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“What are you doing?” Keith asked as he leaned against the doorframe. He’d gotten home a little earlier than expected and was going to surprise Pidge, but he could barely see her over the stacks of boxes dominating her room, which was more of a mess than usual.
“Keith?” He thought he saw the tip of her short ponytail poke out between two piles full of parts he couldn’t even name. She squealed, and then appeared behind her bed. “You’re back!” she screeched, crawling over her bed and jumping into his arms.
He laughed, catching her midair and hugging her in return. “It’s good to see you too.” He held her for a few minutes as she clutched at him, but finally his curiosity got the best of him and he pulled back. “Seriously. What is going on here? I feel like I walked into an episode of Hoarders, though that’s not an uncommon thing when walking into your room.”
She slugged him in the arm and turned back to her bed to pick up the piece of paper lying there. “It’s called spring cleaning. You know, boxing up and getting rid of everything you no longer need. I thought it’d be a good idea, since I seemed to have amassed a bunch of junk in space, but I have to admit, I’m completely lost. This article is giving me nothing. How am I just supposed to”—she thrust both arms forward to encompass the whole room—“choose what goes?” She sighed, exasperated. “It all seemed pretty important when I decided to bring it along with me.”
He watched her with amusement. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen her in a long time; he came back frequently for visits and they kept in touch via email and facecalls. But it was so much more pleasing to watch his girlfriend rant and ramble in real time, when he could feel her energy buzzing off of her. It kept him going, gave him a reason to smile.
And she sure hated that he was grinning now. “Oh, like you could do better,” she said in a challenging voice as she crossed her arms over her chest.
“I can, and I have. You forget that I lived with practically nothing in the middle of the desert and took nothing but my mother’s Blade and my jacket with me to space. And even now, I don’t carry more than a duffel bag on long trips, and that’s only because someone refuses to let me leave without double checking that I’ve packed.”
She groaned with every point he made. It was hard not to grin wider. “Fine, Mr. Necessities Only. Some of us have sentiment and feelings.”
He reached out to catch her by the waist. “Oh, I have feelings and plenty of sentimental ones too. I just don’t keep them in things.”
She tried to lean away from his kiss, but he still got her on the cheek and she wound up giggling. “Yeah, yeah. If you’re so good at it, then tell me what goes.”
“Hmm, this,” he said, picking up what looked like an old copy of Killbot Phantasm from a nearby stack. “Do you even have a gaming system to play it on?”
She gasped and ripped it out of his hands. “Of course I do.”
He snatched it back. “Then that goes too.”
She held her hands over her ears and loudly sang as he continued, adding her character’s costume from the Voltron Show to the list and stealing back one of his hoodies in the process. When she still wouldn’t listen—and entirely refused to let him take his hoodie—he finally gave up and fell onto her bed. “If you didn’t want my help, then why did you ask?”
She flopped down beside him, resting her chin in her hands. “I knew it’d drive you crazy and I love driving you crazy.”
“Wow, thanks. What a great girlfriend I have.”
She laughed and reached out a hand to brush the hair out of his eyes, continuing to stroke it as she watched him. “And what a great boyfriend I have, for putting up with me.”
He tried to stand strong, but she batted her eyelashes and he caved, drawing her in for a kiss.
“He’s pretty great for that too,” she teased before sitting up and turning back to her boxes.
He reluctantly followed suit, lending a hand with the heavier stuff or letting her take advantage of his height to reach the things she had at the top of her closet. By the end of the afternoon, they had a decent stack of boxes to be donated, another with parts that needed recycling, and three more that she insisted were all essentials. In between trips down to her mother’s car, Keith slowly watched her struggle to cram her “essentials” underneath her bed, but two of the three boxes ended up in the bottom of her closet.
“Can you come around to the idea of calling them maybes?” he asked, taking a seat in her chair and leaning an elbow on her desk.
She harrumphed, rolled her eyes, and said she’d maybe think about calling them maybes, which Keith took to mean she’d forget about them until she had the idea to spring clean again.
“Oh, wait! I’m not done yet,” she said suddenly, racing to rummage around in her desk drawer.
“Don’t tell me you’re cleaning me out too,” he muttered as he rolled his head across the back of the chair to look at her.
She stuck her tongue out at him before grinning. “Not on your life. No, I figured you could use this more than I can.” She held out a big, leatherbound book to him, and when he saw it was full of photographs, he arched an eyebrow at her. “Just an album of all the pictures Lance managed to snap when we were killing it with Voltron,” she said casually as she leaned against the wall.
He took it from her, setting it on the desk as he started to flip through it. “Are you sure you don’t want these? You’re more sentimental anyway.”
She nodded quickly and pulled herself up to sit on the desk beside the album. “I copied them all over specifically for you, you know, so you don’t forget all of us while you’re off saving the Galra Empire again.”
He was about to protest when he saw that most of the pictures were the majority of Lance’s face blocking the rest of them in the back, or make a joke as he searched for even a single picture of anything but Lance. He stopped altogether when he reached the last section of photographs.
It was full of him and Pidge, stills of just the two of them. One was of them sitting in Pidge’s workspace, Keith keeping her company as she narrated what she had to troubleshoot. Another was a picture he remembered Lance telling them to smile for, their faces squished together. He’d never seen the final product, never known that Pidge’s eyes were on him and not the camera.
There was even a picture from an actual mission where they were fighting side by side in perfect sync. He couldn’t think of a time when Lance could have managed to take all of these, or why he would have, but he was glad for it. He got to glimpse some of the moments he’d shared with Pidge before they started dating.
She noticed when he grew especially silent and quirked her lips. “I thought you might like these ones. That’s why they’re at the back. Saved the best for last.”
Keith made a half-hearted attempt at a reply, too lost in his memories of them slowly coming together as they grew together. She chuckled a bit as she slid off her desk. “Well, I’m glad you like them,” she murmured, leaning down to kiss him on the cheek. “It’ll give you something to remember me by, when you’re meeting all those beautiful alien girls.”
He laughed, finally drawing his eyes away even as he wanted to stay in his nostalgia; no matter what had led them to this point, he wanted to soak in every second of her as she came, not just as a memory. “Come on, Pidge. You know there’s only one girl for me, and she’s more alien than even I can handle.”
He narrowly dodged her punch, but didn’t miss the glimmer of satisfaction in her eyes.