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“I’m so tired,” Lance mutters drowsily. He’s lying back against his pillow, propped up and staring at the TV without really paying attention to the show they’ve got playing. Imagine Dragons is streaming on the radio, along with a bunch of other bands that had once dominated most of his childhood. They sound so foreign to him now, though they still take him all the way back to when he was in high school, the notes skittering across his skin like the sheets of Hunk’s bed when they’d cram for midterms together. It’s a particular type of nostalgia that sneaks up on him like an attack, a kind of nostalgia he hasn’t felt in a long time. It tingles uncomfortably in his chest, but he fails to escape it because he’s just so tired.
“Then go to sleep,” Keith says from next to him, and Lance turns his droopy eyes over to him and gives him a look that only accentuates how exhausted he is.
“I could,” he says, as though pondering what effects sleeping at a decent time would have on him for once. And then promptly decides, “or we could go downstairs and eat cookies.”
“You want cookies?” Keith asks, the corner of his lips turning up. Lance looks at them for a moment too long.
“No,” he says, eyes flicking back up to his. “But I want to stay awake with you.”
“I’ll be here when you wake up,” Keith says, turning to dig his hand underneath his pillow. Lance mimics him and then they’re looking at nothing but each other. He feels like he could fall asleep the minute he thinks to close his eyes, but he also feels the room warp around him and begin to spin with Keith in the center of it all. And how can he sleep to the sight of that? To Keith, laying in bed right beside him as though he belongs nowhere else but here? How could he close his eyes and miss it?
“We saved the universe together,” he murmurs, the words coming out of him unbidden.
Keith’s eyes flicker with an emotion that Lance decides he desperately wants to study right then and there. Spend life times analyzing them, prodding at them, see what exactly makes them spark. In every single possible way. His breath comes short and it’s like he can see all the times they’ve spent side by side and farther apart than he could ever fathom, and how desperately he wants to fill out the rest of their time together as patiently as this world will let him.
“Yeah, we did,” Keith says, his voice carrying like warm honey in between them. There’s nothing hasty about it, nothing prickling like the edge of a sharp stone preparing to crumble to bits, nothing as rough as Keith usually is. And Lance finds himself wanting to fall into his voice, into the warmth and smoothness and everything of it.
Keith is smiling again and the movement slowly brings him back, his brain doing that strange thing where it reminds him that — oh right, he’s having a conversation right now.
He doesn’t quite remember what they’d even been talking about.
His eyes follow the curve of Keith’s smile and the mole that sits above his lip and the gentle way his chest rises and falls and thinks, how could he forget about the universe?
“You and me,” he says, as though announcing his recollection. And then, “I didn’t hate you back at the Garrison.”
“ Mm, is that so?” Keith says, that amused lilt back in his voice. “Sure looked like it to me.”
“You know I didn’t hate you,” Lance argues, sounding very petulant about it. Like he’d fight Keith tooth and nail to make sure he understands how untrue it is. “It was a mutual, healthy, competitive rivalry that attested to our strengths.”
“I don’t know about mutual or healthy, but…”
Lance rolls his eyes and the room feels all the more hazy around him. He can feel his tiredness seep all the way down to his knees. Why does it always have to be around his knees?
He reaches over and gives Keith’s shoulder a weak shove. “Be quiet, you.”
“My sincerest apologies,” Keith says very seriously, and Lance chuckles into his pillow.
“Hey, that was kinda funny,” he says, shifting closer. Their bangs touch, noses only a mere width away. Everything feels a little funny right now, a little too light. A little too warm.
“Yeah?” asks Keith, smiling. “I like making you laugh.”
“Do it more often, then,” Lance says, feeling his cheeks heat up. He might be feeling more awake now, but it doesn’t last forever because the lighting that falls around them paints the room in a mellow, dreamy, soft kind of glow. Soft like the pillow underneath his head, like Keith looking back at him, like the tickling in his tummy. And then he’s going under all over again.
“I’m glad you’re part of the team. I’m glad we were a team,” he admits with a twinge in his chest, and is thrown back to that vivid memory of saying those same exact words to him when the world had felt like it was falling apart all those months ago. Or years. It’s been so long. Emotion quickly begins to overwhelm him and his eyes and his lips, creeping inside him like a flood. “I’m glad I saved the universe with you.”
Keith reaches over and lays his hand over his, their fingers intertwining together slowly, gently, as though appreciating the way they’re able to come together like this. His eyes have a gleam in them, a portion of emotion in them, of the same ones Lance feels in his stomach. They’re all there, reflected in his eyes.
“I wouldn’t have wanted anyone other than you by my side.”
Lance smiles and tilts his head to bump their foreheads together. “Back atcha, Samurai.”
Keith chuckles and he can feel the air of it tingle against his mouth. He continues to hold his hand, the light continues to try and drag him to sleep and Keith’s eyes continue bringing him back. He looks at him like there’s nothing left to hide. There’s warmth there, there’s security there, there’s relief there, there’s a new beginning there.
His stomach swoops violently.
“I think I’ve always wanted you to look at me like this,” he whispers, feeling almost out of breath with it. “No, I know I’ve always wanted you to look at me like this.”
Keith releases his hand to cup his cheek, his fingers a pleasant cool against his warm skin. He watches Keith’s throat bob, feels his thumb circle beneath his eye, shivers against the ones that brush over his jaw.
“Back atcha,” Keith says after a while of just watching him, and Lance’s smile fills out his cheeks as he laughs into his hand. Soft and incredulous.
“Funny,” Lance sighs, letting himself close his eyes against Keith’s nearness.
“I know I’ve always felt this way about you,” Keith is saying, his voice low and sleepy and quiet and honest. Lance opens his eyes slowly and looks at him with what feels like his heart in his hands. “We’re still going to be a team even after all this.”
And that need in him, this all consuming need that’s been thumping against his rib cage and slamming harder and harder with every word that leaves Keith’s mouth, it becomes frantic and calm and restless and jubilant all at once.
“I love you,” he hurries to say, like it’s the only chance he’s given to say it and if he doesn’t say it right now he might combust like an impatient star. But that’s the thing — that’s not true anymore and he’s still grappling with what that means for them, but it still has his tongue growing slippery with how badly he needs to say it. “I love you, Keith. I love you, I love you, I — I’ve always wanted to say it to you. I love you.”
He already confessed his feelings to him only hours prior, though it feels surreal to even think about it. On the battlefield with Red and Black laying like putty in the dirt and his heart still beating to the sound of the ion cannon and Keith still on alert, still unable to think about the possibility that it could be over.
There’s none of that now. There’s only them, in this small room, on this big bed, under these warm sheets. He still needs to be reminded of the concept of forever, of how he doesn’t have to exist outside of it anymore.
“I’m going to say it to you every day,” he promises, reaching forward to push Keith’s hair back over his head and dragging him in to kiss him like it’s the first time all over again. It still feels so new, still so fresh and unlearned and stomach turning and exciting. He thinks it’ll never stop feeling like this.
The desperation from before is still there, still lingering in their tired muscles and grasping hands and aching lips. But then Keith holds his cheeks in his hands and slows it down, kisses him leisurely, worms a hand in his hair and brushes a thumb over his temple and brings him back to him and this moment.
It’s a gradual thing, reminding each other how timeless this all is now.
It’s in the way they pull back to simply bask in the sensation of being next to each other . It’s in the way Lance lets the tips of his fingers skim across his cheek, it’s in the way they lean back in for something gentle and unhurried, it’s in the way they peck each other like they have all the time in the world because they do . It’s in the way they stare at each other and take one another in and murmur sweet nothings against love-worn lips. It’s in the way they exist solely for the purpose of mere existence.
“I want to do this with you,” Keith speaks over the base of his throat, where he kisses him soft and slow and like something to be treasured.
Lance knows what he means, has been thinking it like it’s the only thought he’ll ever have, like a vow told in different words and waiting to be said as it wants to be said. As it deserves to be said.
“We will, we are, we’re going to,” Lance breathes in between kisses, high off of it. “Everything, every day, with you.”
“Everything,” Keith murmurs over his jaw, sounding suddenly determined as he slides his hand up his waist and down his back. “I’m gonna give you everything.”
Lance feels his breath knock right out of him and can only let out this aborted, spine-tingling laugh. He presses it into Keith’s hair and feels it boom in his chest.
“Keith,” Lance breathes, like he doesn’t know anything else that can possibly measure up to a declaration like that, or how he can’t believe they’re at a place where they can say these things so freely to each other.
And then, Keith pulls his head out of his neck and leans in so closely their noses squish together and declares again, “I’m gonna give you everything,” with full intent and veracity and confidence and everything that makes Keith, Keith.
And god, Lance wants all of him.
He leans in to bump his forehead over Keith’s collarbone and says into his skin, “not — not before I give it all to you first," because he has to. He can feel Keith's low chuckle right here beating against his chest, and then pulls back to kiss him until they find sleep waiting deep in each other’s arms. For the first time in half of forever (because this, this is the other half of their forever), they fall into it as gently as one might fall onto a bed made of clouds. Where there isn’t so much behind them as there is a bright, promising light in front of them, waiting like Keith’s hand reaching out for him to hold onto.
And if every day is going to look like a variation of this — of sleep feeling chaseless and Keith looking at him as though stars themselves were born with every breath he takes and his heart resting easy knowing that all his friends and family are safe — then well, Lance thinks they just might be okay.