Chapter Text
= 12 =
The realisation first hits when Lance is twelve.
He's sat in math class, filling the margins of his exercise book with messy doodles, only half listening to Ms Allen drone on about quadratic equations. He wipes away the eraser shavings that have collected on his desk, and, in the process, unintentionally whacks his mechanical pencil onto the ground. It lands with a thud loud enough to catch the attention of the students sat in front of him.
He reaches down to retrieve it, but it's swept away before he has a chance to.
There's a boy. He sits at the desk in front of Lance, turned around to face him.
The first thing he notices is the boy's freckles, stark brown against his skin, highlighted by the bright afternoon sunlight. Lance thinks they're beautiful, like paint splatters against a blank canvas.
He apparently spends way too much time waxing poetic about the guy's freckles, though, because he's interrupted by—
"Yours?" the boy asks, one arm casually resting against the backrest of his chair, the other holding Lance's pencil out expectantly.
"Oh—" Right, the pencil—
He takes it back, fingers brushing against the other boy's in the process. Lance tells himself it wasn't intentional.
"Thanks," Lance says in the most nonchalant voice he can muster.
The boy shoots him a polite smile before turning back to his tablemate, laughing at something she'd said.
Lance focuses his gaze to the front of the classroom and wills his heart to calm the fuck down.
God, that smile.
Ms Allen's words go in one ear and out another.
And his laugh—
He slams his exercise book shut with a little more force than necessary and stares blankly at the cover page.
Shit Lance thinks.
He likes a boy.
=
Lance thinks his favourite time of day is the bus ride home.
School is noisy and chaotic—a direct result of hundreds of adolescents cramped into a building far too small to contain them.
The public bus is quiet, but not too quiet. It isn't suffocating, but it isn't isolating either.
On the ride home, he thinks about a lot of things, gets lost in his own bubble for a good thirty minutes before the buildings at the front of his street come into view and he has to scramble to press the stop button before the driver passes his stop.
Lately, he's been thinking a lot about boys—a boy in particular.
(Tyler. His name was Tyler, Lance would later come to learn, certainly not after eavesdropping on one of his classmates conversations.)
The moment replays over and over again in his mind, like a record on a broken player. The images—his smile, his laugh—spin around in his mind.
He probably looks like a madman, sitting all by himself on the upper deck of the bus, grinning to himself as his chest fills with this foreign feeling he can't seem to name.
(He can name it, he just doesn't think he's ready to yet.)
The thoughts throw him off his axis. They take everything Lance has ever known about himself and cast them away. Every constant he's clung onto for the past twelve years, pushed too far to ever be pulled back into his orbit.
Lance beats his own thoughts to the chase. He gathers them, forces them in a box that looks an awful lot like denial, and pushes it to the furthest corners of his mind.
He decides to leave the box for future Lance to handle.
= 14 =
A year or two passes. He's fourteen now, in a high school far, far away from middle school.
He's made it through the first week of the year with his dignity relatively intact—aside from that stunt he pulled during freshmen orientation camp, but now's not the time to dwell on the memory of walking into the dorms with toilet paper stuck on the bottom of his shoe.
"All I'm saying is," Eren declares, "the peanut versions are way better."
"Why the hell would you ruin M&Ms like that?"
"Ruining them? If anything, I'm making them better!"
"I mean—" Lance adds.
Cayden cuts in. "Are your taste buds okay?" He leans over in an exaggerated motion, pretending to inspect Eren's mouth.
"Oh my god, get away from me you—"
Lance zones out. A small part of him hopes that they notice.
"—do you even floss?"
They don't.
At this point, he's too drained to make an effort, so he picks up his tray and makes a beeline for the tray return.
On average, humans take around a quarter of a second to react. Lance, however, does not possess the average reaction time.
Theres a shove at his arm and suddenly his lunch tray lay askew on the floor, leftover contents scattered all over the surrounding area.
A pair of dark violet eyes latch onto Lance's. They dart to the mess on the ground before looking back up.
Lance books it out of there before the other boy makes a single move.
He ends the week with his dignity, quite literally, spilled across the canteen floor.
=
What would happen if four teenagers, all practically strangers beforehand, were unceremoniously shoved into a room after being assigned a group project in which they had to recreate a scene from Shakespeare? is a question Lance has never thought to ask, but now has the answer to.
Thanks, Ms Jensen.
"Therefore then, thou gaudy gold, hard food for Midas, will none of thou," Keith recites, deadpan.
Lance pinches the bridge of his nose. "It's thee. Will none of thee," he says, the silence of the empty classroom adding a layer of reverberation to his voice.
"Why," Keith sighs, agitation evident in his tone, "would they use thou in the first part of the sentence and then switch to thee?"
"Oh, for fucks sake." Pidge sinks down further into her seat. There's an audible thump as her head hits the chair's backrest.
Lance steps backwards, out of the makeshift filming set they had spent days putting together, complete with old cardboard boxes haphazardly painted to look like caskets, aluminium wrapped desks to act as silver podiums, and, as a finishing touch, an off-white bedsheet draped over the notice board at the back of the room to serve as a backdrop.
"Guys, could we please get on with it," Hunk pleads. He lowers the school-issued camera from his face, words are laced with resignation rather than irritation. Filming was nearing the one hour mark, no thanks to their unnecessary bickering.
Keith rolls his eyes but continues anyways. "Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge, 'tween man and man—"
"Can you at least try to say the lines with emotion? Literally, an ounce of emotion is all I'm asking for—"
"But thou, thou meagre lead," Keith continues, raising his voice to a volume worthy of noise complaints from the teacher's lounge next door.
"Volume does not equate to emotion!"
"Which rather threaten’st!" He shouts. Lance slaps his rolled up script onto Keith's mouth, effectively drowning out his recitation.
"You're a pain in the ass to work with, you know that?"
Keith grabs the piece of paper and pushes it away from his face.
"The feeling's mutual," he says, though his words are muffled as he uses his sweater sleeve to wipe his mouth in disgust.
Thick silence blankets the room yet again. Lance remains in front of Keith, eyes stubbornly focused on a stain on the bedsheet behind Keith instead of Keith himself.
Then, something in Lance—pushed by the past hour of frustration and annoyance—breaks.
Biting his lip, he takes a step back and unfolds his creased script.
A deep breath. "How all the other passions fleet to air," he starts, hesitantly casting his eyes back up to Keith. There's confusion and remnants of frustration. Lance falters for a second at that, but that something in him is relentless, pushes him to carry on.
"As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair."
As his recitation goes on, Lance watches as Keith's doubt slowly melts away.
When it comes his time to speak, Keith draws a sharp breath before continuing where Lance had left off.
"What find I here?" Keith tries.
It's soft and it's tentative but it's effort and really, that's all Lance has been trying to get out of Keith this whole time.
"Fair Portia's counterfeit!" He puts down his script and tilts his head back up to face Lance.
"What demigod," Keith takes a deep breath, "hath come so near creation? Move these eyes?"
Lance swears Keith's eyes turn brighter as he continues with the rest of the page.
Keith ends and there's a beat of silence. Then, "You did it!" Lance smiles—truly smiles.
Keith returns it with one of his own, small and relieved, and genuine, if Lance looks closely enough.
The moment ends when Pidge hops onto the table in front of her—with absolutely no regard for the way her filthy shoes dirty the surface—and yells, "And that's a wrap!"
Raising both arms, Lance turns to the others, whooping in elation.
He doesn't notice when Keith's eyes linger on him for longer than necessary.
=
A loud thud startles Lance awake.
He looks up just in time to see Keith wince at the sound, shooting an accusatory frown at his textbooks, as if they were responsible for banging themselves into the library's glass tabletop. Lance blinks, still slightly groggy from the nap he'd been taking.
"Uh, hey." Keith says tentatively, pulling out the nearest chair as quietly as possible.
"Hey," Lance says in response, "Didn't see you in class yesterday."
"Oh, yeah. Had the flu. Did I miss much?"
"Well, under normal circumstances, the answer to that question would be no," Lance says, intentionally dragging out the last word.
Keith quirks an eyebrow. "But?"
"But there was a surprise inspection from department heads, meaning she actually had to teach this time instead of just putting on scene analysis videos and then swiping through Tinder the entire lesson."
"Damn," Keith chuckles, "the one time I miss class."
A brief silence falls over them. Lance doesn't know if it's a comfortable silence or an awkward silence. Probably the latter.
"But, uh," Lance starts, "if you need any help catching up, then," He trails off.
This catches Keith's attention. He stops picking at a loose hangnail and stares at Lance for a moment.
Lance panics. "Cause, y'know, I don't have much of a life outside school," What the fuck? "so, my calender's pretty clear most of the time."
Great, now he's moved onto using humour to deflect uncomfortable situations.
He's about to retract his previous words—Keith's silence is an obvious indication of what he thinks of Lance's offer—
His train of thought is cut off by a burst of laughter, rough and unexpected, as if Keith himself hadn't meant to laugh out loud.
Keith calms down after a moment, and Lance thinks that's a shame, because he's never really gotten to hear Keith's laugh until now.
He smiles—the same earnest smile Lance remembers from last time—and accepts the offer.
They spend the next hour and a half going over the scenes Keith had missed, and at some point, Lance thinks maybe Keith isn't that insufferable after all.
=
"Are you kidding me?" Lance stares at the offending die as it lay on the hardwood floor of Keith's bedroom.
"Alright, so agility is a four, strength is one, and intelligence is two," Pidge notes, writing Lance's stats down onto a piece of scrap paper. Under her breath, just loud enough for him to hear, she adds, "Matches his real life stats too."
Taking umbrage at both the remark and the rolls, Lance protests, "No! I demand a re-roll!"
"That's not how this works, Lance."
Lance pouts dramatically and leans into Hunk, who graciously accepts the intrusion into his personal space with open arms.
"Okay, are we ready to start now?" Hunk says casually, seemingly undistracted by Lance's koala-level clinging.
"I call dibs on the green one!" Pidge declares, lunging for the green lion piece.
Hunk considers the pieces for a moment before picking for the yellow lion.
Lance sets his eye on the red lion, but just as he reaches for the piece, it's snatched away. He whips his head up, mouth gaped open in indignation.
"Sorry," Keith says, though his tone suggests otherwise. "Red's my go-to piece."
His eyes twinkle with amusement. Lance feels his competitive side flare up—a Pavlovian reaction that's been ingrained into him through years of living with four siblings.
Lance shuts his mouth and huffs in annoyance. "Fine, I'll take Blue." He grabs the piece and slaps it onto the starting space. "She's better than Red anyways."
Cue the collective eye roll that Lance pointedly ignores.
"Okay, Hunk, you go—"
"How many times have I told you to stop rummaging through my room—"
The door busts open to reveal tattered grey pajama shorts and dishevelled bedhead—hold on, why the hell does this twenty year old have white hair, what the fuck?
"—oh, hi there, Keith's friends." Bedhead scans the room before eventually setting his sights on Keith. "Who I was not informed were coming today. At ten in the morning."
"Get out, Shiro." Keith throws the unused black lion piece at him.
"What, first, you invite your friends over without telling me. Now, you demand I get out of your room?"
Ignoring the various boardgame pieces Keith continues to peg at him, Shiro wedges himself in the space between Hunk and Keith and examines the game board in the center.
"Voltron? Really? That's so old."
"Shut up." Keith says, swatting at Shiro's thigh. "You're old." he adds, as an afterthought.
"Wanna play?" Lance offers. He retrieves the black lion from the other side of the room, where it had landed after being unwillingly used as a weapon of assault. "We still have an unclaimed piece."
Keith goes wide eyed. "No, no no no no no—"
Shiro's smile widens. "Sure."
"No!"
"Why not?" Lance asks.
"Because—" Keith falters for a moment, struggling to think of a valid reason. Eventually, he settles on because this is my room and I said no. Lance doesn't find it all that convincing.
"Do you have any idea how childish you sound right now?"
"Maybe it's a side effect from spending too much time with you."
"Excuse me? You are obviously the one who—"
At this moment, Pidge interrupts the arguement. "Keith, your turn."
"What?" He looks to the board, where the black lion sits on the 3rd space of the board.
"Shiro's moved, your turn now." Hunk smiles innocently.
Refusing to acknowlege Shiro's smug grin, Keith picks up the dice and hurls them onto the ground. They ricochet on impact, bouncing around and eventually landing under Keith's bed.
This was going to be a long game.
=
Lance does a double take when he spots Keith leaving the school library, heading towards the classroom block with his back turned and his earphones in.
This is almost too perfect.
He sends a silent thank you to the higher powers above that have bestowed this opportunity upon him, before swiftly hoisting his backpack onto his shoulder and, as silently as possible, running to catch up with him.
A few accidental run-ins and mumbled apologies later, Lance finally gets to where he wants to be—right behind Keith. Keith, of course, is oblivious, probably too engrossed in whatever music he's taken a liking to as of late.
About a month ago, Lance and Keith, being the competitive dumbasses they are, made a bet to see who could jumpscare the other the most. How they came up with this bet, Lance has no clue. What he does know, however, is that he will win it.
Currently, Lance is leading with a score of nine while Keith lags behind with a meager six. Although it was never specified how many points one would have to accumulate in order to be considered the winner, Lance thinks that ten is a nice and round number to end on. And if Keith disagrees? Well, Lance already has a six page argument ready to go.
He psychs himself up, unable to contain the pure, unbridled excitement he feels with victory just within reach.
"What're you up to?"
For fucks sake.
Lance whips his head around and is met face to face with none other than Pidge, smiling smugly at him as if she knows what she'd just taken from lance.
"Oh my god," a voice emanates from behind him, an indicator that his plans are truly, without a doubt, ruined.
"Were you about to—" Keith's eyes flick from Lance to Pidge, and then back to Lance.
The both of them have the audacity to break out into ungodly laughter.
As he stands stuck in the middle of his two asshole best friends laughing at his failed jumpscare attempt, Lance does not pout, similar to the way a temper tantrum throwing four year old would.
"Pidge, I—" Keith tries between chuckles.
"—am going to treat you to ice cream after school?" Pidge helpfully finishes.
Keith smiles knowingly. "Mm, I'll think about it." Lance has a sneaking suspicion that there was a previously discussed deal.
"Hey, bribery isn't allowed!" he claims, outraged.
"It was never mentioned in the rules, though."
"Wh— there were no rules!"
"Exactly."
Lance mentally curses himself for proving Keith's point. A retort gathers on his tongue, but before he has the chance to call Keith a reprehensible cheater, the bell rings and Mr Robinson comes along to shoo them to their next class.
= 15 =
They're at a nearby mall, scattering in all directions, jumping onto every ride they can get their hands on in the children's rooftop playground.
Hunk sways leisurely on a pink pony spring rider, right next to the monkey bars that Pidge has claimed as hers.
Over at the other side of the playground, the sound of swing set brackets grating against their metal beams is covered up by the sound of Lance and Keith's laughter, as they swing themselves higher and higher.
The terrorised looks the other kids shoot them don't seem to put them off whatsoever.
Having just finished three rounds of lazer tag—much to their wallets protest—they'd been understandably tired, but the four of them are nostalgics, and the sight of the playground had invigorated them with newfound energy.
After tiring themselves out on various playground equipment, the four of them find a corner at the very back of the playground, far away from the eyes of parents looking on in disapproval. They empty their schoolbags and form a makeshift table with the textbooks, careful to make the stack as stable as possible. Hunk pulls out the cupcake he'd made the day before and cautiously places it on top of the pile.
They break off the top of a number 7 candle to make it look like a 1 instead because of course Keith had brought the wrong candles, before presenting Lance with his birthday cupcake, complete with the number 15 proudly stuck on top.
The late evening breeze makes lighting the candles especially difficult, the flame repeatedly blowing out before they even get the chance to start singing Happy Birthday. They eventually make it work, though, after a few failed attempts and singed fingers.
There, as he watches Pidge, Hunk and Keith sing Happy Birthday to him, purposely and unapologetically off key, Lance feels happier than he's been in a long time.
He takes one look at Keith—hair tousled, eyes crinkled, a red flannel tied around his waist that really shouldn't look as good as it does—and comes to a heartstopping realisation.
He thinks back to seventh grade, to sunwashed freckles and smiles and laughter. The box he's conveniently tucked away for the past three years bursts wide open. His heart flutters in a way that's all too familiar to him.
He blows out the candles.
=
"Can we please listen to something else."
"Why? It's a good song!"
"It's been on repeat for ten minutes now."
"Yeah? and I spent ten years of my life convincing Shiro to let me use his Spotify Premium, so I'm going to, and I quote directly from one of Spotify's dumb adverts, play what I want, when I want, okay?"
"God, I hate Luis." Lance scowls. "Can't believe this is what I'm reduced to after getting kicked out of his account."
Keith looks unimpressed. "It was well deserved."
"Geez." Lance pulls out his earbud, nearly pulling out Keith's along with it. "You change all the songs in someone's playlist to Never Gonna Give You Up once, and now you've taken it too far—"
Keith grabs the bud and stuffs it back into Lance's ear. He accepts it with minimal squirming. Familliar chants of wake me up begin to fill his ear once again.
"This is your punishment."
"Listening to Bring Me Back To Life on repeat is punishment for rickrolling my godawful brother?"
Keith stares at him, eyebrows raised, as if to say yes, you absolute idiot, and Lance scoffs in mock offense. His heart does not skip a beat under the intensity of Keith's gaze.
Sharing earbuds with the guy you sort of have feelings for—yes, he's gotten past the denial stage—isn't the best idea, especially when you're pointedly trying to get over your feelings for said guy, but hey, Keith was the one who offered first, and Lance has never been one to make wise decisions.
"Forget it. I'll ask Veronica. I swear, if I have to listen to Amy Lee's stupidly perfect voice for one more minute, I'm gonna implode."
Though, as Keith leans more into his personal space to watch in amusement as he messages Veronica, Lance feels like he's about to implode for a completely different reason. He hopes Keith doesn't notice the slight twitch in his fingers as he types.
"Lance. Lance, I don't think bombarding her phone with mesaages is really going to help your case here."
"Okay, well, I do what I want," he says, continuing to spell out the word 'please' by individually sending each letter in a separate text.
"Oh, look at that, she's left you on read. Congrats."
"What?" his eyes dart to the bottom of his screen and there, low and behold, read 3.17pm.
Lance thumps his head against the back of his seat's headrest. An eerie opening piano tune starts playing for the fifth time in a row.
=
Lance's first Secret Santa goes something like this.
"Oh my god, you did not!" Pidge drops the half unwrapped gift onto the table.
Hunk and Keith exchange confused glances, unsure of what emotion the comment is meant to convey.
She rips off the red and white wrapping paper with all the fervour of a ten year old whacking open their birthday pinata. The happiness radiating off of her is palpable.
"How'd you know?" she asks, admiring the artwork adorning the front of the game case.
"Oh, I don't know," he says, sarcasm in his tone, "maybe because you always complain about how Overcooked levels aren't as fun once you've beaten them all, so I thought getting you the second version would shut you up."
Before Lance can even react, he gets tackled in a bone-crushing hug, a soft thank you mumbled into his worn hoodie.
"Yeah, yeah. Don't get all sentimental on me now." Lance smiles despite himself.
Pidge pulls away. "Alright, who's next?"
"Lance's turn to open his." Hunk nods towards him. The cozy Hufflepuff scarf that Pidge had gotten him remains wrapped around his neck.
His gift, a rectangular package neatly wrapped in brown wrapping paper, sits on the table. He picks it up and takes a moment to admire the way his name, written in Keith's attempt at legible handwriting, decorates the front of the package.
"I, uh, apologise in advance," Keith says, as Lance examines the box further, trying to figure out the contents inside, "I'm not that good at picking out presents."
There could literally be an on-fire garbage can within this box and I would still love it because you were the one who gave it to me, he thinks.
A little taken aback by the realisation of how far gone he is for Keith, Lance occupies himself with tearing open the package so he doesn't have to deal with his own thoughts.
He anxiously reaches inside and pulls out:
A book.
Red and black, with an illustration of a matchbox—no, a book—no, a combination of the two. He stares at the words sprawled in bold text on the front cover—Fahrenheit 451—not because he's trying to figure out what it is, but because he's still reeling in shock.
"Oh." A million more responses lay on the tip of his tongue. He resists the urge to let them spill out.
After a few seconds, Keith asks, "Is it okay?" his voice is laced with uncertainty, and Lance wants to yell.
Because of course Keith had remembered all of Lance's late night ramblings, had remembered Lance, in his sleep deprived haze, talking about wanting to own a hardcover collection that would put Shiro's to shame. About how the first book he wanted in his collection would definitely have to be his favourite—Fahrenheit 451.
He wants to yell, "Yes, you dumbass. Yes, yes, yes. It's more than okay."
But a simple thanks is all he manages to say without his voice cracking. He looks up, straight into Keith's eyes, and hopes that he understands what Lance is trying to say.
Judging by the way Keith meets his eyes, matches his gaze, and smiles, Lance thinks he does.
=
Hospitals exist on an entirely different plane, detached from reality itself, Lance thinks, as he leans against the headboard of his hospital bed. He's been staring at the glaringly white curtains that separate him from the rest of the ward for so long now, he can feel a headache creeping up on him.
For a while, he contemplates opening the curtains. A change in scenery would be nice, but his incessant need for privacy gets the better of him, so he stays in bed, begrudgingly staring at blank white space.
He glances at his broken left arm for what feels like the millionth time that day and sighs.
In his defense, climbing over the backgate to get into the house didn't seem that bad of an idea at the time. It certainly seemed better than waiting another 3 hours for Veronica to reach home.
So, confident in his ability to parkour over the two metre and a half fence, Lance took a leap of faith.
And now, here he was, sat in the hospital, recovering from both his broken arm and the earful Luis had given him an hour prior.
So much for a leap of faith.
The room feels quiet. Not the good kind of quiet, the eerie kind, the one that encapsulates you and drowns out every distraction.
Lance is used to noise, sounds of footsteps against ceramic tile, noisy fans, doors opening and closing—sometimes on bad days, slamming—shut, but here, the only thing keeping him grounded, anchored to reality, is the occassional sound of shuffling footsteps or medical carts being wheeled around.
So he drifts, daydreams about whatever crosses his mind.
And by whatever, he means Keith.
Recently, an overwhelming amount of his daydreams have been linked to Keith. Lance knows it's dangerous, but he can't bring himself to care.
He daydreams about Keith. About falling asleep on his shoulder during their bus ride home, about making his eyes crinkle like they always do when his laughter is full bellied and uncontrollable, about telling him how he feels—
"Lance?"
"Yeah!" he answers all too quickly to be considered normal.
The curtains are pulled away to reveal Keith, schoolbag slung over his shoulder, white plastic bag in hand.
"You didn't tell me you were coming," Lance blurts.
"Normal people begin conversations with hello, but I'll assume that was the painkillers talking and not you."
Keith sets his things down and sits on the folding chair next to Lance's bed.
"Were you really dumb enough to try and parkour into your own house?"
"Shut up. I don't wanna talk about it."
"You talked about it lots in the messages you sent me." He reaches into the front pocket of his backpack and pulls out his phone.
"Let's not revisit that."
"Five fifteen, hey Keith, guess who has two thumbs and is in the hospital with a fractured forearm because he tried to break into his own house?" Keith scrolls further downwards. "Then, you sent a photo of you doing a thumbs up with your broken arm."
"I blame the painkillers entirely."
"Even painkillers wouldn't be able to account for your level of dramatics." he replies.
Keith reaches into the plastic bag he'd brought in with him and produces two chocolate bars and a box of strawberry Pocky.
"I stopped by the 7-Eleven downstairs." he explains, tossing one of the chocolate bars towards him. Lance catches it with his good arm and doesn't even bother hiding his smile.
They chat for a while, their idle conversation eventually turning into a debate about sour Skittles, when the sound of the curtains shifting catches their attention.
"Oh, hey there." Luis says, looking somewhat taken aback by the stranger that's taken residence by Lance's bedside.
"That's Keith," he explains.
Keith shoots Luis a polite smile and receives one in return.
"Next time you get injured," Luis says, pulling the curtains shut with one hand and holding two containers worth of food in the other, "I'm not buying you takeout. You're gonna sit here and eat hospital food in misery."
"Next time? There's gonna be a next time?"
"Knowing you?" Luis raises an eyebrow. No doubt about it, it seems to say.
Lance whacks his brother on the arm.
"Mamá called me. She's on her way right now," Luis says, setting Lance's Happy Meal—he may be fifteen but like hell that's gonna stop him—onto the table.
"What about Papá?"
Luis pauses for a moment. "Overtime." If Keith catches the hint of hesitation in his voice, he doesn't say anything.
"Oh," Lance says simply. The words don't sting like they used to before. Lance tells himself they don't.
Keith is the first one to break the brief silence. "I should probably go now, it's getting late."
Stay, a small part of Lance thinks.
"Yeah," he agrees.
Keith waves Lance and Luis goodbye, but as he's about to step out, he pauses.
"I call first dibs on signing your cast!" he declares over his shoulder.
.
The next day, the first words written on Lance's cast are don't be such a dumbass next time. After a long tangent about how his Mamá will absolutely murder him for letting his friends write vulgarities on his cast, the words get well soon are scribbled in bright red ink over the previous message.
= 16 =
At the very back of the school's multi-purpose hall, past the stained curtains and doors with worn away paint that reveal the beige frame underneath, up the dilapidated stairs that no one ever seems to use anymore, theres a small rooftop garden—or at least, there used to be. Now, the space only houses withered plants, their leaves brown and wilted from months of neglect.
Ms Dana—the only janitor who ever cared enough to water them—left in early June, and the harsh summer sun hadn't been kind to them over the past two months.
Lance misses Ms Dana, misses the days where he would sit on the stepping stones of the garden, doing his homework while surrounded by lush greenery, waiting for her to come in with two watering cans—one in each hand—and a smile on her face.
Now, he sits cross legged in the corner of the garden, back against the cool metal railing and face angled towards the clear night sky.
"We should be asleep." Keith points out.
"Yeah, but we're not. Perks of being in charge. I'd rather be here, anyways." Lance barely stops himself from adding the words with you to the end of his sentence. He might be sleep deprived, but he hasn't lost all semblance of sanity yet.
"God," Keith says, "who the hell took one look at me and thought, wow you know what would be perfect for this broody sixteen year old with no school spirit at all? Being a counsellor for this years freshman orientation camp!"
Lance breaks out into laughter at Keith's deadpan delivery.
When he calms down, Keith continues his tangent. "The new batch are insufferable."
"For the most part, yeah. but there are some tolerable ones thrown into the mix."
"Nope, all the ones in my group are dickheads."
"What about Raine? She seemed nice. I talked to her yesterday."
"Yeah, I thought so too," Keith says, "But then I heard her talking shit about Hadirah during dinner."
"Ouch." Lance grimaces, but he doubts Keith can see it in the darkness. "It's the third day. They're already gossiping?"
"I told you, they're insufferable. This whole camp is insufferable."
Lance gently takes the withered leaf of a nearby bird's-nest fern into his hand. He rubs his thumb over it's pale yellow surface, picturing what it would have looked like before, green and full of life.
There's a long stretch of silence. "You being here makes it less insufferable, though," Keith says, words quiet and spoken into the still midnight air that surrounds the both of them.
The words take a while to click—he's gone the past nineteen hours without sleep, forgive him—but when they do, Lance feels a wound reopen, the same one from a year ago, when he'd blown out his birthday candles. The one he'd stitched shut countless of times before, only to have it open up yet again whenever Keith stuck his tongue out at him or shot him a particularly fond smile.
He hates that all it takes for him to unravel is a simple you being here makes it less insufferable, but he's known Keith for a while now, knows it's his way of saying thank you for being here.
"Thanks," he says, still picking at the leaf.
After a while, he turns to Keith and hopes the darkness of the night masks the bittersweet expression on his face.
"The feeling's mutual." Lance adds, afterwards.
The irony in his words is laughable.