowly ascending her ramp.

Keith feels yanked, in this moment more than ever, in two separate directions simultaneously.

Red growls unhappily in the back of his mind, her connection to him momentarily flaring icy-hot. Like a flush, he can feel her affection for Lance spreading down his skin. Can see the bright, wheeling warmth of the boy, like a dark-winged sparrow taking flight, the way Red has eaten it up in the months following Keith’s removal.

She purrs, guiding Keith towards the flicker of fondness and possession she carries for Lance, and his humor, and emotional generosity, and endless determination. It briefly coalesces with the much deeper well of love she’s kept for Keith since that first moment she swallowed him from the brink of death.

A flame to a dark pool of water. Two yanks towards opposite ends of the galaxy.

There are many kinds of desire. The words, conjured by his former lion, rise up in Keith unbidden. Red sends him a feeling of cool understanding. It is okay to favor one over the other, and as she says it, his eyes land on Lance’s waiting silhouette, his arms held akimbo, hip cocked. The promise of home, in the way that he beckons Keith forward with the small smile he wears.

Keith takes a reflexive step in their direction—towards his old lion and one half of her desires—then stops, face flushing at his own obviousness. His loyalties, laid bare.

Kolivan, whose keen eyes miss nothing, watches this conflict unfold in silence. “Keith,” he finally settles on.

A warning, then.

Keith lifts his chin and waits, jaw locked. Body half-turned. He wears his impatience like armor in this moment, he knows, but no part of him attempts to conceal it. For once, he willingly lets it bleed through. The battle in him burns hotter.

“Don’t let this paladin become a distraction,” Kolivan says, with finality.

For a moment, the words sit like that, held taut between the two of them. Then Kolivan is turning and striding for the elevator bank, where he disappears inside a waiting elevator without preamble. Keith watches the doors slide shut, his cheeks warm. He swallows and starts up Red’s ramp, wiping his face clean for a second time. Here, it’s still instinct to hide himself away from Lance, to stash all the excess between two layers of brick wall.

It’s infinitely easier, though—to forget about the excess altogether—when the light catches Lance’s smile up close, where it has refused to dim. Keith stares, distracted, until Lance begins hauling him up and into Red’s cockpit like he’s giving a tour to a new pair of eyes, instead of the exact opposite. Keith follows helplessly after him, watching Lance’s mouth brighten in degrees.

“That was so—you, out there—just...I mean...I knew you were quick on your feet, but I didn’t think…” Lance pulls Keith to a stop at Red’s dashboard. He sets his hands on Keith’s shoulders and shines him an award-winning smile, like he’s congratulating him on some impossible feat. “Was that speech out there pre-prepared or were you just making things up as you went?”

Keith huffs a tiny, pleased laugh. “Ad lib. Thanks.”

“Hm. Not half-bad, for someone of your broodiness and generally short stature,” Lance says, grinning.

Keith rolls his eyes, says, “I’m ignoring that. And...you weren’t exactly terrible, either.”

“Wow, thank you for that ringing vote of confidence, Keith,” Lance teases, drawing his hands down like he means to straighten Keith’s—nonexistent—lapels. Then his brow furrows and he paints a path down Keith’s body with his eyes. He says, “What are you wearing?”

“What?” Keith looks down at himself, and quickly realizes he’d abandoned his armor in favor of booking it for Ground Level Zero like a bat out of hell. He’s in nothing but his high-collared, form-fitting undersuit and leather boots. “Oh, um,” he says, crossing his arms self-consciously. “I was kind of in a rush to get down here before Kolivan, so I left most of my armor behind. I wasn’t sure if I’d need it, anyway, with what we’ll be doing...whatever it is we’re doing.”

“Right, right, right. My fault for springing this on you out of nowhere, I guess,” says Lance, and he drops his hands.

Keith can feel a mortified flush slowly creeping up his neck.

Then Lance starts shrugging out of his jacket, and he’s saying, “Well, you can borrow my jacket, if you want? I mean...if it’d be more comfortable for you that way,” like it’s no skin off his nose. He adds, “It’s pretty cold in your little lady, too, contrary to what she’d have you believe.”

Keith accepts the proffered jacket in a stunned silence. He stares down at all the acres of dark green fabric held between his bare hands, the way it’s still got residual warmth clinging to its crevices from Lance’s body heat because he apparently runs like a goddamn furnace, how he can smell Lance on it and he hasn’t even put it on yet.

He feels an animal laugh surge through him and has to resist the urge to flip his former lion the bird.

“I get it if it’s not your thing…” Lance says, scratching at a stray cowlick on the top of his head. Probably interpreting Keith’s reluctance as a polite refusal, or worse—revulsion. “I know you’re probably into more of a cropped style. And leather, obviously.” A snort. “Uh, yeah, sorry. Mine’s a work jacket. I think it’s actually designed to fend off bad winds, so it’s pretty warm. Nice and lightweight. You won’t overheat in it, either. Leather has to get really warm when you wear it out in the sun, right? Mine’s a hand-me-down. From my older brother Marco, um...so it might be a little…”

Keith tugs the jacket on, adjusting it to his liking. It feels like a warm hug, only looser. He sniffs discreetly at the collar as he zips it closed, inhaling a lungful of Lance’s scent—the medicinal tang of all the generic soaps offered back on the Castle, and something sweeter beneath that, like cinnamon, or sweat. He breathes a laugh at the finished sight of himself, shoves the sleeves of the jacket back where they’re eating his hands up in length, then chances a look at Lance.

“...big on you,” Lance murmurs.

“It’s warm. Like you said,” Keith observes, satisfied. He shoves his hands into the pockets, feeling around lint, spare coins from all manner of alien currency systems, something that might be a tube of chapstick. He gives Lance a small smile of gratitude. “Thanks.”

“Uh. Yeah,” says Lance, then clears his throat furiously.

His eyes, thinks Keith—distantly and with no little amount of confusion—are nothing but pupil. Two thin circlets of blue, and then all bleeding black.

Keith glances away, overwhelmed by the sight, and lays a curious palm to Red’s chair. The leather is cool to the touch beneath his fingers, though it warms slightly at the physical contact, like her fixtures are aware of him and happy to feel an old pilot’s hand again.

“Hey,” Keith whispers, and it’s as though he can sense Red’s lifeforce thundering here in her head, where the essence of her fire flows the strongest. A river of red, as far as the eye can reach. “Been a while since we’ve seen each other like this, huh?”

She answers with a cheerful rumble and he gets the feeling she’d be kneading her claws in contentment right about now if she could.

Keith shuts his eyes. “Me too.”

Their connection hasn’t felt this strong since...well, since Keith was her one true paladin and Lance was Blue’s. Something soft and bruised within Keith aches and he knows without moving a muscle that it’s showing clear as day all over his face—his longing. His regret. His pain, split open like faulty fruit. He breathes his way through it, thinks: if anyone will understand this, it’s Lance, who once swore by the Blue Lion like he’d been legally bound to her.

Let him see.

Keith’s brow knits tighter with tension where his body itches to resist the command, to disobey Red’s telepathic order.

There is conflict in the Blue one too, is the rebuttal Red sends his way. You are not without solidarity. A pause, as she feels them both over. He would like you to let go. He does not want you to feel ashamed.

I know, I’m trying, Keith thinks back. It hurts like a physical lesion. He puts his forehead to the seat’s headrest and breathes through his nose. In, out. In, out. Then he he forces a chuckle through his teeth at the idea of himself. He’d thought this loss little more than a flesh wound and here it sits on the skin of his body, gaping and infected.

“Hey...” Lance finally says, like he’s testing the waters with the toe of a foot. “Listen, uh. You can take her for a spin if you want, alright? I won’t even charge you extra for it. And I’m kind of lousy at maneuvering in and out of your homebase, anyway. Ask Red if you don’t believe me—she’s got the bruises to prove it.”

Keith pries his eyes open and angles an incredulous look at Lance. He thinks: are you actually so noble that you’d let your sworn rival back into the seat of the lion he let you keep? Then, as he drinks in the look of open patience and sympathy on Lance’s face, realizes, yes. Lance is exactly the kind of noble to perform a volte-face in thanks for the lion and position on Team Voltron Keith’s let him keep.

“She’s yours now, you know,” Keith insists, head still resting against her seat.

“Dunno, dude,” Lance says. He leans back against her nearest wall, his fists finding their way into the pockets of his jeans in the absence of his omnipresent jacket. He shrugs goodnaturedly. “She still feels pretty hung up on you.”

At this, Keith gives a disbelieving laugh. “You say that like—”

Lance arches a brow. “Like I’m her rebound? I mean, I kinda am, to be fair.”

“What?” Keith pushes off the seat and turns to send Lance a long look of defiance. “Are you saying? How can you even—you—you’re her comeback. She’ll tell you so herself. She’s not tolerating you, Lance. That’s not like—” Her. Or me, he thinks. Not like us. We wouldn’t give you the time of day unless we really wanted you. “That’s not this lion, trust me. If she chose you, it’s because you brought what I did to the table and then some.”

Lance stares at Keith in a blank-faced silence for all of three seconds. Then he’s tilting forward at the waist and laughing down at the tongues of his sneakers. His face, from the small glimpse Keith is allowed, looks suddenly flush with pleasure. “Much better, Kogane,” says Lance, when he’s standing at his full height again, his mouth a long, curving line, “than ‘leave the math to Pidge,’ I’ve gotta say. We’ll make a leader out of you yet.”

“I was just being honest,” Keith says, defensive.

“Your honesty is usually a lot meaner,” says Lance, smiling. He chucks his helmet at Keith, whose arms shoot forward and close around it automatically.

Keith looks down at the piece of blue-toned technology in his hands, eyes widening. “I—”

When Lance nods at Red’s waiting seat, he’s got on the relaxed expression of a man lending an expensive sports car to a dear friend for a test drive. He hooks a hand around a nearby piece of piping, says, “Bring us home, dude.”

It feels a bit silly just then, settling into the familiar grooves of Red’s seat in Lance’s blue paladin helmet and giant green jacket. Like Keith is nothing but a kid playing at a pilot. Like he’s Lance’s protégé, or high school sweetheart.

He should feel sillier, he thinks. Or maybe flustered, under Lance’s watchful eye. But Keith has been in this kind of hotseat a million times, and then some. He’s performed class-wide demonstrations in simulation ships for aerial instructors ten times as critical. He’s navigated the Zorlar asteroid belt all by his lonesome. Piloting Red while Lance watches is like warming a body by a fire. It’s like sliding a hand into an old glove made singularly yours over a period of months.

It’s coming alive again, deliberately and without remorse. Keith preens beneath the attention.

He belts himself snug and then inhales in surprise as the seat slides forward before locking into place at Red’s dashboard, which lights up under his careful ministrations and wandering hands. He checks her controls, just for the hell of it. Flicks through her maps. Gets a feel for the state of her core temperatures. Touches a finger to her gravity and element readers.

“Yeah, I’ve missed this,” he says, over Red’s sudden growl of impatience. He flexes his fist against her throttle, his heart throbbing happily. “How you hangin’ in there, Red?”

At this, she snaps forward for a roar so deafening, every spacecraft lining the Blade’s hangar gives a full-body shudder in response.

Keith’s mouth cracks open on a smile of pure joy and he tips his head back in helpless surrender, letting a laugh bubble up and out. He’s sure he’s grinning something goofy at Lance, but can’t find it in himself to care. He wishes there was a language precise enough to deliver the kind of thanks Lance deserves. Wishes Keith had a mouth clever enough to speak it.

Lance’s head is cocked where he’s still holding onto Red’s piping. His gaze is almost soft on Keith’s face. There is only the barest hint of envy in his expression, which for Lance, feels miraculous. “How does she feel?” he asks quietly.

“Like a live wire,” Keith says, exuberant, and he sends her careening forward, through the hangar’s automatic bay doors.

The rumble of Red beneath him feels not unlike the growl of his old hovercycle’s engine, that night he’d wrapped himself in his Goodwill riding jacket and made a break for the Garrison’s infirmary. Then, looking for signs of extraterrestrial life, verification of the Blue Lion’s existence, and instead coming up with his long-lost, presumed-to-be-dead mentor, and three bright-eyed Garrison cadets fresh off the landing pad. This morning, with one of those very cadets at his left shoulder.

That night, he recalls, the five of them had crowded around Blue’s glowing dashboard, alight with awe, back when Lance had been more nuisance than physical ache, and Keith had been only peripherally aware of him, in that reflexive way he is with boys uniquely his type—tall, and warm-toned, beachy almost, with sly, smirking mouths.

Keith thinks about how he'd met Lance’s furious gaze across Shiro’s unconscious body just before then, in that Garrison hospital, while distant recognition washed slowly over him. How he’d flicked Lance a look as they lugged Shiro to Keith’s bike, when Lance wasn’t looking. How Keith had raked his eyes over dark stretches of brown skin, long lashes, oh so blue eyes, almost luminescent in the desert’s dark.

And the resulting warmth that stole over Keith, second only to the knee-jerk irritation he felt. The subsequent incredulity.

How had this kid flown under his radar unnoticed? How had Keith missed him, all those many miles of long legs? And then, of course, because they were in different pilot divisions, and Lance had only ascended in rank in Keith’s absence, if he was to be believed.

This new version of Lance—the Lance of today—is ten times as terrible for all the ways he strips Keith of his most hard-fought defenses, offers up breezy, toll-free smiles without hesitation, waits for Keith at his place of residence with his old lion, offers him his coat, and helmet, and trust, like a rom com cut-out from the eighties throwing rocks at a crush’s glass window in the dead of night.

If he could have Lance one way or another, Keith thinks he’d have him like this—shoulder-to-shoulder and sharing at the helm of an old, well-worn ship, with Lance loose and kind and warm around the mouth, in old, scruffy, earthen clothes. Looking like a dream, or a nightmare designed to make Keith suffer endlessly.

But that isn’t the Lance that Keith has come to know, and understand. It’s not the Lance who is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, still clamoring for even the slightest indication that Allura might like him back, who would sooner give himself up to Galra forces than consider Keith in that way, the way that haunts all of Keith’s waking hours, and even some of the dreaming.

If Keith could have him, he would.

But he can’t, so he ignores the set of wild blue eyes hot on the side of his face and soldiers on, knuckles white against Red’s controls. Friendship is a far cry from what he wants with Lance, and even that he doubts is real at times, but if it’s all he gets to have, Keith will suck it up and find a way to be grateful.

For the entire ride back, he lets himself pretend it’ll get easier with time.

• • •

Lance’s bedroom aboard the castleship, once they’ve safely docked Red and said their hellos to the team amidst the negotiation pandemonium still unfolding, is both everything and nothing like Keith expects.

It’s a quiet, carefully-contained habitat of chaos, and the walls are a riot of color. The whole thing is maybe more than Keith expected of Lance and his aesthetic tendency towards order and cleanliness. But Lance navigates the clutter with the kind of learned grace that says everything has a place and he knows exactly where that place is.

“Right, so,” Lance says, as he sidesteps a pile of neatly-folded laundry, “welcome to my humble abode. Sorry for the mess. I’d pretend it’s not usually like this, but my mom always said lying is unbecoming of the future President of the United States.” Then he looks up at Keith with an expectant glint in his eye, like he’s hoping the humor in that is well-received.

Keith feels his mouth give a twitch. “I thought lying was part of being a politician. You’d make a good leader, though.”

“What? Me?” Lance ducks his head, but it looks suspiciously like he’s smiling. “Nah. Uh, but feel free to make yourself at home. You can look around, if you want.”

Oh, Keith wants.

He strays first to the west-facing wall, where it’s covered from floor-to-ceiling in Lance fanart. The giant collection speaks to a narcissism Keith has already seen and come to terms with in Lance, but the meticulous arrangement and the varying degrees of artistic talent are maybe more endearing than they should be. Like Lance doesn’t care about the quality of the art so much as the thought his fans have put into their creations. Like he’s happy to display even the ugliest stick-person version of himself, if it means showing those fans appreciation.

Keith drinks in every interpretation of Lance, in and out of color—Lance at Blue’s feet, Lance jammed between the Red and Blue Lions, vying for his affection, Lance posing with a rifle, and sniper, and two pistols, Lance at the beach, under the rain, with an arm hooked around Hunk’s wide-set shoulders.

In one drawing, titled RED PALADIN, a rather impressive version of Lance and Keith are standing back-to-back, the two of them grinning with their teeth while Red looks on from above, and seeing the image proudly displayed alongside all the others is for a moment so humiliatingly gratifying that Keith can’t tear his eyes away.

He shakes himself and moves onto Lance's desk. The piece of furniture, fashioned from Altean alloy, is plastered with relics and keepsakes from all the planets they've ever visited and/or helped liberate. One drawer in particular, after Keith has confirmed that he's allowed to open it, is filled to the brim with tiny baggies and jars of what looks to be gravel. 

“What is all this?” Keith asks, picking up the nearest jar and giving it a twirl, till he locates its label. ARUS is scrawled across it in Lance’s neat handwriting. Another: BALMERA. OLKARION. PUIG. And every jar is filled with gravel, or silt, or mud. In one case, a gaseous element with a green-blue quality to it.

Lance peers inside the drawer, then visibly brightens. “Oh! Those are natural environment samples from every planet we’ve ever visited.”

Keith’s brow furrows. He’s never taken Lance for the scientific type. “For what?”

“Well,” Lance says, slowly, “to show my family when I’m back home, I guess? I keep a field journal so I don’t forget anything, but that’s not really the same as seeing pieces of a planet up close. My dad’s a naturalist, so I’m sort of familiar with the process. Pidge says it’ll probably earn me a fortune, too, once we’re back on Earth. I’ll be hailed as a hero in the scientific community.” He smiles to himself, thumbing a small bag of greyish sand labelled EREIRREXE. “So I’ll show my family when I’m giving them the run-down, and it’ll be like they were there with me, and then I’ll turn everything into some non-profit, maybe. Not the government, because Hunk says I can’t trust that, after everything. Um, but my dad’ll help me find a home for these little guys when I’m back, I’m sure.”

“Oh,” Keith says, with a quiet awe.

“Yeah,” Lance says back, equally quiet. “Anyway...I think I’m gonna grab a shower since I didn’t get to take one last night. Or this morning. I was kinda in a hurry to get you back here to everyone. Sorry about that, by the way. Um, do you mind? I can ask Coran to find something for us to do, so that’ll be ready by the time I’m done.”

“That’s fine,” Keith says, still picking his way through all the jars with a warm curiosity. “Oh, you...” he says, looking up when Lance makes no move to leave. “You want me to—uh, I guess I can go wait in my room while you—”

Lance shakes his head. “No, no, it’s cool. I’m not some ultra-private hermit like some people”—he lowers his brows into something taunting here—“or anything. You can chill here till I’m done. I just...I dunno, I kinda figured you’d find all this old junk boring.”

“I’m not a hermit. And you’re one of the most interesting people I know,” Keith says plainly. He picks up a jar of what appears to be ocean water of some kind. Presses it to his ear and gives it a gentle shake. Hums. Then, when that garners no response, looks up.

Lance is pursing his lips, arms crossed over his chest. At Keith’s look, he scratches at his ear where it’s steadily turning a brilliant shade of red. “Oh,” he says eloquently.

Keith raises a brow. “What?”

“Nothing! Shut up!” Lance says. He snags his blue bathrobe from its hook, then whirls with great dignity. “You break it, you buy it, Keith!”

“I won’t…” he begins, as the doors to Lance’s room slam shut behind the boy in question. “...break anything. Have a good shower. No, that’s weird. Shut up, Keith.”

He turns back to Lance's desk to finish up his perusal, shutting the topmost drawer and moving onto the next. He picks up one of Lance’s aforementioned field journals from a modest stack of reading material—mostly comics printed in alien languages—and flips to a random page. A large block of text in dark blue ink stares back at Keith.

So, SEIRDNUS. It’s a dwarf planet (like, would put Snow White to shame levels of dwarf). Sparsely inhabited, as far as I can tell. Smallest object in the LEAR star system. 1 trip around LEAR’s sun = 5.4 Earth years. Moon-like in terrain and texture. Local population has created something of an encampment along near side of planet. Coran says the encampment exists to perform government-sanctioned lunar work. We weren’t there for very long. Just long enough to drop off medical supplies for distribution among their system. SEIRDNUS is basically neutral territory, and the LEAR star system is apparently very “politically volatile” right now. So...space Switzerland, only maybe not so chocolate-obsessed? I call it an anti-beach, because it’s like the exact opposite of paradise. Allura said that’s offensive and not to mention anything of the sort to the representatives we spoke to. They were vaguely humanoid and looked like they could use some sun. According to Allura, this was also highly offensive, not to mention scientifically inaccurate. If Keith were around, I know he’d side with me. Temperatures were pretty cold, even when my suit made thermal adjustments. Made me miss Varadero times ten billion. :((((((( SUMMER I MISS YOOOOUUUUUU ☀ ♡

Beside this, Lance has sketched a tiny cartoon version of himself spread out across a towel, with a glob of sunblock slathered over his nose. The sun, whose talking bubble reads, “What’s hotter than being hot?” smiles down at him from above. Cartoon Lance lies with both arms folded behind his head. A pair of aviator goggles rests low on his face. The drawing’s caption—SOON TO BE ME!!!—is so achingly, hopefully Lance in nature that Keith has to swallow against the sudden flood of hurt he feels on his behalf.

He promptly shuts the journal and returns it to its rightful place in the desk drawer, on top of a comic that follows a masked space vigilante and her crime adventures.

Keith spins in a slow circle, makes to absorb the bedroom’s every last detail while he’s still allowed to. From the east-facing wall, an aluminum sign reads, BEWARE OF BLUE PALADIN, except the word BLUE has been slashed out with black marker and replaced with RED. Next to this, Lance has displayed a series of medals and accolades awarded to him by foreign administrations.

At the foot of his bed, his blue lion slippers are ready and waiting, and across his mattress and standard Altean sheets lies a large, elaborately-sewn quilt no doubt gifted to Lance by an overzealous fan or two. Keith fingers the stitching with something almost wistful. He looks slowly over each of the five squares that have been divvied up among the original paladin lineup.

When he sits heavily on the mattress, it’s so he can get a good look at his own square where it’s been mapped out in red and orange thread. He touches the pad of his index finger to the Red lion, curled lovingly around her paladin. Then, the boy sewn in his likeness, sword brandished proudly at his chest.

Keith doesn’t mean to drop off just then, sure that there’s some universal bedroom etiquette he’s violating in doing so, only he gets distracted staring up at the ceiling of Lance’s bunk when he notices the sheet of shiny butcher paper taped to it. Here, Lance has sketched out and labelled something like twenty of the Greek constellations with a tender attention to detail. He’s also drawn Cuba by hand, off to the side, with two big stars stamped along its coast.

Havana and Varadero, probably, Keith thinks, a little sad at the idea that Lance needs these two cities to be the last thing he sees before he falls asleep each night, is attempting to anchor himself to Earth even now, in whatever ways he can. Keith feels his eyes flutter shut.

He dreams, for the first time in maybe all his life, of a nondescript beach back on Earth.

• • •

The first thing Keith notices when he’s awake again is that he’s now wearing Lance’s quilt instead of lying on top of it. The second: he’s curled up against the far corner of the bed, his body a ball of trained discomfort. He’s spent too long sharing beds, with his father and then his foster siblings, and his body has found this fact hard to forget. He has yet to outgrow these kinds of learned instincts, even in sleep. Third: that it’s dark, with only the muted glitter of Lance’s emergency lights to go by.

Keith blinks his dream away and rolls over onto his stomach, feeling around for his handheld. He lurches off the bed as soon as he realizes that he’s slept the day away, is due back at the Blade’s base in less than an hour, then reels back when he steps on something that emits a quiet groan of protest.

Keith says, “Lance?”

“Time ‘s it?” Lance mumbles, from where he’s bundled up on the floor, a balled-up bathrobe wedged under his head in place of a pillow.

The fourth thing Keith realizes is perhaps not so much a secret as it is a cleverly-stashed piece of information. Lance is not, despite all evidence to the contrary, a rude person. In fact, he’s so well-mannered a boy that he decided to remove Keith’s boots for him, set them neatly at the foot of his bed alongside his slippers, drape his quilt across Keith’s unconscious body, and then proceeded to take his nap on the floor of his own bedroom out of polite respect for Keith’s boundaries, or (assumed) need for personal space, or some other such nonsense.

With this revelation comes the truth of it all: Lance is not a rude person, under normal circumstances. He’s just been, for most of the time Keith’s known him, rude to Keith specifically. Lance is so innately courteous that he probably had to rebel against his most base instincts when he decided it was his sworn duty in life to provoke and antagonize Keith for things that were—in Keith’s opinion—out of his control.

And now that Lance has abandoned their long-established rivalry, Keith is left feeling off-balance, wobbly with surprise.

He says, just for confirmation, “Did you—why are you on the floor?”

“You took the bed,” Lance grants, charitable. He’s sitting up now and rubbing at his eyes.

Keith laughs with the shock of it. “You’re such a—I can’t believe you—”

Lance peers up at Keith, his hair sleep-tousled and sticking up adorably in the back. “Do you have to go now?”

“Yeah, since you didn’t wake me,” Keith says as he shoves his feet into his boots. It’s easier to place blame than confront what he’s currently feeling, where it has begun to sweeten into something not unlike honey. “I have a debriefing.”

“You look peaceful when you’re asleep,” Lance says, as a defense. “Keith the revolutionary...becomes Keith the red puppy. What is it that you dream about anyway, hothead? Humor me.”

Keith missteps and almost trips over his own foot. He turns a scowl on Lance, like the warm beam of a flashlight, and is made more irritable by the sight of Lance’s sleepy grin. “Shut up. I’m not a puppy. And none of your business.”

“Mmm, the jury’s still out on that one,” Lance says. “But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. Wouldn’t wanna ruin your ironclad reputation. No promises about the drool you left on my pillow, though. Thanks for that, by the way.”

For a moment, Keith is incapable of speech. He bursts out: “I did not—”

“I have photographic evidence to the contrary, buddy,” says Lance, smirking. He only laughs, gleeful, when Keith flings the pillow in question at his face.

“I’m leaving,” says Keith. “Enjoy the drool, asshole.”

This, ridiculously, seems to make Lance laugh harder. “Wait, wait!”

Keith stops halfway to the door, bottom lip caught between his teeth in an effort to kill the stupid smile he can feel coming on.

“Sorry,” Lance says, as the last of his laughter flees his face. In its place, something quietly earnest takes up residence. “I’ll pick you up at the same time tomorrow?”

“Right. Yeah. Thanks,” Keith says, and thinks, with something almost like panic: shit, shit, shit, I’ve gotta get out of here.

Lance stands and stretches. “Do you need a ride home?”

“No,” Keith says, a little too emphatically. He thinks he might die, or do something rash and regrettable if forced to sit near Lance in a small enclosed space like this for even a second longer. His fight-or-flight response is a scab he itches to pick bloody. “No—thanks. I can fly myself there in Red. She knows her way back, so. I mean...if that’s okay with you. She’s your lion, obviously, and I can have Kolivan send some scouts out with her, just in case. Seneev—my bunkmate—says they’re already reconfiguring the Blade’s security system for our...um, thing. That we’re doing now. So flying to and from should be okay.”

“Fine by me,” Lance says easily, and picks up his bathrobe. He moves to hang it from its hook in his wardrobe, his shoulder brushing Keith’s along the way, in the kind of lax motion that perhaps feels more perilous than it truly is. “Be safe.”

Keith thinks, with growing wrath: are you trying to kill me? Aloud, he says, “Sure. And, Lance?”

Lance twists at the neck to throw him a look of patient curiosity.

“Next time,” Keith begins, and feels his face begin to heat. He firms his jaw and pushes on. “I mean, if I ever...fall asleep on your bed again, you don’t have to…I don’t care if you nap next to me. I’ve shared beds with people my entire life, so it’s not like...I don’t care, is all. I’m used to it.”

Lance frowns, eyes gentling. It makes Keith feel unhinged all over. “Then maybe that means you deserve to have your own bed every once in a while.”

“No,” Keith decides, resolve unwavering. “Being alone...isn’t my first choice.” And he hates how that makes him sound, like he’s fishing for a cuddle buddy and Lance is the first willing participant he’s stumbled upon. His face grows warmer. “I just mean...sharing a bed with someone...someone who I trust...I don’t hate it.”

“Oh,” Lance says softly, eyes widening at the implication, after a tense moment of silence in which Keith can feel the quicksilver pace of his own pulse in his throat. “Okay, well. Fortunately for you, I don’t hate drool.”

“Oh my god,” Keith breathes, and turns to leave the room at once. He can’t swallow his smile fast enough this time. “Never contact me again.”

Lance is laughing full-out, now. “Snoring, maybe! Sleep-talking, or sleepwalking...those might be dealbreakers for me! But drool...now that I can handle! Just promise you won’t accidentally drown me in my sleep, Keith, and I’m sure we can make this work.”

“Goodbye forever,” says Keith.

Lance says, “I look forward to our next joint nap!”

“Delete my number from your handheld,” Keith calls, to musical laughter, as the doors to Lance’s bedroom slide shut on him.

It’s only when he runs into a wide-eyed Matt in the hallway that Keith realizes he’s just been spotted coming out of Lance’s darkened bedroom with a bad case of bedhead, a bright flush stamped on either cheek, and Lance’s oversized green jacket still wrapped around himself. Keith stops short, with the look of a deer caught in headlights on his face.

He says, “I—it’s not what it looks like. I was just—”

“Sure,” Matt says, with something knowing.

Then, he winks.

• • •

The next morning, Coran sends them to a preservation planet in the Dexom star system called Noeg.

Noeg is small in size, its soil rich, and there is the weakest insinuation of a long-dead civilization just beyond its overgrowth. The environment, in all its many greens and golds, seems to have reclaimed what it’s always owned, like a lion finally rearing in rage and beheading a veteran poacher. The planet’s strength is swift and unforgiving like that.

Keith likes the quiet of it. He likes moving through the bowered paths where they’re no longer path, where they’ve become unknowable with new sprouts and creeping weeds, Lance trailing him in a happy silence. He likes traipsing through it all with the hushed knowledge, sitting just below his ribs, that they are two of the only people currently on the planet. That they’ve been granted access to its spring harvest, with the Dexom delegation’s legal permission.

A list of plants—medicinal and edible both, carefully curated by Coran and Hunk in the early hours before they set off for the planet—sits inside the interior pocket of Keith’s riding jacket. He long ago removed it, submitting to Noeg’s insistent heat. The leather now rests heavily around his waist.

Lance, by contrast, is in his full paladin armor this morning, like he and Keith are two warring magnets, always at odds. He looks radiant, crisp. But then, he always does under the light of a new sun, Keith realizes, like a flower come alive again. His skin is already blooming a deeper, darker gold, and the faint emergence of freckles has begun at the bridge of his nose.

Lance does not notice all of Keith’s noticing. He bumbles through the overgrowth with the ineptitude of a fawn, popping moonflower seeds into his mouth from the bulging pocket of his green jacket, returned to him this morning with a half-embarrassed apology from Keith. When prompted about its presence on their mission, he responded with a bright, “Good for stuffing samples inside!” as though that was that. He spits moonflower shells out as they walk, aiming them away from Keith with practiced ease, somehow both elegant and disgustingly animal.

He wears in this moment that effortless and accidental charm that so often enchants Keith, like an unexpected clock to the face. Like summer rain. Sheets of it, gone gold with daylight.

For a while, they wind their way north in a comfortable silence, towards Noeg’s infamous blossom meadows, where its most lush and medicinally-potent blooms thrive. Lance hums nameless tunes most of the way there. Occasionally, he has Keith stop so he can jot something down in his field journal with his blue pen, crouched among the greenery and frowning thoughtfully.

Other times, he orders Keith to pose next to some new and wild alien phenomenon for a photo—crystal caves, sun-bleached trees rotted black at the mouth, the ruined remnants of a stone city peeking out at them past all the overgrown grasses and ivy. And each time, Keith leans lightly against the scenery and slaps on his best deadpan expression, just to be contrary.

“Would it kill you to smile?” Lance squawks after the third or fourth time, from where he’s perched on a large boulder set several feet away. He lowers his handheld in annoyance. “No, really. Will you collapse in agony? Dissolve into a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West? Be honest with me, Keith...will smiling for my photo induce a coma, cured only by true love’s kiss?”

In answer, Keith adds a peace sign to his pose.

“Okay, you little shit,” says Lance, “you’re definitely doing this on purpose!”

Keith quirks a brow. “What gave me away?”

“Is this revenge for last night?” Lance calls. “Know this, Keith: you will pay for your crimes against humanity...in...in more embarrassing photos of your drool! Which I will then sell to the highest bidder! And don’t think there isn’t a market for that kind of thing, because there is! And after that, I’ll use my newfound wealth to dethrone Kolivan, during which point I will become your new boss. Is that what you want? Hm? I will legally change your organization’s name to the Dicks of Marmora, don’t test me!”

Keith’s mouth twitches. He bites his lip against a quiet laugh.

“Ha! His Achilles’ heel, revealed!” Lance says, whooping in victory. He snaps twenty or so photos, in quick succession.

Keith blinks his way through it all. He says, “Okay, that did not count as a smile.”

“By Keith standards, it did!” Lance sings. He climbs down from his boulder and prances his merry way back to Keith with all the smugness of a gold medal-wielding olympian.

“By Lance standards, it didn’t,” Keith returns, and laughs when that immediately wipes the look of self-satisfaction right off of Lance’s grinning face.

Lance makes a stubborn game of trying to get Keith to smile for photos after that, pulling out every weapon in his arsenal—which means Keith suffers through long minutes of terrible puns and appalling Kolivan impressions. By the tail end of it, he’s spent so long trying to stave off his laughter that his body is shaking where it longs to let go. He’s red-cheeked and very nearly crying, leaned up against the gnarled trunk of a collapsed tree with all the strength that he no longer possesses.

Lance, encouraged by this reaction, senses his next opening and seizes it. He points to a vaguely mammal-shaped creature paddling its way down the surface of a nearby stream, and shouts, jubilant, “Grand Theft Otter!”  

Keith, whose resolve has been chipped away at over the last forty minutes, crumples against his tree in a fit of snickers.

“Fool!” Lance crows in delight, snapping endless photos, one after the other. The shutter of his handheld’s camera is loud in the forest. It travels their little grove like an insect’s hissing. “That one didn’t even make sense!”

Keith squeezes his watery eyes shut and laughs all the harder, clutching helplessly at his stomach.

To his chagrin, Lance ends up setting one of the photos from this batch as his handheld’s lockscreen wallpaper. He flashes the screen at Keith in passing, waving it above his head in smug triumph with the long, tree branch-reach of his arm, as if to say, I won and I bet you wish I hadn’t, and Keith glimpses himself in over-sharp, intensely hued reverse—he, leaned up against a dead tree in a boneless heap, his head thrown back, mouth open on a peal of soundless laughter.

He thinks: Lance made me look like that, then feels his face tingle with heat at the thought of the boy flicking his handheld on in the dead of night, in the heart of a crowd a mile deep, in front of Allura, or Hunk, and seeing Keith’s laughing face displayed behind the time. A constant, casual reminder.

Keith’s always thought he looked strange caught in the thick of a laugh. Like his mouth is trying to make sense of a foreign language, lips struggling against new and unfamiliar rules of grammar. Here, he only thinks that he seems to have melted naturally into his surroundings, the stone ruins beneath a blanket of moss, and that he has not gone unseen.

“You should smile more, you know,” Lance says just then, apropos of nothing. He angles his handheld different, studies his new wallpaper for a beat with a look Keith can’t decode, then pockets it. “It changes your whole face. You might not scare off the whole galaxy that way.”

“I like my face how it is, thanks,” Keith snaps. He crosses his arms over his chest just to have something to do with them, feeling stupid.

“It’s a nice face,” Lance agrees, casual, and he stuffs his loose hands inside his jacket pockets, picking up the pace until he’s given Keith his back.

Lance doesn’t wait for a response to this, just starts up a new whistle, this one bright and inoffensive.

• • •

The meadows are a Technicolor tsunami.

They collect dame dollops, nightkills and daybreaths, Noeg mint, wild flustra, bloodshoots, and myriad herbs and alien succulents Keith has no hope of ever pronouncing correctly. He stoops in the dirt, Dexom’s sun beating down on him from above, and demonstrates the correct bend of the hand, feeling silly, his shoulder pressed warmly against Lance’s armor.

Aloud, he says, “We should probably be soaking these before digging them up.” He clears his throat. “That’s how I was taught, anyway.”

“Right,” Lance agrees, watching Keith’s bare hands work at the soil with rapt attention. Keith’s fingerless gloves sit off to the side, for the moment discarded. “To keep the plants hydrated, right?”

“Right,” Keith says. He wipes at his sweaty brow with his wrist, then dives back in with either hand. “So, you should try to keep the rootball in tact with most of this stuff, I think. Most plants need to be transplanted with their soul—soil, I mean. Sorry. That’s just what he...my dad...always used to call it.”

“Oh, hang on, I just remembered...Hunk had me bring along a bunch of supplies for all this,” Lance says, removing from his shoulders an overstuffed black backpack. He begins emptying it of its contents, arranging a series of tiny, pot-shaped containers at Keith’s knees. Then he inhales deeply, like he’s steeling himself, and goes, “Your dad...is he...I mean…”

“He died when I was pretty young, yeah,” Keith says, swallowing hard. He accepts the water bottle Lance offers him without looking up from his work, uncapping it with his teeth and soaking the soil in front of him. “Thanks. The water makes everything a lot easier.”

“I’m sorry,” Lance says, hands dropping into his lap. He fiddles with his fingers for a moment, blue eyes downcast. “I mean...I can’t even imagine what that’d be like. And I used to think divorce was the end of my whole world...”

Keith nods mutely, fingers working at loosening the soil surrounding a cluster of nightkills, whose sealed petals are a vivid pattern of white-black.

Nightkill, when its anthers are isolated and liquefied, becomes a powerful and untraceable poison able to wipe out whole armies at a time, Keith remembers reading off of Coran’s datapad this morning. When combined with its much rarer sister-plant daybreath, the two—known, once fused together, as nightbreath—turn into one of the most effective treatments for laserfire burns and Galra contagions. Daybreath also remains, to this day, the only known cure for nightkill poison. As such, most of daybreath’s kind has been destroyed over the last 10,000 years by Zarkon’s empire, while its sister-plant nightkill continues to serve as a well-cultured poison in most Galra military circles (commonly spread through blade-to-blood contact). Noeg’s version of daybreath—fiercely handled and guarded by the Dexom delegation—is one of the last surviving species, and the universe’s oldest known plant.

Lance murmurs, “What was he like?” into the quiet, then goes beet red, catching himself belatedly. “Shit. Sorry. That’s so—insensitive—I’m—you don’t have to answer that—sorry—”

Keith shrugs and his mouth lifts on one side, involuntary. He gives Lance a look that he hopes conveys exactly how unhurt he feels by this question. “He was...he wasn’t perfect, but he was…” Mine, he thinks, with a stab of retroactive possessiveness. Too little, much too late. “He was all I had for a long time. And I—I loved him, don’t get me wrong. I just...I got the feeling, sometimes...that he didn’t know how to be a dad. Or what to do with me. Not that he was walking on eggshells around me or anything like that, but like...like I confused him. And maybe that’s because I’m part-Galra, I don’t know…”

“It’s like that with a lot of parents, I think, especially when they’re raising you alone,” Lance offers. He holds a pot up for Keith to relocate the nightkills into. “Guesswork, I mean. Especially with kid number one. It’s like taking care of your first puppy, times ten billion. That’s how my dad described it. Hard, but worth it in the end. But your dad...if he took the time to show you how to...how to transplant flowers...he must’ve loved you a lot, Keith.”

Keith feels his eyes go wet and blinks the moisture away. A single stubborn tear leaks free, pearls on the petals of one of his nightkills. He sets them inside the pot, heaping soil in, patting it flat, not looking at Lance all the while. “We were always going on hikes when I was a kid. The outdoors...I think he understood that. He...he was different, whenever he was surrounded by trees.”

He doesn’t know why he’s rehashing the better parts of his childhood for one of his former teammates, only knows that something bodily is occurring within him. The forced loosening of a tongue. He thinks he’d like to be the kind of boy who can impart family secrets to his friends without flinching first, and see them returned, an exchange of memories. He thinks he’d like to let Lance look inside him every once in a while. To desire, and be desired back.

He wants, badly, to be for Lance what Lance is fast becoming for Keith.

It seems an impossible leap, but Keith decides to try in spite of this. He thinks briefly of Iverson sitting him down in his cluttered little office when the day of Keith’s reckoning had finally arrived. How Iverson had leaned back in his chair, arms folded over his paunch, and just looked at Keith with his one working eye—the one Keith hadn’t gotten the chance to hit before the Garrison guards swarmed, like large, grey-suited beetles.

“You know, I see myself in you, kid,” he’d said, which made Keith snort. “A different me, from another lifetime. That’s how I know removal from my institution is the only thing that’ll stop you in your tracks.”

Keith sat unmoving in his chair, a mass of unspeakable rage, and thought: I’ll level your institution to dust before I let you stop me in my tracks. Thought, growing calm: nothing has stopped me so far. Thought: I know my way around the world’s lack of faith.

Now, Keith looks down at Lance’s brown hands and says, “There was this...there was this woodsy area in Texas that we liked to visit, the two of us...and flowers were always sprouting up out of nowhere, all over the place. No one knew who was doing all the planting. My dad called them the Invisible Gardener, and we’d go hunting for them sometimes, with binoculars and walkie-talkies.”

“Ah, and thus, Keith the conspiracy theorist was born,” Lance guesses, sage.

But as he says it, Lance wears the look of some primordial stargazer on his face, after having just discovered the existence of a new planet—completely captivated—and it’s remarkable, and wondrous, and entirely arresting. It disarms Keith at once. He thinks he’d resurrect a hundred half-dead secrets just to prolong it. Just to make it last even a second longer.

Instead, he looks away and rolls his eyes, playing at annoyance. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist. The one theory that I followed turned out to be true and look where that got us.”

Lance bumps shoulders with Keith. He says, “Brought us right here. You ever think about that? Hard not to believe in the magic of Voltron, or the universe, even, when you do. Like, what are the odds that I just so happened to be where you were that night, back on Earth, near the site of those bombs you set off right as you set them off? That I recognized and went after you? I’m not much for conspiracies myself, but the invisible hands of fate...shoving us together so we could find each other and—and make something out of nothing...that, I think I do believe in.” A pregnant pause. And then: “We would have found each other eventually, though, I think. No matter what, I mean. I always got the feeling I was supposed to know you.”

For a moment, Keith says nothing. He is frozen on the cusp of something dangerously forbidden, ashamed at how much he likes the sound of that—this collection of words, arranged just so.

I recognized and went after you.

We would have found each other eventually.

I was supposed to know you.

You ever think about that?

Keith digs his fingers in deeper, harder, savage, flesh to soil, skin to soul, inches away from an unmade poison that has been used for eons to bring down entire armies, even knowing those same fingers will come away muddy, wet with grime. That’s war, he thinks, and says, out loud, “Sometimes,” when really he means, always, and tries not to sound as drunk on pleasure, and bewilderment, and fright, as he feels in this moment.

• • •

In a spill of late afternoon light, Lance unpacks their lunch—thick slices of cheese made from the curds of Kaltenecker’s milk, crackers roughened by low quality grain, a few oddly-colored fruits filched from old alien banquets.

Keith leans his weight against either elbow, face tilted up to Noeg’s sun. He pushes his damp bangs away from his forehead and appraises their handiwork out of the corner of his eye—neat rows of potted plants resting in the shade of a nearby copse of trees, well within their allotted margin, ready for transportation. The sight brings a momentary calm over him.

Beside him, Lance lies back in the grass, his upper body armor long ago removed. The sight of his dark undersuit sans chestplate draws Keith’s curious eye and for a moment he has to fight his way through a bout of retrospective embarrassment, remembering the way he’d shown up to Lance’s lion without any armor yesterday morning. He thinks: if I looked anything like that…, and then forbids himself from finishing the thought, his eyes glued to the lean muscles of Lance’s abdomen, his sinewy shoulders and biceps, showing through the thin black material.

Lance, cheerfully oblivious, peels the skin from a round, rose-colored fruit, one leg crossed over the other, his foot jiggling restlessly. He hums something quiet under his breath, head cocked at an angle. A daybreath flower sits tucked behind his left ear. Earlier, when he’d plucked it up and moved to slide it into the tufts of hair that grow down his temples, Keith had sent him a short look of disapproval, to which Lance said, affecting innocence, “What? They won’t miss one tiny flower.”

“It’s their rarest and oldest surviving species, Lance,” Keith had said, unimpressed.

“Yeah,” Lance shot back, “and it brings out the blue in my eyes, so I’m sure the Dexom delegation will understand my motives of thievery. Besides, we’re still well within our margin. Oh, don’t look at me like that, you little killjoy, I’m pretty sure you stole your fair share of government-owned property back on Earth.”

“That—that’s totally different!” Keith sputtered. "I was trying to uncover the truths of the universe."

Lance smirked and picked a second daybreath flower from a bloom nearby. He gave it an elaborate sniff, then stuck it behind Keith’s right ear with a flourish. “Smells the same,” he said brightly. “That makes two thieves, Kogane. You are now an accomplice to my crime of flower burglary. Should you ever find yourself poisoned by nightkill, however...I think you’ll have reason enough to thank me.”

Keith scowled, touching the pads of his fingers to the flower caught in his hair. It was a deep yellow in hue, brilliantly eye-burning where its sister was a cool flood of color, and tinged turquoise at the tips. He touches the flower idly now, wonderingly, thinking that it’s strange to have such a universally-desired antidote resting just above his right earlobe.

Next to him, Lance finishes peeling the last of his fruit’s thick skin, tossing a final piece into his compost pile. He digs both thumbs down the meat’s middle. The fruit splits in two with a fine spray of citrus juice. Lance licks at this, where it’s now running down his fingers, with renewed enthusiasm.

Keith looks away, face growing warm, and folds either arm behind his head, lying flat on his back. He counts each of his breaths as they pass through him.

From his peripheral, Lance offers him a wedge of blue fruit. He says, out of nowhere, “Have you given any more thought to coming back to the team?”

Keith freezes, his hand outstretched towards the wedge in question. His fingers twitch in want. He watches in silence as Lance’s throat works to swallow down his first bite with a quiet noise of pleasure.

When Keith makes no move to take the fruit himself, Lance drops the proffered slice into Keith’s open palm. He continues on, licking his sticky lips, saying, “I’m not saying we desperately need you or we’ll die, dude. I won’t put that on you, because I don’t want Team Voltron to be...you know...just another mission you feel like you have to cross off some bigger checklist. Not saying that’s what’s happening with the Marmorites. Just...from my end of things, that’s how it feels. Um.”

Keith stares down at the pitiful slice of fruit lying wetly in his gloved palm. His appetite seems to have fled him. He sets the slice off to the side in sudden disinterest, carefully wiping his glove off on his stretchy pants.

“But maybe,” says Lance, after spitting a seed out into the grass, “consider what you need once in a while. And I’m not talking about...about...like, your base desires, I guess, or your...your sense of duty, the way you feel obligated to the cause, or the universe, or...or, hell, even us. I mean...what does your body tell you it needs? At night? When you’re not in the middle of a recon mission or a knife-fight? What do you really need? What’ll make you happy? What won’t?”

Keith looks fixedly at Noeg’s sun, until his eyes are watering and he has to blink them closed. He keeps his mouth locked shut on a flood of aborted confessions. Part of him wants to scream, I don’t know! And if I did, I’d probably never tell you. Another part thinks he’s divulged enough secrets for one day.

But Lance, as it happens, seems to disagree. He says, made low and imploring: “What do you need from me, Keith?”

Keith’s eyes crack open. He slants Lance a look and finds him staring up at Noeg’s sun, like he’s Keith’s reflection, or summer antithesis. The silence he leaves Keith seems willing to wait for his answer. Like Lance thinks Keith will need time to think on it, now that the question has been reframed, made more narrow—what do you need from me? as opposed to a simple, what do you need?

Keith doesn’t need time.

He doesn’t look at Lance when he says, “This. Just this.”

It’s almost a whisper. A passerby, should they pass them by, if there existed another person on this planet at this moment in history, might mistake it for a hiss of the wind. A field of tall grasses caught in a quiet dance. The scuttle of an alien woodland creature, dashing underfoot. Keith hopes Lance hears it for what it is; is almost tempted to repeat it, louder, just to ensure this.

“Okay,” Lance says softly, still watching the sun’s watercolor descent. “I can do that.”

Keith crosses his arms over his chest, feeling restless, until he’s squeezing his lungs breathless.

Lance’s head lolls in the grass and Keith can feel his blue eyes on him, traveling his length where it’s stretched out in a rigid sprawl. “So,” he says, conversationally, and it sounds like he’s smiling one of his playfully arrogant smiles. “Guess that makes me and you friends now. Officially. Should we put it in writing, just in case? Write out our terms and conditions? Sign our names on the dotted line below?”

All of a sudden, Keith can’t get the words out fast enough. He spits: “I don’t want you to be my friend out of some misplaced sense of duty, either. I don’t need you to protect me, Lance. I’ve been getting along on my own just fine until now. So if this is some—some pity gesture, I don’t fucking want it.”

Lance sits up abruptly, the smile gone from his face. His green jacket slides slowly down his shoulders, where he'd been wearing it across his back like a makeshift cloak, as though it too has been mortally offended by Keith's words. Lance grabs at the green fabric, pulls it back up and slides his arms through the sleeves over his undersuit, and he quickly adjusts the daybreath flower in his hair, checking that it's survived the turbulence. He looks shaky with shock.

"Dude," he says. His brow is stricken. "How can you even—insinuate that?”

“You’ve never liked me,” Keith says hotly. He still refuses to look Lance in the eye. “Not till I almost sacrificed myself against the shields of some Galra warship. Look, I’m not stupid, so don’t treat me like I am. I...I won’t be mad. Just—tell me the truth, and we can go back to being rivals, or whatever.”

“Keith,” Lance says, or murmurs, really, the word rough and dulcet-warm coming out of his mouth. He says it like a psalm. Then he’s inhaling deeply, staring down at his hands where they’re dyed blue with fruit juice, and saying, “What if I don’t...want to go back?”

Keith frowns at a wisp of clouds overhead, trying to parse this, to no avail. Lance’s words are always impossible to unpack, covered in unnecessary layers of silk and tissue paper and ribbon. Keith feels like he could spend whole lifetimes trying to dissect them. “What?”

“Like I said...logically, I know Voltron doesn’t need you anymore. I mean...we’re...we’re doing just fine without you, I think. We haven’t suffered some huge...I don’t know, strategic loss? No offense. But what if.” Lance chews his lip a moment, like he’s considering the weight of his next words. He looks over at Keith, lashes fluttering uncertainly, eyes darting every which way. “What if I want you back? Not Keith the red paladin, or Keith the black paladin—though they’re great, and I'd be happy to welcome them back, don’t get me wrong. Just...just Keith. Just you, like this?”

“Like...this…” Keith says dubiously. He plants his elbows in the grass, half-sitting up in a confused daze.

“Yeah,” Lance murmurs, as though he’s scared to rupture the moment by pitching his voice any louder. He picks thoughtlessly at a few locks of grass, then leans forward to rub a thumb against the toe of Keith’s boot in a back-and-forth motion that lasts three seconds total. The gesture is awkward. Charming. Maybe a little heart-stopping. “I guess I missed you like this.”

Keith sits up fully and turns to stare at Lance, for a moment forgetting himself. “Like this,” he repeats stupidly, his pulse climbing.

“You and your dumb go-go boots,” Lance says, smiling crookedly. His freckles are showing like whole star systems now, after hours under the sun. Unmapped galaxies, or something. “And your leather jacket—I missed that, too. The luxite knife always strapped to your hip. Oh, and of course, the fanny pack that doubles as a belt. Very stylish of you.”

“It was my dad’s,” Keith mutters, his face hot. “And it’s...sensible.”

Lance’s smile goes soft in the middle, and sort of exasperated too, three different kinds of fond at once, stacked one on top of the other, and Keith has no idea what to do with his hands. He’s sure his eyes are the size of saucers.

Lance says, “I just meant...I like this Keith. You, I like. So...it’s not a pity gesture.”

“Oh,” Keith whispers, and he rubs his sweaty fingers off in the grass, looking down at his knees in a startled silence.

“Maybe your little stunt with the shields made me...I guess...realize I’d been taking your friendship for granted. But I promise you, buddy, I’m not doing this...trying to...um, be friends with you—like, real friends, and not the shitty half-rival, half-bro kind—out of pity. I don’t pity you, Keith. I don’t think I’m capable of that, come to think of it. With you, that is. I’m doing this because…” Lance clears his throat. “Well, I care about you, obviously. And like I said, I like you and want to be your friend.”

“Oh,” Keith repeats.

“Is that…” Lance licks his lips and fools around with the zipper of his jacket a moment. “Um. Is that okay with you? I mean, do you...want to be friends with me too? Pity not included?”

“Yes,” Keith says, without missing a beat. His face flushes impossibly hotter.

“Oh,” Lance whispers, eyes big.

“Yeah,” Keith whispers back, and they stare at each other in a wide-eyed wonder that seems to stretch insurmountable distances, and a feeling like armed struggle settles in Keith’s stomach, only softer. Panic, maybe. Determination, perhaps. The knowledge that he’s hurtling to the ground at alarming speeds, and being okay with it. Seeing Blue in his peripheral, her jaw firmed, eyes trained on the sand below, and Keith wants to keep nose-diving alongside Lance, over and over and over, his stomach swooping in excited fascination each and every time, till they’re both breathless with want, and laughing too.

So that’s what they do just then, after they’ve held eye contact for ages or eons or nanoseconds. Lance is the first to crack, huffing a tiny breath through his nose, mouth curling imperceptibly, and then Keith follows him over the edge, helpless against the urge to chase, helpless against the way his eyes track Lance’s every movement, and it’s the best kind of hope.

It’s something Keith’s been afraid to feel for so long.

In a helter-skelter sense of bodiless self-awareness, or maybe a distinct lack thereof, he sees his own hand reaching out for Lance, in a hundred different realities, gloved and gloveless, knuckles bloody and bruised, scarred and unscathed, nails uncut and painted, over and over again.

He thinks: he’ll never stop reaching for Lance, for as long as he lives.

Or as long as Lance lets him.

And the way Lance is looking at him in this moment, Keith thinks he’ll let him.

“So, you don’t have to leave the Blade right this second,” Lance says, finally. “But when—if—you ever, um. Want to come back. We’ll be here waiting for you.”

“I...I don’t think I’m ready to leave yet. There’s still too much I don’t know,” Keith says, then hurries to add: “But, um, maybe with enough time, I will be.”

At this, Lance smiles, just a slight lift of the mouth on one side, and settles into the grass again. He sticks a slice of cheese in his mouth and folds his arms behind his head, chewing soundly. “Whenever you’re ready, buddy,” he says through his mouthful. He swallows. “We’re never not gonna want you back, so just. Take all the time you need. And in the meantime, you have this.”

Keith looks Lance over with the air of a sleepless soldier just offered respite, and repeats, with conviction, “This.”