Chapter Text
“Lance.”
“My life is in shambles.”
“Lance.”
“Woe is me.”
“Lance, get out of my room.”
There he was, Lance McClain, ladies’ man. Sprawled out face first on her bunk in his satin pajamas with his bare feet slapping against the mattress like a petulant child. Sadly enough this was actually one of his finer moments, in Pidge’s opinion. She glances over at him from her seat on the floor with a pitying expression. It’s not like he kicked her off the bed, she actually liked sitting on the floor. Like a gremlin, he often teased. She didn’t know why, it was just comfortable. The room was filled with the sounds of his whining and the fast paced, rhythmic tapping of her fingers flying across the keyboard in her lap. A typical weekend for the two of them. Sometimes Lance could be a nuisance upon her alone time, but he was entertaining, some background noise at the very least. It gets boring in her room at night, which made his presence all the more welcome.
They had a routine. He’ll bring her coffee or a peanut butter sandwich, try to clean up the absolute trash fire that was her room but she won't let him, she already knows where everything is and she doesn’t like people touching her stuff, which he also loved to do. He’ll steal her headphones, she’ll retaliate by stealing his jacket. And through it all they’d sit there, musing about the day’s events or just going about their business quietly, or as quiet as could be with Lance around. It was their thing.
He springs to his feet, still on the bed, and throws her blanket around his shoulders like a cape.
“I will not lose to that swoopy haired pretty boy!” He proclaims to the ceiling.
“Lose at what, exactly?” She asks.
He falters with a blush before regaining his confidence and resuming his shouting, “You don’t understand, Allura’s been spending way too much time with this ‘Lotor’ punk!”
“You sound like a concerned father whose daughter is fooling around with some boy on the football team. They’re both in student government, of course they’re gonna spend a lot of time together, what’s the big deal?” She asks, knowing Lance hasn’t fully come to terms with his crush on Allura since, unlike every other girl, they were actually friends.
“A lot of time together...” Realization dawns upon his face exaggeratedly as he sinks into her green comforter. Pidge simply shrugs with a sigh before turning away from him and resuming her programming homework.
A few minutes later he perks up again. Typical Lance.
“Do you think I should grow my hair out?” He asks her, fiddling with the short tufts of his bangs.
The thought of Lance whipping his hair over his shoulder dramatically crosses her mind and she giggles.
“No. Absolutely not. Forbidden.”
“Why are you laughing? I’d look good!” He flips over onto his back, tossing one of Pidge’s stuffed animals towards the ceiling to amuse himself before pausing to add, “Speaking of, why don’t you let your hair grow out the way it was before? I’ve seen the picture of you and Matt from back in middle school, you looked cute.”
The end of the wall of text on her laptop’s screen reads “<script_type=”iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii” as her fingers stop dead in their tracks. She can feel the hair on the back of her neck rise as the compliment travels from her back up to her ears and she quickly composes herself before he can notice her embarrassment, erasing her error and continuing the line of code.
“No thanks, too much of a hassle.” She says, and really it is, but the larger reason is that if she goes back to the way she used to look she’s afraid she won’t be the person she is right now, that people won’t look at her the same, that she’ll be too much of a girl . It sounds ridiculous, and she doesn’t think anyone will understand, so she keeps quiet about it. It’s not the only thing she’s keeping quiet about.
“Aww, come on. I’d help you, I’m pretty good at braiding. I would braid my niece’s hair all the time back home,” he says with a mix of fondness and sadness. Really she feels sorry for him, from what she knows about Lance, he’s very family oriented so being at university all the way in America so far away from them must hurt. Her brother and father have frequently gone away on lengthy business trips, but the time apart never been anything so substantial. She really is lucky. She wishes she could share some of that luck with him.
“... Maybe. But I’ve got a tender head so you better be as good as you say.” And that’s all he’s getting.
“Miss Holt, you have nothing to fear! Your scalp will be in heaven once I’m done with it,” he demonstrates this by climbing off the side of her bed and beginning to massage her head.
She wants to get annoyed and slap him off of her, but he’s not wrong, it actually feels pretty good. However, she can feel her ears turning red with heat so she slaps him. He laughs. The sound rings pleasantly in her ears.
Another thing she can’t tell anybody, she thinks he’s pretty cute. Yes, he was annoying, arrogant, flirty. But he was also compassionate and sensitive, confident and funny. But she could never admit that, she wasn’t allowed to. They were too different. She believed in numbers and statistics and Lance was the type of person who’d crash into a traffic pole because he was either staring at the sunset or a pretty girl, they weren’t compatible. Their relationship was fine the way it was and there was no point in complicating things. Besides, how could she let herself have a crush on someone that flirted with half the school’s population, including a couple of guys? It was way too much of a hassle.
Honestly, imagine if she had a crush on him? God. Imagine. Imagine having him fawn and get all googly eyed over everything that moved, right in front of her. Imagine him treating her like one of the guys, getting in her personal space, flustering her, all just to come in her room and rant and rave about his giant crush on Allura at two in the morning. Imagine.
She takes her glasses off and places her forehead in her hand. She’s an idiot.
Pidge chances a look at him, sitting on her bed in her headphones and her blanket without a care in the world like she was his plucky roommate rather than a girl whose room he was in with the door closed after dark. Her father would kill them both if he knew anything about this. Hell, her brother would too if he wasn’t off lecturing at another university a few states away right now.
She keeps staring at him until he notices her and turns his music down.
“What’s up, Pidgeon?”
“Nothing,” she says as she stands up, bringing her laptop with her and discarding her glasses on her night stand. She flops down on the bed next to him, well into his personal space as she lets her back touch the wall, continuing to type nonchalantly. She suppresses a smirk as she can literally feel the awkwardness begin to raidate off of him.
“What?” She asks.
Lance toys a little with the headphones in his hand before letting out a small ‘nothing’ and playing on his phone, the sudden realization that he’s sitting on a girl’s bed with her alone seeming to finally blossom in that big head of his. He scoots over, away from her, and she takes it as a challenge and decides to up the ante.
Still typing away on her laptop, she folds herself over to lay on her pillow, unfolding her legs and placing them on top of his.
He laughs awkwardly, not seeming to know what to do with his hands. She was loving this.
“Sooo,” he begins, but doesn’t finish his thought.
“What?” she reiterates, raising her eyebrows to give him a sarcastic look.
“Nothing,” he says, settling on placing his palms flat on the mattress on either side of himself, the wall must be a lot more interesting than his phone all of a sudden because that’s what he’s staring at. She loves that she’s finally gotten him to squirm.
After a moment, she sighs and lets her back sinker deeper into the pillows behind her, satisfied.
“Lance?”
“Yeah?”
“Get out.”