Archive of Our Own

Some days, the water laps against his thighs, cold and wet. He can survive those days. 

But some days, it climbs up to his neck, harsh and unforgiving as it scales past his lips until he’s submerged underwater. The water flows in through his lips, through his nose until it fills his lungs and he’s drowning, suffocating for a gasp of air. 

Those days—he wants nothing but to let go. 

It’s easier to stop fighting once there is no reason to hold on. 

There was no body to bury, no grave to remember her by. 

Nothing but the hollow ache in his chest and an emptiness in the universe where she once stood to indicate that she even existed. No one but Lance and the family she left behind as witnesses of her sacrifice. 

Lance wonders what will happen in ten years, in twenty, in a century when he will no longer be here as the only proof of the universe’s salvation. He wonders if he too, will disappear into history as nothing more than a name, if he too, will become an empty space that will be forgotten. 

Everyone, even his parents, walks on eggshells around him, as though saying or doing the wrong thing will break him. It makes him feel suffocated because he cannot be the person they want him to be.

They’ve lost too much already; lost more people in their family than Lance can count on two hands, lost a son to a war, and lost everything they’ve ever known. He stands ramrod straight, trying to be strong for them so that they have one less thing to worry about. 

Everyone moves on. Keith leaves with the blades, Shiro gets married, Hunk leaves for Balmera, Pidge sets up base at the Garrison, and Coran heads off to rebuild civilization on New Altea. 

Lance stays behind. He cannot move, his hands and feet bound by loss, keeping him imprisoned by memories that will never be anything more than that, memories. He wonders if this will be his fate, to stand still in one place whilst the universe moves on without him. 

He stares at the endless stretch of fields, green and dewy under the morning sun. Small, pink buds sprout from the ground in between the stalks of grass. They’ll take six months to bloom, Coran had said when he had given Lance a small seedling he had bought back from the Altean Colony. It was barely alive as he had cupped it in his hands and he remembers thinking, that it was the only piece of Allura he had left to himself. 

Now, he stares at the fields of small pink flowers. He stares and he feels nausea swirl at the pit of his stomach. They surround him, keeping him bound to a life he no longer remembers, to a boy that no longer exists. 

He’d thought that if maybe he tried to bring life to something other than himself, he would be able to survive, somehow. Because that’s the nature of things, no matter how difficult everything is, our bodies force us to survive. 

For the first time in his life, he’s sick to death of staring at an endless stretch of pink flowers. It makes him want to strangle somebody, possibly himself. 

He turns around and walks back to the house. Shoves his clothing into a duffle bag, grabs his belongings from the drawers, and keeps them cushioned amongst his shirts. He looks out of the window and beyond the field a distance away, the Red Lion sits guard over the land. 

He looks at the house, barren and bleak. 

He’s never thought of it as home. 

He doesn’t think he’s ever going to find a home. To find somewhere he belongs. Not like he had with her. 

The door rattles on its hinges when he slams it shut behind him. 

Without looking back, he leaves. 

No one calls, no one comes after him. 

They never do, not since the war. It’s easier for them to pretend that everything is fine, to pretend that the scars do not run deep, almost splintering bone on their way through.

It’s easier to pretend that Lance isn’t crumbling under the weight of his own sorrow. To pretend that he’s the same person he was when he’d entered the war, innocent and blind to the truth—when they’d all believed they would make it out alive, together. 

It’s easier to pretend that she isn’t gone. 

But Lance, he’s sick and tired of pretending. The more he tries to ignore it, the more it harrows deep into his bruised heart. 

It’ll get better with time, you just have to learn to let go. 

But if he lets go of her, he’ll fall to his death. 

So he leaves. 

He walks away and away until he’s impossible to reach, and lets his legs carry him wherever they please. 

He finds himself on a rocky coastline, staring out towards the ocean. Storm-tossed waves crash against rugged hills, and the cold wind whistles past his ears, nipping his skin until his cheeks flush a rose pink. The air is heavy with the silence of nightfall and the scent of saltwater. 

He grips the straps of his bag and stares out towards the horizon. Dusk falls over the coast, dense clouds looming over him. The sun has long set, settled beneath the horizon, and he watches the tide roll in and out. 

He wonders if she’s watching over him, and feels his throat close up. When he looks down at his palms, there are crescent moons etched onto his skin, red and inflamed. 

He spares a glance at the horizon and walks away. 

The door groans as he pushes it open, the hinges squeaking in protest.

It was left in his name by his grandmother; an old, weather-worn house by the coast. He steps in, and the floorboards creak under his weight. The air is stagnant with the scent of must, and dust blankets the surface of threadbare furniture. 

When he opens the window, blue curtains dance with the cold wind that drifts in. 

He sets his bag down on the rickety table and draws in a deep breath. The fragrance of his grandmother’s favorite perfume still lingers in the house. He looks around, almost expecting her to appear from the kitchen. 

He flips on the light switch and the light bulb flickers and crackles like the last embers of a dying fire. The pale white light illuminates the living room, and discolored walls stare back at him gloomily. 

He thinks he could make this place inhabitable. It’s better than nothing, and it’s all he has to call his own.

He strips the windows of their curtains, the beds of their linen, and scrubs the water stains off the walls until his hands are red and raw. He fixes the wiring around the house and repairs all the electrical appliances.

Having an engineer for a best friend isn’t so bad, not when he’d taught Lance all the basics. Despite everything, he doesn’t know if they’re still best friends. They haven’t been Lance and Hunk in a long time, only two people carrying out the duties of the universe bound by nothing but shared history. 

He doesn’t remember the last time he’d seen Hunk, let alone the last time they’d had a real conversation. 

When it rains, water leaks in through a damaged section of the roof and drips down into the kitchen. There are water stains all over the ceiling that need a new coat of paint and the top surface of the kitchen cabinets are eroded with moisture. 

Lance climbs onto the roof, swaying with the strong wind that rushes past him. In the distance, the tide comes surging in as dusk begins to settle over the town. He pries away the damaged roof shingles with a crowbar, and underneath, the water that has trickled past the shingles has rotted the wood. Lance cuts away the deteriorated wood and replaces it with a small OSB sheet, nailing it down onto the roof trusses. He fixes new shingles over the wood, nailing them into place, and takes in the stark difference between the weather-worn roof and its new addition.

His muscles ache in a way they haven’t in a long time, like an ache that comes from a strenuous battle, of striking down countless enemies until he lets muscle memory take over, shutting off his mind. 

He works and works until his hands run red, until his bones creak, until his lungs burn, until he’s killing himself trying not to think about her. 

Sometimes, anger surges through him like a tsunami wave, leaving him trembling down to his bones. Anger; because it wasn’t fair, he’d given all he had to this war and still it asked for more, asked for more than he had, because maybe, maybe if he did something different, said something different, he could have changed everything, because if he took down Honerva when he had the chance, or Lotor, or maybe even Zarkon, then Allura would still be here. 

But most of all, he’s angry at himself for not doing better, for not being better, and sometimes the force of it is so great that he thinks he could destroy this entire town with it. 

In the single bedroom that Lance takes to sleeping in, he finds a box of well-thumbed books, their spines creased, the pages yellowing with age. Beneath the stack of books, Lance notices a large envelope. Letters fall out, several, addressed to both his grandmother and grandfather. 

As he begins reading through them, his chest aches. 

They’re love letters between his grandparents. Pages upon pages of pure, unadulterated adoration documented onto paper, surviving a lifetime of companionship, surviving through a war, surviving long after neither one remains on earth, timeless and everlasting. 

He thinks of Allura, and his hands shake as he places them back into the envelope, hidden beneath the stack of books. He thinks about the letters he never got a chance to write to her and the words he never got to say to her. 

He mourns for a love stolen by time, for a love he will no longer be able to call his own. 

She comes to him in dreams, a wispy, unformed figure with her pearly smile and her blue eyes. 

Lance, she whispers. Lance.

Allura, he hears himself crying. 

He tries to reach for her, to hold her in his hands, but she disappears like sand slipping through his fingers until he’s left clawing at the air, chasing a phantom. 

He wakes up with her name dying on his lips and his cheeks streaked with tears, winded as though he’s been running for as long as his legs could carry him. 

He keeps his eyes closed, trying to burn the image of her into the back of his eyelids for fear that if he opens them, she’ll disappear from his memories forever. 

There’s an ache deep inside him, settled into his bones and demanding to be freed. It’s Allura, he knows. Because when you love someone for years, that kind of love doesn’t disappear for a long time. It turns into grief and embeds itself into the very fiber of your being.

Lance doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t swallowed by grief, a time when he was truly happy. He doesn’t think he’ll ever feel anything other than the all-consuming misery that’s found a home inside him. At least this, he reasons, is better than feeling nothing at all. 

When he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t recognize the person staring back at him. It’s a stranger in this house, in his own body. His once-bronzed skin is now pallid, the dark shadows under his eyes making him appear haunted. His hair is a disheveled mess and he’s lost weight, he notices vaguely. He can see his collar bones protruding beneath the neckline of his t-shirt. 

He touches the pale blue marks on his cheeks. They look strange against his skin, out of place, as though he does not fit into this world or the next, wandering as a lost soul. 

He doesn’t feel like himself either, hasn’t for a long time. He thinks that somewhere along the way, he had lost himself, and in the midst of being too busy loving Allura, Lance had forgotten to go back and look for himself. 

He thinks that even if he went looking for the part of himself he had left behind, he wouldn’t find it. 

He stands at the shore, cold water lapping his feet. Allows the wind to comb its fingers through his hair, his t-shirt flapping wildly like the wings of a bird taking flight. 

Waves strike the large rocks a distance away, shattering into millions of tiny shards.

He wonders if he can claw out the misery inside him. Tear into his chest and rip his broken and bloody heart out of his ribcage, to throw it into the ocean. Scrape inside his chest for the tissue and fiber until the numbness inside him has been scooped out, leaving behind a hollow shell of the person he used to be. 

He wonders if that would work, and wonders if he should throw himself instead, let his sadness drown with him to the depths of the water. 

Lance takes a step forward. The water curls around his ankles, beckoning him closer. 

He wants to submerge under the waves and let them carry him out to sea. Wants to float away and away until he disappears into the place where the ocean meets the sky.

Two months later, there’s a knock on his door. 

When he answers, Keith stands at the doorway. 

His hair is long and messy, pulled into a low ponytail at the back of his head. The scar on his left cheek is the same as Lance had remembered it. 

His sharp edges have softened out, mellowed from a soldier to a boy like he’s finally found his place in the universe. 

“There you are,” Keith breathes, smiling softly, and for a moment, it feels like he’d never left. 

“How did you find me?” Lance asks, voice quiet and bereft. Keith’s heart breaks. 

“You told me once. A long time ago.”

Lance stares at him for a moment, silent. He turns then, leaving the door open, and disappears into the house.

The person in front of him is not someone that Keith recognizes. He is not the same person that Keith had spent years with, fighting battles, fighting each other, and saving the universe side by side. 

Lance was the boy who swallowed the sun, glowing from the inside like a star. Full of life and vitality until he was bursting at the seams with energy, mouth running a mile an hour with words that were sprawling past his lips in epic tales of his youth. 

There was never a moment of silence with Lance. But now, that is all there is, filling the empty places of this house with unbearable quietness, smothering Keith with a stillness that suffocates him. Allura’s absence has drained every last drop of life out of him and left behind an inanimate corpse. It’s harrowing, staring at the ghost of his best friend. 

If Keith did not know Lance like the back of his hand, he may have mistaken him to be a complete stranger. His skin has taken on an ashen hue, sunken eyes staring into empty space, as though he has seen all he needs to. The bright azure of his gaze has dimmed like a light has gone out inside of him. 

Lance is slowly fading away, right in front of his eyes. Keith wonders what will be left of him to hold on to. 

He fears it’s already far too late.

Keith stands behind the kitchen countertop, stirring sugar into his coffee. Lance sits at the small dining table, staring out of the window towards the ocean, his breakfast untouched. 

During the night, Keith had heard him crying in his sleep, calling out for a lover who would never return. Keith could do nothing but lie beside him, holding his breath and wishing for it to pass, wishing he would wake up and find himself in a time before everything was ruined, so he could go back and save everyone. So he could save Lance. 

“Do you want some sugar with that?” Keith asks, sitting across from him. 

Lance turns to him like he’s seeing him for the first time. He looks down at the bowl of cereal like it’s an oddity. “No.”

Lance used to have a sweet tooth. He used to like a lot of things, be a lot of things. 

They sit together in silence. A distance away, seagulls cry as they fly above the crashing waves. 

“Talk to me, Lance,” Keith pleads, desperation staining his voice. 

Lance turns to him slowly, his hollow eyes settling on Keith. “About what?” he asks, voice hoarse with disuse. 

Looking at him, Keith feels as though someone has reached inside him, and is twisting his heart in their hands, gripping it tightly. His chest aches in a terrible sort of way. 

“Anything. Everything,” Keith says, his voice quivering slightly. Lance stares at the dining table blankly. Keith continues, struggling to keep his attention. “Do you remember what you said, when we lost Shiro? You said I would drive myself insane if I kept everything to myself, just like it’s not good for you to keep this all locked inside.”

Lance doesn’t reply. 

“You were there for me when Shiro was gone,” Keith says, struggling through the lump in his throat. “Let me be here for you, Lance. Let me in.” 

He doesn’t say, It’s killing me to see you like this. 

He doesn’t say, I wish I could take your pain and make it my own.

“Shiro came back,” Lance says quietly. 

But Allura, she’s never coming back. 

“Please Lance,” Keith whispers woefully, his hands reaching out on the table. “I just want my best friend back.”

Lance looks at him for a long time. “I don’t know how to be that person anymore,” he admits at last, and falls back into silence, continuing to stare out of the window. 

Lance is tearing off the last of the tiles in their bathroom when he leaves. He posts a letter to Lance’s parents, reassuring them that he’s safe and that Keith is looking after him. When he inquires about any mail for him, the lady at the postal office shakes her head sadly. 

It was Lance’s parents that had reached out to Keith whilst he was in the middle of a mission. Lance has been gone for two months, they’d said, packed up his things and left. They’d assumed he’d somehow come back, but when there was no call or text, they’d begun to worry. Keith had asked the rest of his team, but even they had no idea Lance had left, nor did they seem particularly concerned. He’d dropped everything then, and came running in search of Lance. 

He’d known Lance was struggling, they all were, but he did not know it was this bad. He’d scoured the earth, torn apart every place he knew Lance would likely go to but had turned up empty-handed. 

Keith had remembered a conversation then, a lifetime ago. They had been sitting in the observation deck of the caste of lions, a place they would frequent on sleepless nights. Lance was talking about the ocean, how he missed it. He’d mentioned spending his summers at his grandmother’s house by the sea; learning to swim and surf, to be one with the ocean, whilst collecting fossils of various sea creatures. Lance had said it was the only place he remembers being completely free. 

On his way back home, Keith goes to the hardware store, picks up a bag of thin-set and puts in an order for bathroom tiles before making a stop at the grocery store. He doesn’t know when he’d begun thinking of it as home, but he supposes that wherever Lance is, is where he feels most at ease. 

The grocery store in this little coastal town only has enough provisions for its few residents. Everyone knows everyone, knows each other’s daily schedules, and even the mundane little details. 

They’re far enough away from any major cities that Keith can walk around freely without anyone recognizing him as the leader of Voltron, and even if they do know, they do not seem to care. It’s a welcome change from being bombarded by hoards of people for his signature or a picture with him. He was never good with people and even then, it was always Lance that had put on an easy smile and posed for a picture with Keith, effectively taking most of the attention off Keith himself. 

Keith buys food for them, and as he’s paying, he notices small potted plants off to the side. They’re perfect for Lance, he thinks as he turns it in his hands, it would give him something to do instead of sitting with his thoughts. 

“Looking to take up gardening dear?” comes a voice behind him. An old lady leaning on a cane smiles at him. Before, he would’ve been able to sense someone that was ten feet behind him, but the months after the war have made him softer. 

“I’m—I’m not sure yet,” he replies with a polite smile. 

“Those flower around summer,” she explains. She looks at him over her glasses. “Say dear, are you new here? I’ve not seen a handsome face such as yours before.”

Keith smiles shyly. “Yeah, I’ve only been here a week. I’m staying with a friend.”

“And whom might that be?”

“Lance. He’s only been here for a few months too.”

“Oh, the poor kid,” she says sadly, recognizing his name. “There seems to be a great tragedy that’s struck him, bless his heart.”

Keith looks down at the flower pot in his hands. “Yeah… yeah, he’s been through some hard times.” 

“Well dear, if you ever need any advice on gardening, I’m your woman,” she smiles. Her name tag reads Barbra.

“Thank you,” Keith replies, watching her shuffle away. 

Keith returns home to find Lance changing a lightbulb in the bathroom. He reaches over and switches it on, and Keith watches him for a moment, standing on a ladder, the light circling his head like a halo. 

“Hey,” he calls, unpacking the groceries. 

“Hey,” Lance spares him a glance, twisting a screw into the light fixture around the bulb. “Did you put an order for the tiles?”

“Yeah,” Keith replies. “I got a white marble one. Is that okay?”

“Yeah.” 

“We could use it for the splashback in the kitchen too, it would match.”

“Sure,” Lance replies indifferently.

Keith hesitates. “And hey, I bought you something too.”

“What?” Lance asks as he climbs down the ladder. 

Keith brings the planet from behind his back, smiling. “A flower pot. I thought it might brighten up the place.”

Lance takes it, studying the small, purple flower buds. He looks up at Keith, staring at him for a moment too long. “Thank you.”

He places the plant on the kitchen table, grabbing a glass of water and pouring it over the soil. Watching him from the corner of his eye, Keith notices how small Lance appears. Where he once stood tall and proud, he’s now shrunken in on himself, like he’s attempting to take up less space in the world until he’s completely disappeared. 

Keith wants to gather him up in his arms and hold him tight until all his broken pieces stick together again and make him whole, returning him to his old self. But he fears that if he touches Lance even in the slightest, he may break apart under his hands, and he will be left with nothing at all. 

Keith dreams of fire and blood. He dreams of the people he couldn’t save, bodies turning cold and blue, he dreams of the people he’s killed, his hands stained red. He dreams of Shiro, dying at the hands of the Galra. His brother’s unseeing eyes stare back at him in accusation as the sky erupts in an explosion of flames behind him. 

“Keith,” calls a calming, familiar voice. “Keith, wake up.” 

Keith opens his eyes, chest heaving as he struggles to breathe. His eyes adjust to the dark, taking in the warm body next to him. His legs are tangled between the sheets. There’s a hand cupped across his jaw, rough and calloused from battle, a hand whose hard knuckles and slender fingers Keith would know even with his eyes closed. 

“You were shouting in your sleep,” Lance says, his brows drawn in worry, his body turned toward Keith. The moonlight casts a gentle shadow across his features, painting his skin silver-blue. 

Keith draws in a shaky lungful of air, forcing his heart to calm its pace. “I’m sorry for waking you,” he replies quietly, laying a palm over the hand still cupped around his face. “Bad dream.” 

“It’s okay,” Lance says. “What did you see?”

“The war,” Keith replies. “Shiro.” 

“How is he?”

“He’s okay. He and Curtis are taking it slow.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the wedding,” Lance says regrettably, drawing his hand away and tucking it beneath his head. It feels too cold suddenly, without the warmth of Lance’s touch on him. 

“Don’t be,” Keith replies. “I almost didn’t go either, you know?”

“Why?” Lance asks, and he thinks vaguely that this is the most Lance has spoken since Keith has been here. 

“We had a fight, when he told me he was getting married,” Keith explains. 

He remembers the state Shiro was in when he found out that Adam had died. It had left him baffled when mere weeks later, he’d announced his engagement to Curtis, a guy whom he barely knew. Keith had told Shiro that he was simply moving on with the next available guy without processing Adam’s death, and they had not spoken for weeks until his wedding. 

It was during that time Keith had found himself wishing more than anything for Lance’s presence by his side. Lance was always the better part of him, able to draw Keith back from getting too lost in his head and helping him see sense. But Lance had been mourning, his wounds still too fresh. 

“Why?” 

“I felt like he was disrespecting Adam by getting married so fast, but it was his own way of dealing with things.”

“Does Shiro love him? Curtis?” 

“I think so. The best he knows how.” 

They watch each other in silence, laying side by side. In the quiet of the night, Keith can hear the everpresent sound of the waves breaking against the shore. 

“Do you still love her?” 

Lance is quiet for a long time. “Yes,” he says finally. 

Under the dim moonlight, the Altean marks on Lance’s skin glimmer. Without thinking, Keith reaches out, cupping Lance’s face and caressing a gentle thumb over the mark. Under his thumb, Keith can feel the rough, raised skin of a scar running through the mark, as though Lance had taken a sharp instrument to his face in an attempt to be rid of them. Keith feels a tremor go through him at the thought, his chest aching. 

“Does it still hurt?” he whispers. 

Lance stares at him with sad, blue eyes. “Terribly.”

Keith holds his face until Lance’s eyes eventually flutter shut, drifting off to sleep. He looks peaceful in sleep, unmarred by his anguish. 

He feels safe here, in this normal life with Lance. He feels more like himself than he has in years, like he’s finally stopped running. Like he has a purpose here than he does elsewhere, trying to piece together splintered galaxies and chasing outlaws.

In the morning, they will sit together on the porch, holding their coffees and drinking in the ocean breeze. Lance will tile the bathroom walls whilst Keith goes out to buy more supplies. He will make friends with the seniors in this coastal town and they will invite Keith and Lance to dinner. Lance will decline. Keith will make elaborate meals for lunch and dinner and try to feed Lance as much as he can without him noticing. They will talk about memories of their favorite planets whilst carefully avoiding mentioning her name. Keith will try to fix the old TV left for them by Lance’s grandmother whilst Lance sits on the couch with his legs tucked beneath him, reading a book. They will sleep side by side, and it will be the first time in his life that Keith has slept soundly. 

They throw out most of the furniture, including the old threadbare couch with its gaudy floral print, the shelf with damaged frames and cracked china, along with a broken lamp that wobbles precariously all the time. Their bedroom is the only place in the house not requiring any renovation, except possibly redecorating.  

Lance keeps the glass coffee table because it’s the only thing in the house that appears relatively new. He builds a new bookshelf against the far wall, and tears away the cast iron fireplace. He gives away the vintage paintings of birds hanging around the living room, to whom, Keith doesn’t know. 

They tear away the wooden cabinets rotten with age, the crumbling countertop, and the sink of the kitchen, restoring them with new, white cabinets and a marble countertop. They replace the stove with one working burner and the exhaust hood caked with dust. 

They remove the small kitchen island that stands in the way to the bathroom and replace it with a new dining table. The rusted kitchenware is all thrown out, and the only things remaining once they strip down the house to its bare bones, are the kettle and the toaster. 

A few days later, there’s the sound of scratching at their door. Lance tenses, looking at Keith anxiously. He opens the door hesitantly and on the other side sits a bundle of long fur, looking up at Lance. 

Kosmo whines and lunges at Lance, and both of them topple to the floor. He licks Lance’s face, his tail wagging excitedly. Lance scratches his head, letting him paw over his body. The most extraordinary thing of all is the smile pulling on his lips, brightening his face. It’s when Keith sees it that he realizes just how much he’s missed it, like something he had lost and had been searching for desperately. 

“I’m his dad, and he can’t even be bothered to say hello to me?” Keith muses behind him. 

Lance looks up at him, smiling, and lets out a bright peal of laughter. It falls past his lips in a melody of angelic giggles, and it feels as though the dark, heavy clouds that had cast the world into shadow, have finally parted, allowing the bright rays of sunshine to pierce through them and light up the world, the entire galaxy. Keith thinks the radiance of Lance’s smile rivals that of a supernova. The sight of it soothes some weary part of him, making it easier for him to breathe. 

“It sounds like you’re jealous Keith,” Lance smiles, sounding just like his old self, like the Lance that used to make fun of Keith and always had a wide beam on his lips. The relief that Keith feels is enough to send him falling to his knees, but he grins wide until his cheeks hurt and tries to imprint the sight of Lance’s smile to the back of his eyelids. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Keith replies, and Lance laughs once more. He decides then, that he will make it his life’s mission to make Lance laugh for as long as he lives. 

Kosmo perks up at his voice, and leaving Lance where he is, launches himself at Keith. He catches him, scratching his neck, and Kosmo whines happily.

“Of course you don’t,” Lance replies, staring at Kosmo fondly. Keith watches Lance, his eyes swimming with something similar. 

He wants to catch this moment, to hold it in his hands and preserve it somewhere safe like catching fireflies and trapping them in jars. He wants to make it last forever, content to live in this moment for the rest of his life. 

Keith had left Kosmo with his mom before he had left in search of Lance. He had whined and cried, but had listened to Keith when he had said he would be back soon. That was almost two months ago. 

Kosmo finding him was for the best, Keith decides. It gives him an excuse to nudge Lance out of the house under the guise of being too busy with renovations to take Kosmo on his daily walks. Lance is reluctant at first, but Kosmo’s huge puppy eyes work like a charm on everyone that’s subjected to them. 

They’ve completed the bathroom now, walls tiled with white marble, brightening the entire room drastically. Keith is using the leftover tiles to slate the kitchen splashback around the new sink and stove. Scooping up a clump of thin-set on his notched trowel, he bends under the extractor hood and spreads it across the bare wall, grabbing the marble tile and placing it over the thin-set. 

After completing the wall behind the stove, Keith stands back to admire his handiwork. He rolls his neck, squaring back his aching shoulders. Sighing, he wipes the back of his palm across his forehead, realizing too late that his gloved hands are caked with thin-set. 

Keith curses under his breath, wiping it off before it dries against his skin and hair, walking off in search of a hairband in their room. His hair is too long now, always falling into his face and shrouding his vision. 

There are little trinkets of Keith’s laying all around the house, and the bedroom particularly, looks as though it’s shared by a married couple and not just two friends sleeping under the same roof. His clothes are hung up in the closet, next to Lance’s. Their belongings are scattered together on their bedside table, and to an outsider it may all appear as though Keith has been here for years, nestled into Lance’s life as though he was always meant to be there. It shouldn’t make him feel as pleased as it should. 

He shakes his head, dismissing his absurd thoughts, and opens the first drawer on the bedside table, rummaging around the contents inside for a hairband. He finds it hidden at the bottom, and as he takes it, he notes a flipped piece of paper. Curiously, he reaches for it, flipping it around. 

He wishes he hadn’t. 

It’s a picture of Allura and Lance on their first and last date. He’s wholly unprepared for the pain that sears through him at seeing Allura, alive and happy. 

He remembers that day, clear as day. He remembers how nervous Lance was, how he had come searching for Keith’s company. He remembers distinctly, the feeling of his heart dropping to the pit of his stomach when he had announced he was going on a date with Allura. 

Some secret, selfish part of him had been hoping until then, that he and Lance had shared something special. Hoping that the years of standing and fighting beside each other had amounted to something they were both afraid to name, hoping that it wasn’t completely unreciprocated wishful thinking. 

But in the end, that was all it was, mere wishful thinking on Keith’s part, because Lance had gone and fallen in love. He had plastered a smile on his face and reassured Lance, all the while trying not to feel as though he was giving a piece of himself away.

Keith swallows thickly, staring at the photo of Lance from months ago. He’s smiling, leaning into Allura. He looks happy. He traces the outline of Lance’s profile in the picture, gently stroking the line of his smile. 

The sound of a key twisting in the lock startles Keith. He hurriedly replaces the picture at the bottom of the drawer and exits their bedroom, putting his hair up into a ponytail. 

Lance is carrying grocery bags, Kosmo at his heels, sniffing the contents inside the bag. “No, Kosmo—you can’t eat chocolate. Do you want to end up in the hospital?” Kosmo whines petulantly. “Yes, I thought so.” 

Kosmo trots over to Keith, whining at his feet and looking up at him with wide eyes. “Hey, don’t look at me. What the boss says goes.”

Lance smiles smugly. “Exactly. Listen to your dad Kosmo.” 

“But he does eat everything and nothing seems to make him sick,” Keith says, carrying one of the grocery bags to the dining table. “It must be his celestial genes.” 

“So you’re the culprit,” Lance says, putting away a loaf of bread into their new cabinet. “You spoil him too much.”

Keith eyes the chew toy at the bottom of the bag. “Seems I’m not the only one”

Lance follows his line of vision. “Oh, hush. He practically begged me until I bought it for him.”

Kosmo howls, as though refuting his claim. 

“I’m sure,” Keith grins, ripping open a granola bar and taking a bite. 

Lance’s cheeks are flushed, a sheen of sweat clinging to his skin. Now that he looks closely, Keith can see the faint, damp spots of sweat on his back. 

“Did you run here?”

Lance huffs. “He made me,” he says, looking accusingly at Kosmo, who sits back on his legs, tilting his head innocently. “He started chasing a bee, even when I told him to leave it alone. I couldn’t keep up with him.”

“Yeah, I can’t either,” Keith bites down on a pleased smile, scratching the top of Kosmo’s head. Whilst Lance’s back is turned, he discreetly breaks off a small piece of his granola bar and gives it to Kosmo. 

“Don’t think I didn’t see that,” Lance calls over his shoulder. Keith smiles around a mouthful of granola. He’s putting the milk in the fridge when he casually says, “Phyllis asked us to come to dinner again… I said okay.” 

Keith pauses. “You did?” he asks, attempting to mask the surprise in his voice. 

“Well… yes. It would be rude to decline when someone asks twice.” 

“No—of course, yeah.” 

“And I saw Barbara,” Lance says, coming to stand in front of Keith with his hip leaning against the countertop. “She asked about you.”

“She did?” 

“Yeah, you’ve made quite the impression amongst them,” Lance replies, a small, sly smile on his lips. 

“I have?”

Lance hums. “It seems they all can’t get enough of the handsome new bachelor.” 

Keith laughs. “I’m not.” 

“You’re not what?” Lance raises a brow. “A bachelor? Or handsome?” 

“Both.” 

“Give yourself a little credit Keith, you’re not that awful looking.” 

Keith leans in, smiling happily. “Is that a compliment I hear? From Lance McClain, my sworn rival?” 

Lance shifts closer, crossing his arms over his chest in a challenge. “Would it be so terrible if it was?” 

“No,” Keith says. He realizes then, just how close Lance is. “Not at all.” 

Lance reaches out suddenly, his hand stroking Keith’s hair. He rubs a strand between his fingers, and when it comes away, there is dried thin-set residue between his fingertips. 

“You have paint in your hair.” 

“It’s thin-set.” 

“Are you trying a new look?” Lance asks, his fingers brushing against Keith’s temple. He holds his breath, his heart rate accelerating. “Finally getting rid of the mullet, mullet?”

Keith breathes out a soft laugh. The years have come and gone, but the one thing that’s stayed the same is Lance’s nickname for him. It brings him a moment of comfort to know that some things never change. 

“I can’t, because what will you base your entire personality on then?” 

Lance laughs, his mouth falling open in false outrage. “You jerk,” he smiles, pushing Keith’s shoulder ever so gently. “Take that back.” 

“And if I don’t?”

“Well then, you can sleep on the living room floor tonight,” Lance says. “Have fun with the termites.” 

“In that case, please accept my sincerest apologies,” Keith says, bowing his head slightly. “I beg for your forgiveness.”

“Fine, only because you asked so nicely,” Lance says, smiling slightly. 

Keith opens his mouth to reply, but something akin to guilt flashes across Lance’s eyes, his face shuttering and his smile slipping. Keith’s words die on his tongue, and he watches Lance, the familiar sorrow clouding his features. 

They stand together in silence. Keith wants to rewind the clock to the last five minutes, to see Lance’s smile, to hear his laugh. 

“I’m gonna… I’m gonna get started on the living room,” he says quietly. 

“Okay,” Keith replies. 

Lance’s eyes roam around Keith’s face, his brows slightly furrowed. It appears as though he wants to say something, but he decides against it, turning around and walking away. 

Just when Keith thinks he has Lance in a firm grip, he slips through his hold like water, disappearing with the tide and swallowed up by the waves only to be spat out onto the shore as a hollow shell of the person he used to be. 

Keith watches his retreating back, wondering when Lance will return to him.

Kosmo howls in the distance, running across the shoreline. 

The last of the setting sun disappears beneath the horizon, and the moon hangs above them like a pearl against the coral-pink sky. Cold wind whistles past them, Keith’s shirt flapping with the current. 

Beside him, Lance stares out toward the ocean, watching the roaring waves crash against the shore. They’re sitting on the craggy rocks, surrounded by foamy seawater that laps against them, watching the tide slowly come in. 

Keith inhales a lungful of sea breeze, a scent that has always reminded him of Lance. Keith glances at him. He’s perched on a particularly big rock, ankles crossed, twisting a bracelet around his wrist. The cold fingers of the wind caress his honey-brown hair as it gently flutters and the last embers of the sunset cast soft, golden shadows over him, making him glow. 

If Keith tries hard enough, he can pretend that they’re sitting on Black’s head watching a sunset, that the hard rock beneath his palms is the cold metal of Black’s hull. That they’re back where they were before everything fell apart—back at the beginning of the end.

He can turn to Lance, and pretend he’s looking at the best friend he’d lost to the war, can pretend that he’d never left, that he’d been here all along. But he blinks, and the mirage shatters. The Lance sitting next to him is not the youthful Lance he remembers, this Lance has been hardened by love and loss, his childlike joy shed away in the face of sacrifice. 

Despite all this, he is still the same benevolent soul that Keith has become fond of. He watches the waves swell and wane, sea foam rippling as the tide laps a comforting sound to his ears. 

“I think I understand now,” Keith says. 

“What?” 

“Why you like the ocean so much.”

“Why’s that?”

“Everything changes,” Keith replies, watching a flock of birds fly overhead. He craves that freedom again, to fly above the clouds in Black without a care in the world. “Everyone changes. But the ocean stays the same. It’s always the same.” 

Lance stares at him for a moment, his eyes careful and curious. Gazing into his eyes feels as though Keith is staring down the fathomless depths of the sea.

“Yeah…” he turns back to the horizon. “Yeah, I guess so.” 

Lance watches the ocean, and Keith watches him. 

He’s beautiful, Keith thinks vaguely. There’s a small mole just below his ear on his neck, one that Keith has seen countless times before, but it feels now, as though he’s seeing it for the first time ever, as though he’s seeing Lance in a different light. 

It comes to him slow, the quiet clarity, like the ebb and flow of the waves, and Keith realizes that somewhere along the way, he had fallen in love with a boy in love with a ghost. 

There’s a guilt inside Keith that he can never be rid of for as long as he lives. 

The guilt inside him lies in the pit of his stomach, growing with each passing day and settling in his veins until he’s nothing but a walking mass of shame and remorse, haunting him with the ghosts of the dead he had failed to protect. 

A guilt for failing to save Allura, because if he had been a better leader, a better paladin, and a better friend, she would still be here. 

A guilt for loving Lance, because he feels as though he is dishonoring her by allowing his heart to fall for the boy she left behind. He knows it will never lead anywhere, having learned what it is to fight a losing battle. It will pass, he knows, with enough time. Until then, he will keep his shameful confession buried inside him, until it too, will become a memory. 

“Which color do you like best?” Lance asks for the umpteenth time. 

“I don’t know Lance,” he replies. “Whichever one you like.” 

They’re at the hardware store, trying to find the perfect color to paint the house. Beside them, Kosmo sits at their feet, watching them curiously. 

“That’s not a proper answer, Keith,” Lance huffs. 

“Fine, get blue.”

Lance turns to him in surprise. “Your favorite color is blue?” 

“No, it’s yours.” 

Keith doesn’t say that it is his favorite color, simply because it reminds him of Lance’s eyes. 

“I can’t believe you remembered that,” Lance says vaguely, turning his attention to the tins of blue paint in front of them. “We can’t get blue, because none of the other furniture we ordered will match.” 

“So?”

“Keith,” Lance huffs. “Do you want people to think we just randomly put together whatever we saw?”

“Who cares what they think? It’s our house.” 

“I care. Everything has to match because otherwise, it’ll look like we’re living in a goddamn kaleidoscope,” Lance says, shaking his head with disapproval. “Honestly, it’s like you have no stylish bone in your body.” 

“Hey! I’m plenty stylish,” Keith argues. 

Lance raises a brow. “That mullet on your head says otherwise.”

“Lay off my hair. It’s done nothing wrong to you.”

“It’s offending me with its mere existence, Keith. It’s done a great deal of wrong.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Will you quit complaining about my hair and pick a color?”

“Fine, fine,” Lance drawls. “What about beige?”

Keith raises a brow. “I never took you for a beige kind of guy.”

“Oh yeah?” Lance leans into his space defiantly. “What kind of guy am I then? Since you know me so well.”

“I don’t know… maybe pink.” Keith bites down on a smirk. “Like bright, hot pink kind of guy.” 

Lance narrows his eyes. “Are you calling me a girl?”

“Your words, not mine,” Keith shrugs. 

“At least pink is better than black, Mr. I’m-so-emo, ” Lance drawls. 

Keith huffs out a laugh. “Just get the beige paint, we’ve been here for ages.”

Lance stares at the beige section for a while, before turning to Keith with a pout. “Which one?”

“Lance,” Keith whines, and randomly picks a beige paint with an underlying peachy hue. “This one.”

“Hmm,” Lance regards it. “That’s actually a good choice.”

“Thank you,” Keith rolls his eyes. “We’re almost out of milk, I’m gonna go pick some up. I’ll meet you outside.”

“Okay, I need to pick up some locks for the doors too.” 

“Come on Kosmo,” Keith calls, and Kosmo follows him obediently. 

As he’s leaving with the milk, Keith notices a stand of newspapers. 

On the front page lies a paparazzi picture of Lance, on the day of Allura’s memorial service. His head is bowed but the haunted look in his eyes is visible. Dressed in his black suit and tie, he appears desolate. Keith is standing beside him in the picture, their shoulders pressed close, and he remembers how Lance had been leaning against his side for the entirety of the service, as though his legs were too weak to support the weight of his loss. 

Where is Lance McClain? The co-leader of Voltron disappears from the public eye following the death of Princess Allura of Altea, reads the headline, in large, bold letters, speculating his whereabouts. 

Keith flips through the newspapers, and all of them have various paparazzi shots of their team, writing about the nearing of Allura’s anniversary. He stops when he sees a picture of himself, on the day he had landed back on Earth in search of Lance. 

Knightless Keith Kogane: the Black Paladin returns home amidst reports of Galra outlaws attempting to revive the empire to its former dictatorship. 

He frowns, opening it up to read the article about himself. Beside him, Kosmo starts howling once he sees Lance, and Keith drops the newspaper with a start. 

“Hey,” Lance greets as they begin walking home. He regards him curiously. “You okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” he says unconvincingly.  

Keith just hopes that Lance has not seen the speculations about himself. He doesn’t need a reminder that the entire world is watching and waiting to pounce on him, especially during a time that is so significant to him.

Lance hums. “You know… you’ve always been a terrible liar.”

“I have not,” Keith smiles lightly, attempting to come up with a lie so that Lance cannot pry him open and get the truth out of him like he always does. “I was just… wondering how the others were doing.”

“Oh,” Lance says. “Last I heard, Hunk opened a restaurant on Balmera. That’s all I know.”

“Have you talked to him lately?”

“No… not in months,” Lance replies quietly. 

Keith watches him in silence. It’s unusual that Hunk would not even attempt to contact Lance, considering they’ve known each other far longer than Lance and Keith have known each other. But then again he’s not exactly surprised, because the rest of their team haven’t made an effort to stay in contact. He doesn’t blame them, not after everything they’ve been through, but he cannot help wondering if this is all they’ll be, strangers with shared experiences that will meet up once a year at press conferences just to share small talk. He wonders if they were ever a family like they claimed to be. 

“I haven’t either,” Keith admits. 

Kosmo runs ahead of them, his tail wagging happily. 

He thinks back to the newspapers, thinks about his mother and Kolivan attempting to reform a species that are incapable of accepting defeat. No matter how much he’s done, it doesn’t seem enough. There’s always another planet that needs saving, a group of rebels that need capturing, and endless meetings that need attending. 

He knows he cannot stay with Lance forever because this fantasy he’s living in, it’s not eternal. He can fool himself into thinking otherwise, but he knows that eventually, it will be his turn to pack up and leave. But the thought of doing so, twists something ugly and painful into his chest. 

Keith looks at Lance. He’s watching the seagulls that are flying above the shoreline, squawking happily. 

He wonders then, how he will be able to survive, leaving his heart behind in the palms of Lance’s hands. 

Despite his efforts of refusing to acknowledge the obvious, the anniversary of Allura’s death approaches them like an inevitable tragedy, and it seems the entire world is also intent on reminding them. 

Keith is sitting next to Lance on their bed, Kosmo curled up into a ball at their feet. They’ve moved the TV into their bedroom whilst they work on the living room, and Lance flicks through the channels, searching for something interesting to watch as Keith reads a book beside him.

He pauses suddenly, and Keith feels Lance tense against him. 

Keith looks up, and he feels his stomach twisting uncomfortably. On the screen, is a statue of Allura, the fabric covering it slipping away to reveal her still, smiling face.

Royal Advisor, Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe unveils memorial statue of Princess Allura on New Altea in honor of her sacrifice, reads the scrolling news ticker at the bottom of the screen. 

Coran stands beside the statue, gazing up at her sculpture with sad eyes. He looks years older than the last time Keith had seen him.

“They got it wrong,” Lance says quietly. 

“What?” 

“Her nose. The tip of her nose is smaller than that,” Lance murmurs. “And there is… there was a scar on her chin.” 

They watch the screen, which now shows a shot of a field filled with pink juniberry flowers. 

Keith mourns for the new universe, mourns for all those that will never know Allura; of her kind yet fierce soul, of her heart which was bigger than her body, of her laughter which had the ability to heal those around her. 

“The other day I… I forgot what her voice sounded like, just for a second,” Keith admits hoarsely, his guilt festering. “I’m scared that one day I’ll forget her, and I’m scared that without us, the rest of the universe will forget her too.”

Lance listens quietly. 

“I’m scared that one day I’ll stop missing her,” Lance says eventually, staring down at his hands which are trembling almost imperceptibly. “Because this pain, it’s all I have to show that I once loved her. It’s the only thing I have left of her.”

“You have New Altea, and you have the universe that she saved,” Keith replies. “But most of all, you have yourself, because Allura loved you,” he says, forcing out the words through the painful lump in his throat. 

“I loved her too. I’ve loved her for so long, I don’t know how to feel anything else,” Lance confesses quietly. 

His eyes are glistening with tears. Keith feels his heart being pulled taut, hard enough to tear in half. He wants to reach out and hold Lance in his arms, but even wishing so feels as though he is disrespecting Allura. He keeps his hands by his side, guilt-ridden. 

“I think… wherever she is, she’s looking over you,” Keith says, looking away from him, unable to bear the sight of his despair. It would hurt less, Keith thinks, if Lance had ripped his heart out of his chest and crushed it beneath his feet. “She always will.”

Keith wakes in the middle of the night, feeling strangely disconcerted. The spot beside him on the bed is empty. The sheets are gradually cooling. 

Kosmo is sleeping on his own bed as Keith gets up and pads across the cold floor to the living room. Lance is not in there nor in the kitchen or the bathroom. His heartbeat thuds in his ears with panic. 

He wonders for a moment, if Lance had packed up and left again. Maybe he had decided he’d had enough of Keith, and left, just like everyone else in Keith’s life has. He looks around frantically. Lance’s belongings are still strewn around the house. 

His eyes flit past the ocean through the window, and refocuses on a figure standing on the shoreline. Lance. 

He rips open the door and stumbles into the dark, his chest constricting with terror and his heart clambering into his throat. His bare feet sink into the sand, as though it’s attempting to swallow him into the ground, and Keith rushes across the shore, his limbs trembling in fear. 

Lance is standing in the water, staring out into the horizon. The waves lap against his thighs and the sea breeze rushes past him. Keith nears slowly and realizes that he’s simply standing, not attempting to walk further into the ocean. 

Keith comes to a stop beside him, foamy water splashing against his knees. His pants are soaked, his thin t-shirt flapping violently with the strong wind. The moon casts a rippling silver line over the rolling sea. 

“Lance,” Keith calls over the tumultuous waves. He feels himself being pulled further into the sea with the surging water. Lance doesn’t appear to hear him, blankly looking out toward a point in the distance, as though he’s waiting for something. “Lance.” 

Lance turns to him, confused, as though waking from a dream. His Altean marks are glowing faintly. 

“Lance, what are you doing?” 

He turns back to the sea. “I don’t know,” he says after a long moment. 

He reaches out and folds his hand over the crook of Lance’s elbow. “Come back inside, Lance. Please.”

Lance looks at him, his brows drawn, eyes roaming over Keith’s face as though he’s searching for something. “Okay,” he finally agrees.

He gently tugs Lance against his side, afraid that if he lets go even a fraction of a second, Lance will disappear. 

“Let’s go.”

They walk across the shore and when Lance stumbles in his step, Keith’s arm darts out and wraps around his waist, keeping him close to his body. Lance sits at the kitchen table whilst Keith rummages around their closet for a fresh pair of pants. 

He lets Lance get changed, and busies himself by making them a drink, merely to keep his trembling hands occupied. He doesn’t even realize what he’s doing until there are two mugs of tea in front of him. 

Keith sits across from him at the dining table, wrapping his cold hands over the warm mug. They sit in silence for a moment. 

“Why were you out there?” he asks. 

Lance frowns down at his lap. “I thought I heard her voice, calling me.”

Keith breathes in, waits for the panicked thudding of his heart to calm. “What did she say?” 

“My name.”

Keith doesn’t know what to say to that. Because while he finds it hard to believe, it is not entirely impossible. Sometimes, he feels Allura’s presence when he thinks of her, like she’s hovering in his vicinity even if he cannot see her. 

“I’m sorry,” Lance murmurs. 

“For what?”

“You. You’ve been looking after me when you have more important things to do.”

“That’s what friends do.”

“Yeah, but… it’s not your job. I don’t want to be a burden to you.” 

“You’re not a burden Lance,” he whispers softly, reaching forward and taking Lance’s hand in his. “You never will be, not to me.” 

Lance gazes at him woefully. “Lately it feels like that’s all I am.”

“You’re not,” Keith says firmly, squeezing his hand. “And I chose to be here of my own free will. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I like being with you?”

“Not really, no.” 

“Well, I do,” Keith assures him. He wants to tell Lance that he would start another war in his name, that he would tear apart entire galaxies if Lance had asked him to and he would even face down the barrel of a gun with Lance’s finger on the trigger, if it pleased him. But he doesn’t allow himself to voice any of those words, so he swallows down confessions that Lance will never hear, and instead says, “I’ll be here as long as you need me.”

Lance stares at him for a long moment, something indiscernible yet fond swimming in his eyes. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Keith says, standing up and holding out his hand. “Let’s go to sleep.”

Lance slips his hand into Keith’s and twines their fingers together. As they return to the bedroom, Kosmo looks up sleepily, giving a small whine and settling back down. 

Laying behind him, Keith watches his turned back, gently rising and falling as his breathing evens out. His caramel brown hair lays against the pillow like feathers. Peeking above his t-shirt, Keith can see the scarred skin of his back scaling up to the nape of his neck, from the injuries he had sustained when he had jumped in front of an explosion to save Coran all those years ago. 

Without thinking, Keith reaches out and traces the marred skin, rough beneath his fingertips. He draws away, watching Lance’s sleeping form. 

For a long time, Keith doesn’t dare close his eyes, fearing that when he opens them, Lance will not be there. He wants to draw him close and keep him safe, because it seems that just as Keith tries his hardest to keep Lance near, the universe is intent on tugging him away to a place Keith cannot follow. 

Keith is scared that Lance will slip away, swept up with the waves until he disappears into the ocean entirely, like he had almost done today. 

When they wake in the morning, Lance is curled into him, their arms wrapped around each other and their legs tangled in their sleep. Lance’s face is tucked into the space between Keith’s neck and shoulder, and Keith’s chin is resting on Lance’s forehead. 

They don’t talk about the awkward position they find themselves in. 

It’s the first time they’ve both slept peacefully through the night, uninterrupted by nightmares or terrible memories. 

They don’t talk about that either. 

“Have you been to New Altea?” Lance asks suddenly. 

They’ve worked their way from the back of the house to the front, where they’re currently replacing all the floorboards of the living room. Lance pries away the last piece of rotten plywood from the subfloor with a crowbar, the tendons in his forearm flexing with the movement. 

Keith stands behind him, measuring new sheets of plywood and cutting them into the appropriate lengths. 

“Once,” he replies, turning off the table saw momentarily. “But I didn’t stay long. It felt… wrong to be there without her.” He glances up from the spirit level to look at Lance. “Have you?”

“Not yet,” Lance replies. “But I want to. I want to tell all those people what she was truly like.” 

“That’s a good idea,” Keith encourages. “It’s the least she deserves, after everything she gave for the universe.”

“I’m not… I don’t think I’m ready just yet,” Lance says, grabbing pieces of lumber to screw in between the joists. 

“That’s okay,” Keith replies easily. “Just take your time.”

They work quietly, and as Lance finishes boarding up the subfloor, Keith lines up the sheets of plywood against the edges of the walls. On top of the subfloor, they put down a cork underlayment. 

“You could come with me,” Lance says after a while, as they’re arranging the brand-new panels of laminate flooring. “We could go together.”

Keith pauses, looking up at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. It’d be… nice to have you there with me,” Lance says, gazing down at the floorboards with intense concentration. 

“Okay,” Keith agrees, and Lance looks up with surprise, as though he’d been expecting Keith to say no.

“Okay,” Lance says, giving him a small smile. 

Keith wants to say that he would walk to hell and back as long as Lance was there with him, but he doesn’t. He goes back to arranging the floorboards, swallowing down the words to a place where they will never see the light of day. 

“Does this look okay on me?” Lance asks, buttoning up the top of his blue shirt. 

Keith comes to stand beside him as they both look in the bathroom mirror. He pulls his hair into a low ponytail out of his face. 

“Yes, Lance,” Keith sighs. “You look good. I’ve told you this like a hundred times already.” 

Lance’s lips twist into a scowl that Keith has not seen in forever, and it should not make him feel as happy as it does. His eyes meet Keith’s in the mirror, a retort ready on his lips, before his eyes track down Keith’s figure and he pauses. 

“Why are you dressed like a dad?” Lance asks, turning to him as he stares at Keith’s maroon sweater. 

“I’m a dog dad,” Keith replies. “I think that counts.”

“You look old,” Lance says, reaching out and fixing the neck of his sweater. 

“Thank you,” Keith rolls his eyes. 

Lance looks at him skeptically. “Is this really what you’re wearing?”

“It’s just a dinner, Lance, not a red-carpet event.” 

They had finally managed to find some free time to attend the long overdue dinner they had been invited to by Phyllis and her husband. Keith is not one for dinners or any kind of social affair, but he’s willing to endure it for Lance’s sake, because he’s finally agreed to leave the four walls of their house in favor of other people’s company. 

Lance huffs out a long breath, fiddling with a button on his shirt. “I know. I’m just… nervous. I haven’t been around people in a while.”

“I know,” Keith says softly. He reaches out and takes Lance’s hand in his. “But hey, if at any time you wanna leave, just give me the signal and we’re out of there, okay?”

Lance gazes at him with wide, sapphire eyes, smiling slightly. “I’ll be fine,” he assures, twining their fingers together. 

“I know you’ll be fine,” Keith protests, gently squeezing their joined hands. “But you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“Okay,” Lance smiles. With his free hand, he reaches out and tucks a loose strand of hair behind Keith’s ear. His skin tingles where Lance’s touch had lingered, and Keith keeps still, afraid that Lance can hear the loud thumping of his heart. “I’m really glad you’re here. Thank you.”

“I wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else,” Keith murmurs gently, and it’s the most truthful thing he’s said in a while. 

They leave Kosmo with a neighbor that’s keen of dogs, and at least for tonight, he’ll be in the company of others too. They don’t have the heart to tell him that Kosmo is a cosmic wolf. 

It seems Phyllis has extended the invite to all of her friends, because when they get to her house, there are loud, happy exclamations once Keith steps into the living room with Lance trailing behind him, their hands clasped between them. They’re welcomed with hugs and kisses, and Lance’s hesitant smile grows bigger with each person that comes up to greet him.

Albert from the flower shop shoves two glasses of whisky into their hands, and Barbra from the grocery store immediately strikes up a conversation with Keith on the progress of the flowerpot he’d bought a few months ago. 

Later, when they’re sitting down for dinner, Lance reaches out and gently squeezes Keith’s knee. Keith lays his hand on top of Lance’s and gives him a soft smile. 

They tuck into the homemade meal, and it’s a hundred times better than what Keith and Lance can make. Across the table, Phyllis unsubtly nudges her husband, gesturing to Lance and Keith. He pretends he doesn’t see it. When she does it for the third time, Ralph clears his throat, setting his fork and knife down on the table. 

“Lance, Keith…” he starts awkwardly, clearing his throat again. “We just want you to know… this is a friendly small town, in comparison to other places.”

Keith looks at Lance, puzzled. He gives an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, equally confused. 

“And we want you boys to know that we’re accepting of all different folk,” Ralph continues. “No matter their preferences.”

“That’s… that’s really nice to hear,” Lance says hesitantly. 

“In fact, my niece and her fiancée are getting married in September,” Phyllis adds happily. “They’re the loveliest girls, grew up right here in this town and they never had any problems.”

Then it sinks in, and Keith shifts in his seat uncomfortably, heat crawling up his neck and settling on his cheeks. He stares down at his lap as Lance stammers beside him. 

“Oh—we’re not… it’s not like that,” Lance denies. 

Keith feels his heart crack into two. It’s one thing to believe that the odds of his feelings being returned are impossible, but it’s another thing entirely, to hear it straight out of Lance’s mouth. 

He tamps down the ache that gnaws away at his heart and looks up at them with a strained smile. “Yeah, we’re only—we’re just friends,” he says, and as the words leave his mouth, they leave a bitter aftertaste on his tongue. 

Lance turns to him then, his brows drawn and a small frown pulling at his features. Something indiscernible flickers across his face, something that Keith does not have the energy to decipher. “Yeah… just friends,” Lance agrees, gazing at Keith for a long moment before turning to his meal, topping up his glass of whisky. 

The food in his mouth tastes like cardboard, and his appetite has suddenly disappeared, but he forces himself to swallow it down so as to not seem rude. There’s a tense silence that’s settled between them, and their hosts have noticed too, because from the corner of his eye, he sees Barbra and Albert share a meaningful glance. 

He wants to leave suddenly, to go back home and sleep off this ache that threatens to consume him. He wants to cry, to shout, to confess his love for the boy sitting next to him so that this terrible secret that’s heavy in his chest will finally leave him, and it’ll be Lance’s responsibility to deal with. 

Instead, he sits at the table and provides a happy smile. He hopes he can leave this unscathed because he’s fought one war already, but this never-ending battle with Lance, he hopes, is something he can get out of in one piece.               

Lance leans heavily against his side as he struggles to open the door. He’d had too many glasses of whisky at the dinner and he’s on the verge of drunkenness. Keith can feel the alcohol coursing through his own system, warming his blood. 

“Keith,” he whines. “Hurry up, I’m cold.” 

Keith huffs. “How am I supposed to open the door and carry you at the same time?”

“You’re not carrying me,” he protests, and stands upright. He sways precariously, and Keith darts out a hand, steadying him. 

They manage to get inside, stumbling around in the dark before falling onto their new couch in a heap of limbs. The thing about Lance, is that when he gets drunk, he gets sleepy. Leaning against him, Keith can hear his breathing slowly evening out.

“Don’t fall asleep on me,” Keith says, jostling his shoulder. 

“‘m not,” Lance murmurs. 

“C’mon, let’s go to bed,” Keith stands, offering his hand for Lance to take. 

Lance pushes himself up and takes Keith’s hand as they shuffle to the bedroom. At the doorway, they get stuck. Moonlight streams in from the window, painting the room a silver-blue. 

Lance bursts into laughter and Keith looks at him in confusion. 

“What’s so funny?” 

“We’re stuck,” he laughs. 

“Oh,” Keith says through his intoxicated haze. “You go first.”

Lance continues to giggle, his lips pulled into a wide beam. He seems elated, though Keith doesn’t know what is so funny. Lance leans forward and rests his forehead against Keith’s, his eyes fluttering shut. 

Keith’s breath hitches in his throat, his heart drumming in his ears. Keith can smell alcohol and a trace of mint on his breath. Lance leans back a fraction, and his laugh falters. His gaze darts down and catches on Keith’s lips, and his heart stutters in his chest. This close to him, Lance’s eyes are as deep and fathomless as the ocean, and staring into the cerulean pools of his irises, Keith feels as though he’s floating, drifting with the waves. 

Keith holds still, afraid that if he moves, Lance might pull away. 

His hand comes up to rest against Keith’s cheek, warm against his skin. He leans in close, warm breath ghosting across Keith’s lips. 

Lance hesitates for a fraction of a second before pulling Keith closer. His lips crash against Keith’s like the waves breaking against the shore. Keith holds him, tilting his head and slotting their lips together perfectly as they move like the ebb and flow of the tide. 

Lance wraps an arm around Keith’s waist and tugs him flush against his body. Keith wraps his arms around Lance’s neck and maps the shape of his body, his veins coursing with liquid ecstasy. He presses in closer, kissing into Lance’s mouth with desperate urgency, almost devouring his lips in hunger as though he has been waiting all his life for Lance’s lips to be on him. There’s a fire in his chest, and it blazes bright and hot as Lance kisses him back just as fervently.

The hand cupping his face travels up into his hair, threading slender fingers through his raven tufts and sending a shiver down his spine. Keith pushes against him, chasing his lips and Lance’s back hits the doorframe. 

Keith knows he should pull away before things escalate, but he cannot bring himself to. He knows, but some ugly, selfish part of him relishes in it, wants more than what he can get. He’s dreamed about this moment more times than he can count, he grabs it with both hands and holds on as tight as he can. 

Lance tastes like all his hopes and wishes, and the hard lines of his body feel like everything he’s ever wanted. Lance pulls away slightly to latch his mouth onto Keith’s neck, mouthing at the delicate skin. Keith lets out a ragged breath and bares his neck for Lance to take as he pleases. 

He presses a line of kisses to his skin, murmuring something under his breath that Keith cannot catch over the blood roaring in his ears. Lance moves onto the other side of his neck and then, Keith hears it.

“‘llura.” 

Keith’s blood runs cold, his muscles freezing and locking up. The fire in his chest is snuffed out and replaced with a terrible ache that threatens to knock him to his knees. 

Lance has mistaken him for Allura. 

As Lance continues to suck bruises on his neck, he wonders if this entire time, Lance had seen Allura when he had been looking at Keith. That explains why he had kissed Keith, because he would never choose to kiss him voluntarily, only when he’s deceived himself into thinking he’s kissing Allura.

His chest constricts, his throat closing up and Keith cannot breathe. 

“Lance,” he chokes out, voice cracking at the last syllable. “Lance, don’t do this. You’re drunk.”

He hums, pressing more kisses onto Keith’s jawline. Keith pulls away, placing a hand on his chest to keep him at a distance. 

“You’re drunk,” Keith repeats quietly, and for a moment, he wonders who he’s trying to convince, Lance or himself. 

Lance must see his face, because he pulls back and stands upright, hands hanging by his side awkwardly. They stand in the doorway, the entire house silent except for the sound of their breathing. Keith looks at the floor, and in the dim moonlight, notices that a panel of the new flooring from the living room has jutted out into their bedroom. 

“I’m sorry,” Lance breaks the silence. 

He doesn’t know what Lance is apologizing for, and he doesn’t think Lance does either. 

“It’s okay,” he whispers hoarsely, unable to look at him. “Just… go to sleep, Lance.”

Lance stands in front of him, unmoving. In his peripheral vision, he sees Lance attempting to reach out for him before his hand drops back to his side. Keith stands in the doorway of their bedroom, barely holding himself together with the last of his strength so that he will not break apart. 

“Okay… goodnight,” Lance says at last before he walks away. 

Keith leaves him there, padding through the house and opening the front door. Limbs trembling, he sits on the porch steps, staring out toward the inky-black sea. The wind drifts past him, cold fingers combing through his hair and it feels as though he’s back in the house with Lance’s fingers running through his hair, tugging him closer. Much like a permanent mark branded onto him, he can still feel the ghost of Lance’s lips on his skin and the feel of his hands on Keith’s body, haunting him with a memory of fleeting happiness. 

There’s a tension that fills the air, hanging between them stagnant and thick. It’s almost palpable that Keith can reach out and touch it. 

Lance doesn’t mention anything that happened last night, and Keith doesn’t dare breach the subject. If he wants to pretend that nothing ever happened between them then Keith can play along to the pretenses. But the thought that kissing Keith was nothing more than a mistake to Lance, is something that he cannot bear to think about, and it lingers at the back of his mind like a stain he cannot scrub away.

Sometimes, Keith feels eyes on his turned back, burning holes into him. Lance looks as though he wants to say something but in the end he never does, turning away silently. It feels like a bridge has formed between them, one that Keith doesn’t know how to cross. It would be better if Lance would tell him the truth outright so that Keith can abandon the hope clinging to the pieces of his broken heart, because ultimately, he has nothing else to lose. 

A few days later, they’re sitting across the dinner table, hands wrapped around two mugs of tea. Kosmo lays on the floor, his tail wagging behind him as he looks up at them. 

Keith flicks through a Vogue magazine on interior design. Lance fiddles with his hands, his brows furrowed deep in thought. 

“What’re you thinking so hard about?” he asks, not looking up from the magazine. 

Lance hesitates. “Do you think it makes me a bad person?” he asks a moment later. “That it doesn’t hurt as much as it did before?”

Keith stares at him. He wants to say yes, it does, because he cannot mourn for Allura and then turn around and hurt Keith. He wants to lash out, to turn the terrible pain inside him into anger, and make Lance feel the same pain he’s feeling. 

But he doesn’t. He’s far too in love with Lance to ever think of hurting him. 

“No,” he replies. “She wouldn’t want you to be unhappy.”

“I miss her.” 

“I miss her too… Sometimes it doesn’t feel real, that she’s gone,” Keith says, his chest panging. “Sometimes I think that if I called out to her, she might just appear, as if she was in the next room all along.” Memories of the quantum abyss flash through his mind, and Keith swallows thickly. “Sometimes I feel like it was my fault,” he admits quietly. 

“Don’t do that,” Lance shakes his head. “No one knew what was going to happen.”

Regret swirls at the pit of his stomach. “I had a vision,” he admits quietly. “When I was in the quantum abyss.” Keith looks down, staring unseeingly at a page full of various couch sets. “I didn’t know what it was at the time but it was a glimpse of the future, and I saw Allura walking off with Honerva.”

Across from him, Lance is quiet. Keith is too ashamed to look up. “And I keep thinking… that if I knew what it was, then maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe I could have stopped it.” 

The clock on their kitchen wall counts away the seconds. The house is silent save for the sound of their breathing.

“You knew?” Lance asks at the end, his voice low. 

Keith looks up, his heart dropping to the pit of his stomach. Lance’s lips are pulled into a taut line, a muscle in his cheek jumping as he clenches his jaw.

“Lance—”

“—you knew she was going to die?” he bellows, pointing a finger at him. He pushes away from the table roughly and rises to his feet. 

“I didn’t! I didn’t know that was what was going to happen!” Keith shouts back as he stands up, gesturing wildly. 

“You knew and you didn’t do anything?!” Lance yells accusingly, his blue eyes cold and unforgiving. “Why the fuck didn’t you do anything?! You’re supposed to be the leader of Voltron!” he shouts, throwing his arm up in the air.

“If I knew, do you think I would be standing here today?!” Keith bellows, anger as familiar as breathing lighting his veins on fire. “You know I would have killed myself first instead of letting Allura sacrifice herself!”

“Maybe you should have! Because then she’d be here!” Lance shouts and Keith stills. His breath catches in his lungs as though he’s been struck with a great blow, and he stumbles back a step. Pain twists in his chest, like a knife pierced into his heart, driving deeper. “She’d be here instead of being the fabric of the fucking universe!”

Keith stares at him. The clock ticks away. Lance seems to realize what he’s said because his eyes grow wide and he makes an aborted move to reach for Keith. 

“Keith—I didn’t—I never—”

“—No—no you—” Keith swallows thickly, taking a step back and putting distance between them. “You said what you said.”

Behind them Kosmo is howling, he notes, probably scared because of their fighting. 

He takes a breath. Tries to calm the broken pieces of his heart that are barely beating. He doesn’t know how much more it can take. 

“Keith…” Lance tries again. 

He turns around and walks for the door. He can hear Kosmo’s footsteps following him. He steps out as Kosmo trails after him, and slams the door shut behind him, walking away. 

Keith leaves and he doesn’t come back for two days. 

In his guilt-ridden state, Lance searches the entire town; the grocery store, the flower shop, even the small library where Keith had spent a whole day once. He walks the entire length of the shoreline and yet there is no trace of Keith. Guilt festers inside him like an untreated wound. Without him, there’s a void inside Lance, like a part of him has been ripped away, leaving him to slowly bleed out.

He wants—needs—Keith to come back, so that he can apologize; for his cruel words, for kissing him and then refusing to acknowledge it. It feels as though they’ve been walking on a tightrope for the past week, swaying precariously above an outcropping of all the words left unsaid between them as it waits below to consume them. 

He still remembers the taste of Keith on his tongue, of how he had felt in his arms like a long-lost dream come to life. He used to hope about Keith, in a time before his heart was stolen by Allura and was never returned to him. But his hope never amounted to anything, although the possibility of what they could have been had plagued him from time to time. 

It was after Keith had found Lance, that he’d realized a part of him had fallen in love with Keith long ago, and that same part had never once stopped loving him. 

He’s sitting on the porch, staring out towards the sea when he sees a small figure running across the shoreline. It’s Kosmo.

With his breath held in his lungs, Lance rushes to his feet, looking around frantically. A distance away from the house, Lance sees him. He’s walking up slowly, eyes downcast. Lance’s relief is so great that he almost cries. 

Keith halts once he notices Lance, staring at him wearily. 

“I’m sorry,” Lance rushes out desperately. “I’m so fucking sorry Keith.” 

Keith looks at him for a long moment. Beyond them, the sea rolls into the shore slowly.  

“You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t mean it,” Keith replies. 

“I never meant that. I was angry, and I know that’s not an excuse but I would rather give my life for yours a hundred times over than to ever mean that Keith,” Lance pleads, his voice becoming thick with emotion. He takes a step closer to him. “Sure, I miss Allura, but I would never wish for you to be in her place, because Allura, I can survive, but you… if it was you, I would already be dead.” 

“No you wouldn’t,” Keith replies.

“Yes, I would. You’re the one person I can’t lose, Keith,” Lance insists. “I need you. I could never do this without you.”

“Yes, you could,” Keith says, his eyes roaming across his face, looking for any falsehood. Lance bares his soul out for him to take and pry open for the truth. 

“I don’t want to.”

Keith’s hard eyes soften. “I’m sorry too,” he says after a while. “I know this hasn’t been easy on you.” 

“This isn’t about me,” Lance says, hesitantly reaching for his hand. When Keith doesn’t pull away, Lance counts that as a victory greater than the war he’s fought and won. “What I said was terrible, and I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.” 

Keith gives him a small smile. Lance catalogs it into his memory, keeping it hidden away in the chamber of his heart. 

“I accept your apology,” he says, tangling their fingers together. 

The wind ruffles Keith’s hair. Lance looks at him, and he feels his heart swelling inside his body. A confession rises in his chest, climbing up into his throat until it’s struggling to escape through his lips. 

“Would you accept it if I told you I love you?” he asks. 

Keith tenses in his hold, eyes blowing wide and lips parting with surprise. “You—”

“Because I do Keith, I love you,” Lance confesses with devotion, gently tugging their joint hands and placing Keith’s palm over his rapidly pounding heart. “I think I’ve loved you far longer than I’ve known.”

Keith stares at him, his brows rising slowly, pinching together. “You do?” he asks in quiet disbelief. 

“Yes,” Lance breathes out.

“I…” Keith lets out a ragged exhale. “I love you too.”

A small, incredulous smile breaks across Lance’s lips, a heavy weight lifting off his chest. “You do?”

“Yes, I love you,” Keith says more firmly, his eyes swirling with a hint of fear as though the sky may come crashing down on them. “I have for years, longer than I can remember.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“How could I, with everything that happened?” Keith asks, staring down at their joined hands. “I wanted to, but the timing was always wrong and I didn’t—I would never forgive myself if I disrespected Allura’s memory.”

Lance stares at him, the back of his eyes prickling with tears. “You said she would want me to be happy. Well… you’re my happiness.”

Keith gazes at him with wide eyes. “I’m your happiness?” 

“Yes. Yes, Keith, you are,” Lance says, his voice thick with emotion. “I know you might not believe me but every day when I wake up and see you sleeping beside me, you’re the reason I get up out of bed.”

Keith stares at him, his eyes shining with tears. “I thought—I thought that you would never return my feelings, never in a million years. And I accepted that, I was fine with it as long as it meant I could be by your side as long as you let me.”

“I’m sorry,” Lance whispers. “I think… I was scared to let myself be happy. And I was scared of admitting to myself that I loved you because I thought… I thought you would leave too.” 

Keith fists his hand into Lance’s shirt. “I would never.” 

“I know that now,” Lance murmurs. “All that time…” he says, gripping Keith’s hand more firmly. “All those years we wasted.” 

“It wasn’t wasted,” Keith argues. “Not when it gave me a chance to adore you even from afar.” 

Lance lets out a wet chuckle, his heart throbbing with affection. He leans forward and rests his forehead against Keith’s. “Who knew you were such a sweet talker?” 

Keith smiles, a small dimple appearing on his cheek. He leans forward until their noses brush. “You’re not the only loverboy.”

“You remember that huh?” Lance huffs out a small laugh. 

Keith hums. “I remember everything.” 

Lance leans back a fraction and stares at him, his eyes lingering on Keith’s lips. “I wanna kiss you.”

He hears the small hitch of Keith’s breath. “I wanna kiss you too.”

He leans forward, his lips hovering before Keith’s. Lance’s heart hammers against his ribcage, as though it’s attempting to flee his body and find a home within Keith. 

Keith makes a small sound of impatience and slots their lips together. He kisses Keith slowly, trying to savor the moment and he touches Keith tenderly, as though he is holding something precious in his hands. 

Keith’s lips feel like Lance has finally found his way home, only he did not know he was lost.

“Where did you go?” Lance asks later, as Keith lays against his chest on their new couch. 

Kosmo is on the armchair opposite them, paying attention to the program playing on the TV. Lance glances around the living room; to the brand new flooring, the new furniture, the kitchen in view and the bathroom behind it, all of it bright and new. He realizes then, that he’s built a home with Keith, that he’s built the start of a new life. 

Vaguely, he thinks, tomorrow they should begin replacing the decaying wood of the porch beams, and later, they can give the front of the house a fresh layer of paint. 

“Barbra’s house,” he replies, playing with Lance’s hand, their fingers loosely intertwined. “She saw me while I was walking, and I must’ve been in a state, because she invited me in for a drink.”

Lance kisses Keith’s head. “I’m sorry,” Lance apologizes for the umpteenth time. 

“It’s okay, Lance,” Keith says. 

“It’s not,” Lance argues. “I really did mean it when I said I’d be sorry for the rest of my life.” 

Keith twists against him until they’re lying chest to chest. “Well… I have an idea how you could make it up to me,” he smiles. 

“Really?” Lance smiles, tucking a strand of his hair behind his ear. Keith’s violet eyes blink up at him. “Care to tell?”

Keith hums. “How about I show you instead?” 

He smiles as Keith leans close to him, his breath fanning over Lance’s mouth. 

Lance has been drowning for a while. But as he leans forward and their lips meet in the middle, it feels as though Lance has broken through the surface of the waves keeping him under, finally coming up for air.