Archive of Our Own

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

— William Ernest Henley, ”Invictus”

i. fate

Red stood parked on a flat area of dirt only a few feet behind Keith, a noticeable veil of desert dust coated her varnished exterior after the hectic ride. It was all over his own clothes as well but Keith hardly noticed it himself. He’d been too busy being engulfed in the way his blood rushed through his veins as he pushed her to go even faster than she’d ever been pushed before. Only now when they had arrived at their destination, surely against all odds, did the lack of exuberant speed and immediate danger leave him in a sense of limbo. Keith barely managed two steps ahead before his feet caught onto absolutely nothing, except the sudden realization that he was on top of a cliff in the middle of a desert without really knowing how he got there, and tripped him right down to his knees. Keith gasped, threw his head back and pushed his sweaty bangs out of his face. 

The night sky opened up above him; splashes of stars shining disappointingly compared to the view from space, but still managing to feel infinitely more like home. 

If Keith was even allowed to call Earth home anymore. The word felt rather misplaced on his tongue after everything that'd happened, and yet there was something in Keith’s gut that yearned to lay down flat on the ground and never leave. To feel his skin press into the sharp edged gravel and coarse surface of the sand, for his lungs to inhale the familiar air—he swore oxygen had never smelled so clear before, even through the dust blowing in the wind—and to look up at the sky and see the exact same map of stars he recalled from his earliest memories.

That’s a home, Keith tried to tell himself, this must be what a home feels like.

And for too long he kneeled, immobile beneath the immense pressure of the sky above him—too long for a human, that is. Keith always turned out to be a bit more alien than he was comfortable with.

He was not unwelcome here, though. Not on this cliff. It was an empty vacancy ready to be occupied whenever Keith needed a quiet place, a sanctuary. It was his dad who took him up here for the first time and kept them coming back. Keith remembered his tiny hand drowning in his father’s palm as they trailed the now familiar path up the sand dunes and onto the cliff. They always went here in the evening, just early enough for Keith to be able to stay awake, just late enough for the dark sky to feel like the world’s biggest blanket folding on top of them. Up there on the cliff Keith’s dad told him stories of his mom, of his youth, of the world. Here Keith truly learned what it felt like to settle down and belong.

Then his dad died. 

And maybe Keith had never really belonged anywhere. 

The last foster parents Keith stayed with before juvie and the Garrison were the worst of them all, but not necessarily in the way a social worker would ever understand and larm about. Keith never left the place with so much as a scratch. Not physical ones at least. Instead he left that place feeling as if they had been chopping away on his insides, just slicing off thin, barely noticeable pieces off of him without him even realizing. At first, Keith sort of thought he had at least found a place to exist inside the walls of that house, somewhere he could eat and sleep and store his few possessions until he was old enough to get a job and move out. It was only when faced with the world outside that he realized they had put a lid on him, tried carving him into a mold of their choosing although knowing he was infinitely expanding, demanding space. Keith was a foreign, lost thing and they had no idea how to make him fit inside their home.

This was dangerous to think about, but thoughts like that always seemed to catch up to him. No matter how great his escape was, no matter how fast he was running.

There had been this stray cat they used to feed that always came sneaking around the back porch of his foster parents’ house. A sleek, thin, poor thing. She never made a noise, never as much as a hiss. She only sat there waiting for the food in out of arms reach. No strings attached, Keith remembered thinking. One time, though, just as Keith put down her little plastic bowl of dinner leftovers, she padded closer. She sat down just next to him and stared defiantly into his eyes, daring him to do anything to her that she hadn’t allowed. Keith stared back. She’d never had a collar, but from this close Keith could see a faded chip mark in one of her ears. Another lost thing, then. He finally dared to pat her head, the fear that his troubled past would corrupt her in some way quickly fading. That cat had been exactly the same as him.

That night Keith had tried talking his foster parents into taking her in. He couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t—they’d taken him in and he was just as skittish and stand off-ish as the cat. He didn’t realize it would turn into such a fight, that even though he lived there, even though they had insisted on him to start calling that place his home, he never really had the rights that should come with that statement. He was never part of the family. He was something they picked up along the way and never found a place for. Keith threatened to bring the cat into his room and keep her there if they didn’t adopt her. The next day when Keith was at school his foster dad took out his hunting rifle and the cat never came back.

Lost things don’t belong anywhere unless someone finds them, but Keith learned the hard way that most times running seemed better than being found.

It was the same thing over and over again, and finally, when Shiro was pronounced dead and Keith got kicked out of the Garrison, he knew the desert was the only place that would have him. So he ran. It used to be his dad’s place and now Keith guessed it was his. He’d missed the rush of standing on top of the cliff and looking over the edge. Keith could never put his finger on it but there was always this gaping something right there in his chest whenever he leaned too far out over the edge. He could feel the adrenaline surge through his body even as he leaned back to safety. It turned out that this strange something was buried in a cave beneath him all this time.

The first time Keith found the cave he was appropriately gobsmacked. The energy was so much more concentrated down there compared to the cliff, yet the feeling of staring right into an abyss remained. Keith desperately wanted to jump but it would take several months before the mystery of the cave would be revealed—and to make matters even more fucked, it had been revealed by the only person Keith can think about as he finds himself on top of that very cave once again, the one person he fears as much as that abyss.

Lance McClain. 

Lance, who is loud and charming and demands the attention from everyone around him—Lance who has that strong pull of gravity that makes Keith sure he could tilt the whole world on its axis if he just tried. It’s only natural that Keith fell for the act, he just never thought he would ever get to know the boy beneath the shallow exterior as well. No matter how charismatic and gravitating Keith found Lance to be, the guy really didn't seem to like Keith at all. For a long time Keith was convinced Lance would cling to the alleged rivalry between them through their whole stay in space. Lance was an enigma that way. One second he was the most fascinating person Keith's ever encountered, only to reduce himself to some idiotic loudmouth who couldn’t take anything seriously the next. Keith just didn't get it, he didn't get Lance—at least not until he really started paying attention.

After long, careful, non-stalker-ish observation, Keith could confirm that Lance gave twice as much as he got. Always. 

It started with this: Lance was the kind of person who’d complain and act like his life was going to end on long missions and at first Keith really believed his drama queen act, but then he noticed that every time Lance had ever complained about them walking for too long, about his desperate need of a break, was when Pidge was lagging behind. So maybe Keith grew a little suspicious, and after further investigation he found out that Lance’s little food games at the dinner table were really just his way of making sure everyone was eating. Bet I can down this bowl of goo faster than you, Lance said, every god damn day, and wiggled his ridiculous brows towards Keith and his untouched food across the table, and by then, Keith started second guessing everything Lance did. His walking between team members to bother them seemed to be only to make sure Hunk wasn’t binge cooking to cope with his anxiety, to check up on Pidge every hour and poke her until she looked up from her screen once in a while. It was to joke around with Shiro, even though everyone on the ship knew that Shiro’s sense of humor was the actual worst, and it was indulging Allura with her mouse circus shows or whatever the fuck that was, and it was listening to Coran’s stories for eternities and never complain even once, even if Lance got stuck doing pod cleaning while doing it.

It was Lance leaning against the wall, or sitting down crossed legged, or straight up lying down on the floor, flat like a starfish, rambling on and on about the first thing he could come up with at the top of his head, waiting for Keith to tire himself out in the training room. Keith didn’t notice it at first but Lance would always bring him a water bottle, neatly placed next to his own. Keith didn’t know how dependent he had become of that extra water bottle until Lance had gotten himself thrown into a healing pod for jumping in front of Coran and taking the worst hit of a bomb. It was that first night, standing alone looking at how pale Lance appeared through the healing pod glass, that Keith came to the ground breaking realization that the reason why Lance was doing all of this was because he cared.

These days Keith thought Lance might care about him more than anyone has ever cared before.

And that was one slippery slope Keith did not want to go down again. Lance was really dangerous to think about.

Especially the thought of Lance’s hand clasped onto Keith’s as if he was afraid Keith would disappear from Earth’s surface if he let go. Lance’s eyelashes, dark and pasted together from all the tears, cutting shadows down his cheeks. Keith mind always get stuck on that tiny, specific memory; on the shadows cast from Lance’s long eyelashes, and how it almost made it look like darkness was caressing its sharp, skeleton-like fingers down his face in comfort. It was the one memory that had been engraved in Keith’s mind years before he got to live through it. It didn’t help at all once he did.

The recollection of how he left things with Lance in the workshop before arriving at the cliff was entirely uninvited, but with it came the sudden epiphany that the thought of Lance—the way Keith’s brain seemed to be wired to constantly redirect his mind to him—had been the most reoccurring, stable thing that he could remember. Lance was the common denominator in every fraction of Keith's life, and, ah, wasn’t that just ironically tragic. The unwelcome feeling of affection this brought him withered away quickly, squashed down by guilt and even deeper self loathing. Keith was not stupid. He has known what his feelings for Lance were since way, way back, but Lance had no idea how it all came to play in the great plot of things—and it had to stay that way. He really should stop indulging the fantasy of Lance and him and whatever that could entail.

He clenched his fists until the knuckles turned white.

Krolia knew about all of this. Keith was pretty sure she knew everything there was to know about him. You don’t spend two years trapped on the back of a space whale, sharing memories of the past (and visions of the future, though Keith refused to accept them as such) without inevitably knowing each other like the back of your hand. And thus, Keith knew Krolia. He knew he’d gotten his impulsiveness and general bone structure from her, but those things were obvious. Keith’s short temperament and stoic glare were always a bit too foreign to be coming from his human, self-sacrificing father. It was obvious that he was going to look and act like Krolia because his dad never seized to tell him how much he reminded him of her. Keith never knew if he was supposed to take it as a compliment or a dooming prophesy. Just like how Krolia got to sneak into the darkest corners of Keith’s conscious, witness all of his worst secrets and suppressed wishes first hand, Keith also got to know hers. He now knew that she had hated herself for years after leaving him. He knew she saw it as punishment every time he called her Krolia instead of mom, and he knew that she thought she deserved it. 

He wished he didn’t know Krolia. Not like this. 

Keith could feel the drop of adrenaline like he’d been hit by lightning, the sudden lack of control of his own limbs paralyzing him. He hunched over his own knees like a rag doll and remained like that, fighting the strain of his spine until it became unbearable. Slowly he raised his head again, every second another day passing by, until he looked right into the abyss—and for the first time ever he could identify the tug of vertigo in the very back of his stomach, like a hook pulling him inch after inch closer to the edge. He raised a trembling hand and dug it deep into the ground to ground himself, recognizing the motion as if it was yesterday. 

Do you feel that, Keith? his father had said, both of their hands buried in front of them, almost burning their skin off in the scolding desert sand. That's Earth, and she's so excited to meet you.

Keith huffed out a strangled laughter. Sentimentality had never bothered him before, but now everything about this, the cliff and Earth herself, felt so inherently wrong—as if he’d trying to squeeze himself into a world where he just didn’t fit. 

But that was it, wasn’t it? There was absolutely nothing wrong with Earth. That was still the exact same fucking cliff as the one he went to with his dad. Nothing had changed except for Keith. He wad the one who brought a sense of wrongness wherever he went. Deep down Keith still truly believed his dad was the only redeeming thing about his existence and after he died there was just nothing left attaching Keith to Earth anymore. He was always a bit too non-human and the people around him could always tell. Keith didn't belong anywhere. He knew this. He had tried making peace with that information for a very long time, had almost thought he’d succeeded.

And still, to whatever cosmic entity out there that might’ve been listening to his struggle, he couldn’t help but to send out one last juvenile wish for everything to be different.

ii. aphelion

Though both being born and raised on Earth, Keith had never felt like he was breaching uncharted territory quite like he did that very second.

Lance was already crying, but to be fair, so was Hunk. Shiro hadn’t said a word since they got told to step into the transport vehicle that would take them to their families, not since Keith bluntly reminded him that Adam probably would be waiting for them at the Garrison. Keith wasn’t good at reading expressions, but even he figured out he said something wrong. So now he was sulking next to Shiro, arms crossed and eyes directed out of the roofless vehicle.

Unsurprisingly the only one who had their shit together was Pidge. She was keeping herself busy chatting with the driver about Earth, about everything they’d missed during their years in space. Allura, Coran and Romelle were frantically trying to tune in to the interesting conversation, all while they kept their fascinated eyes on the landscape outside. This was the first time they’d gotten to really experience Earth’s terrain since they arrived last night.

Keith knew he sounded like an asshole, but he didn’t get the hype. Earth hadn’t changed one bit since the last time he saw it. 

He didn’t get much time to brood about his disconnection compared to the rest of them though, because suddenly Lance stood up from his seat with such force Keith could feel the whole vehicle shake, and then he fucking hauled himself over the edge of the still moving car, brushed off the gravel from his palms as he got up from the ground and sprinted across the concrete.

”Mama,” Keith heard him say, breathlessly, and then he was on his knees surrounded by at least ten other people—all vaguely looking like Lance, all hugging each other.

Keith sharply looked away, ignored the pounding in his chest.

It really was an unnecessarily dramatic exit since the car stopped only a few seconds later, much closer to the rest of the people that were there to welcome the Paladins of Voltron home. The next one to go was Hunk, quickly ridding himself of the seatbelt that Lance evidently had elected to ignore from the start. Hunk, my buddy, my man. This car is literally rolling at the speed of my grandma’s wheelchair, Keith recalled him blabbering in the row behind his seat. Hunk, a true intellectual, even opened the car door before throwing himself out to run over to his parents.

Keith glanced back over at Lance. He was too busy holding on to a tiny version of himself to notice the eyes on him. Keith couldn’t remember if that was his little brother or a nephew. He looked back over at Hunk, also busy with his family. His eyes quickly drifted over to the other people on the team. Pidge was finally breaking down like the rest of them, crying and hugging her mom in a tight embrace. Keith felt bad that they couldn’t convince Matt to come as well, even though he knew Matt would be here next week. There had just been so much things to do in the coalition, organizing the rebels and what was left of the Blade members. 

Keith was still kind of pissed that he didn’t get to stay. He could be of much more help in space going with Krolia and Kolivan to set up a base somewhere, than he was here on Earth where he was the only one having exactly no one dying to meet him. Here on Earth, where he was completely useless. It reminded him of the first and last time he was in a school play—tree #3—and how all the children ran to their applauding parents afterwards. Keith had just found out he was moving to another foster home, so the only one who stood there waiting for him was a social worker he’d never met before. 

In his peripheral, Keith spotted Admiral Sanda and Iverson skillfully move through the reunited families to get to the alteans. Allura stood stiff and tall with her hands clasped in front of her—her usual stance of I am royalty, eat shit. He tried to spy on the weird altercation that was basically his old teacher striking up a conversation with a 10 000 years old alien space princess, but then Shiro knocked his elbow into Keith’s and stood up from his seat. Keith turned to his sharply to ask what the fuck his problem was, but Shiro didn’t pay him any attention at all. He was staring at something far away. Keith followed the trail of his gaze and sighed when he spotted what had caught Shiro's attention.

It wad Adam, of course. Shiro’s boyfriend. He was standing right in the middle of the mess that was Hunk and Lance’s families, staring right back at Shiro, mouth wide open, hands trembling slightly at his sides. As soon as their eyes met Shiro promptly jumped out of the car, leaving Keith alone as he took a few staggering steps towards Adam.

”Takashi,” Adam gasped, and then tears were running down his cheeks and he was running towards them, through the crowd and directly into Shiro’s frame. The force of it almost knocked them over but Shiro straightened them up again, as if his feet were glued to the ground. Keith couldn’t tear his eyes away from Shiro caressing his fingers over Adam’s face, as if he was watching a horrific car crash happening right there in front of him.

Something numb and ugly grew like a void in Keith’s chest and finally, he wrenched his eyes away from the tender moment. There was a tingle in his legs. A restlessness that only awakened when Keith was faced with his own dissonance.

A stoic veil fell over his face, and all things human inside him shut down, one after one.

Keith climbed out of the car and started walking. He didn’t care which direction, he just needed space, but he only got a few steps away though before he heard someone call after him. He froze for a slight second, and then glanced back briefly over this shoulder only to see Lance jogging towards him.

”Hey, Keith! Wait up!” he shouted, and his eyes were red, face bloated. The happiness was practically shining through his pores. Keith stopped in his track but didn’t deem it worth a response. He was sure nothing as unimportant as his bad mood could bring Lance’s down.

”Hi, uh, so—” Lance started but quickly stalled when Keith was standing right in front of him and only greeted him with a glare. He chuckled, looked elsewhere, but the ever charming half grin never left the corner of Lance’s mouth. ”I just, you know, uh—where are you headed now?” Lance scratched the back of his neck as the question left his mouth. Keith’s eyes latched onto the angle of his wrist.

”I’m gonna visit my dad’s grave,” he said.

Lance stared right at him for a few seconds, brain rebooting, probably trying to recall a time Keith had ever talked about his dead father before.

”Oh,” he said eventually, and then, ”oh, cool, cool, do you, like, need a ride or something?”

Now it was Keith’s turn to reboot. His eyebrows flew up beneath his bangs and his mouth fell open as if by itself. Lance’s face did something complicated and clambered to explain himself when Keith didn’t seem to find the ability to answer.

”Listen, ha, it’s just my whole family is here and they have their own cars, and we can like split up if you need to get anywhere—or, I dunno, if you need somewhere to sleep you’re welcome at my place. I think I know you and your mullet pretty well by now and I bet you’re gonna crash at that shack of yours and that’s a no can do, buddy—I refuse.” Lance ended his spiel with his nose stuck high in the air, palms waving in a cutting motion between them.

”Uh,” Keith responded, eyes still following the trail of Lance’s hands, ”I’m probably gonna get a ride with Shiro or something.” Suddenly, as Lance’s hands lowered down to his sides, Keith felt very eager to get away from this conversation. He could feel a blush spread steadily on his cheeks and that just didn’t sit right with Keith at that very moment.

Lance visibly deflated at his answer.

”Oh,” he said. Then they both flinched and looked over at Adam who was shouting for Keith to get his ass over to his car. ”Oh,” Lance said again. 

”Yeah, but thank you though,” Keith offered meekly and looked at a point directly between Lance’s eyebrows so he wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.

”No problem,” Lance said, quietly. Keith nodded once, like a complete idiot, and then he turned away, almost running in hurry to get away from Lance. He reached Adam who was standing by the open car door to the driver’s seat. Shiro was already inside looking through Adam’s useless CD collection—the man unironically listened to Kidz Bop albums. 

”That was painful,” Adam commented and shook his head as he opened up his arms. Keith flushed properly now, not sure what he was supposed to do.

”Shut up,” he ended up saying, no bite at all. Adam was crying again, or maybe the tears had never really stopped, and he took the final steps himself and brought Keith into his arms.

”It’s really good to have you home, kiddo,” he whispered and clutched Keith as close as he could, as if he’d actually missed him. Keith was acutely aware of the fact that he might’ve possibly started crying as well if Adam didn’t let him go anytime soon. Adam seemed to get the memo, because he only squeezed Keith gently one last time before letting go and stepping back. Keith immediately moved to escape inside the car and as soon as the door was shut Keith closed his eyes and took a deep breath, collecting himself. 

That was a weird reaction. He could still feel his skin burning wherever Adam’s embrace had pressed into him.

Keith had known Adam ever since he was brought to the Garrison by Shiro. They, Adam and Shiro, were together even back then and worked together as faculty members at the Garrison. It felt like ages ago, but Adam was the first person Keith came out to, officially at least. It hadn’t really been on purpose since Adam found out by walking in on Keith kissing some guy in the flight class a year above him. Keith wouldn’t say he wasn’t embarrassed, because he was absolutely dying a little inside as it happened, but he was also a kid who was used to grown ups being disappointed in him, so he’d simply figured this really wouldn’t be that different. Figured being the keyword here. He had been genuinely chocked when Adam only said whoops and a quick excuse me and went back through the corridor the same way he’d come from. Later in the day, he even came looking for Keith to ask if he was okay and to apologize again—to talk. He didn’t want Keith to feel uncomfortable, he’d said. Keith didn’t have enough similar life experiences to even know how to react. 

Adam was a good person. Worst taste in music, but a good person. Keith just didn’t realize he meant even a tiny bit as much to Adam as he meant to Keith.

Good to have you home, kiddo.  

Keith opened his eyes again and met Shiro’s gaze from across the car. He’d turned in his seat to look back at Keith with a soft smile, eyes that seemed to say it really is good to be home, isn’t it? and then Shiro raised his hand intertwined with Adam’s and kissed the other man’s knuckles gently. Keith let out a soft snort, just a distinct exhale really, and looked out of his window as the car started rolling to the tunes of a Kidz Bop version of Uptown Funk.

Keith didn’t know if this was home, but it felt goddamn close to one.

iii. shipwreck

”Hey, man.”

Keith whipped his head around as soon as the voice reached his ears over the sounds of the city far below them, but the revelation of how close Lance was still made him recoil from his spot. Lance frowned at this and Keith bit his tongue as to not blurt out how Lance definitely was overthinking his reaction.

”What are you doing out here?” Keith says instead, because no one was really supposed to be on the balcony. Keith was just really good at fading into the background and finding places where no one would come look for him. Except Lance did come look for him. 

Lance looks away, eyes straying over the parapet, out over the city lights—avoiding the question. The heavy pounding of the bass throbs through the doors Lance made sure to close when he got out here. Keith can feel it as imminent as his own pulse. He clears his throat as if it would get rid of the uncomfortable feeling. 

”I thought you’d be the type to enjoy a party setting,” Keith continues, baiting him.

Lance doesn’t deny it. Actually he doesn’t say anything at all. He just keeps frowning, eyes looking at Keith as if he’s searching for something. 

Then he clears his throat. He doesn’t seem to find whatever he came out to the balcony for.

”Yeah, uh. No, I—” Lance starts and chuckles awkwardly ”—I just needed some air. We can’t let the ladies get a too big of a bite the first night out on Earth, can we.” He wiggles his eyebrows at Keith as if he could ever relate. Like always Lance seems to operate on a level Keith just can’t seem to reach. Yet in true Lance spirit he powers through Keith’s lack of response and waves a hand dramatically in the air. ”You gotta give them something to work for. Spoiling it all right away would only make them bored after—”

”Okay,” Keith snaps, maybe a bit harsher than necessary. ”I get it,” he says after, softer, like some kind of damage control. But the damage was already done by the looks of Lance’s firmly shut jaw and Keith curses himself for always sabotaging every conversation with him—but then Lance takes a breath and he keeps going.

”Geez, fine. You know what, Mullet, you really need to relax. We’ve been on Earth for like a month now and you’re stiffer than the stick up your ass, and you still haven’t lost the fanny pack—I mean, come on. There should be some kind of law for that fashion atrocity.” Lance wrinkles his nose and pointedly looks down at the outfit Keith didn’t even get to chose himself for the evening. Except his belt.

Knots coil in Keith’s stomach. Usually comments like that would make him snap, but Keith is too aware of why he’d rather have Lance insult his fashion sense than keep talking about all the girls waiting in line for him inside. He likes it way too much that Lance chose to be out here on the balcony with Keith. The implication of it all, that maybe he’d been looking for him. Maybe even asked someone where they saw him last. Only the thought makes Keith’s heart race.

”Utility belt,” he says, too softly, because Lance’s neatly plucked eyebrows were starting to raise dangerously close to his hairline the longer it took for Keith to respond to his insults. He clears his throat. ”It’s called a utility belt,” he repeats, stronger this time. Leveling Lance with his standard glare of defiance. Challenging him to argue back. It reminds him of them bickering at the castle, and for some reason that thought felt more comforting and grounding than anything he’s experienced on Earth this far.

Lance just looks at him though, mouth hanging half open. 

Keith shuffles on his spot as the silence drags out. This is usually where Lance starts one of his rants about Keith’s hair or whatever and Keith huffs and shoots meaningless comments back. But Lance doesn’t say anything, and Keith has no idea what to do with a broken Lance. The very air around them seems to stand still, waiting in anticipation for some kind of release—as if someone has pressed pause on a remote Keith wasn’t aware existed. 

Then Lance huffs out a small laugh, a laugh that grows and grows until he’s pulling a hand through his perfectly styled hair and leans forward on his knees to really milk it. 

Sometimes, looking at Lance is like looking directly into the sun. Keith knows he should close his eyes but he doesn’t want to. He’s completely stunned. First by the reaction in itself. He’s never really considered himself a comedian—still doesn’t—but by Lance’s laugh he might as well switch careers right away. But also because it has been far too long since Keith’s seen that carefree, explosive kind of laughter exiting Lance’s mouth. The one where he smiles and he doesn’t care that he gets wrinkles in the corners of his eyes or that he’s got Keith on a first row seat ticket to a display of his goddamn wisdom teeth with how wide he’s smirking. 

Keith doesn’t notice the way he starts mirroring that smile.

Finally Lance calms down enough to take a couple of deep breaths and look over at Keith. The way the sound trickles away leaves them in an even more intimate silence than before.

In the neon lights decorating the balcony Lance looks positively radiating.

”Come on,” he says with a softer smile and reaches out his arm in front of Keith. Keith blinks down at the offering hand, wondering what the fuck he’s supposed to do with it.

”Uh,” Keith says like the socially inept person he is. Lance chuckles again and waves his hand gently but impatiently, as if he wants Keith to take it.

”Come on, Mullet. Dance with me.”

Keith’s eyes flicker up from the odd sight of Lance reaching him a hand and meets his eyes. The too familiar fight or flight response wells up in Keith as the situation of Lance’s action sets in. It’s the little voice in the back of his head that tells him he is not supposed to dance with radiating boys in a neon lit club on a skyscraper. That Keith is not supposed to want to hold Lance’s hand and get swept away into the music and the arch of his mouth. That it’ll only get worse if he does.

Keith wants to decline, he wants to run, but he sucks it up and suppresses the self loathing until another time. Because Lance is looking at him with such mirth and warmth that Keith doesn’t know if he could ever forgive himself if he turned this opportunity down.

”Okay,” he murmurs, takes Lance’s hand and, impossibly, Lance’s smile grew even bigger. But he doesn’t move, and Keith doesn’t know what do do—this was him shooting the ball to Lance’s court. This—dancing, asking people to dance, having fun—is Lance’s thing and now he just stands there looking at Keith as if he didn’t expect to get this far.

”Sorry—” Lance shakes his head, still smiling softly, ”Uh, sorry, I”—a deep breath—”Let’s just go.”

Lance pulls him by the hand through the doors and enters the dark corridor Keith lurked through earlier to find the balcony in the first place. He follows Lance’s steps, keeps his eyes on their intertwined hands and as they trip down the stairs Lance turns around and looks at Keith as if they are just two stupid teenagers in a stupid chick flick movie—and Keith can totally see it. The only light in the stairwell is from the glowing exit-signs on each floor, leaving them both in a dimmed green light. It feels almost magical, as if Keith is high or something. The music is vibrating through the walls, and it only gets higher as they get further and further down the stairs. Lance keeps walking backwards and he pulls Keith closer until he’s only one step behind, finally the taller of the two. Lance looks up at him and once again Keith feels scrutinized to the bone beneath Lance’s heavy gaze.

”What,” Keith says, barely audible through the rush of his blood and the pounding of his pulse. The trail of Lance’s eyes leaves his skin burning. Keith grabs the banister in a spastic hold. He doesn’t trust himself to keep his hands to himself when he’s let the situation spiral like this. It was exactly the kind of situation he was supposed to keep himself out of. 

”Nothing,” Lance breathes. Keith frowns because he’s not sure this is nothing. His eyes flickers after Lance’s, trying to figure out what it is he’s looking for in Keith’s face.

It is inevitable, the way they both started leaning closer—unconsciously, but not really. Not at all. Keith can feel the sweat collect in his neck but it feels distant somehow. Flat, like he’s watching this from behind a tv screen. Lance looks intently at his lips and then up again to meet his eyes. Keith hates the way his breath hitches and how he can feel the urge in his spine to close those last inches between them. He won’t though. He can’t. For several reasons, including the fact that taking advantage of Lance is the last thing he wants to do. Keith knows Lance is drunk, has seen him with a drink in his hand the whole night. He really wasn’t trying to stalk him but they hadn’t seen each other since they reunited with their families almost a month ago, and Keith really missed him. It was only after a lot of persuading himself that he only wanted what was best for Lance that he allowed himself to keep an eye on the boy. And in these lights, in the loud music, the longing felt so tangible Keith had no idea what else to do with it. 

”We should get back to the others,” Keith whispers instead of going any further, but it's still too loud and completely shreds the atmosphere. Lance freezes. Clears his throat. Leans away. Takes all the warmth of the limited space in the stairway with him.

”Oh. Uh, sure, I just… Yeah, of course,” Lance stammers and shakes his head, as if he could just shake away the memory of the past few seconds from his skull. Then he presses his back into the wall and ushers Keith down the stairs, gesturing with his free hand towards the door beneath them. ”Lead the way, Mullet.”

Keith hasn’t had a single drink after the mandatory toast in the beginning of the night. The one where the organizer of the party (some politician who Keith had never heard of before) raised his glass for the Courageous Paladins of Voltron, and kept talking for at least ten minutes as if every word was capitalized. Keith even refused when the very skilled bartender offered one. It’s usually on the secret menu, but tonight it’s exclusively for you. Keith doubted the very existence of a secret menu. Anyway, what Keith’s trying to say is that he is not drunk. Not even close. Yet when he looks at Lance in this pale green, buzzing light, and feels the bass vibrate in his eardrums, he can’t help but to stumble down the stairs as if he’s completely shit-faced. 

He opens the heavy door in a rush and is hit with the party atmosphere as if walking into a brick wall. The air is thicker, the music louder. Much louder. Keith can’t hear when Lance tells him to keep going until he’s being pushed forwards and Lance steps into the club as well.

Keith has never liked loud music, never really understood the appeal. What he did like, though, was how easy he found it to disappear into the noise, being illuminated and featureless in the neon lights and completely let himself get absorbed into the beehive mind of the thick crowd. A club is a golden mine for a runner. No one knows your name, can hardly see your face most times—and they don’t really want to either. Here we’re all ships in the night.

Except Keith can’t touch Lance’s scolding hot hand like this and think of him as a simple ship. 

”Hey,” Lance shouts, but with the way he’s leaned into Keith’s side, mouth almost grazing his earlobe, it’s as intimate as a whisper. Keith turns his head slightly towards him. Lance looks wild, eyes blown, mouth still open from shouting. ”Let’s dance,” he says.

Then Lance takes a step backwards onto the dance floor, their linked hands hovering in the air between them. And just like that, as if Lance had planned this, the song changes to something calm, something personal. Something that craves people’s skin to touch, for breath’s to mingle, for doubts to illuminate. The light dims, and Lance tugs at his hand. It beckons Keith closer, and he doesn’t stop until he’s back in Lance’s arms, their noses only a few inches from each other. Lance’s grin is long since gone, and he looks at Keith with a forlorn tint to his frown. Keith tilts his head to escape the weird look, takes a better hold of Lance’s hand and brings it up to be cradled between their bodies, and then he moves.

It’s awkward at first, because Keith has never danced like this with anyone—just swaying, closely pressed together, melting into each other as if they’re one body. But he finds himself yearning for it like it’s something he’s been missing his whole life. The proximity, the skin on skin contact, the warmth of Lance’s breath in the side of his neck. It burns his skin like steam from a furnace. 

Keith hasn’t touched anyone in weeks. The first week back on Earth had Keith crashing on Adam’s couch. It was nice at first. He felt better than he’d thought he’d do about staying on Earth. But then when every day life started for Adam, going back to work, cooking meals, spending all his time with his now-fiancé that has been missing for six years—Keith started feeling like he was just in the way. Shiro was busy with helping the Garrison to communicate with Allura and the rest of the coalition. Keith would have offered to help but the whole diplomacy thing was never his forte. He was much better placed behind an engine, in a cockpit, on the battlefield with a weapon in hand.

There wasn’t much of that here on Earth. Not on Adam’s couch. So he moved out, and he hasn’t really seen Shiro or Adam since. Of course they both called him daily, several times actually, but Keith hardly ever carried his phone with him so he only knew because he’d always have three or four missed calls by the end of the day.

Keith didn’t realize how touch starved he’d become. Earlier today he’d been crowded by Shiro and Adam before the party began, berated for not picking up his phone enough, for not responding to their dinner invites, to their movie nights, to anything. But after being immediately forgiven he’d gotten brought into several hugs. Then the team swarmed around them, and he’d gotten even more hugs. It felt as if the touches would corrode his flesh after a while. 

But this, having Lance of all people touching him, it felt different to anything else. 

Lance spun them around slowly, had gradually taken over the initiative as they danced on. Keith gladly left the directive of their dancing up to Lance, he was perfectly fine just joining for the ride. That way he could focus on breathing in the cologne oozing from Lance’s skin. He could slide his hand up the dips and hills of Lance’s arms, memorize the width of his shoulders, until his arm was tightly hooked around his neck. Lance accommodated to his shift and brought his own hand to the small of Keith’s back, pressing him closer. Lance brought their hands up between them, slowly, as if he was trying to do it without Keith noticing, until the bundle of fingers grazed his lips.

Keith turned a blind eye to the almost-kiss. Perhaps he was being selfish. He just knew that if this is the closest he’ll ever get to being kissed by Lance McClain, he’d gladly take it.

iv. rush

When Keith was nine he got lost after school and fought the police in one afternoon. 

He had lived with his current foster parents for a week, so naturally he didn’t trust them one bit. It was only a year after his dad had died so it was too soon for him to have realized that he had to be happy and kind and gullible in order to be kept longer than a few months in one house, but by then Keith was an angry, difficult kid. A troubled kid. A problem child—and honestly, he never really grew out of it. This was only the second time he had walked the route from his school to the house he hardly recalled the color of. He can’t remember what happened, and it’s not like it was that long of a walk, but somewhere between slipping past the goodbye’s of his teacher and throwing angry rocks in the bushes growing next to the sidewalk he completely lost track of where he was going. The roads all looked the same. 

Roads can go anywhere, he’d thought equally panicked as he was excited, but they all have to meet somewhere.

So he picked one at random and stalked down the street like the impulsive, reckless nine year old he was. It was the complete opposite way of where he was supposed to be going. Maybe deep down in the core of Keith, he knew that this wasn’t the right way. Maybe he just didn’t want to arrive at the house just yet, where he wasn’t allowed to put his feet on the furniture, and where the door second to the left in the hall was always locked and off limits even though he was immensely curious about what was in there. So he walked. He walked for what must have been at least a couple of hours when suddenly a police car slowed down on the opposite side of the road from Keith. He stopped—then hesitated because even if he knows that cops are meant to help people, he’s only associated them with bad things that he doesn’t want to think about—and then he kept walking, perhaps a little faster than before.

He went into a full out sprint when he heard the police man shout after him. Keith was fast, has always been the fastest kid on the playground, but even he knew he wouldn’t be able to outrun the police. So he figured his best chance of getting away would be fighting—another one of nine year old Keith’s brilliantly impulsive decisions. He felt large hands gripping his sides and he started kicking and screaming like he had gone completely mad. Keith realized pretty quickly that he was overpowered, but he never stopped fighting against being held down, led or in anyway forced to do anything he didn’t want to do. 

He heard the exasperated sigh of the police officer and it fueled his anger even more.

”Let’s get you home, kid,” he’d said after getting a few one syllable answers out of Keith and lured him into the police car with the promise of letting Keith talk into the police radio.

He never got to.

The police officer only meant well, Keith’s assured. But he remembers it so distinctly, the feeling of complete rejection at the word home being applied to that blank house, and to those people inside of it—like how your body rejects a new kidney. 9 year old Keith didn’t know much, but he knew that this was not a home.

He did have a fleeting thought of home being a grasping of his hand and his dad’s encouraging smile as Keith stumbles up the dunes of the desert. It’s the crackling of a fire and an open night sky, spotting falling stars and wishes of nothing ever changing (or maybe once or twice the wish of a mother arriving out of nowhere, changing everything).

However, even that feeling faded away along with the memory of that house and the people who lived inside of it. Keith can’t even recall their faces now. 

To Keith the concept of home is unfamiliar at best, and downright repellent at worst. He never understood Allura and her vehement affection for anything altean, the intense loyalty to her father and to the throne of a dying civilization. In the eyes of a runner it seemed pretty tiring being tied down to something like that. He never understood it—wasn’t sure if he wanted to.

But then, sometimes, when Keith catches Lance in a rare moment of silence, all focused and collected, surrounded by trinkets and tools in front of the shack, or when Lance reaches out to graze Keith’s skin when he’s excited, as if he’s doing it unconsciously, as if it’s instinct—then Keith can kind of see where Allura is coming from.

Home is everything Lance ever talks about when they see each other… and they see each other a lot. Keith isn’t sure how that happened. He hadn’t exactly been a social butterfly before Voltron, and he certainly wasn’t one after. If anything he’d become even more off putting and secluded, yet Lance still managed to find him and catch him off guard and make arrangements and using phrases like it’s a date, making Keith’s skin tingle in anticipation. Keith didn’t even have to really do anything for it all to happen anyway, so he tried not to complain.

Lance is definitely a hit the gas full on until the pedal is leveled with the ground kind of guy. Not only in his actions but also in the way he speaks. The guy can talk through anything and Keith only has to nod a bit and make some conversational noises when appropriate to keep him satisfied. It’s definitely not as hard to just hang out with Lance as he made it out to be in space. Keith didn’t know if Lance was over compensating for something back in the castle or if he only felt the massive pressure of infinity in space and tried to accommodate his equally massive personality to it. Maybe Earth is the one anchor he needed to not blow up.

(Although, in all honesty, a lot of the problems revolving their issue of hanging out were mostly just Keith’s anyway, at least after the first few months.)

Keith was working on Red, mumbling to himself, while waiting for Lance to arrive for one of their weekly meet ups by his old shack. At first, Lance only came there to learn how to fix his car, do his own check ups and such. But one thing lead to another and now Keith finds himself just hanging out with Lance three, four times a week. He doesn’t know why they haven’t moved their location to somewhere else, because the motive was clearly not to make Lance a mechanic anymore. It would have been great to hang out in a place with a fridge. Or a bathroom. The shack has stood deserted for so long Keith isn’t even sure if the plumbing or electricity even works. He didn’t live there, hasn’t even stepped a foot inside the shack since they got back to Earth. In fact, he got gifted an apartment back in town—empty, except for a single bed mattress on the floor—for being an intergalactic war hero or something. It was too big for him, too much contained space for one half-human to fill up. He found himself spending most of his time out here in the desert, just working on Red, flying her around the sand dunes, being a general nuisance to exactly nobody’s complaint.

Keith had noticed her getting overheated the last time he took her for a ride and had sat down to check the cooling system. Annoying, because he’d drained the coolant the second he bought the hover bike, which was only three months ago. So he popped her hood and tried to find the reason why she would be overheating, eventually coming to the conclusion that the pressure cap and radiator itself were old as fuck and in desperate need of replacement. Keith seethed at the memory of the old man he’d bought her from assuring him that she was in top condition. Yeah, right.

”What an idiot,” he mumbled and patted her hood. ”Poor Red.”

”You named your hover bike Red?” Lance’s sudden voice came from behind him. Keith jumped at the sound, but tried to smooth it over by reaching for a piece of fabric from one of his old shirts to wipe his greasy hands with. This thing where Lance keeps approaching him all unannounced really has to stop. Keith wasn’t used to feeling this on edge all the time, and he didn’t like it. 

He threw a glance over at Lance, who stood leaning against the fence to Keith’s porch, arms crossed over his chest, hip jutting out, in all his casual glory. Still managing to look like some ancient sun God. Keith gulped.

He looked good.

”Don’t make fun of me,” Keith managed.

Lance grinned and pushed away from the fence, stalking over to where Keith stood, still winding the fabric in his hands. How did Keith not hear him get here? His huge, monstrous car stands parked right next to the shack.

”I’m not,” Lance answered matter of factly and leaned against Red instead, much too close to Keith. He narrowed his eyes at Lance’s slouching frame, trying to figure out if he was lying or not, but Lance was too busy looking interested in whatever Keith was going to say next.

”Right, uh, I just… miss Red, I guess.” Keith shrinks as the words leave his mouth, but refuses to look away. Lance opens his mouth to answer and then he closes it again, sighs and breaks the eye contact himself. Keith’s eyes flicker down to Lance’s long fingers playing with a loose thread on his shirt.

”I miss him too. And my girl Blue,” Lance says after a while. Keith looks away completely 

”It’s not really the same feeling as when I missed my family from the castle though,” Lance continues when it’s evident Keith wasn’t going to respond. ”This is more… solid. You know? Like, when I missed my family it was because I didn’t know if I would ever see them again. It came in waves and it was like—wild, man. A body can’t handle that much strong emotions all the time, it has to shut them off and then surprise you with them at the worst times. This, right now, it’s more solid. I miss Blue like I miss my old room back in Varadero. It’s still there, I can still get it back, but I just… don’t.” Lance furrows his eyebrows as if he managed to lose himself in his ramblings, but then he looks up at Keith with a soft smile and shrugs. ”It’s nothing bad, it just is what it is.” 

Keith tries to compute everything Lance just dropped on him. Because even if he can kind of see where Lance is coming from, it’s not at all what Keith is experiencing now. The ache Keith feels for Red, for the castle, for space and being out on the battlefield fighting for not only his life but the future of the entire universe—that ache was all consuming. It swallowed him whole. Some nights he would lay in bed in cold sweat and he could feel every single pinpoint of his body where he’s gotten hurt in battle. A reminder that what he went through wasn’t just all constructed in his head.

Some nights it even felt good.

Some nights he felt so guilty for wishing the war to not be over that he stayed holed up in his furniture starved apartment for days.

Keith moved on with his tedious check up on Red. Lance had silently helped him turn on the engine for a minute or two to warm up the gook so Keith could start the process of changing the oil. He had just removed the drain pan from below her to take her on a test run and see if the dipstick would stay on ’Full’, when Lance made his presence known again.

”You don’t—you don’t have any family left besides Krolia, right?” he asked, still holding on to the old, empty oil filter, wrapped in too many layers of paper towels. 

Keith had almost forgotten about their conversation. He can tell Lance is trading lightly, carefully, as to not scare Keith away. It didn’t matter. Keith didn’t get scared easily, but family had always been a weak spot of his. Sort of how kids are scared of monsters under their beds—and then they grow up, fully aware how irrational that fear is, yet still they can’t help but make sure no feet pokes out of the mattress at night.

”Not that I know of,” Keith answers anyway, because he doesn’t have to be scared around Lance.

”Did you live here with your dad?” Lance asks, slightly changing the subject in one smooth question. Keith glances up at him, catching the end of his gesture towards the shack. An unattractive snort escapes Keith’s nose, but he doesn’t care. Lance has seen him do irredeemably worse things.

”No. This is just a shack dad found when he was young—and bored, probably.” Keith laughs and squints up at Lance. ”He decided to fix it up himself. We actually lived in a house a bit out of town. It’s pretty close to here, but I think all the houses has been demolished now.”

”What?” The reaction startles Keith enough to widen his eyes and stare at Lance. ”You grew up in a house? Like a real house-house? White corners, windowsills, fence around the garden kind of house?” Lance shrieks dramatically, and somehow Keith isn’t annoyed. It’s nice, actually—a stupid distraction from an even more stupid fear.

”Yeah. I grew up in a house,” Keith says slowly, a smile hiding in the corners of his mouth. ”You know, I’m not actually a savage desert child. I only came here with my dad every other weekend to stay in the shack. And it was the only place I could go after I—when I got kicked out of the Garrison.”

”No. Excuse me—but no. This is world shattering information, Keith. You can’t just explain it like it’s just another thing.” Lance shoots out his hands, palms up to the sky.

”Uh, sorry?” Keith staggers, not really following what Lance wants him to say. Lance groans and drops his hands, leans back onto Red and crosses his arms over his chest.

”Whatever, Mullet... So, you came here with your dad a lot?” he asks and looks out over the desert terrain all around them. Keith nods his head and leans against Red right next to Lance. ”What did you even do out here? Watch the sand? That doesn’t sound much like a fun weekend activity, if you ask me.”

Keith rolls his eyes.

”No, we didn’t come all the way up here to watch the sand,” he drawls. Then he slouches even lower, avoiding Lance’s eyes that suddenly turned to watch him as he spoke. ”We came here because it’s the best place to watch the stars. You know light pollution is a thing right? Well, there’s no lights here. Only sand, and rocks—and infinite sky. It’s even better when you get higher up. You know the cave where we found Blue?” Keith turns his head slightly to catch Lance’s nod before he dives away from his gaze again. ”Yeah, above that cave there’s this cliff dad used to take me at night. We could stay for hours, just watching the sky. He would tell me stories about the constellations. It was—it was great.” 

Keith bends his neck, squints up into the pink sky, and promptly gets blinded by the sun, even though it’s halfway down the horizon already.

They bask in the silence for a while. Until Lance’s silence-quota is reached, that is.

”Stargazing, huh? I didn’t know you liked that kind of thing,” he comments, but it doesn’t sound as harsh as it usually does when Lance teases Keith. Keith turns to look at him. Lance too has his face angled up to the sky, but his eyes are closed. To an outsider it would probably look like he’s just sunbathing in the sunset. To Keith, he looks like the missing piece in a puzzle he’s been trying to solve for years.

”Lance,” he says, furrowing his eyebrows. Lance glances at him from the corner of his eyes. ”I wanted to become a pilot. I went to the Garrison, known for training the world’s most successful astronauts. Why the fuck would you think I’d hate looking at the stars?”

Lance looks at him fully now, eyes wide, mouth set ajar. Then he gulps and laughs breathlessly.

”Well, when you put it that way, Mullet,” he says and knocks his shoulder into Keith’s. Keith didn’t realize they’d come so close to each other during the conversation. He can’t even remember moving an inch. "I almost didn't even get into the Garrison," Lance continued after a second of silence. "I barely managed to pass the admission flight test because I was so scared of the height," Lance admitted and Keith tried to focus on that surprising reveal instead of Lance's shoulder pressing into his.

"What?" Keith fumbled the word out in his confusion. Lance glanced over at him, a thin coat of pink on his cheeks.

"Uh, yeah." He exhaled a breathy laugh. "I don't even have a tragic childhood story to go with that. I just... never liked heights. I even used to challenge myself and climb trees a lot when I was younger—you know. Try to defeat my fear or whatever. Veronica always egged me on, she was a real pain in the ass back then. But then one time I climbed so high—man, I just kept climbing because I knew that if I looked down I was going to fall. You know when you get so scared you can't move? That was me, but I would just drop—like completely drop everything."

Lance turned and looked at Keith then, maybe to make sure he was still listening. He was. He was absolutely listening. Keith doesn't think he's ever not listened to Lance when he talks about himself.

"Did you fall?" Keith asked, just to show Lance that he had his attention. Lance looked away, the blush becoming even more prominent.

"Yeah, no—I almost wish I did, but no... I just kept climbing until it got kinda dangerous, and Veronica started panicking for real so she ran away and got our parents. Dad had to call 911 and get someone to take me down. It was humiliating, Keith."

Keith couldn't help the wide smile spreading across his face. It's just, he could see it so clearly; a small, stubborn Lance climbing a tall tree just out of pure spite to defy his fear of heights. Only to get stuck and need professionals to get him down.

"At least you got rid of your fear," Keith said finally, to ease Lance of the embarrassment a little. But Lance only shook his head.

"Oh, no. I'm still scared of heights, dude. That shit's fucking terrifying," Lance said and shivered visibly. "It made it really hard for me in the beginning to fly. Iverson fucking hated me. He never got why I wanted to become a pilot if I was so scared all the time. But it's—I can't really explain it, it's just such a rush, you know, freedom—yeah. It's freedom to fly even though I'm so scared. Just knowing that I can do it, that's why I wanted to be a pilot."

Keith stared at Lance with a half open mouth, still trying to wrap his mind around a world where Lance is scared of heights. A world in which this boy, with subtle freckles splattered across his pointy nose, is scared of heights and has defied that fear all this time. Keith can't even recall every time he's gotten into a cockpit and relied on Lance's skills and courage, backing him up without blinking an eye. Every time Keith's challenged him to make loops and drop to the ground and just do reckless shit. Every time Lance saved Keith in battle and all the sacrifices for every alien they came across—all those times Lance has been scared. And he'd done them anyway. Because he likes the rush.

Because if Lance is scared of anything, it's of being limited.

It was never intended to be a secret that Keith has always admired Lance, but this is a completely next level kind of admiration. This right now was almost a tangible rope, slippery and coiling in his hands, the other end connecting him to Lance and pulling him closer and closer into Lance's atmosphere. Suddenly the situation felt much too real. A popped bubble, except Keith seemed to be the only one of them to realize the oxygen is pouring out. 

He straightened up quickly and took a step away from Lance. 

”You should leave,” is the only thing he says, like an asshole. Lance looks at him with a stricken expression. ”I mean, it’s getting pretty late. So you should probably start heading home—unless you want to get lost in a dark desert,” he ushers out and folds his arm over his chest, looks down to his feet to avoid Lance’s eyes. Keith knows exactly what he’d see if he looked up, and he’s not in the mood for it. At all.

”Oh, uh, okay,” Lance says and gets off Red as well. He stands there for a few seconds, shuffling on his feet, as if he’s waiting for something. Keith doesn’t budge from his concentrated dissection of the ground, but he can still feel the way Lance deflates. ”Okay… I’ll see you later, then.”

Keith doesn’t answer, only nods and directs his full attention on Red, crouches to tinker with whatever he can find in her open hood. Lance turns around and starts walking towards his car, and Keith fucking hates himself. He leans his head down on Red, knows he’ll get a smudge in the middle of his forehead, when Lance suddenly shouts his name.

Keith whips his head to look at him. Lance stands next to his car, keys ready in the hand raised to his eyebrows to block the sun. He smiles kindly, a smile Keith doesn’t deserve.

”You should come over for dinner. At my house. Mama’s been asking when she gets to meet you properly.” 

Lance is golden in the light of the sunset. Keith doesn’t know why someone like that would invite a greasy boy like him to their home.

”Please. Say yes,” Lance says quietly. Keith opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. So he nods. Lance lits up into a smile worth challenging the sun, and nods enthusiastically along with Keith.

”Cool—yeah, cool. So, I’ll text you the details. We always do family dinners on Sundays, but you’re welcome whenever—” Lance fumbles with his car keys, but manages to open the door to the drivers seat. ”Uh. So. Great. I’m gonna leave now. See you.” Then he disappears into his car and drives away.

Keith sits in front of Red until it turns dark, and the warm sun rays are replaced by soft moonlight. He doesn’t think he’s stopped blushing ever since Lance car disappeared behind the horizon, and he wonders if he might just have ruined everything.

v. reflection

Keith shuffled the gigantic bouquet of flowers into one hand and used the other to ring the doorbell. It was a familiar gesture by now, hardly brought him any anxiety at all, not like the first time he stepped up to the doormat and almost turned right around again. Keith had quite honestly been shaking in his boots that Sunday when Lance first asked him to come for dinner. Family dinner. Keith had no idea what he was doing there, staring for too long at the doorbell, daring himself to just press it. In the end it was pure spite that made him ring the bell. He was not going to let fear drive him away from eating free food. He can do this, just this once. 

Make Lance happy and go to the fucking dinner, and then you’ll never have to do it again.

Keith didn’t expect to enjoy the family dinners as much as he did. Maria was one of the most easy going people he’s ever met—Lance really is his mother’s son. She picked up right away that Keith is not a talker—not even close to their level—and instead of trying to include him and push for answers, she simply let him eat in peace that first dinner. He was never excluded, mind you. They just never really expected him to come with snarky comebacks or quick witted responses, like the rest of the family seemed to excel at (well, if you'd count reciting memes out loud at the dinner table as equivalent to being quick witted). 

And it was comforting in a way Keith hasn’t really experienced before. 

Family dinners, Keith learned, wasn’t just exclusively for family. Sometimes they were joined by Hunk, sometimes Pidge. Sometimes it’s the whole team and Lance’s family together, crowded into their small kitchen. Most times though, it’s just Keith that’s invited outside of family, and sometimes he finds himself sitting at their kitchen table on other days than Sundays. He tries not to feel weird about being there so often, because it would be too like him to ruin something that was completely wholesome before he started poking and prodding at it. It actually does feel like they enjoy having him there, and he refuses to question it.

So he ringed the bell, and he waits patiently with the flowers clutched in front of him and when the door opens it’s followed by a blinding, original Maria McClain smile, that Keith’s been exposed to so many times he’s started to feel comfortable enough to smile back. 

”Keith, sweetheart, just in time!” she exclaims, and then she stops in the middle of her gesture for a hug when the flowers in his hand registers. ”Flowers? Are they for Lance?” she asks without missing a beat, smile wide. 

The flush on Keith’s cheeks burned worse than walking barefoot on the desert sand at noon, and he wished he could just hide behind the bouquet forever.

”No, uh—no, they’re for you, actually. As a thanks for cooking food for me.” Keith doesn’t think he can get any redder than this, but then Maria shifts her gaze to him and it’s filled with so much care and affection that Keith isn’t sure if he can trust his own judgement anymore. She smiles again, a quiet smile, not as blinding as the usual one, but it contains just as much feeling. Keith can’t place what feeling, but it feels good and it’s soaking him in warmth.

”Thank you, Keith… You’re a good man,” she says softly, gaze overwhelming with meaning, and then she’s reaching for the flowers. Keith nods, clearing his throat. ”I’m going to put these in a vase right away. The food is almost ready, and then we’re just waiting for everyone to get here—Lance! Keith is here!”

Another thing Keith’s learned not to flinch over anymore is the way Maria shouts for her children. That woman must have got the biggest pair of lungs Keith’s ever experienced before. It’s understandable though, since she’s been cursed with all of her four children being equally big blabbermouths. 

(Keith thinks it’s a charming trait, but that one’s obvious by now.)

”Yeah, mama, send him up!” Lance’s voice echoes down the stairs. Maria mutters something about Keith not being a FedEx package, but still gestures for him to skitter up the stairs. Keith does exactly that, barely manages to hang off his coat before he’s off to the second floor of the McClain house.

This isn’t the same house Lance lived in before Voltron. When the news broke of three Garrison students missing, the McClains picked up their belongings in Varadero, Cuba, and moved to the US near the Garrison to keep up with the investigation. Lance’s dad already lived here, as well as his big sister Veronica. Apparently, Manuel McClain was a fighter pilot for the Garrison back in the day, and still worked there, and Veronica was specializing her training at the Garrison during the time so it wasn’t that much of a struggle really. Some other relatives, an aunt and her husband, moved into the Varadero beach house temporarily, so it’s not lost forever or anything. But by the time the team came back to Earth, the McClains had been living here in this house for five years. 

It wasn’t the home Lance remembered, but it was still home.

Keith takes the steps of the stairs two at the time. At the top he heads towards Lance’s room right away. His door is halfway shut, but there’s a sliver of light shining through the gap. Keith guesses it’s where Lance is hiding. Though when he opens the door he doesn’t immediately spot the boy, but as soon as he’s stepped a foot inside a tell-tale snicker comes from the desk chair. Keith doesn’t get the time to ask what the fuck he’s doing before Lance dramatically spins the chair around with a shit eating grin, pointed at Keith.

”What’s up, my dude?” he says casually.

Keith’s eyes immediately zooms in on the hot pink fanny pack around Lance’s waist. He’s not impressed, and he hopes it shows in his face. Then Lance reaches to open the zip and pulls out a lip balm that he thoroughly applies to his lips. Keith's eyes follows the gesture.

”What?” Lance says innocently and raises an eyebrow. ”It’s a utility belt.”

Keith can sit and pretend he thinks Lance is being hilarious, but honestly, he doesn’t have to. He is too enamored with the boy in a hot pink fanny pack, who apparently remembers conversations from ages ago. So Keith grins back, and eventually that grin transitions into chuckles, into full out laughter. Because he’s being so silly, and Keith eats it up.

Lance brightens at the reaction and gets out of the chair to join Keith by the doorway, chuckling along. He lifts his arms and slings them over Keith’s shoulders, locking his hands behind his neck, and Keith automatically responds by circling his around Lance’s back.

”That funny, huh?” Lance smirks, when Keith’s laughters trickles away. Keith shakes his head stubbornly and dives in to lean his forehead against Lance’s shoulder. It felt good to finally hug Lance. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of days. Not since Lance left for Varadero to collect a few boxes of his things in their old house that his family had left there, hopefully waiting for the day of his return.

”Where did you even get that?” he asks, muffled as his face is pressed into Lance’s shirt. 

”Oh, man, you won’t believe the shit I found in our old attic—” Lance wrenches out of their embrace and sprints to his bed where he’s got all sorts of junk spread out on the sheets.

”You’re going to become a hoarder,” Keith jokes, but is also half serious, eyeing the stuff carefully. Lance just snorts.

”Bold of you to assume I’m not a hoarder already,” he says and throws something at Keith. Keith flinches and takes a step back, but the thing circles him and settles tightly around his waist. Keith looks down at the rope, the end of it still in Lance’s hand. 

”What—” he says but Lance starts pulling at his end and Keith’s ruthlessly hauled across the room.

”A lasso!” he shouts eagerly, so Keith only frowns at that until he’s standing right in front of Lance, neatly placed between his knees, and glares. Lance looks up at him, still maintaining that innocent smile.

”Caught you,” he murmurs. 

Keith sighs and folds his arms over each other, afraid that Lance will be able too see his heart beating through his chest. That’s when they hear a knock on the doorframe. 

”Uh. What the fuck did I just walk into,” Veronica says and stares at the way they’re positioned—and also the fucking lasso. Keith blushes and looks at Lance for an explanation as well. Incredibly, there’s a light pink shadow spreading across his cheeks. And here Keith’s been thinking Lance has got absolutely no shame at all.

”Go away, Veronica—God, I swear you can’t have any privacy in this house, and I’ve fucking lived with six other people stranded on a ship in space for three years.”

”It’s six years, you big drama queen,” Veronica responds with a playful grin. She moves her eyes over to Keith, and it's immediately clear to him that this is Lance's big sister. "Good to see you again, Keith. You might as well move in with how often I find you here. I bet Lance wouldn't mind a roommate," she says, the grin suddenly turning very pointed. Lance lets out a high pitched squeak and throws his pillow in her direction, but it only falls down to Veronicas feet. She grins in response and salutes them before she moves along in the hallway, leaving Keith and Lance in the awkward silence. Lance is still blushing.

”Remind me of why I even hang out with you again,” Keith mumbles eventually and keeps looking at the door to hide his face. He knows he’s looking too mushy right now, too fond, but he can’t help it. 

”Psh, you love me, Mullet. You can’t deny it anymore.”

Keith turns his eyes back to Lance. Something in the way he said it made it sound like less of a tease, and more sincere than intended. But when he looks at Lance, he’s only smiling that soft smile back at him.

”Guess I’m gonna have to add you to my collection now,” Lance continues.

”Ha, ha, very funny,” Keith says and pushes away from Lance, at least as far as the lasso will let him. He forgets about whatever that was before. Maybe he’s becoming paranoid.

Eventually, Keith gets Lance to let go of the lasso and free him—Fine. You’re a free elf now, Dobby. Go do your boring free elf things—and they settle down on his bed to chill in wait for Maria to call them down for dinner. Lance is throwing a rubber ball in the air, occasionally passing it to Keith, who has to scramble to catch it every time since he’s given no warning whatsoever.

”So,” Lance starts, and Keith can feel the ominous clang to his voice just from that first word. ”Shiro called me today, and something came up.” He stops there, keeps throwing the rubber ball into the air. Keith sighs.

”Yeah?” he indulges him. Lance throws the ball so hard it hits the ceiling and bounces to the other side of the room. They both watch it roll until it stops by the desk chair. Then Lance sits up properly and focuses on Keith.

”Why didn’t you tell me Iverson offered you a job?” he asks in a small voice. Keith goes rigid. Of fucking course Shiro had to go and tell Lance about that. Keith knew Shiro was proud of him, hell, even Keith was a little surprised that Iverson offered him a fighter pilot position, on the behalf of admiral Sanda. She’d been impressed by his skills and wanted him on a team. 

Keith declined and didn’t offer any explanations, though. Not to Iverson, not to Shiro. And definitely not to Lance.

”Because I wasn’t going to take it,” is the only thing he says, and even that Keith thinks is generous. 

”Why?” Lance inquires and leans closer. 

Because I already have my hover bike. I already have the desert. I already have—whatever this is between us. I don’t want anything else. Can’t have anything else. 

(Because I don’t trust myself to control a ship and not steal it to fly far away from here, leaving before you do.)

”I just didn’t want it, Lance. Drop it.” Keith shuffles to the edge of the bed and puts his feet on the floor. There’s that itch in his bones again.

”No—no, we’re not doing this, Keith. You don’t get to be all lone-wolf with me.” Lance puts a hand on his shoulders and forces Keith to look at him. He’s got that frustrated little wrinkle between his eyebrows, and Keith focuses on that.

”Why not? What makes you so special?” he asks sharply. Because, really, Lance has no right to Keith. They’re not—a thing. Why should he get a special entrance to Keith’s thoughts when even Shiro doesn’t. Lance pulls his hand back from Keith’s shoulder as if stung.

”That’s not—I didn’t—” Lance struggles to form a coherent sentence, but then he takes a breath and leans towards Keith again, and Keith can’t help wondering how many fucking times he’s going to have to hurt him before he realizes Keith isn’t what he thinks he is. ”Look. I just want to know what’s going on with you, okay? But you need to talk to me in order for me to do that.”

”Maybe I don’t want to talk about it with you.” 

There’s a drop of a screen that only Keith noticed. A barrier between them, keeping Keith from going off on Lance the way a small, but incredibly loud, voice inside of him is commanding him to do. That small part of Keith wants to just get this over with, just ruin him, stop dragging it out and just finish this—whatever this is. 

Lance flails in the air for a few seconds but seems to find his footing again.

”Sure. Fine, but then you need to talk to someone else,” he says, and he’s finally starting to sound annoyed. Good. An angry Lance is better than a ruined Lance. Keith can work with that. ”Shiro. Or Adam. Or anyone really, but you’re not doing that either.” Lance gives him this look that is something close to pity, but it’s not, and Keith can’t tell what Lance wants from him. So he just glares defiantly in return. ”Keith. You do know me and Shiro talk, right? I know about you not answering their calls or visiting anyone. You only come here for dinner, and hang out by the shack. I’m—I’m worried about you.”

There it is. Once again Keith is ruining everything, and this time without even noticing. He thought he’d been so careful. He’d seen Lance so happy the last couple of weeks, just like earlier with how they'd been laughing and touching and joking around. Keith thought that was how it would always be. How it would remain. He’s a fool for thinking that would ever be enough for Lance. To ever think he would be enough. But Lance deserves so much better—so much more than what Keith can offer.

All Keith has ever managed to do is worry people. Either for him, or for themselves. He hates to worry people. He hates the uneasy, stiff atmosphere when he walks into a headmaster’s office after getting in trouble and none of his caretakers picks up the phone. He hates the pity in their eyes while playing in the backyard of a rare friend who’s mom got a call to be warned that he doesn’t have any parents. But worst of all is this, the unfairness of having to sit through when the boy he’s in love with realizes that there’s so much more wrong with Keith than he’d first imagined.

”Don’t be,” he bites back, all of his contempt for the world, for himself, welded into those words, as he turns his back on Lance again, ”it’s a waste of your time.”

”Well, I can’t just shut it off now, can I?” Lance shoots back, with just as much steel as Keith. ”I can’t just walk around not feeling anything or showing concern for people—I'm not you.” 

Keith doesn’t see Lance’s face when he says it, but by the force the words whip the skin of his back he’s not sure if he even wants to. That one hit a little too close to home.

Keith shoots off the bed, about ready to bail out of this dinner.

”No!” Lance shouts, the panic in his voice a surprise for both of them. ”No, wait—don’t go. Shit. Sorry.”

Keith looks back at Lance when he’s sure his face won’t betray him. Lance sits half hovering on his knees hands reached out, as if he’d been ready to grab Keith if he tried to walk away.

”Lance,” he says; a warning, yet no emotion what so ever betraying his voice.

Lance’s expression crumbles at the sight of Keith’s face, and Keith can kind of understand why. He probably looks a bit scary right now, sort of empty, blatantly inhuman. He remembers just walking across the playground in whatever school he’d been put in for the next few months, and on that short walk from the parking lot to the entrance he’d have to defend his face, defend his too sharp features, his weirdly colored eyes, the way he didn’t seem to respond the same way the other children did.

Here he comes! Watch out, he’ll steal your soul and eat your corpse! It’s the Grim Reaper!  

Keith’s heard it all before.

”I’m sorry, I—” Lance begins, looks down on his baby blue sheets. ”I’m sorry, okay? Just don’t go.”

Keith can’t see any reason to stay. That’s always been his problem. Lance can’t smooth over something Keith’s already broken. It’s better this way—better Lance gets over whatever fixation he’s got on Keith now rather than later. Keith has indulged in this for too long, got too carried away. He forgot himself. Forgot the promise he made himself in the quantum abyss.

”I’m leaving.” Keith gets away from Lance’s reach but Lance immediately scrambles off the bed to run after him.

”Wait! Stop, seriously,” he shouts after Keith and grabs his wrist. Keith barely fights it, hoping still that Lance will just tire himself out, but Lance is looking too close to desperate for Keith’s comfort. He reaches with his other hand to put in a firm hold of Keith’s neck, pulling them closer together until he's blocking every escape Keith could find. ”Why do you always do this? Why do you always run like this? What are you so fucking scared of?”

”Lance—stop,” Keith almost growls. This is starting to spiral out of control—has been spiraling out of control for too long. Keith should’ve never agreed to that first dinner, he fucking knew he was going to ruin everything.

”No, fuck, I’m just trying to look out for you, I—I care about you, Keith. Just let me care about you for a while and please—please just start talking to me.” Lance furrows his eyebrows and his hand travels from Keith’s neck up to his cheek, thumb drying away a tear Keith didn’t realize had escaped his eyes. The touch was so gentle, so careful, completely wasted on Keith’s skin.

Keith doesn’t say anything, because if he opens his mouth now he’s going to break.

”You don’t have to run,” Lance murmurs, cradling Keith’s face as if it’s the most precious thing he’s ever held in his palm. ”I won’t hurt you. I promise, Keith. I won’t walk away, or—or whatever it is you think people do when you start showing that you have feelings.”

”Shut up, Lance. You can’t say that.” He really can’t. Keith has to stop Lance now or they’ll both regret it. They’ll both suffer the consequences. ”You can’t—you have no idea what people do.”

”And you do?” Lance questions, grips Keith’s chin so he won’t hide.

”Yes. They get tired of you, or—or they die. Or they realize you’re not what they wanted.” If Keith is anything, it’s stubborn. So he keeps looking into Lance’s eyes, even as the other boy shakes his head in dejection.

”No. That’s not right, Keith—I won’t walk away from you.” 

Lance’s voice is soft, but his touch is rough, hot, heating up more by the second. Soon Keith’ll have another permanent scar on his face. And wouldn’t that be ironic—the boy who’s known for not showing his feelings wears the marks of the two people he loves the most on his cheeks.

”You will. Because that’s what people do, Lance—they leave.” Keith can feel anger simmering in his chest. He doesn’t want to take it out on Lance. He knows it’s his own god damn fault for letting it go this far. It’s just, having Lance denying what Keith has seen written in stone, even though Keith himself is fighting fate, is starting to get tiring in a way he didn’t anticipate. 

”That’s—that’s bullshit.” Lance looks surprised by Keith’s words, as if he can’t even wrap his head around the concept. And it dawns on Keith that this whole conversation is going in circles. It’s useless. Lance will never understand. He can’t.

”No,” Keith said, a sudden calm cooling him to the bones. ”That’s the truth. We’re all running from something—and you’re fucking naive to think otherwise.”

He wrenches himself out of Lance’s hold, catches a last glimpse of his expression, flickering, and hurries out of his room. Keith almost jumps three steps at a time down the stairs, not really caring about the noise he makes until he’s in the hall and can see Veronica and the kids in the kitchen, staring at him with wide eyes. So they probably heard all of that. Great. Keith turns to escape this mess through the door but Maria comes out of the kitchen and stalls him long enough for Lance to come running after him down the stairs.

”Keith? What’s wrong?” Maria says, and she sounds exactly like the mother Keith wished he had. The perfect mix of concerned and calm. The solid foundation Keith wished he’d had from the beginning to build himself up on. Instead Keith was built like a card house—one soft blow and he would fall to pieces.

Her eyes flickers to Lance, searching for answers Keith can't give her, and it’s enough to break the spell.

”I’m sorry,” he says, puts all the things he wished he could tell her in those two words, not sure if this is the last time he’ll ever see her. And then he steps past her and out the door. Lance is shouting his name, even as he runs across their front yard, even when he puts on his helmet and rides off on Red, far, far away. 

As he's leaving them behind Keith comes to realize that he might understand Krolia a little better now.

vi. scorpion

Keith wakes from his worried slumber the same way he’s seen princesses do in those old Disney movies—eyes slowly fluttering open and a soft gasp leaving his lips. He has never been a jumpy person. In contradiction to what everyone seems to think of him now, he’s excellent at quelling down any sudden unwanted feelings interfering with the situation he’s in. Often this translates into more reckless impromptu reactions than the original one, but at least he’s not afraid.

Keith is not a stranger to nightmares, so there’s no use acting like he should be.

The strings in his shabby couch are so run down Keith feels as if he’s sunk directly through the padding and onto the floor. It’s not the worst place he’s ever slept in, but still not a pleasant experience for his spine. He recalls driving Red to the shack sometime after riding around the desert for a while. He didn’t bring his phone to the dinner at Lance’s house in the first place, is pretty sure it lies on the floor next to his mattress back in the apartment. Keith never told anyone where he was going. The only thing noticing him on his way here were the streetlights by the side of the road. It’s probably not the best decision he’s made but it’s too late now. He’s already here. He must have slept for only half an hour or so.

It creaks ominously as Keith sits up and he writes a mental note to look into a new couch. Then he glances around the room, takes in the cracks in one of the windows, the old stove that's more rust than iron—maybe he should just renovate the whole place. 

It did come to Keith’s attention that he should probably feel some kind of nostalgia by being here again, get his brain filled to the brim with memories of his dad and of his life before Voltron, before foster care. Keith can’t feel anything. This is the ruins of a house he left behind. He only sees dust piling on the floor. The flapping parts of the roof where the wind howls through. This isn’t his home. It’s just an empty shell of it. As if a light has gone out just before he arrived here, and now he’s left with a gust of smoke, too faint to really grasp on to.

Coming here was a mistake. 

Finally admitting it gives Keith the spark to shoot up from the couch and pat down his jeans in search for his keys to Red. He exits the shack and knows that it’s for the last time. He doesn’t even look back.

He jerks Red out into the open terrain of the desert, follows the familiar path that has it’s beginning somewhere stored in his DNA and drives faster than he’s ever done before. He can feel his pulse beating, feels the blood coil and burn as if it’s trying to fuel him to go even faster. 

The ride to the cave ends in minutes. Some kind of record, probably.

Keith rips off his helmet and stares up at the cliff, tries to make himself as welcoming as possible to the energy it once held. He groans in frustration when the place comes up just as empty as the shack.

For someone so keen on running in circles and staying a lost thing, he’s rather desperate to find his way home.

Throwing his helmet in the sand he scrambles off Red and starts his determined descent into the cave. He slides down the bigger dunes, climbs over rocks and once he’s standing by the entrance it’s too dark to really see anything. Keith digs into his utility belt and almost drops the flashlight in his hurry to turn it on.

Keith feels like a ghost walking the bumpy floor of the cave once again. It felt as if the dust and dirt had grown at least an inch in thickness since the last time he was here about five years ago—three for the rest of the team. 

Six for the rest of the world, Keith reminds himself.

It was all those years ago, together with the others, when Lance touched the carving on the wall and they lit up and sent them down the waterfall to get Blue. Keith recalls the excitement of being able to show Shiro what a weird fucking cave this was, and the chagrin of having Lance—loudmouth, enigmatic Lance—being the answer to the riddle Keith’s been struggling with since before his dad died.

Blue wasn’t his to have. Keith knows this. He never really felt the particular need to be the blue paladin anyway. It was never jealousy over Lance being picked by Blue at all and completely about the fact that Lance stole the show and then he kept it. He just—this was Keith's cave. This was the only place where he would never have to run. And now it feels like Keith’s been running ever since they stepped into Blue for the first time that day.

Now he’s back. He even ran away from his fight with Lance to get here. Gone full circle. He hoped to find some kind of release—or something. Something to keep him from spiraling further.

Keith hums as the beam of his flashlight crosses over a familiar carving in the wall, reaching a careful hand up to touch the lion, he realizes it’s the very same one Lance touched. The tip of his index finger gently grazed the rough exterior, and then he pressed his whole palm onto it.

Nothing happened. No lit carvings. No hole in the ground.

Keith doesn’t know why he feels so disappointed. He doesn’t even know what he was expecting. The Blue Lion isn’t even down there anymore. She’s with Allura and the rest of the lions up in space. Yet it still feels as if someone has folded his insides. As if he’s too big to fit into his own skin.

He ushers backwards and stumbles over a crooked stone, watches the flashlight fly across the cave but catches himself before falling into the wall behind him. He stands there, chasing for air in the sudden claustrophobic environment, wondering what the hell he’s doing down here. The energy is gone. The pull that he was so used to, comforted by, has long since faded away. Keith is floating, without direction, without purpose. There’s nothing left for him in this cave.

Never before has he felt so much like an alien stranded on Earth without their spaceship as he does in this moment.

In his urgency to get out of the cave, Keith forgets about the flashlight lying on the ground. The beam is directed towards the way he came in anyway, so he runs. He runs until he stumbles again and this time he doesn’t have the gracefulness to catch himself. The rock came out of nowhere, or maybe it was there this whole time but Keith was too absorbed in his tunnel vision to get the fuck out of there that he didn’t see it. He feels how it yanks his foot from under him and he’s falling to his hands, only the ground is nowhere near where his hands should have been. Before his head hits the ground, Keith manages to think what an idiot he is for entering a fucking cave, alone, in the middle of the night, and then even the distant, weak beam of his flashlight goes out.

Keith opens his eyes the way a car would come to life after standing parked in the same place for the entirety of winter—slowly, nature fighting against his every step. He can’t remember if he got knocked out or not. There’s a distant ache pressing into his forehead. He can’t breathe through his nose. He closes his eyes again but opens them in panic when it felt like another hour had passed in just that one motion. A groan makes its way out of his throat and he can feel the pain starting to creep back into his consciousness. That’s definitely a broken nose, and something else. A wound in his head most likely.

Keith forces a trembling hand up to his head and recoils the moment his fingers graze the blood still flooding down his face, pooling in the dirt where he's lying. Fuck. This is not good. This really isn’t fucking good. Keith tries to get up from the ground, but the moment he raises his head the whole cave lurches to the side and Keith is sure he’s going to get buried alive.

Okay. Okay. He just need to calm down. Surveil the situation. Figure out if he’s bleeding enough to die of blood loss. He doesn’t think so. It feels like the blood is beginning to dry—which is worrying in itself because Keith can’t remember that much time passing—and his nose, after closer inspection, doesn’t actually feel broken, just really fucking bruised. He grits his teeth and pushes his body off the ground and twists until he’s at least lying on his back instead of face down in the dirt. 

He stays like that for a while, waiting for the world to stop spinning. He’s not sure if the dizziness is caused by the wound in his head or the amount of blood that poured out of it. Perhaps both. He refuses to move before he’s sure he can get up without fainting, or throwing up. Or fainting and then choke on his own vomit. When he opens his eyes again he realizes he does not recognize where he is. What the fuck. He can’t manage to work it out though because his brain feels as if it’s falling out of his head, so he just tries to focus on breathing.

Time feels different down here. It’s so dark Keith isn’t sure if he would even be able to tell if the sun has started to rise. It’s so dark Keith has started making up his own shapes and constellations in the cave ceiling.

He names one Cosmo. After his wolf. Cosmo had to go with Krolia back to space, at least for a while. Until they figure out how to make sure this alien wolf doesn’t carry anything that might cause the extinction of Earth’s complete population. (Translation: until they figure out a way to make sure Keith won’t use Cosmo’s teleportation abilities to rob a bank or something.)

Keith misses him. If Cosmo was here he would have been able to teleport and get help.

Keith wishes he was outside. It would have been nice to have the night sky as the last thing he sees before he dies. Keith thinks he should have probably been able to see Scorpius, the constellation his zodiac sign is named after, somewhere up in the sky. It was his dad who pointed it out for him, on one of their usual outings to the cliff. Keith had been so small, too young really to understand what his father was talking about when he tried to explain the mythology behind it all in terms of a tale. A tale about how Keith, the scorpion that stopped Orion’s path of destruction, had saved the world. 

See, Keith? That’s you. A scorpion so brave the gods put you in the sky. You're not a monster, you were sent by the goddess Gaia to save every animal on Earth. Orion was just a butthead. 

Keith doesn’t really remember more than laughing at his dad calling someone a butthead. 

He wished he brought Shiro there. Shiro knows a lot about constellations. Keith bets he would have been exited even—because he’s a Greek mythology geek—to tell Keith the tale of the scorpion that poisoned the hunter Orion. It wouldn’t be exactly the same as having it told by his dad, but it would have been something. Something he won’t get to experience now. Keith can feel his eyelids grow heavy, making it harder and harder for him to keep them open, to resist the calmness that has washed over him, to ignore that fact that the pain is fading from his wound, and that he knows this is not a good thing. In his head he’s a scorpion, wriggling on the ground, fighting a tall faceless man with a hunting rifle. It’s a losing fight, but Keith refuses to give up without at least tearing a limb off the man. The man has always ben stronger, bigger, weaponized. All Keith’s got is his poison and he never really learned how to use it for good things. For protection. 

Keith closes his eyes. Can’t help it. The man is looming above him, cursing his name.

”Keith!”

He could practically hear it—feel the way the mouth of the rifle is pressed to his forehead, ready to fire. 

”Ke—Oh my God, Keith!”

Keith flinches. That doesn’t—that wasn’t his thought. 

”Come on,” the voice says, and it sounds more real than anything Keith could have conjured up in his head. The looming man leans back, gets up on his feet and leaves Keith on the ground. ”Come on, Keith.”

He feels hands on his body. Can feel himself coming back to himself. He pushes his eyes open, just a smidge.

”Thank God, honey, you—you’re okay. I’m gonna get you out of here, just be strong, alright?”

Keith doesn’t really understand what he’s seeing at first. Dark, tanned skin. Short, messy hair. For a second he thinks it’s an angel, then the more wistful part of him thinks Lance. Then when the rational part of his brain wakes up he realizes that it’s Adam.

”Adam,” Keith croaks, and he thinks he’s started crying because Adam is here in the cave and Keith is not going to die. Adam is hovering above him and he’s talking into his phone too fast for Keith’s groggy brain to catch it all. From what he could gather he’s getting help, but Keith’s brain is too caught up on the fact that there’s actually phone reception down here.

”Yeah—Takashi, calm down, yes. He’s… he’s not fine but he’s alive. Just get here right now. Oh God, Kashi, bring an ambulance. Hurry.”

After that Keith fades in and out of consciousness and doesn’t think about scorpions or hunting rifles or tall, looming men again.

He recalls snippets of how they got him out of the cave. Suddenly it was very loud around him. He heard Shiro’s voice, screaming his name, demanding to know what had happened to him. He heard Adam calming him down and felt a scolding hot hand pressing into his cheek. Keith thinks he actually did vomit somewhere between that and disappearing into darkness again.

The next time he woke up they had made it all the way to a hospital, at least Keith thinks they have. He can tell they’re just unloading him from the ambulance but everything around him is too hectic and colorful for his mind to process. He can’t find his voice anywhere, which is odd. It’s not like he hurt his throat. He grumbles a bit about that until his mind suddenly hyper focuses on another noise.

”Where is he? Where’s Keith? Is he—is he okay?” The frantic shouting echoes from somewhere he can’t see.

Keith is being rolled onto the ground and into a facility—definitely a hospital—when Lance comes running out and crashes into his stretcher. The paramedics try to push him away, and even though Lance tries not to be in the way he can’t help latching onto Keith’s hand—long, lanky fingers slips between Keith’s, a grip so tight Keith’s surprised he can remember a time when they weren’t laced together—and leans in close.

”Keith,” he exhales, as if he’s been saving that one breath forever and finally got to let it out.

Lance, Keith whispers back with a voice he still can’t locate, tries to tighten his grip of Lance’s hand to make up for it but he doesn’t really think he manages. Then he promptly passes out to the image of Lance’s face hovering only a few inches from his own.

That’s a picture he wouldn’t mind dying to

vii. abyss

Where do you go?

What?

When you run. Where do you go?

I don’t know. Home. I go home.

viii. scorched

Keith had woken up in the hospital thinking he had a migraine or something. (Later he found out it was probably the stitches and his concussion that caused the headache). He blearily flickered his eyes open, and stared into a light blue ceiling. Odd, since his ceilings in his apartment are white. For some reason he though of Lance, but he couldn’t recall why he would wake up in his room. He tried to move his head, but the pain doubled in just that tiny movement. A groan escaped his lips.

”Keith? Are you awake?” a familiar voice spoke up. Keith just groaned again. In closer thought, Lance didn’t have blue ceilings either. It was the sheets. 

A face suddenly came into his view, startling Keith’s groggy mind.

”Mom?” he grumbled, saw her eyes widen a fraction before they went back to her usual expression of careful insignificance. 

”Yes,” Krolia answered. ”Keith, you are in a medical ward. It is not really a hospital, Shiro explained to me. I don’t know why they didn’t bring you to a proper hospital.”

”What—why am I—medical ward?” Keith couldn’t really put together a coherent sentence. He was too busy ransacking his brain for something that could help him figure out what fucking trouble he’d gotten himself into this time.

”You went into Blue’s cave alone and hurt your head. Fell into a hole in the ground. I believe it was Shiro’s partner that located you,” Krolia explained. Keith almost shoot out of the bed at hearing Shiro’s name, despite the pain reverberating through his bones.

“Shiro’s here? Where is he?” Did Lance come here? his mind supplied hopefully. Assuming anyone came to visit Keith at all.

“I asked them to get the quiznacking out of here. You need rest and the handsome one was talking constantly.” Krolia sat down on the chair next to Keith, and he really can’t tell if she’s joking by the flat tone of her voice.

“I really don’t think that’s the right use of that word—and Shiro don’t talk that much usually,” he says defensively.

“I do as I please,” Krolia says and makes a rare face. “And I was not talking about Shiro. I meant the other one. Lance. He has an infinite mouth, that one.”

Keith didn’t know why he was blushing at his mother calling Lance handsome, because he is—that’s neither news nor a secret. Krolia was obviously teasing him. Keith just couldn’t understand why she would tease him about that when she knew—she’d been in the quantum abyss with him and seen all of it. She knew, and still she tried to tease him about Lance, as if any of this is normal. As if they stood a chance.

Then the implication of her mentioning Lance sunk in. Lance has been here. Suddenly memories of their fight came pouring into Keith’s mind, like that goddamn blood scene in The Shining.

Lance came to visit Keith even though he’d bailed from family dinner, even though he'd said all those things. Keith wasn’t sure what to feel about Lance wanting to visit him even after all that.

”Why—why am I in a hospital?” Keith asked instead. He can’t really recall what happened after storming out of Lance’s house, and this is definitely not his own room. There’s beeping machines all over the place—and Keith’s ceilings are white, not blue.

Krolia frowned at his question, which made Keith even more anxious.

”Head injury. You fell into a hole in Blue’s cave. Very clumsy,” Krolia said sharply. Keith nodded and closed his eyes again, the bright lights in the room only gave him more of a headache.

”Are you in any pain?” Krolia asked. He could feel her gently trace the side of his head not currently on fire. 

”No.” He clenched his jaw and opened his eyes again. He’d hurt his head. Fought with Lance. That is basically all he knows right now. Keith wondered if he should feel any shame, because right now he couldn’t feel anything but his injuries. Krolia gave him a doubting look.

”You have medicine that will help you, Keith. Why won’t you let it help you?”

Why won’t you let it help you?

Well, isn’t that the million dollar question. Keith is not used to getting any help, first of. His dad tried to teach him how to tie his shoes when he was five, and it wasn’t that his dad wasn’t helpful, it was just Keith who thought it was much more effective and less time consuming to just tuck the laces into the shoe. So he did that for years, his dad indulging him in his stubbornness, knowing it would come back and bite him in the end. So Keith went around his whole childhood not knowing how to tie his shoes. There was not a single foster parent or social worker who even thought about helping him with his shoes—what eight year old doesn’t know by that age?—not until he got yelled at in gym class one day because it’s dangerous and you can trip. No one seemed to even realize that he’d walked around with untied shoelaces for six years. 

Keith doesn’t think this is what his dad had in mind with it coming back and bite him.

The thing is Keith has gotten used to not receiving help, so he learned to pretend everything was fine. He got real good at mirroring other people’s behavior, applying it to the appropriate situations, and he got away with it. Keith learned how to be human by observing other humans, and that he did all by him self. 

So, why won’t you let it help you? It’s less about the won’t and more about the why. Keith doesn’t mind receiving help. He just never learned that he could be worthy of helping.

Krolia cracked the code immediately though, and simply force fed him Tylenol. She took one look at his pale skin, his gritted teeth, the way he flinched every time his gaze got close to the bright window, and decided he was an idiot. He reminded her that she’s half of him so that would make her part idiot too. She gave him an unimpressed glare in response.

The doctor came by shortly after he woke up. She told Keith stuff about himself he didn’t know. 

You have a nasty head injury, scull fracture and a concussion. And some minor bruising and scratches from your fall. We believe you tripped and rolled down a tear in the ground of the cave, I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure unless you start remembering what happened. You’ll need lots of fluids and rest, and meet with a neurologist for follow-up. It’s important for us to make sure there hasn’t been any changes in your condition, so don’t skip it. You may feel confused and disoriented now and that is completely normal, you will probably suffer from headaches for a while. Do not hesitate to contact me if it doesn’t go away, or gets worse.  

Then she came back the day after—when Keith had spent yet another night filled with nightmares and alarmed a nurse enough for her to talk to Keith's doctor about it—and told him some information that he did know, but would rather not think about. 

You have suffered a lot in the war, Keith, but also previous to that, and I’m afraid this is something that will keep on haunting you unless we set you up with a psychologist who can help you.

Keith didn’t want to talk about anything with anyone, but the doctor said it would stop the nightmares. Keith thought it sounded like stop the guilt and didn’t really know if he deserved that kind of help.

Krolia eyed him suspiciously, as if she could read his hesitation just from a look. Why won’t you let it help you? 

In the end Keith agreed to start talking with a psychologist. Or Krolia agreed he should start talking with a psychologist. He got a paper with names and contact info which he promised both himself and Krolia to look into. He stayed for a third day at the infirmary. Nausea left him pretty shaken up, and they still wanted to keep him on IV fluids. His CT scan had showed that it wasn’t anything really wrong with his brain, so when he managed to stand up without feeling like he was going to fall over from the vertigo, he got discharged. They told him he’d probably still feel dizzy and nauseated for a while, and that the headaches may fluctuate, and that the only thing he can do really is rest, eat Tylenol and put ice on his head to lessen the swelling. So he left, Krolia beside him, and a paper with a date for his follow-up with a neurologist folded into his pocket. Krolia kept the list of psychologists herself. Told him she didn’t trust him to actually hold on to it.

Krolia stayed on Earth for a week after that. She’d come as soon as Shiro got a hold of her and explained Keith’s accident, which Keith found surprising. She did say she couldn’t stay for too long—there’s still too much to be done with the Blade of Marmora members, and so few people equipped with helping them. Keith got that, he really did, and yet he still can’t quell down the emptiness inside him. That black hole in the very center of his stomach that has been eating at him for years. Krolia wasn’t obliged to stay with him, or to let him stay with her. She’s seen his secrets, his desires, lived with him as her only company for two years, and still she never really got to know him. Hasn’t really tried ever since the war ended. 

Keith’s used to being discarded, he’ll live.  

That insight made it very easy to live with Krolia that one week she stayed with him at his apartment. She’s too clinical to ever hover the way Lance does. She heard what the doctor said and did what had to be done. No coddling. Straight to business. She wouldn’t really touch him except for the occasional hand on his shoulder, or brief caress of his cheek. Not at all the way Lance touches him, layering his long arms around him, resting his head against his neck and consumes him. Keith has never been quite embraced like that before, like Keith is the last organism in Lance’s ecosystem, and he’d do anything to keep him alive and thriving.

Lance visited Keith as soon as he got home from the hospital—practically knocked his door down—and then he kind of just lingered. Keith didn’t bring up the fight, and neither did Lance, because it was just easier to go on without acknowledging it. Also, Keith still suffered from his concussion and had a hard time remembering the details of the fight, and just really didn’t feel up to getting into a new one.

Krolia got tired of Lance hogging Keith at the end of the week though. She told Lance that he had her blessing to spend the rest of his life with Keith—Keith practically choked on his spit, but the way Lance stood frozen on the spot for several minutes afterwards almost made it worth it—but today it was Krolia’s turn to spend time with her son. She wanted to visit the grave, and she wanted Keith with her, without the distraction of Lance. (Lance was the only one of them with a car though, so he ended up tagging along anyway).

Keith sat in silence. He watched the familiar road, the trees he’s only seen in passing but could identify just from a look. Lance kept talking the whole ride to the graveyard even though neither Krolia or Keith responded. Keith thought it was nice just hearing his voice in the background, it was calming, grounding. As if he was a rechargeable battery feeding on Lance’s chatter. Maybe Lance sensed he needed the illusion of normalcy. Keith hadn’t really been back to his dad’s grave since that very first day back on Earth, and didn’t feel like he needed to. The further away from this chapter of my life I get, the better, he’d told himself at the time. The faster I run, the faster I’ll forget him.

Lance stayed in the car as Krolia took Keith by the arm and insisted on him showing the way. Keith walked towards his father’s grave the same way a prisoner on death row would walk towards their last meal—with longing in their eyes, yet a gaze that still flickers to anything that might possibly be an opening for escape. It was with a sense of finality that they both stopped in front of the grave. Keith didn’t really feel anything, and Krolia just stood there staring at it. He didn’t know for how long they stood there, but Krolia eventually fell to her knees and pressed her purple hand onto the stone surface. Keith knows the texture, the roughness of that stone, he can imagine his own hand pressed to it.

”Your father would be proud to see you now,” Krolia says suddenly, her voice trembles, and Keith can’t recall ever hearing it do so. She doesn’t turn around to face him as she speaks, only keeps her hand flat over his father’s name. ”To see how far you have come. How much you care for people. I can see it, Keith. You think you are so emotionless, but I know your face. I know it because it is mine, and—and his. He cared about people in a way I never learned to myself. He cared enough to save me and keep saving me. He gave me a family—” Here Krolia turned towards Keith. She wasn’t crying, but Keith has never seen her this emotional before, ”A home.”

Keith could feel his chin wobble, and he fucking hates to cry, refuses, God knows he’s been through enough things to make him cry to last another lifetime, but sometimes—sometimes life won’t listen to you. Sometimes life is cruel, and cold, and a thousand miles of frozen ground. And sometimes, life forces you through all of these horrible situations so you won’t have to suffer as much in the next one, because sometimes life knows what’s best for you. 

Keith doesn’t really believe in any of that. So Keith lets himself cry because right now, he just wants to fucking cry, over his dead father and his found mother and for the boy in the car back in the parking lot, and for himself.

”He would be so proud. I know I am,” Krolia continues, not even blinking at the tears suddenly spilling down her son’s face. She gets up from the ground and faces Keith, puts her hand—cold from being pressed so long against the gravestone—on Keith’s cheek, drying away his tears. ”Keith, you are the only thing in the universe I care about. You are my home now, and I—I know you don’t see me the same way, I know I am too late. You have your own family. Your own home—and it is a good one, that one. Don’t throw him away, Keith.” Keith sobs in her hand. Tilts his head down so he doesn’t have to look into her eyes, so he doesn’t have to face the sincerity, the absolute conviction that Keith can defy fate, can defy the future laid out for him. ”You have been running for so long, and now you’ve finally come home.” 

Krolia cradles his head between her hands, pulls him closer until his face pressed against her throat. He could feel her familiar, pointy chin on his head. And there it is, that embrace he’s been yearning for. The absolute consumption of each other. 

”But I am your mother, and you are my son,” she murmurs, softly, yet so firm Keith simply has to listen. ”And I need you to know that I love you regardless of how you feel about me. I am proud of you and the person you have become…” Her fingers pressed into his scull, as if the importance of her words would sink in better through touch. ”And I know your father is as well.”

Pride is a concept that never felt that appealing to Keith. He never grew up around it, never learned the benefits of it. Never saw the reason why he should be proud of anything. Life is life. You either get lucky or you don’t. You either make luck, or you don’t. What’s the point of stopping to think about your achievements and feel proud? It only feeds egos and hurts people who’s not as lucky. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason, and Keith didn’t have time for that.

But Keith had never been the sole subject of someone else’s pride before—never like this, where the only thing he’s done to qualify for it is exist… and that feeling was elevating—could fuel a spaceship and shoot him into space. It was a high that left him soaring. And maybe pride isn’t so bad if used correctly. With dedication, and love.

Keith remained silent, except for the occasional sob. They didn’t stick by the grave much longer after he stopped crying—everything that needed to be said had been said. Lance didn’t talk at all for the ride home. He only sneaked his hand across the gearshift, into Keith’s fist and braided their fingers together, and it was just what Keith needed in order to not float away into the infinite and never come back.

Krolia left the following morning with the promise of coming back soon, and Keith didn’t feel anything special about her departing, still too emotionally exhausted from her visit in the first place. It did leave Keith alone with Lance in his apartment though. Alone for the first time since their fight. Lance never brought it up, but Keith could tell he was holding something back. 

Two weeks has passed since Keith got out of the medical ward of the Garrison, one week since Krolia left, and Lance still treats him as if he’ll run away and get himself knocked out in the closest cave again.

”Lance. You’re hovering,” Keith grits out through his teeth, the first thing at four AM in the morning after waking up. He could feel Lance’s gaze burning holes into his skin even before he opened his eyes. 

Usually Keith wouldn’t mind a hovering Lance. He’d welcome it. Especially like this, both of them holed up in Keiths apartment, Lance breathing a bit of life into the blank walls and vacant rooms. It really is too big for just one person. But right now, Keith is so fucking tired of Lance’s light treading through subjects, his worried glances that he thinks Keith doesn’t notice. It’s tiring because he’s fine. He’s basically healed. He’s talked to a doctor and he’s taking his medicine and doing his exercises and it’s normal to dry heave into the toilet after a severe concussion like Keith’s, so he doesn’t understand why Lance is acting like he’s about to die.

”Sorry,” Lance whispers and stops fidgeting with his hands and finally plops back down on the mattress next to Keith. Keith shuffles a bit further to the side so he can fit. Lance lets all his lanky limbs go to rest only to shoot right up again.

”Jesus Christ, dude,” Lance says and takes out Krolia’s knife from under the pillow he just hustled around. Keith snorts and turns, putting his back to Lance.

”Go to sleep, Lance. It’s too early for this.”

”Yeah, yeah, I will—I just… You sounded like you were having a bad dream.”

”Lance. Sleep,” Keith grunts and pulls his pillow over his head. He didn’t remove it until he finally felt Lance revert to carefully pressing his face into Keith's back, nose nestled into the dip of his spine, and heard Lance's breathing slow down to something calm and collected enough for sleeping. 

Keith feels bad about the dismissal. He knows Lance just cares about him, that he wants to help in any way he can... but Keith's just not sure how talking about it would help him get over it. If anything it feels as if it would just peel open the wounds he'd so carefully concealed. However, with Lance... with his tender embraces and fingers softly caressing his skin, maybe it wouldn't feel so bad to talk about some of this stuff. Maybe he should start throwing him some bones before he finally realizes what a hopeless basket case Keith is and just ups and leaves.

Lance rubs his nose into Keith's back and throws an arm across his waist. It doesn't make Keith feel trapped, only comforted, and warm... and ready.

"I dreamt I was burning," Keith whispered into the quiet of the living room. Lance's breathing stilled for a moment, and Keith knew he wasn't really asleep yet. The arm tightened a bit around his waist and brought Keith impossibly closer to the man behind him. 

"Burning," Lance mumbled into Keith's skin. He shivered involuntarily. Flashes of the dream still stung even now as he desperately tried to suppress them.

"Yeah," Keith breathed. He couldn't decide if he wanted to close his eyes and try to go back to sleep to rid himself of the exhaustion, or if he wanted to keep them open to save himself from the pain of reliving the dream. The inner conflict got disrupted though by Lance's thumb, drawing circles into the spot right above Keith's bellybutton. He focused on that motion, on the pattern.

"Why burning?" Lance asked quietly behind him. 

"You know my dad was a firefighter." Lance's hair tickled Keith as he nodded. Keith nodded back even though he knew Lance couldn't see him, he just needed the stalling from the story he suddenly realized he was about to tell Lance. "It was about around this time in the morning, I think. He came running into my room and just grabbed me and rushed us out of our house. I was still half asleep, I—I didn't really understand what was happening. But when we got out I remember being so surprised that the sun was out already. It was—it was so bright, Lance. I should have understood but I didn't—I was so small, I was only eight. I had just woken up." 

"It's okay," Lance comforts, and Keith holds his breath, tries not to fall apart just from a story. "It's okay, baby," Lance says again and resumes thumbing his pattern on Keith's skin.

"Our neighbors right next door to us—they'd moved in only like a month before or so," Keith manages and exhales. "I think they were pretty young, like maybe this is their first house kind of young, but I don't know—everyone above thirteen looked old to me. But I know it was their house. It was—I was... Lance—" Keith grabbed onto Lance's hand in a convulsive hold. Lance immediately reacted and scrambled to get Keith to turn, to face him, to bring him close and settled into his body. "It was on fire. Their house. It was completely illuminated—I didn't even know what I was looking at." Keith continues his story, hopes to God his words doesn't come out all mangled. It's too late to stop now anyways. Lance needs to know and Keith needs him to know.

"It's alright. It was a long time ago. It's okay if you don't remember," Lance mumbles and threads his fingers through the back of Keith's hair, placing Keith neatly onto his chest, face pressed into Lance's neck. Keith relishes in the embrace for a few seconds, just gathering his bearings for the next part of the story. He knows it's only normal if he can't remember every detail, but it feels like a dishonor to the people involved to not tell the story as accurately as he can.

"The fire had spread to our house," Keith continues after calming his breath. He tries to focus on Lance's fingers in his hair, the sensation of his nails scratching his scalp. "That's why dad got us out. There were other neighbors there too, watching the fire... but not—not the couple who lived next to us. They were stuck in the house and my dad... he—he just ran. He just fucking bolted into the house and the smoke was so thick and I thought he would come back—I thought he'd come back out—" Keith remembers the staggering steps towards the burning building when the seconds after his dad disappeared into the smoke turned to minutes, how someone—a neighbor he can't recall the name or face of anymore—grabbed his arms and pulled him back, keeping him from running into that house after his dad. "And I—I know it's not my fault, it's—what could I have done? I'm not a firefighter. I can't fucking control fire. I was eight. If anything it was those fucking neighbors' fault. It's—fuck, I know that's so fucking horrible to say—I didn't mean that. I didn't. But my dad, he died saving them—he found them and crushed a window to their back yard and got them out. They would probably have died all three of them, but it—it was only my dad who—they survived, Lance. It was only my dad who—"

Keith will never forget the sirens of a firetruck. He didn't think he would ever get rid of the taint of smoke, or the tar coating the inside of his throat and nose. That icky, burning sensation that carried with him for months until it only made itself reminded in forms of panic attacks and meltdowns—and constant nightmares.

"I dream about running into the house," Keith grits through his teeth, trying to contain the compulsory sobs wrecking through his ribs. "It's—it's not so bad anymore, I usually just wake up. I don't—I didn't mean to bother you—"

"Keith," Lance says and brings his arms tighter around him and pulls him up until their cheeks rest against each other. "Baby, no, you're never bothering me," Lance whispers in Keith's ear, lips brushing gently over his earlobe. "I want you to be happy, and safe. That's all I want. I wouldn't mind waking up in the middle of the night a thousands times for you if it means I could help you feel better."

Keith doesn't know what to make of that. He just feels the warmth—not scolding, only warm and safe—and he knows he wouldn't want to change this for the world. The guilt still lingers, but Keith decides that it's a problem for another day. Right now he just wants to be with Lance. So he brings his own arms around Lance and coil deep into him. The pounding of Lance's heart overshadows any other memories that looms over Keith and he slowly gets lulled back to sleep. 

This is what they’ve been doing ever since Krolia had to go back to her work with the coalition. Lance had really freaked out when he saw Keith in the Garrison medical ward (because that was the closest hospital for them to take Keith). Keith’s doctor told him it was rare for people to bleed out from head injuries but at the time they had no idea how long Keith had been lying in that cave so they didn’t want to take any chances. Apparently Keith had really looked halfway to dead, and now Lance didn’t want him to be alone for a single minute. So playing House with Lance has been his everyday life for the past week. Including, but not limited to, both of them sleeping on Keiths three feet wide mattress because he quite literally doesn’t have any other furniture. They even had to go and buy another plate for Lance to eat on because Keith only had one. 

If Lance had been freaked out about leaving Keith alone because of his condition, it doesn’t even compare to the way he freaked out after he saw the way Keith lived.

Lance was jittery, more so than usual. He would stand and observe Keith throughout the day, like a crazy person. Keith had no idea what he was doing, but it was annoying as fuck. Having Lance here was annoying as fuck. The only thing making up for it was the fact that Keith now had enough material to imagine up a world where they could be together for real. Where Keith could be having Lance near him, in his apartment, being all domestic together, without guilt or anger or any of the other complicated feelings Keith had suppressed during Lance’s stay (and even further back than that).

Keith was not pleasant company, and he knew that. Nights like these were the perfect example of how bad of a roommate Keith was. Lance is not a quitter though, which has become evident for Keith throughout these past months on Earth. He keeps coming back to Keith every single night, no matter how big the fights, no matter the passive aggressive actions, hurtful words or ignorant comments, no matter how awful the nightmares. Lance always came back to bed, touching Keith in some way. Making sure he was still alive, most likely.

Keith yearned for Lance’s touch the same way he yearns for oxygen—blissfully oblivious to his addiction until it’s taken away from him. He’s gotten so used to the casual touching he’s started taking it for granted. He dreads the day Lance finally has had enough and leaves Keith to sleep alone at night. Lance has no idea Keith can’t fall asleep until he hears his slow breathing next to him.

Loving Lance is the biggest, heaviest, most badly kept secret Keith’s ever had. It’s so easy to give in and be soft with Lance at night, in the dark, when the world is quiet and so small it feels inevitable to let Lance press his cheeks to Keith’s, or pull his fingers through his hair, intertwine their legs and pull him to his chest. It’s a dangerous pattern. Keith has caught himself giving into his feelings too many times, and it’s not fair to Lance at all. A relationship with Lance, even if only brief, was right in his grasp, but still a concept Keith wasn’t allowed to indulge in any further. Atlas was doomed to carry the weight of the world for eternity, and much like him, Keith found himself in constant situations where he had to turn Lance down, over and over again, though wanting nothing else but to give in.

And that is the heaviest burden Keith’s ever known.

A month, and then two months went by since Keith got out of the hospital and Lance still spends most of his time at the apartment. They’ve gone into some sort of routine, where Keith stays at their apartment, lying in bed under three different blankets and ignores Lance throughout the day, and when night falls he clutches Lance’s body so tight he can’t even tell where he ends and Lance begins.

The saddest part is that Lance lets him. It’s infuriating, really. Keith doesn’t understand how Lance just accepts these conditions. How he just lets Keith use him like this.

Today is a bad day for Keith. He just got back from his first therapy session, and probably his last. It felt like bullshit, a waste of his time. And he’s got a murdering headache. Everything he touched seemed to break. Lance’s hovering and the way he’d smoothly step in to fix and clean up all of Keith’s messes only pissed him off even more.

”How did it go?” Lance finally asks, hands placed in the pockets of his sweatpants, leaning against the door frame to the living room where Keith’s lying face down into their mattress—no. His mattress. What the fuck?

Keith doesn’t even know when he started thinking of his things, the entire apartment, as theirs.

”I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbles into the blanket, ready to cocoon himself for another day. But Lance has always been an excellent prodder, and Keith has always been his favorite subject to prod at.

”It’s normal for the first few sessions to be awful,” Lance says, tries so hard to be helpful, but Keith is so tired of always having to look at things from the bright side, no matter how much artificial light Lance shines down on it.

”I said, I don’t want to talk about it,” Keith snaps.

”Well, you’re gonna fucking have to eventually,” Lance shoots back, just as heated. Keith flinches, lifts his head and stares at Lance.

He’s walked into the middle of the room, and he looks like a perfect storm. Like someone who’s reached their last straw. Like someone who’s given so much they hardly got anything left. And Keith thinks, this is it. 

This is how it ends.

”Why?” he questions, because Keith has always been a prodder. And Lance has always been a wholesome thing that Keith can’t help but to prod at.

”Why? Why? Seriously, Keith, come on. This is literally why you go to therapy—you can’t keep holing up like this, you can’t keep everything inside of you and expect it to just go away. It won’t. It will only grow and grow and then suddenly it’s gonna be too late and I’m gonna lose y—” Lance interrupts himself, stares at Keith with wide eyes as the unsaid rests heavily in the air between them, and then he takes another breath. ”You’re gonna regret it,” he says instead in a small voice.

Keith stares at him. Stares past his flushed skin, his laughter lines in the corner of his eyes that are starting to look less and less like laughter lines and more like actual wrinkles. He looks tired, so, so tired—and Keith hopes he’ll finally leave. Hopes this is the moment where Lance decides Keith isn’t worth it. 

”It’s been months, Lance,” Keith says and fuels the engines of their heated conversation, while standing up from the mattress. ”I’m fine. Can you please back the fuck off.”

Lance gapes at him. And then seems to collect himself into something untouchable, something Keith haven't ever had to face before.

”You think you’re fine?” Lance asks. ”You’re really gonna say that to my face?”

Then Lance is storming further into the room and gestures around him.

”See this, Keith? No? Well, maybe because it’s empty. This is not a home, Keith. You live in a shell. An empty fucking exoskeleton. It’s a ghost, of—of something. I don’t know. But it’s something you can’t seem to let go of, something holding you back. And I’m trying so hard to make you feel comfortable to, maybe, let go of that, or something. Or let me in—God,” Lance walks up to Keith and puts his hands on his cheeks, and Keith is burning like a furnace, looking him right in the eyes. ”I’m right here, Keith. Right here. I’m not going anywhere, so I don’t understand why you’re trying so hard to push me away.”

Keith can feel Lance’s breath on his lips, can count each and every freckle on his slightly upturned nose, can observe the defiant arch of his eyebrows, see the confusion and desperation in his eyes from trying to figure Keith out.

This is exactly why Keith loves Lance—and why he needs him so desperately to go away. Walk out of Keith’s door and never, ever, turn back. Because if he keeps saying shit like this, if he keeps knocking down Keith’s walls, keeps convincing him that this—whatever it is—won’t break under pressure, then Keith might just believe him.

Keith should have put an end to this already from the beginning. Shouldn’t have said yes to that dance. Shouldn’t have accepted the dinner invite, and every other time Lance barged into his life and nestled into a spot right where he's impossible to remove. Shouldn’t have let Krolia’s words affect him the way they did. Now it’s gone too far, grown too attached, that when he breaks it off it’ll actually hurt. And not only himself, but Lance too. Which was the very thing he’d set out to stop from happening.

Maybe the best thing Keith can do is become a clean cut for Lance to heal from. The last steppingstone to a fresh path. 

”There’s nothing you can do for me,” Keith says simply into the void between their mouths. ”And I don’t want you here.”

Keith can see every word drill into Lance like needles under the skin.

”You don’t want me here,” Lance repeats, shallowly, as if he's never heard those words put in that order before.

”I want you to leave me the fuck alone,” Keith confirms, and the words taste like acid on his tongue, but a corroded throat is a small prize to pay for hurting Lance. Keith pulls his face away from his hold and starts searching around the room for Lance’s things.

A sweatshirt that Keith had stolen from him, lying crumpled on the floor. His phone charger, still plugged into the wall next to the mattress. A book that he started reading last night but gave up on when Keith quite literally scrambled into his arms and stole all of his attention. Each thing of Lance’s that would remind him of their domestic oasis here in his apartment. Of the illusion of them living together like a real couple.

”What are you doing,” Lance says, and it’s a question, but it doesn’t sound like a question. It sounds like a command. It sounds like stop. 

”I’m packing your things,” Keith answers anyway, because he was never good at following orders. He starts shoving all of Lance’s things into this old duffel bag from when Lance was on a swimming team. Keith remembers when Lance told him that, how he couldn’t help but nod, thinking he’s definitely got the shoulders of a swimmer.

Lance’s wide frame and swimmer physique suddenly appeared in front of Keith, his hand placed on top of Keith’s on the bag, forcing him to stay put.

”Why?” he asks, and this time it actually sounds like a question. A desperate one. A biting my tongue so I won’t burst into tears one. Keith ignores him, only moves on to the closet in the hall, pulls out every single piece of clothing to the floor and starts sorting it into two piles, his clothes and Lance’s clothes. (And if he lets one of Lance’s shirts slip in the wrong pile, then so be it.)

”For real, Keith. You’re not thinking this through, you—you can’t be serious.” Lance is just standing in the hallway a few feet away from him. He’s looking at Keith as if he’s crazy. 

Maybe he is. Maybe he’s actually gone batshit crazy. That’s only a better reason for Lance to get away from him.

Keith threw him a glare, a strand of hair escaping the sloppy knot of hair on top of his head and falling into his eyes. Then he got up from the ground—Lance’s pile of clothes packed into the bag—walked over to Lance and shoved it into his chest. Lance didn’t even budge.

”Leave,” Keith said, made sure to really catch Lance’s gaze. He didn’t look away.

”No,” Lance said, a simple breath, but it made Keith’s skin crawl.

”Leave, Lance,” Keith says again, and he doesn’t like that he’s the one tapering on desperate now.

”No,” Lance responds and puts his hands on Keiths wrists to stop him from shoving the bag further into him. ”Keith, no.” And there he breaks. Tears fall from Lance’s long eyelashes. Keith looks away stubbornly, down to their fighting hands.

”You need to leave,” he says, ignores how hard it is to swallow suddenly. How every muscle in his body protest his actions. Keith keeps shoving and Lance keeps fighting against his every move, but eventually Keith’s got him by the door.

”Lance, please,” he begs, finally, because he’s desperate. ”Just—go home. Go see your family, hang out with Hunk, find someone—anyone else to be with. And just leave me alone.”

Lance stares at him as if he’s speaking a language he can’t decipher. It’s that look of utter bewilderment, the complete lack of understanding for the situation, that finally makes Keith crack and he sobs as he pushes Lance into the door. 

”Keith,” Lance says and he doesn’t fight against the pushing, he welcomes it, pulls Keith with him—and it’s not at all what Keith wanted but the best thing that’s ever happened to him. Keith cries into the neck of his shirt, the duffel bag dropping to the floor between them as Lance gathers him in his arms.

”Why won’t you just leave,” Keith sobs into the fabric. Lance hushes him softly and Keith doesn't understand how he's still here, comforting him, even as Keith is actively trying to push him away. It's so unnecessarily heart wrenching. ”Just—just fucking go, Lance. Why do you have to make this so much harder?”

"I doesn't have to be—"

Keith looks up at Lance as he talks and shoves away from his embrace, more strands of hair falling over his forehead.

"I doesn't have to be—but it is," Keith urges. If Lance could just understand, or no, not even that. Keith wishes he would just roll with it. Just take Keith's words for what they are and leave. But he'd never do that—Keith knows he'd never do that.

He's going to have to break it off completely. 

"This is it, Lance." Keith sloppily dries away a few tears from his face and stares defiantly at the boy in front of him. "I don't—I don't have anything more to give you. I'm done."

Lance looks stricken at him and swallows. A few seconds pass in silence, and then Lance opens his mouth again.

”I—okay,” he breathes, anguish wearing his face. Keith couldn't even have anticipated the way those words would hit him. How Lance agreeing would completely pull the air out of his lungs, leave his throat clenching in the vacuum.

Lance reaches out, a trembling hand removing the hair from Keith’s eyes, brushing it behind his ear and stays there. ”I’ll… I’ll go. I just—can I just—” and then Lance leans in close to his face, a beeline that wasn’t there before, and Keith knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s not moving an inch. Lance hesitates just a breath from Keith’s lips. ”Just once,” he whispers, and then he surges in and catches Keith’s lips in a kiss so harsh he’s sure he’s gonna bruise.

Keith has never denied being a masochist.

Time still passes, probably, but Keith can only focus on Lance’s lips caught in his. On the wet sensation of their tears against each others skin, how it tints the kiss into tasting like salt. On grabbing any part of Lance he can in his fists, because he knows this will be his only chance to hold him like this—and he’s going to make it count. 

They eventually break apart, and Keith isn’t sure of anything anymore. Isn’t sure why Lance thought it would be a good idea to kiss now and not earlier. Lance takes a step back, looks at Keith like that time on the balcony, as if he’s searching for something. Then he just clears his throat and picks up his duffel bag from the floor.

Keith has no idea if he’ll ever find what he’s looking for.

”Okay,” Lance says and turns around to open the door. Keith can only stand there, thinking his body must be in shock or something. Lance takes a step out of the apartment, but abruptly stops and turns towards Keith. A soft gasp escapes Keith’s mouth as Lance’s eyes finds his and keeps him pinned.

”You need to know,” Lance says, some kind of urgency in his voice, a plea for Keith to take him seriously. ”This is not me walking out on you.”

His words contain a finality that confirms Keith has failed in whatever he tried to do here. Make Lance hate him or something—how crazy. It’s suddenly so clear to Keith that making Lance hate him is about as likely as God himself stepping down on Earth, going April fools! This is all just an illusion, you’re all simply stardust floating in space, Earth is nothing but a joke, Lance doesn’t love you.

”Maybe you should,” Keith whispers, catches the way Lance’s usually expressive face flickers to a blank slate, and then he shuts the door.

ix. perihelion

Keith can’t remember cooking food. He must have eaten, because he’s not hungry, he’s not dead. But he can’t for the life of him recall what he had for dinner yesterday, or even what he’s got in the fridge today. He can’t really find the urge to care enough to go check.

He knows Shiro came knocking on his door the first week after Lance left and brought food. He had let himself into the apartment with the spare key only to find Keith buried in his sheets, glaring half heartedly at the intruder. Keith has been ignoring his calls. He hadn’t seen him or Adam since Keith and Lance went to dinner at their place a few weeks ago. He’s been avoiding them—avoiding everyone.

”So, Lance moved out?” Shiro asks, casually, noticing the lack of Lance’s things—the lack of Lance. Keith is sitting by his window, bundled up in his blanket, looking out over the city below. He doesn’t look at Shiro as he nods his confirmation.

He hasn’t talked to Lance since they broke up—or, whatever it was they did. They never said anything about being together. Never confirmed anything… but it felt like a breakup, and in retrospect it dawned on Keith that they had acted like a couple even since before Lance moved in. How fucking foolish he had been to think him and Lance would stop when left alone in an enclosed space like his apartment.

”You guys broke up?” Shiro asked softly, only confirming Keith’s speculations.

”We were never together,” he mumbles. It’s not a lie, but still so far from the truth Keith wants to grab his own arms and shake some sense into himself.

Keith doesn’t recall when Shiro left, or if he kept trying to pry more details out of Keith—but he did leave the apartment looking a bit cleaner. Keith briefly lets himself wonder why Lance hasn’t told Shiro about their breakup. It felt like something a blabbermouth like Lance would spill right away. 

Then he immediately shuts down any further thoughts about Lance. Nothing good will come out of that.

Keith walks through life like he did back in his early teens—mechanically, in a monotonous pattern, as if he’s alive simply because he was born, not because he has something to live for.

The only thing that brings Keith some kind of relief of the numbness is Red. He works on her tediously, fanatically, even though there’s nothing to work on anymore. He does check ups upon check ups. Takes her for test spins. She works perfectly. But it’s not enough. The fervency of flying her in the open desert only keeps him distracted for a while, and then that too is ruined by numbness. He decides to start taking her apart, build her up again from scratch. He sure has the fundings to buy fancier parts if he needs them. The workshop at the Garrison has all the stuff he needs to do this. (And he needs to do this, or he’ll sink so low he won’t be able to climb his way up again). So he actually picks up his phone and dials his last missed call to ask for a rare favor.

Shiro and Keith put Red, and the exterior parts of her Keith’s already taken off, onto the platform of Shiro’s car and then they’re off. Shiro talks a lot, which is unusual in itself, but Keith finds it more odd that he hasn’t mentioned Lance even once. He’s grateful, but suspicious. He also doesn’t have the energy to pursue it any further than a lazy glance over at Shiro.

Shiro helped him getting Red in place inside the workshop. It stood empty at this hour. Iverson had given him permission to use this place, since they never really used this part of the workshop anymore. Asking Shiro to do all the talking had also helped.

For three weeks Keith worked on Red, sometimes through the nights and into early morning. Shiro always offered to drop him off and pick him up. All Keith had to do was call and he'd come get him. Like some personal chauffeur or something. Keith thought it was mostly out of pity, but he really needed the ride so he let it slide.

One afternoon Shiro called Keith to tell him he'd have to get home early if he wanted a ride. So that's how Keith ended up in Shiro's car at five PM distinctly not driving the way to Keith's apartment.

"Shiro," Keith said. A simple warning. 

"Calm down, Keith. I just—no, actually, Adam thought you should come over for dinner. I had nothing to do with it." Shiro responded and kept driving to his shared apartment with Adam. Keith groaned—he really should have seen this one coming.

When they arrived and walked through the front door, Adam peeped out of the kitchen, domestication personified. He even had an apron on that said Mr. Good lookin' is cookin'. Keith had to close his eyes for a second when he saw that. It looked exactly like something Lance would either loathe with his entire being or wear every day just to spite those who did.

"Long time, no see, Keith," Adam greeted and gave him a quick hug, kissed Shiro on the cheek and went back to the stove. He was cooking something Keith would never attempt. Not because it was repulsive or disgusting in any way, but because Keith couldn't really make anything more extravagant than ramen noodles.

Keith and Shiro started putting plates on the table and finished just in time for Adam to claim the feast ready to be eaten. Like, those were the words he literally used.

Keith knew the moment he sat down in his chair that this dinner was going to be more of an interrogation than a friendly food experience. The company fell silent as they began to eat. Keith was fine with the silence, he wouldn't mind if it stuck around this whole evening. But of course it couldn't. They made it about halfway through their plates with shallow small talk until Keith caught Adam throw a pointed glance over at Shiro, who shrugged. Keith almost groaned at their lack of subtlety.

"So, Keith," Shiro started, finally. "Have you talked anything with Lance lately?"

Now Keith did groan. 

"No," he said. Short and simple, exactly what he'd planned to make of this conversation.

"Nothing at all?" Adam asked and cut some of the steak on his plate, that he had been cutting already for too long. Keith glared at him.

"Nothing at all," he confirmed. 

"Oh," was all Adam responded with, giving Shiro yet another pointed glance.

"I heard Lance was considering going back to school," Shiro said and smiled at Keith. Keith remained silent, although that did come as news to him. Lance hadn't said anything to Keith about wanting to study again. 

"Oh, yeah," Adam exclaimed. "Marine biology, right? I thought he said something about that last week."

"Last week?" Keith questioned. Adam looked up at Keith and smiled brightly.

"Yeah! Lance usually comes over for dinner every other week. He was here for taco night last Tuesday—or was it Wednesday?" Adam mused and turned to Shiro. Shiro had his eyes on Keith though. Keith glanced over at him and caught his furrowed eyebrows and considering look and decided to go back to Adam.

"He was here?" Keith asked. Lance had been going on taco nights at Shiro and Adam's. Talking to people about going back to school, starting this new life. He really was getting over Keith, wasn't he? Keith's fingers clenched in his lap.

"Have you considered maybe talking to him?" Shiro said, preventing Adam from answering. Keith closed his eyes, not at all in the mood to be having this conversation. His food was growing cold on his plate but he felt like he couldn't have eaten any more anyway. "I think Lance would want to talk to you. He's just scared that you won't want to talk to him so he hasn't—"

"He's right. I don't want to talk to him." Keith put his fork down on his plate, there's no idea pretending to eat.

"But why?" Adam asked, the frustration starting to seep into his voice. "I don't understand what happened—you were so happy. Both of you."

"Nothing happened. We were never together. We were never anything," Keith snapped and got up from his chair. "Thanks for the dinner. I should be going home now."

Shiro and Adam looked at him with equal frustration and surprise. 

"I—yeah. Sure. I'll drive you home," Shiro said and got up as well. Adam kept looking at Keith, worried this time, and it was almost worse than being asked questions about Lance. 

Keith and Shiro got ready to go in the hall when Adam came after them.

"Don't forget to call us," Adam said and held up a bag of leftovers for him to take home. Keith took it and nodded slightly. He felt kind of bad for being so cold towards Adam, he felt bad for how the entire night turned out. Especially after he'd cooked for him and made everything so nice. "And remember to put the food in the fridge, and to not just leave it there for an entire week—it'll go bad and then you'll have to cook for yourself and I know you only make noodles, Keith, you can't survive on noodles—"

"I think he got it, honey," Shiro said softly and took Adam's hand, that he had clutched into his chest. 

"Yeah, uh. I got it. Thanks," Keith said and nodded.

"Okay. Well, take care of yourself, Keith. And don't forget those calls," Adam said and immediately pulled Keith into a hug that was so warm Keith would be able to feel it the whole way home. Adam let go and smiled at Keith in a way he couldn't decipher, then he leaned into the goodbye kiss Shiro gave him and then they were out of the door.

The car ride was even more silent than the first half of dinner had been. For the first time Keith wished the silence to go away. All it did was give him more space to think about what Lance had been doing for these past weeks. What he'd been up to, which people he'd met. Keith recalls telling Lance to specifically find anyone else to be with, and those words dangle bitterly in the front of his mind now. Keith misses the way Lance could ramble away a deafening silence. How his chatter helped Keith focus, or even unfocus if needed. Now all he was left with was his empty apartment and a silence that used to mean solitude and now only meant that he's let the one thing he never thought he'd have in the first place slip through his fingers.

They arrived at Keith's apartment before Shiro opened his mouth.

"Keith," he said as Keith opened the car door to go. He'd been ready to bolt and get back into his little nest of blankets on the mattress. Now he turned back slowly and looked at Shiro with a blank slated face. Carefully hiding the current turmoil inside of him. Shiro had that same furrowed look as before. The one where he looked like he was considering a new side of Keith and couldn't quite make out what he was seeing. "I don't mean to pry—you know I don't. But I just—I don't understand why you keep saying you and Lance never were together."

Keith clenches his teeth together. 

"Because we weren't, Shiro," Keith says stiffly. "There's your answer. Are we done now? Can I go?"

"Wait, Keith. I just wondered—have you talked to Lance about that? Does he know you don't think you were together this whole time?"

"What the fuck? Of course he knows!" Keith said and looked sharply at Shiro. His pulse was beating up his throat, he could almost feel it reverberating in the tiny interior of the car.

"But are you sure? I think there's been a misunderstanding—Keith, maybe you should just talk to Lance and this will all be figured out—"

"There's nothing to figure out!" Keith shouts and he really doesn't mean to get so worked up but he just can't handle this right now. He wants to forget—forget Lance and forget this feeling, whatever the fuck this is where the car seems to get smaller and smaller. "There's nothing to figure out," he repeats, calmer this time. He tries to breathe normally but he can't really tell anymore what the right amount of air should be.

"Keith—" Shiro begins and reaches towards him, a worried wrinkle forming on his forehead.

"Just drop it, Shiro. I'm fine. I'll—I'll be fine." He opens the car door again and gets out before he hears an answer to that. He grabs the bag of leftovers and leans into the car.

"Tell Adam I'm sorry, and that dinner was really good," he says and avoids Shiro's eyes. "You don't have to drive me tomorrow. I'll probably finish Red anyway."

When he leans away again he hears Shiro scramble to look at him.

"I love you, Keith. Don't do anything stupid," is everything Shiro says, and it's weird and Keith doesn't really understand what he means even though he can kind of perfectly understand what he means. He just nods, and then he shuts the car door and walks into his building.

Keith took a cab to the workshop the next morning. Early as fuck as well. He really didn't envy that chatty cabdriver who had to deal with Keith's even grumpier mood than usual. He wasn't even a morning person to begin with, but then he also felt the guilt from yesterday. The way he flipped out on Shiro and the disrespect he showed to Adam. He really should call them today and apologize properly.

The guilt eased a little when he stepped into the workshop and saw Red parked in the middle of the floor. He had decided that today she would be ready to take him home. So Keith got to work, and then he worked the whole day, paused for an hour to go heat up Adam's leftover food, and then went right back to work. It must have been late in the evening when Keith took a step back from Red, tightened his sweaty hair in its bun on top of his head and really felt that he was finished. It felt both liberating to have her back and like a doomsday that’s been looming over him ever since he decided to pick her apart. The way she roared as he started her up was satisfying, but he couldn't help flailing a bit at her new, shiny surface, not really sure what to do with himself now that he was done.

”She looks great.”

Keith’s entire body freezes at that voice. The world holds its breath just long enough for Lance to step up next to Keith. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest, looks at Red with such intensity Keith is sure he’s doing it just so his eyes won’t stray over to Keith.

”What are you doing here, Lance,” Keith sighs, refusing to look over at the other boy as well. He knows there's no idea in asking how the fuck Lance even knew he was here. Shiro has never been good at keeping secrets.

Lance shuffles and finally turns towards Keith.

”You’ve been avoiding me,” he starts, and Keith turns to face him, opens his mouth to tell Lance that of course he’s been avoiding him, but Lance keeps talking. ”—and I don’t want to hear it, Keith. I don’t want any excuses or explanations. I just—I just need you to hear me out and listen carefully to everything I have to say.”

Keith doesn’t like the way this is going, doesn’t like the serious atmosphere Lance surrounds them in, doesn’t like that this is all on Lance’s terms now, and Keith just gets to listen.

He does. He’d do anything for Lance, and that is his weakness. So he nods.

”I don't know if it's just me—If I haven't been clear enough or something. But I want you, Keith. I—” Lance gulps, his nerves showing through the cracks of his confident act. ”I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anyone as much as I want you—no. I know I’ve never wanted anyone as much. It’s been weeks since I saw you and I still find myself looking for you when something funny happens. I still search for you next to me in the mornings. You're the first person I want to tell when something happens—I just want to be with you all the time and it kills me, Keith. I love you. I love you so much.”

Keith doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know how to breathe. He felt as if he was doomed to stand there, under the cold, uncaring eyes of whatever entity that orchestrated this mess, as Lance ripped open his bare heart and let all his deepest emotions spill over their feet on the greasy floor.

”So, uh,” Lance stalls at Keith’s silence, but pulls through in the end. ”I want to show you all of that. I want to show you how much you mean to me, so I’m gonna have to ask you to stop running away—just, stop fighting me, this. I want to be with you, and I think... you want to be with me too.”

”I do,” Keith says because he can’t lie to Lance. Because Keith has always been soft no matter what people think of him, and he loves this boy. So he can’t lie. Even if the truth will hurt so much more.

Lance immediately brightens at his response, although surprised by it. 

”You do?” he interrupts Keith, awed. ”I mean—good. Great. That’s—that’s amazing.

Keith feels the first crack in his heart splitting open.

”But I can’t be with you,” he whispers, finishing his sentence. Lance’s happiness goes out instantly, leaving him with a stiff smile on his lips. Lance looks down on the ground between them, the endless chasm that finally seemed to be impossible to get over.

But Lance is not a quitter.

”I don’t understand,” he admits, finally acknowledging the real issue. ”Keith, you just said you wanted to be with me. I want to be with you. I don’t—what exactly is the problem?”

Keith shuts his eyes, backs away a step from Lance, from his offer. 

”I just can’t,” Keith responds, and retreats to Red, straddling her seat. He is determined to get out of this conversation with the least bit of damage to Lance. Which means not having this conversation at all. 

Lance is not having it. 

”And now you’re leaving again. Perfect. Just—perfect,” he says and walks right after Keith, and angry Lance is intense. Intense enough for Keith to stop and look up at him. See the wet trails on his cheeks, see the frustration, confusion, unconditional love that radiates from his eyes. ”This is so like you. You always run away as soon as we actually get close to talking through whatever your issue with us is. All I want is to be with you—just like we’ve been together this whole time. I don’t understand why you are doing this to me—why you’re yanking me back and forth like this. I don’t—I don't understand you.”

This is not the first time Keith’s heard he’s hard to understand, to work with, to keep. He’s strange, too problematic for foster parents to handle. He’s heard it his whole life. 

”Yeah, that’s not a surprise, Lance,” he says sharply and looks away from Lance, down on the handles of Red. ”I’m not human. You’re not the first one who’s noticed.”

Lance gapes at his words.

”I—that’s—no, Keith. I don’t fucking care if you’re an alien. I don’t care if you’re human. I want every single piece of you. Jesus, I just want you, okay?” Lance pleads, his brows furrowed over his bloodshot eyes. ”Just—just let me have you.”

The feeling of deja vu hits Keith with the force of an avalanche. Burying him alive.

”I'm right here, Keith. I’ll never—I’ll always be here,” Lance continues and fights through his sobs, fights through the hopelessness.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Keith says and places his hands on the handles, ready to get the fuck out of here before it’s too late.

Lance’s hand surged forward into the air and grasped onto Keith's wrist faster than anything Keith has ever seen the paladin do before, stopping him from flying away. It was as if it was instinct for Lance to always be touching some part of Keith. Two magnets cursed on an atomic level to never stray too far from each other. 

”Don’t leave.” Lance looked at him with wide eyes, frantic, desperate—everything Keith wishes he didn’t bring out of him. And there it was, the picture that has been haunting Keith ever since that first day at the quantum abyss. The tears pasting Lance’s eyelashes together. The shadows. Darkness caressing his cheeks. This is the picture that burned into his mind and refused to leave him in peace. This is the picture that finally revealed the obvious truth: there is not much Keith wouldn’t do for Lance. He could recite a whole litany of sacrifices he would make to be sure Lance gets to be happy and safe for the rest of his life. Keith promised himself that he would do anything to keep this vision from ever coming true. 

A promise he now realizes was impossible to keep.

”Please,” Lance whispered, accompanied by a sob, too sharp in the stillness of the workshop. ”Stay.”

Keith clenched his eyes shut to escape the reality of Lance crying because of him.

Keith is not above admitting that Lance’s confession has made him happier than anything ever has. He’s just a small planet in orbit, and Lance is the star pulling him in. Sometimes when Lance smiles at him—not those cocky grins back on the castle, but real ones, happy ones, as if he’s decided Keith is worthy of sharing this moment with—Keith is so blinded by his light he feels as if Lance may be everything and everywhere, the closest thing for a tiny planet to call a home. 

But stars are reckless forces of nature and Keith is floating dangerously close to getting caught in his blazing flames.

”I have to go,” Keith finally answered, gritted through his teeth. Because if he relaxed even for a second, he was sure he was going to fall to Lance’s feet and beg him to forgive him, to comfort him, to tell him that everything was going to work out. Keith was sure Lance would do it, definitely, without a doubt—and that’s the problem. Because even if Lance loves him, he can’t predict the future. But Keith can. He’s seen it all with his own eyes.

Keith is just a tiny planet and Lance his sun—and a supernova would destroy both of them. 

So Keith does what he does best.

He ripped his hands out of Lance’s grip, hit the gas and heard Red roar as he fled for his bare life, leaving Lance behind.

x. serendipity

Keith can’t recall how many times he’s dreamed about this memory before it even happened. How many times he’s woken up in tears to the thought of a possible future with Lance getting yanked away from him by none other than himself. 

But Keith refuses to play by the rules of some distant space magic. The only thing these visions have lead to is Lance suffering, and Keith has had quite enough of that. The best thing he can do is just remove himself from the equation completely. Disappear. Retreat back into space and fly far away until he reaches a galaxy where they’ve never heard of him, never heard of Voltron. Maybe he can try to call Red back to him somehow, or steal a ship from the Garrison—he’s sure no one would really stop him if he told them he just wanted to go for a practice flight. 

What it all came down to though, was that Keith did not believe in fate. Because believing in fate is believing there’s a meaning behind all of this, and Keith doesn’t think he can stomach that. There’s no reason for an eight year old to lose his only parent. There’s no reason for a teenager to be shipped around the country, losing pieces of himself along the way. There’s no reason for him to fight a fucking intergalactic war and learn the future only to see himself hurting the one person he would never want to hurt.

Keith pulls his hand out from the sand to get up on his feet. He wipes his tears away from his face with the end of his sleeve and narrows his eyes into the horizon. He’s made up his mind. Just a few miles straight ahead and he’ll be back at the Garrison. Keith could take Red there now and be out of Earth’s atmosphere before the sun is out.

He could really do it. He should. 

But as always, a voice finds him in the most unlikely of places and tears through Keith’s thoughts of escape. He recognizes that voice. He would recognize it anywhere. 

”Keith!” Lance screams at the top of his lungs, and then the messy crown of his head is visible over the steep ascent of the cliff, quickly followed by broad shoulders and long, lanky limbs. Keith’s eyes are stuck on Lance as he straightens up and stares back at Keith. ”Fuck—Keith,” he sobs and reaches towards him but hesitates, as if Keith’s a bomb that will detonate any second now. Keith wonders if he should start getting worried with how often he feels like he can’t move a muscle, because right now his feet has grown roots into the ground and all he can do is stare at the apparition of Lance in front of him. 

Lance keeps both his palms raised while his eyes flicker all over Keith, assessing the situation. Only when Keith is sure he’s about to have either a panic attack or faint right on the spot does Lance let out another curse under his breath and pulls it together enough for a familiar mask to fall over his previously panicked features. A suspiciously calm Lance is left in front of him and Keith has seen that face many times before. It’s the one Lance puts on every time they went on a mission that was a little too risky for anyone’s comfort. It’s the face he wore in the final battle when he realized that Keith was dying in his arms and the only way to his lion was across no man’s land. 

”Keith,” Lance says again, the trembling in his voice too strong to quell completely. ”Can you—will you please come a bit closer to me?” Keith watches Lance twist his palms in a more friendly, come hither way. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t compute what Lance is implying. ”Please, fuck—Keith.” Lance takes a careful step closer to Keith, arms still outstretched towards him. ”It's going to be alright. I'm not going—just, please, come here.”

Keith can suddenly see what this all must look like to Lance.

”I don’t want to die,” he blurts.

”Good—now come here,” Lance says and wiggles his fingers again. ”Come to me”

”No, Lance. I don’t want to die,” Keith almost stumbles on the way rushing over to Lance. He grabs his arms and looks Lance in the eyes, urgent for him to believe him. ”I’m not—I don’t want to die, Lance.” 

Lance stares dumbfounded back before bursting out into wailing tears.

”Thank fuck—you fucking asshole.” Lance clutches onto Keith’s arms as if he’s still afraid Keith is going to do something impulsive, fingers digging into Keith’s skin.

”Lance.”

”I thought—I thought... holy shit, I don’t even know what I thought,” Lance rambles through the tears and leans into Keith.

“Lance.” Keith holds his shoulders at arms length, forcing Lance to look at him. ”I’m leaving”

“What?” Lance frowns. 

”I’m leaving Earth. I’m not staying,” Keith explains, and he tries to stay calm, he really does. But Lance wasn’t supposed to be here for Keith’s departure—Keith wasn’t supposed to have to watch Lance try to make him stay. It’s selfish, but it’s necessary for Keith’s plan to work out.

”What are you talking about?” Lance shakes his head and scrunches up his face, a new load of tears pouring down his cheeks. He sniffles and Keith doesn’t think he’s ever met a person that has ever felt so real beneath his touch before. Lance is the only person Keith can truly say he knows—understands in a way he’s never understood people ever since childhood. Lance is so utterly human, and he’s like no one Keith has ever met.

That's why he has to leave him behind. Someone like Lance doesn't deserve to be stuck with someone like Keith.

”I’ve seen this, Lance—I’ve seen all of it,” Keith says, stressing the words and can only hope that Lance understands him. ”And we—this—us, it ends here.”

Lance stares at him with his big eyes.

”Are you… are you talking about those visions you and Krolia had on that space whale?” he says after a while, and he sounds so dumbfounded Keith can’t help but let out a hysterical laughter.

”Yes!” Keith exclaims, dropping his grip of Lance’s wide shoulders and steps back. ”Yes, exactly—the space whale.”

Lance continues to look confused for a few seconds, but then the frown on his lips deepens.

”You’ve seen all of this?” he asks, gesturing between them both.

”All of it,” Keith confirms. 

”Then what happens next?”

Keith furrows his eyebrows.

”I—” he says. ”What?”

”Keith. What happens after this?” Lance looks so intently at him he feels as if he’s missing something important. ”You said this is the end, but I don’t see the end anywhere.”

Where does it end Keith?  

Suddenly, Keith is standing in an empty classroom. He’s fourteen. He’s kind of scared he’ll get expelled. The walls feel ten times as high and doubled in thickness. He’s trapped with the only teacher that has ever bothered with him.

Keith, you need to listen to me. Where does it end? These actions are not acceptable. I’m so disappointed in you.

Great. Another disappointed adult. Keith snorts defyingly and directs his gaze away from Ms. Parker’s desk. She sighs.

You know, I also played soccer when I was young. But then I hurt my knee on the field and that was it for my career.

Keith listens to her speak because he always found her voice calming in lectures, but he really doesn’t know where this conversation is going.

My knee injury stopped me from doing something I enjoyed. Something that really was good for me. It ended my career. But you know what? That knee injury was out of my control—there was nothing I could have done to stop it no matter how many ‘what if’s’ I can conjure up in my head.

You however, you still got options. You’ve got time. You have healthy knees, Keith. That’s why I cannot understand why you of all people end up in these situations. Why you always end things this way. The fight today at soccer practice was maybe not uncalled for, but it was mishandled. You know to go get a teacher when something like this happens. 

Keith can feel shame creeping up on his face. He did know that. But he also knew Alex Andrews was a homophobic little bitch that deserved getting punched in his face after he told Keith he couldn’t shower with the rest of the soccer team after practice. Psh, as if Keith would ever dream of fantasizing about Alex. He wouldn’t even poke him with a stick.

I am disappointed in you, and I don’t want to ever see this happen again—but I am glad you stood up for yourself.

Keith glanced up at her through his bangs, not really processing her unfamiliar words.

I am disappointed, but I’m also so proud of you, Keith. I want you to know that. You are not inferior. Not a predator. Never less human than the rest of us. Do you understand me?

Keith’s never had a grown up talk to him like this before—a completely new scenario for him to wrap his head around. He glares down at the floor, fists tied in harsh knots, feeling warmth coil in his chest. He nods.

Ms. Parker cleared her throat.

Okay then. I have spoken to principle Mann. You have detention for the rest of the week. Mr. Andrews is forbidden to approach you again. But if he does I want you to come to me. I’ll handle it.

Keith nods stiffly again, can’t find words to articulate the odd thankfulness he feels.

Okay. You can go now. 

He scrambles to lift his backpack from the floor and walks towards the door.

Oh, and Keith… You will get past this. Life moves on.

Keith stops and glances back at her, catches her smiling at him like no one has in a long time.

This is not the end.

”How did you know where to find me?” Keith asks Lance, breathlessly. He’s already given up on ever winning this roundabout fight they’ve been having for months now.

”What? That’s not—“ Lance broke off his sentence at Keith’s change in demeanor and took a deep breath instead. “You… you said once that when you run, you always run home.” Lance gestures weakly with a limp arm over the rocks and the sand pits and the dust. He looks sad. ”This is where you used to stargaze with your dad. Home.”

Keith’s breath hitches, he can’t tear his eyes off him. 

”Why are you here,” he asks, but it doesn’t sound like a question. It hardly makes a sound at all.

”I—” Lance stops himself again, clenches his fists. ”I think you’re right. People leave. People leave all the time—I would know.” 

Keith flinches at the harsh words, but Lance keeps looking at him with that sense of unconditional devotion, and somehow it didn’t feel as much of a berating as it first did. He closes the little air pocket of space Keith had created between them, and bends his neck until his forehead rests only an inch from Keith’s, close enough for their breaths to mingle. The bare presence of Lance in front of him causes shivers to spread all the way down to Keith’s core.

”But there’s one thing you never stopped to consider,” Lance continues, and Keith can’t quite manage to meet his eyes. ”It doesn’t matter how much you run. Keith,” he whispers. Keith’s eyes snap up to meet his finally, and Lance is shining brighter than any star in the whole goddamn universe. Keith would know—he’s seen it. ”It doesn’t matter,” Lance urges and looks at Keith as if he’s finally found what he’s been looking for. "Because I’ll always catch up to you.” 

Lance leans in, and it really was inevitable for them to reduce the last inch between their lips, gasping into each other and twinning their limbs around and around until Keith’s not sure who’s holding onto what. But he doesn’t care—serendipity, Keith decides, is not the same as stumbling into the snares of fate. They slowly let their lips break away and Keith has never felt more at home than right there at the opposite end of Lance’s warm gaze, with the full view of the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes, the way one corner of his mouth goes higher than the other when he smiles like this.

“Stay?” Lance whispers and closes his eyes, forehead pressed into Keith’s, as if he’s too afraid to watch the answer leave Keith’s mouth.

“Yes,” Keith breathes, and it’s the easiest thing he’s ever said in his life—an exhale that has been lying in wait inside of him this whole time, and Lance clutches him impossibly closer.

How he ended up in Lance’s arms—dust already tucking into the wrinkles of their clothes, pressed flush against each other, so close Keith can feel Lance’s heartbeat—wasn’t the way he though it would be at all. From his dad dying, and Shiro taking him in as if he was family, then going to space and getting to know his mom as if she never left while also getting glimpses of a future he thought he didn’t want, to saving the universe and finally trusting Lance to catch up to him, it was all a huge cosmic joke of a mess that Keith didn’t have the energy to untangle. All he knew was that he was exactly where he wanted to end up, no matter what fate had planned for him.

Keith supposed it could have all been different. 

But he didn’t want it to be.