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"Lance," Keith demanded impatiently. He, for one, felt that his narrowed-eyes, crossed-arms, annoyed-foot-tapping combo was scathing, but Lance was apparently immune. He continued fiddling with whatever it was on Hunk's work desk that had him so captivated.
"Don't 'Lance' me," the boy in question replied, uncannily mimicking the way Keith said his name. This only served to further incense Keith, whose foot-tapping was now reaching speeds yet unmatched by modern science.
Keith struggled to pick one thing to argue out of the multitude of annoyances he was facing at the moment. "That's not even how I said it." Okay, maybe not the most substantial argument, but he had never managed to be both angry and articulate at the same time. Eloquence had never been even one of the slightest of his strong suits.
"That's exactly how you said it," Lance responded, his teasing all the more infuriating for the fact that he wouldn't even grant Keith a spare glance as they spoke.
Hunk withdrew his head from under the hood of a relatively small ship to join the conversation. "That's how you always say it," he remarked simply. Keith felt that he was offended by this statement, but he couldn't exactly tell why.
"What does that mean?" he asked. This time he was answered by Pidge's voice, ringing out from somewhere in the back of the room. Keith hadn't been aware that she was in the room, but after some searching he spotted the very top of her hair peeking over some sort of console. She scooted out from under it, wires still in hand, to address him.
"You have this certain way that you always say Lance's name when you're irritated with him," she said.
"Which is a lot of the time," Hunk interjected.
Pidge continued as if she hadn't been interrupted. "You say it like it's two different syllables. 'Lay-unce.'"
Keith considered this, but found that he didn't care whether it was true as much as he cared that this habit of his being so heavily noticed embarrassed him.
"I do not!" he argued. Hunk laughed.
"You do, dude. You say it like, 'Lay-unce, hurry up!'" Hunk pitched his voice up slightly to match Keith's timbre. "'Lay-unce, stop messing around!'"
Keith felt his face redden, and he started to object to Hunk's impersonation of him, but he was cut off by Pidge joining in.
"'Lay-unce!'" She mocked, mirroring not only Keith's voice, but his scowling facial expression. "'This isn't a joke! Lay-unce, I'm serious!'" Her pretend tyrade faltered out as she tumbled over herself in a fit of laughter at both her own joke and the sour look on Keith's face. Hunk joined her, much to Keith's chagrin. Even Lance was shaking with ill-contained snickers.
"It's true," Lance managed to say through his grin. "You say it just like that."
Keith rolled his eyes and silently wished that the blood pooling in his cheeks would go back to where it came from.