Chapter Text
Lance is half way through his last (and first) glass of champagne when it happens.
They’re at a gala for an Allura-approved charity dedicated to helping wounded veterans find jobs. Keith had been invited by proxy of Shiro and so had dragged Lance along for, as Keith had put it, “mutual suffering.”
As Keith makes nice with the donors and Allura and Shiro dances across the floor, Lance has made himself comfortable at the bar with what ended up being prime viewing to the meeting of two soulmates. He’ll learn their names later -- Maria and Jacob, both born into separate yet great dynasties of old money and privilege whose families could not be happier for the lucky, wealthy match -- when their faces and soulmarks are plastered over every other magazine cover.
For now they are both just two very pretty people bumping into each other, a spilled glass of whiskey forgotten between them as the woman grabs the man by the shoulders. In the movies there is always a moment of silent recognition, a second where the magic sets in and the soulmates realize who they’ve just met, how lucky they are.
Lance remembers that moment. He’d been ten -- and so young, so naive -- when he’d run into Jasper on his way out of Macy’s, racing after his sister and her best friend. He’d tripped on something, probably just his own two feet, and then there he’d been helping Lance off the ground, wrapping one strong hand around his wrist.
Lance swears the world had stopped. That as his soulmark burned into place, a bright blue splotch against his left shoulder blade — an exact echo of the mark on Jasper’s right — the world had gone silent and still in honor of their meeting.
But as an observer it never looks like that. The world doesn’t stop. The world, ultimately, doesn’t care. It happens in an instant. A stumble. The sound of glass hitting tile and the splash of spilt whiskey. The woman bursts into tears and throws herself without care into the man’s arms. Slowly the room catches on. The cheers washing over the pleasant music of the party.
Somewhere across the room is Keith.
Lance slips out onto the patio.
.
Jasper dies when Lance is fourteen.
It is a drunk driving accident. The driver dies. The driver’s daughter dies. Jasper’s mom dies. Jasper dies.
For a long time, Lance dies too.
Here’s the danger of soulmates. You live your whole life waiting for this person. Sure, you do other things. You have to. The human attention span is only so long and there are only so many ways one can stare longingly into the sunset. You pick up hobbies. You go to school and achieve goals. Sometimes you even fall in fleeting, temporary love.
But throughout it all you wait, you wonder, and you think “when I meet them, will they be proud?”
Everyone told Lance how lucky he was. He’d only had to wait ten years after all. They’d be able to grow up together. They’d never have to wonder “what will my soulmate be like?” because here they were. Young love, his aunt had sighed lost in the romance of it all. How lucky.
Three days after the crash Lance wakes up surrounded by sterile white walls, his shoulder on fire.
No one told him how lucky he was ever again.
.
Keith finds him by the marigolds.
The view is breathtaking from up here. The Chrysler building is one of the last skyscrapers standing despite it all. Around them the city splays out like constellations against an inky black sky with the moon as its watcher, a forever beaming beacon.
“Full moon soon,” Lance says redundantly as if Keith doesn’t know, as if he could forget.
“Are you okay?” Because Keith had never taken his bullshit. Not during the war and definitely not after.
Lance tries for a smile. When he falls short, he shrugs instead. “Just surprised me.”
For a few blissful minutes they stand in silence, watching their city spin below as a cool breeze wraps around them. At some point, Keith takes his hand and Lance let’s him.
“You want to go?” Keith offers as the commotion inside settles. The new soulpair must have made their escape.
“Yeah,” Lance says and lets Keith wrap an arm around his waist, lets him lead Lance past well-meaning dignitaries and deep-pocketed philanthropists desperate to speak to one of the Defenders. Even lets him open the door to the car like a proper gentleman.
It’s an improvement.
.
The war starts with a hole in the sky. It starts with fear. It starts with first contact.
The pod lands fifty meters off the coast, out in the lower bay.
Lance watches the shakey phone footage from the safety of his childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, next to his Abuela, still numb from the crash that ruined his life three years earlier.
Lance watches as the aliens, large and purple and so human looking demand their surrender and assimilation into their great Galra empire. Lance watches as the human race, truly united for the first time since conception, tells the aliens to fuck off.
They lose the first year of the war and they lose badly.
The aliens are stronger, faster, and more durable. In the face of this great invasion, their human soldiers just can’t last long enough.
Luckily not all their soldiers are human.
Lycanthropy was once considered a great disease. These days more and more people have come to view it as a necessary sacrifice.
The soldiers bitten before the war were durable enough, fast enough, and more than strong enough. Not only in body but in mind and soul. Capable of lasting longer without food, water, and sleep while sustained on their pack bonds alone, werewolves could withstand the force that had crippled their brothers in arms and keep marching. The werewolf platoons alone had kept the invasion back, but just barely.
The price--the cost of lycanthropy--is simple. To be bitten is to lose your soul mark.
When the world was made, it is said God or nature or magic or evolution split the human soul and placed them into two bodies. When these two bodies united, the soul was complete. The person made whole again.
A werewolf needed no soulmate. They had their wolf. In all ways that matter, the wolf became their soulmate, completed their souls, and strengthened their bodies.
To a young man like Lance, just barely 18 and with nothing to lose and so very tired of watching his world die, the price is something he’s more than happy to pay.
.
The next morning Lance thanks Keith with a full breakfast for when he comes back from his run. Pancakes and bacon and cups of fruit.
“Feeling better?” Keith asks, taking a seat at the breakfast nook and accepting the coffee Lance hands him.
After the war, they’d returned to New York with their sizable paychecks and bought the war torn landscape at a steal. Over the last six years they had encouraged rebuilding with a fever that his mother had commented as obsessive.
Keith had grown up in this city and Lance had always longed for the old New York, for the glitz and glam. He’d dreamed of broadway and the fast paced life lived here. To help return their city to its former glory isn’t just about smart real estate; it’s about healing.
After all, humans were truly the universe’s most stubborn cockroaches.
It wasn’t long before people started coming home.
“Much better,” Lance smiles, leaning across the table to tuck a stray hair behind Keith’s ear. “You have a good run?”
“Shruthi says hi,” Keith pops a grape into his mouth and says around the mouthful. “She wants to invite us for dinner next week.”
Lance turns to his own breakfast. “I imagine she’ll want to show us another million baby photos.”
Shruthi had been one of their first to move into their small renovated tenant building. As a fellow werewolf and veteran who’d lost her soulmate in the war, she’d refused to settle anywhere else. “This is where it started,” she’d told Lance in confidence while Keith and Shiro had carried her dresser upstairs. They’d been in the kitchen unpacking her china. “And this is where I’ll finish. We can’t let them take this city. It’s what Jessia would have wanted.”
Looking outside the window to the site of yellow cranes, Lance thinks that's what they’re all trying to do: finish the war.
.
The first wave of werewolves brings a new kind of soldier.
The first are men and women like Lance, people who’d lost their soulmates because of life or because of the war. Mostly the war. The chance to meet the wolf as selfish as it is necessary.
(There was a part of Lance that hoped maybe this could cure him, could fill the echo Jasper had left.)
The second are mated pairs, soulmates who’d enlisted together after finding each other. Their soulmarks nearly obsolete now that they knew each other’s face.
It’s all very clinical. The recruiter calls him by name to the next room where a doctor does a full work up and checks his family history before he’s lead to a third and final room where a soldier in full fatigues stands in parade rest.
“Are you aware of the cost?” the nurse next to the soldier asks as she presses cold nodes to his arm.
“Yes,” Lance says, unable to tear his eyes from the man who would bite him. The werewolf. “Does it hurt?”
The soldier seems startled to be addressed directly before composing himself. He doesn’t even try to smile. “Yes. It will be the most painful thing you will ever experience.”
Lance nods, stealing his resolve. “What… what are packs like?”
The man is silent and for a moment Lance considers repeating himself before he says, “It’s like choosing your soulmates.”
It’s something Lance won’t fully understand until years later.
.
Pidge is the one who tells him.
It hits news stations two weeks later, but before that Pidge calls him halfway through lunch with urgent news. “They say it’s a cure,” she warns him. There is a crashing sound behind her and she curses.
“Do you think it works?” Lance asks.
“It does something,” Pidge snaps. “I personally don’t trust them. You know how people are. They think we’re freaks.”
Lance doesn’t say anything. Pidge sighs, “God damn it, Lance.”
“It’s good isn’t it?” Lance defends. “If it works…”
“If it works!” Pidge cries. “The only thing they’ve proven is it makes your soulmark colorful again. I wouldn’t consider it extensive testing.”
“Why tell me?” Lance bites back, hackles raising as another crash comes over the line. “What are you doing?”
“Research facility,” He could hear the eye roll in her voice. “Listen, just be careful, okay. You guys are pretty public out there. It’ll be the talk of the town soon and you deserve the warning.”
“But does it work?” Lance presses, hand coming to press weakly against his left shoulder blade.
“I don’t know,” Pidge admits. “Just… be careful, Lance. Don’t say anything stupid.”
.
Lance meets Shiro and Allura first.
They’re a mated couple who joined the war as soon as the call for volunteers had gone out. Shiro had already been in the army and had lost his arm in an explosion. The army had fit him with a custom prosthetic to handle a gun.
“It is different,” Allura admits, british accent thick. She’d moved to the US four months before the war to marry Shiro and be a journalist. They’d been living in New Jersey when the attack struck. “I can no longer feel him as I once did here,” she presses a graceful hand against her heart. “But I can still feel him.”
“Pack bonds,” Lance nods. He can feel it stirring as well in his gut. An instinct older than time calling to him, drawing him towards Shiro and Allura. They were his. They were each others but they were also his. It felt weak, fragile. Like one wrong move and they’d be nothing more than two passing ships on moonlit water.
“It is different,” Allura repeats. “But I like it. Sometimes I worried, you know? Would we be together if we weren’t told? Would he have still chosen me when I live so far away? Would we have worked so hard to make it work if we weren’t told to? But now we don’t need each other. I have Her and he has Him and our wolves do not tell us to be together. Instead we choose each other.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Lance admits, thoughts turning to Jasper. What they could have been if only Jasper had lived long enough to be here.
“How are you settling with Him?”
Lance shrugs. The wolf stirs in the back of his mind as if amused. It sends a gentle nudge like the press of warmth against his shoulder. The warmth spreads through his limbs. “I like it.”
Allura laughs, “Yes. I like it too!”
.
It’s hours before Evan’s grand opening when the news drops.
Lance is busy scrubbing every scruff and scratch from the second hand counter they’d picked up from amazon and had Shruthi install, when Evan comes crashing in, calling for the remote, “Keith is on TV!”
“Keith is on TV?” Lance repeats, tossing Evan the remote. “What does that mean?”
“I mean he’s on the TV,” Evan cries, switching the channel to CNN.
Lance hops over the bar and grabs a chair as Keith’s face comes on the screen. “What is he doing?”
“Shhhh!” Evan hisses slapping Lance in the arm. “He’s talking.”
“Are you considering the cure?” the CNN reporter asks, pushing the microphone closer to Keith.
Keith frowns (he’d never been the one for public speaking). “Cure?”
“You were famous in the Defenders for volunteering without finding your soulmate,” the CNN reporter explains. “Are you considering taking the cure? Find your soulmate after all these years?”
“Why would I do that?” Keith says, blunt as ever.
On the other side of the screen, Lance gasps quietly.
“W-well...” The reporter stammers clearly surprised. “Why wouldn’t you want your soulmate?”