Chapter Text
Keith doesn't pine. That's what he tells himself every day.
He can watch Lance's cheeks burn with every brush of Allura's hand on his shoulder, with every soft smile she sends his way, with every laugh that cracks out of her at one of his stupid jokes. He can watch Lance stumble his way through asking Allura on a date, and stumble more miserably when his advances are rejected. He can watch Lance sniffle and sob, curled up on his beanbag after Allura told him she didn't return his feelings, blowing his nose tissue after tissue and wondering what he could've done different.
Keith rips another tissue out of the box and passes it to Lance, grimacing as the heartbroken boy presses it hard against his wet eyes and whimpers.
Keith doesn't resent Allura for this. No one can force themself to fall in love. But he wishes it were different, that Allura had said yes, because if she did, he wouldn't have to sit here and watch Lance cry half his body weight in tears.
He doesn't know why Lance asked him to be here. He's not very skilled at comforting people in highly distressed situations.
“I don't know what I did wrong,” Lance croaks, “Maybe... Maybe if I wasn't so—”
“Stop," Keith says firmly, and Lance's arms drop in the middle of his gesture. “You don't need to change yourself. And you definitely don’t need anyone’s permission to love yourself.”
Lance blinks away some more tears that roll down his cheeks, and slowly, he lets himself smile. It's a hesitant smile, and Keith gets the impression he still wants to drown himself in self loathing. But, baby steps.
“Thanks, dude,” Lance says quietly.
Keith loves him, so badly he wishes the only tears Lance would cry would be happy ones, beaming and flushed, the kind of tears you cry when you’ve finally let go of your sorrow.
Keith doesn't pine.
He can watch Lance fall in and out of love with Allura, and the only thing he could think throughout all of it is—
I want him to be happy.
Keith doesn't pine because his heart doesn't shatter into a million pieces at the idea of Lance loving someone else. Because he’s smart enough to know that Lance already loves him as a friend, and that's enough.
If Lance had felt the same way about Keith, he'd have shown it already. Keith is okay with that.
Keith's love isn't pounding at the gates of his chest, demanding to be let out. It's... it's inching towards the door, not exactly nervous or anxious, but curious.
“Lance—”
The gates crack open.
“I...”
His heart peeks through.
Lance meets his eyes, followed by a pregnant pause. Keith searches and searches the depths behind the open doors that bare his soul, and only finds one thing: heartache.
Keith’s mouth twitches into an awkward smile. “It's no problem, man. Guess I'm better at cheering people up than you thought.”
Lance snorts, and somehow the room is brighter. “Don't get ahead of yourself. You've got a long way to go.”
The gates close.
Lance punches Keith's arm softly, and Keith tries to hone in on the warmth of his skin before it pulls away.
“Yeah,” he says absently. “I do.”
Keith is sixteen when he promises himself not to utter a word of his feelings to Lance.
“I'm not pining,” Keith tells Shiro one day, a month or so before he's supposed to graduate.
Underneath the grainy light of the weight room, Shiro, understandably, favors him a look of doubt.
“I'm serious,” Keith says, dropping the dumbbell he was curling onto the floor.
“Hey, hey,” Shiro points at the dumbbell from where he lies flat on the mat, “You need five more reps and you're done.”
Keith deliberately ignores him. “I'm not pining! What's so hard to believe about that?”
Shiro falls onto his back from a sit-up and shrugs, halfheartedly mulling it over before deciding, “Maybe you're right. Maybe you aren't.”
Keith throws a hand up and slaps it down to his thigh. “Thank you!”
“But if you have feelings for him and you're not pining,” Shiro ponders, slowly sitting upright and rubbing his chin, “Then I think it's unrequited love.”
“Unrequ—” Keith sputters, taken aback. He shakes his head, as if to knock the idea out of his brain. Unrequited love would entail rejection. “I've never even told him how I feel.”
“Well, that's not always the case,” Shiro says matter-of-factly. “You've come to terms with the possibility that Lance won't reciprocate. That's the basis of unrequited love.”
“I... guess so,” Keith mutters. The technicalities are messing with his thought process.
“Why are you so adamant about that, anyway?”
Keith halts in the middle of bending down to pick up his dumbbell, and raises an eyebrow at Shiro. “About what?”
Shiro makes a vague hand gesture. “About, you know, Lance never feeling the same. Reciprocating.”
Keith straightens up, frowning at his worn out running shoes. He sighs, dropping his face into his hands. “I don't know. I think I've lost too many people in my life to handle losing Lance over something as stupid as a crush. I just... want to love him any way I can.”
Shiro rests his chin on his palm, smiling at Keith with a sympathy that threatens break the walls built around his heart. “Any way you can,” Shiro repeats. “And that means falling for him in silence?”
Keith resolutely gulps down his water, sparing Shiro a response.
“Are you scared you'll push him away if you told him?” Shiro asks.
“No,” Keith mumbles. He sets down his water bottle, dread settling in his stomach like leaves on an autumn day. “I'm scared he'll push me away.”
Keith doesn't remember why he's there, just knows that he was supposed to go back home at least two or three hours ago, but he couldn't. Not when Lance cornered him with those stupid puppy dog eyes and begged him to stay for another movie. A terrible sci-fi movie nonetheless, but it seemed to entertain him with its corny tropes and situations. Keith just leisurely sipped his juice pouch and stared whenever Lance would laugh or ramble aimlessly about some topic related to the movie.
“Oh my gosh,” Lance gasps when a new scene commences, “Are those space elephants?”
Keith squints.
“I wonder if they're any different from Earth elephants.” Lance casually grabs the pouch from Keith's hands and brings it to his lips. Keith chokes on air. “Like, do you think alien animals have the same caliber of emotions that Earth animals do? Do you remember hearing that story about the elephant that cried for a whole day after its mother died? Ugh, their little elephant faces are too cute to look that sad. It's so—” Lance makes aggressive squeezing motions, and eloquently finishes, “sad!”
Keith snatches the pouch from Lance’s frantic grasp and leans back against the cushion. “Very.”
Keith lifts the pouch up to sip, and then freezes almost robotically. His eyes flit to the straw, then to Lance's moving lips, talking a mile a minute, then back to the straw. He grabs Lance's wrist in the middle of a flailing gesture, sets the pouch in his palm, and settles back into his previous position.
Lance wrinkles an eyebrow, tangent forgotten. “What are you giving this to me for?”
“You drank from it.”
“So?”
“So,” Keith says sarcastically, “I don't want your germs.”
“I'm the most hygienic person you know!” Lance says defensively, and then in a childish pout, as if to say that's not fair , “I drank from it after you did and I didn't care about your germs!”
Keith thanks whatever god might exist that it's too dark for Lance to see his face burst into flames. “Cause you're just gross.”
“Are you pulling a no-homo on me right now, dude?” Lance scoffs and nudges his arm. “What's a little indirect kiss between two bros?”
Keith’s resolve cracks like glass on a hot stove.
Lance keeps the juice pouch for the rest of the night.
“You think we'll still be friends after you go to college?”
Keith's eyes flick up, fixing his gaze on Lance amidst the spots of yellow and purple and blue that pulse into his vision. He's tired, and a little high, but Lance is higher. Possibly floating on his own little cloud among the stars.
“Sure,” Keith mumbles, squinting at the bright colors from the screen of the television as an old rerun of Spongebob plays out.
“Yeah?” Lance asks in a thin, wiry voice.
When he speaks his voice comes out hoarse, and there's a certain undertone that he hopes Lance will ignore.
“You and I... would still be friends, just because,” he declares. His voice is thick and heavy, and he can feel the claws of sleep pulling him in as it wears down his throat.
Keith only has enough energy to look at Lance from the corner of his eye, and he can't decipher the look on his face. There's something new in his blue, blue, blue eyes. So blue.
Lance lets his forehead rest on Keith's shoulder, timid grin highlighting the blush that has taken place on his cheeks. Lance raises a limp hand up to grip Keith's bicep, as if to balance himself.
He softly asks, “Just friends?”
Keith is so high he wakes up the next morning thinking he'd dreamed the entire thing.
Keith jolts when Lance presses a wettened pad to the cut above his eyebrow. He grimaces, wringing his fingers in his lap. Lance is trying not to let his irritation show through his face, but it does nothing to help the shame swirling in Keith’s stomach.
“You know,” Lance says, cutting through the silence unexpectedly, “You should really protect your face a little more whenever you tussle with somebody.”
Keith’s nose scrunches up. “Tussle?”
Lance ignores that. “Your face is your moneymaker. Keep it safe,” he tries joking.
Keith studies his face, and Lance’s eyes dart away. Keith sighs, focusing now on his shoes. “You’re disappointed,” he decides. He doesn’t know why he had to say it out loud; they both knew.
Lance tenses up. “No!” Keith doesn’t seem very convinced, so his shoulders slowly drop. “Okay, maybe a little.”
Keith’s eyes sting, and he blows out a breath to stop his heart from clenching too hard.
“But I’m also kind of proud.”
Keith looks up, taken aback. He waits for Lance to take it back and list the reasons he should be ashamed of himself, but the look in his eyes is sincere. The backdrop of Lance's kitchen outlines his silhouette in a way that Keith finds he can't look away from, and it momentarily distracts him from the surprise he initially felt.
"Why?"
Lance smiles to himself. "You were a real jerk when we first met. And an asshole. And rude."
Keith frowns. "Okay, this is—"
"And I realized it's because you were just fighting for yourself."
The mood shifts, or maybe it’s just that the air in Keith’s chest dropped suddenly. But it strikes a chord deep inside him, like it was something he’d always known about himself but never truly admitted. He bristles and asks roughly, “What does this have to do with some dick making a comment towards Hunk?”
“This has everything to do with that!” Lance laughs, a bit cautious as he approaches his next words, “You were a jerk because you only fought for yourself... but after Shiro took you in,” he reaches forward to gently press a bandage to the scrape across Keith’s browbone, “You started fighting for others.”
Keith's flinches as a tiny jolt of pain shoots through his face. He lets the pain distract him from fully digesting Lance's implication.
But then Lance takes his hand. His fingertips graze Keith's palm, and the world stops.
"I know why you protected yourself," Lance says quietly. He looks too fond. "And now that you have more people to care about, you don't want them to feel the way you did."
Keith feels like his chest is being ripped open and dissected, and his heart pumps with unbridled fear.
"You wanted someone to protect you."
He remembers once hearing that hopes and fears are two different things, yet all the same. The line between them is thick, blurred, and easily confused. Keith had imagined being stopped by a police officer in the middle of the road, being forced to walk that line to prove he hadn't been drinking, wobbly and unfocused and drunk with... something. Something. Somehow he'd stumble and fall onto one side of the line, not knowing whether he'd fallen into a hope or a fear.
But he guessed it didn't matter, because they were all the same.
And Lance doesn't know that he's planted the seed.