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Lance finds himself wandering down the halls, letting his feet quietly pitter as if he had never left these corridors and the most dangerous thing would be being caught outside his dorm after curfew.
“McClain,” a voice booms. “It’s past curfew.”
Lance chuckles. “Adam,” he tentatively says, and his toes wiggle with slight discomfort. Adam isn’t as tall as he remembered.
“Old habits die hard, hm?” Adam chuckles back, head tilting teasingly.
“I guess you could say that,” Lance awkwardly says.
“I thought so,” Adam nods. “Here, my hands are kinda full.”
Lance blinks and finds Adam’s hands are indeed full. “Oh,” he says, “thanks.”
“Oh, thanks, indeed,” Adam replies, passing a hot mug of a deep pink steaming liquid to Lance.
Adam starts to open his mouth to say something, then frowns a little and closes his mouth before opening it again. Lance doesn’t remember Adam being this uncertain.
Adam eventually says, “I usually make tea for Takashi around this time.” He sips. “He has trouble sleeping,” he adds.
Lance hums in response, not wanting to admit to having seen Shiro sitting by himself in the observation deck by himself late at night, hunched over watching a small hologram of the Earth twirl around. If he admits this, then it means admitting something else entirely.
So he doesn’t.
Instead, Lance blows away the steam from his mug and finds out the tea is raspberry flavoured. He also burns his tongue, and immediately sucks air through his teeth.
Adam continues to stare at Lance, quietly sipping at his coffee. Lance knows this man very well, even if there are more grey hairs on his temples.
“You know, you’ve been back for almost a month and I’ve left my office door open each night.”
“Right,” Lance says, dragging out the word, rocking on his heels. He likes the aftertaste of the tea. He thinks there might be a spoonful or two of honey in there somewhere.
“Leandro, we might have been apart for half a decade, but I can still recognise your footsteps even if you’re a little quieter,” Adam sighs.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Lance forces out with an whininess he hadn’t used in years. He concentrates on the sweetness of the tea.
Adam firmly says, “You’re right, but you were a kid when you left- You just turned 17, and you went headfirst into a war .”
Lance shrugs, “I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“God, you’re just like Takashi,” Adam quietly groans with a shake of his head. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Uh, I’m not sure Shiro would appreciate me crawling into bed with you guys-“
“Leandro,” Adam sighs, flicking Lance’s forehead. He points up.
Lance chuckles, almost bouncing his way to the rooftop. “An officer breaking the rules?”
“You’re not a Cadet anymore,” Adam chuckles. “You technically outrank all of us.”
Lance’s laughter dies down. His tea is almost done.
Adam’s eyebrows furrow. Lance remembers them doing that a lot.
After Lance sets himself at his usual spot and lets his legs dangle from the edge of the rooftop, he begins, “It was great up there, you know? I felt pretty useful and I saved so many people.”
Adam nods.
“I- It kind of felt like I was a hero, and they’d throw these victory parties, give us gifts and stuff- We’d explore new places, learn about new cultures, it was nice.”
Adam continues sipping his coffee, quietly smiling.
“The castle- God, you would’ve loved it, it had all these cool rooms, and me and Hunk and Pidge- sometimes Shiro, and eventually Keith, we’d bake and stuff when we had time between missions. It was... it was fine, because it meant we’d forget every once and a while.”
“Forget?”
“You know, the scary shit- Ah- I mean-“
Adam laughs loudly this time. “You’re not a kid anymore, remember?”
“Hah,” Lance embarrassedly shrugs.
Adam, with a face as carefully disinterested as ever, asks, “Have you been doing anything lately?”
He wonders if Keith learned this from him.
Probably.
“Uh, well, Pidge’s working with Hunk and her Mom, and Keith and Shiro have been properly catching up, since the whole clone situation and Blades thing got in the way- Krolia stops by sometimes too, and my family need help with stuff- Ronnie needs help with stuff too, and I...”
“You’re not a spare tyre,” Adam interjects.
“I know that,” Lance says, too unsure to sound completely defensive.
“That almost sounded like a question.”
“No... it didn’t,” Lance says.
“Hm,” Adam says as he sets his mug down to lean back onto his hands to watch the stars. He inhales for a few seconds. He exhales for longer. “Your footsteps are quieter than they used to be- Granted, they had always been quiet when you wanted them to be.”
“Training,” Lance vaguely offers.
He does not talk about the time the sound of his footsteps gave away his position and his left leg and arm was almost blasted off by lasers, but the skin was grazed enough that it hurt when he had to peel off the remains of his bodysuit. He hates having to deal with his own injuries and watching them heal, but hates going into the cryopods even more.
Adam asks, “Training?”
Lance fails to point out the mission where he was unable to rescue a set of prisoners because the guards had heard coming down the hall, and Lance entered just in time to watch the guards relentlessly shoot into the cells. Lance remembers the feeling of blood splattering onto his face, and is not proud of the way he shot back with as much ferocity.
“Training,” Lance insists with a shrug. He finishes his tea. When was the last time he had honey?
He neglects to mention the time the sound of his footsteps allowed him to get followed and ambushed on a planet, home to people that navigate through sound. There he was brought to and tortured by Galran soldiers for hours on end before he is rescued and Keith helps him- desperately carries him back to Red because of how broken his ankles were, shattered and hanging onto dear life.
“I see,” Adam says as if Lance has failed a test he has all the answers to.
Sometimes, Lance sees a scar on Shiro’s human arm, and remembers that it was his carelessness that caused it, his loud, clumsy footsteps that kept giving away Voltron’s position.
He wonders if Adam’s seen it. Does Adam know it’s Lance’s fault?
“I don’t know if I’ve told you, but you and Takashi are very similar.”
Lance laughs.
“I’m surprised, you were with him for a long time- Haven’t you noticed?”
There were nights, where the skies on planets were too clear to hide the fact they were not on Earth, where the stars were sometimes too close, or there were just too many moons that you couldn’t focus on one.
On those nights, Shiro would light a fire and talk about home, as if the stars were just right and the moon was just one. As if the grass had always been green, and lions only existed in savannahs and zoos.
“I’m very flattered you think that highly of me,” Lance says, unsure.
“It’s not just a compliment,” Adam says, a matter of fact. “Even Takashi agrees.”
On those nights, Lance would forget about the scar on Shiro’s human arm, about the scars on his ankles, scars everywhere they shouldn’t be and everything else that came with them.
On those nights, Shiro would talk about Adam, the calming presence of his, who grew up with ochre sands under Floridian skies. Adam, who forgets to take his glasses off before going to bed and folds his pyjamas and tucks them under his pillow in the mornings.
Adam, who believed in Lance enough for him to keep going.
“He’d always found it boring, but Adam means Earth,” Shiro had said once, when they all talked about what their names meant.
“I heard about what happened between you two,” Adam continues. “You’ve been avoiding him, haven’t you?”
“No,” Lance immediately says.
“Jesus Christ,” Adam sighs.
Shiro did say Adam sighed a lot. Lance agreed.
So did Keith.
It was one of the few things they agreed on. However it was the stuff they disagreed on, like who was taller, that made it all the harder for Lance to watch Keith leave for the Blades.
“You don’t have to talk about everything all at once, but I thought you were dead for years- Just- Give me something to work with, please?”
Lance blinks.
“When you left, I wasn’t just mourning for Takashi,” Adam eventually says. “Though it makes for a romantic headline for the news.”
“No?” Lance replies, with a slight curiosity.
“Yeah,” Adam sighs. “You guys were the first set of kids I ever taught- You, Katie, Keith and Hunk.”
Lance works it out in his head. Adam was around 22 years old. Lance is around that age now.
“You know I was a little relieved when Sam told me Keith and Takashi had each other, and Matt and Katie- I heard Hunk and Katie worked a lot together with Sam, and he said he was glad she made more friends- But you, Leandro, I wondered if you were okay.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” Adam grumbles, exasperated.
“Wow,” Lance says, winded.
“I’d sit out here a lot, right where you always sat, and wonder if you were happy amongst the stars,” Adam continues. “Were you?”
“Was I what? In the stars?”
“No, Leandro,” Adam replies. “Were you happy?”
Ah, that’s what he’s been trying to do, Lance realises, ask questions to get an answer that he doesn’t know yet.
But if Lance’s old teacher doesn’t know all the answers anymore, then what?
If all the things Lance was sure he’d find once he came back home to are nowhere to be found, then what?
What does he do now?