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Chapter Text

“[T]he science-fiction books about endless wars in space, where technology is magic and the killing proceeds without moral or psychological justification of any kind, probably are written from the same unadmitted despair. The future has become uninhabitable.”

“When we look at what we can’t see, what we do see is the stuff inside our heads. Our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones. And it seems to me that when science fiction is really doing its job that’s exactly what it’s dealing with. Not “the future”.”

 - Ursula K. Le Guin, Excerpt from her Essay Facing It written and published in 1982; Excerpt from her essay Science Fiction and the Future written and published in 1985, respectively; Dancing at the Edge of the World.

First, there is nothing. And then there is blinding, searing pain.

**

When Lance opens his eyes, the first thing he sees is the clear, blue, pearlescent sky. No cloud in sight, no wind blowing past his ears, only the dapper and bright gradient of the early morning. This is the perfect weather for shooting practice. He’s sure his uncle is waiting for him already, tapping his foot impatiently against the kitchen floor, his hairy arms crossed.

“Estaré ahí, tío,” he mutters to the sky. His head feels weirdly thick with cotton, his tongue heavy with the drug of sunlight. His eyelids droop with the weight of his lashes, and he suddenly has the desire to sleep in the arms of the sun.

He could lie here forever. If only it weren’t for the faint ringing in his ears.

He thinks his tio is calling his name, but he can’t hear him. His head is so heavy, he can’t turn around and look. All he can do is stare up at the sky.

The ringing grows louder and louder, piercing, maiming. It hurts. Oh god, it hurts. It bleeds around him, unrelenting, surrounding him. It invades him everywhere, getting louder and louder and louder until—

The flash of red in the corner of his eyes is his space pods alarm going off.

And then everything hits him at once.

He crashed. They were in battle, fighting Zarkon, fighting the witch. Haggar…

His whole body is on fire. His head still feels heavy, but one experimental nod tells him that he hasn’t injured his neck. His face feels warm, though from what he can’t tell.

The dashboard is fried, which is probably why the alarm is going off. That or the fact that the left wall is ripped out and missing. He feels the rays of the sun directly on his skin, which tells him his helmet was missing somewhere.

So. He’s crashed somewhere, and somehow survived. Well, he isn’t about to let God change his mind on that one.

“Ugh,” Lance groans when he reaches for his seatbelt buckle. It hurts somewhere he can’t particularly pinpoint. It feels like every nerve of his body is repeatedly hit with hammers. His fingers are stiff and bloodless, but he manages to squeeze the buckle open with immense effort.

“Fuck,” he exhales when it opens. It takes more out of him than he likes. His best bet is getting out of the pod for now, and taking in surroundings.

He grips the torn wall and hauls himself up to stand, stumbling over the debris and wrecked parts of the pod.

Outside, the landscape is barren and empty. The earth is dry and cracked, with occasional weeds popping out of the small ravines. It looks like a desert. The sun is unforgiving in its heat and brightness. He tries to block the light from his eyes with spread fingers and he can already feel the sweat down his back in droplets.

Lance tries to loosen the neck of his body suit, thinking maybe he could catch the faint, cool wind, when suddenly his head swims intensely. He stumbles and catches himself against the pod, before he keels over and closes his eyes to keep the world from spinning and his bile in his stomach.

Then, as if from a dream, he hears faint footsteps. Lance snaps his eyes open, but the sun is blinding in its brightness and he quickly squeezes them shut again. He squints in the direction of the sound and sees a shadowed, wobbly figure some distance away, coming towards him. He can’t tell how far away it is, or what it even is. He hopes he’s hallucinating and it’s actually a cactus, but as the figure draws closer, he knows he’s wrong.

He spots something white and bright that catches the light of the sun as it comes closer, and Lance has just enough time to think that there was no way he could fight in this condition, when he recognises him.

“Keith?” he croaks out.

And then he faints.

**

When Lance opens his eyes, all he sees is Keith’s constipated frown, blocking the sun.

“Oh, hey,” Lance says from the ground, and wonders if Keith is a hallucination from a heatstroke. Or a concussion.

“Hey,” Keith says, curtly. “Can you stand?”

“Uh… not sure. Where are we?”

“Not sure either. Wrist tech is fried.” He shakes his wrist in Lance’s view and Lance sees that it has soot marks on the edges and through the cracks. Then he offers his hand. Lance takes it.

As Keith pulls Lance up to stand, Lance is relieved to find that he’s not a hallucination, and then wonders how he found him, if his tech is fried.

“We crashed not far from each other,” Keith says as if reading Lance’s mind. He points over Lance’s shoulder to where Keith’s pod was lying sideways and wrecked beyond repair some distance away.

Great.

“Lucky us?” Lance suggests, when all he wants is to whine lucky me. Not only is he stranded in bumfuck nowhere, but he’s stranded in bumfuck nowhere with Keith. The last person he ever wanted to get stuck with. Why couldn’t God have done him one more favor and had him crash with the gorgeous alien princess instead of the grizzled, murky loner?

Keith grunts and looks around. “Is your wrist tech working?”

Right. Lance checks his wrist and sees the device still intact, but turned off. He taps it a few times, until it glitches awake. The screen emits a blue light, presenting a hologram of the menu settings.

“Check our coordinates,” Keith says.

“Aye, captain obvious,” Lance sniffs, annoyed at his command. What did he think he was gonna do, check the weather?

Keith rolls his eyes in response, but doesn’t say anything else as Lance touches the location tab.

“30* 40’ 24’’ N,” Lance reads aloud. “Huh. Weird name for a planet.”

“Press colloquial, idiot.”

“You’re the idiot, tonto,”

“Just do it.”

Lance grumbles, but when he switches from analog to colloquial, he stops. And stares. And refreshes the tech and then stares some more, speechless.

“We—” he starts, “we’re on Earth.”

Keith snaps his attention back to Lance. “Earth? Are you sure?”

“I’m not blind Keith, it says Earth right there.”

“But we weren’t anywhere near the Milky Way.”

“I’m telling you what the tech says, man.”

Keith shakes his head. “It must have fried.”

“Maybe your brain is fried,” Lance retorted.

“I’m not the one with the concussion.”

“Are you sure?” Lance mocks in echo of Keith.  “‘cause you’re saying a lot of shit right now.”

“Check again,”

“I just checked,”

“Let me check, then.”

“No.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Lance, don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not the one who busted my tech like an idiot.”

“Ugh, you’re impossible!”

“And you’re a pendejo with a stick up his ass! I guess we’re all learning things today.”

They bristle at each other in silence.

Finally, after a long silence, Keith sighs through his nose and then pinches it with his fingers. “Look. I don’t want to fight. We’re both stuck here, alright? We gotta find a way to get back up there.”

“And how do you want us to do that?”

Keith looks at the ripped wall of Lance’s pod, and the giant crack on the view glass in dismay. “Do your comms work?”

Lance tries his comms, but they don’t go through. Either they’re too far away from the others or it’s busted and there isn’t really a way to find out which unless they had some solid tech. Of course, neither of them crashed with Pidge on board, so building their own satellite communication device was out of the question, too.

“Nope,” Lance says, and turns off his wrist tech. He looks around the desert plains and wonders where on Earth they are.

“Does the tech say where we are, on Earth?” Keith asks.

Lance is starting to wonder if he’s saying his thoughts out loud, but he doesn’t want to ask. Instead, he looks at his wrist tech again, and tries to use the urban section, but all it shows him is just Earth from afar. Usually the urban setting of Voltron’s wrist tech shows them the information the Altean database has on the respective planet, which includes areas and city names. But it seems Earth has been too far away from Altea to really make any sort of detailed report on Earth and its locations.

When Lance tries to force a zoom in on the hologram of Earth, all it gives him is a bunch of coordinates, probably because the database hasn’t given any names to the areas yet.

“Nope,” Lance says, disappointed.  

Keith runs his hands through his hair and starts pacing. “Fuck.”

Lance looks at Keith’s crashed pod some distance away and tries to keep his head from swimming. “If we’re on Earth, there’s gotta be people around who can help us. Maybe if we keep walking, we’ll hit the road at some point.”

Keith nods, but just stands there, his hands on his hips. He catches Lance’s expectant eyes. “What?”

“Well?” Lance says, spreading his arms. “You’re the one who lived in the desert for like a year. Lead the way.”

“I lived in a shack with a hover bike and a map. That doesn’t make me an expert of all deserts.”

“Alright, well, we gotta start moving. If we’re out here during the nighttime, we’ll freeze to death.”

“You’re the one with the working wrist tech. How about you lead for once?”

“Maybe I will!” Lance says, his voice shrill.

Since the map doesn’t really show them where they are exactly, Lance can’t actually lead them anywhere. He’s as lost as Keith, but he’s not willing to admit that, so Lance looks around him in different directions and then picks one. However, before he can take a step, Keith grips his arm.

“Wait,” he says and turns Lance to face him. He stares at Lance’s forehead. “You’re bleeding.”

“Huh?” Lance feels at his temple. His gloves torn, the tips of his fingers come away red with blood. “Oh,” he says in response, weirdly calm. “It’s nothing.”

Keith gives him a look and starts walking. “If you faint again, I’m not carrying you.”

The sun’s heat is unyielding on Lance’s face as he protests, “I’m not gonna faint!” and follows.

They walk for a long time in the baking heat. None of their supplies made it through the crash, so they walk thirsty through the desert. Lance wonders at one point if they crashed in the middle of the Sahara, but there weren’t any dunes, only dry and cracked earth, so it seems unlikely.

After a while though, Lance starts feeling woozy again, but he doesn’t want to ask for a break, because he doesn’t want Keith to think he has to start carrying him, so he sucks it up and focuses intently on not tripping over his own feet.

That’s when he spots it. A grimy metallic roof that covers two pillars that look about as dusty as the cracked earth they’re walking on.

“There!” Lance points and then groans in thanks to God. “Ugh, finally.”

Lance quickens his pace and looks back to see Keith frowning, following cautiously. “Come on, Mullet, chop chop!”

“I don’t like the look of it.”

“It’s a gas station in the middle of the desert, what did you expect?”

The door rings when they step inside. It’s a dingy little place with a few shelves, mills with sunglasses on them, and spiderwebs in the corners that probably haven’t been cleaned in years. The guy behind the counter, a middle aged man with a balding spot and sauce stains on his shirt, eyes them suspiciously, noting especially their armour, and their roughed up appearances, but doesn’t say anything.

Keith wanders to the refrigerators in the back, while Lance looks around and the kiosk guy’s eyes follow him there. Then, Lance catches sight of the newspaper stand near the door.

He snatches a copy and reads the headline, then reads it again. It’s in Spanish, which means that they are either a sea apart from home, or God blessed them one more time by putting them right next door. Lance hopes for the latter.

The headline is talking about a new road being built in the nearby town. Local newspaper, then. Maybe they aren’t too far off from the town. Hopefully they could make it within the day if they kept walking. And once they got there… well, they would figure it out by then.

He flips through some of the pages in hopes of recognising something, and catches sight of the name of a city he’s heard about before. Looks like they crashed into the neighbour’s backyard from home. This is a little inconvenient, if not unfortunate, but if Keith and Lance keep their wits about them and survive the heat somehow, they could probably get to the Galaxy Garrison within the week.

Lance quickly checks the date, and sees it’s the same date as the day of their mission. They must have split from the group somehow, but Lance’s biggest question is how did they end up in the Milky Way, let alone Earth, within a day from a galaxy that was thousands of light years away?

Lance puts the newspaper back on the stand, a plan slowly piecing itself together as he walks up to the counter.

The kiosk guy eyes him warily as he comes up, taking in his disheveled form, and eyeing the dried blood on Lance’s face, but his face betrays nothing. Lance is actually kind of impressed by his restraint.

“Por favor,” Lance starts, which he’s learned is always the best way to open a conversation with a stranger. They don’t expect politeness from a thug, and the confusion might just give him what he wants. “¿Puedes decirme dónde estamos? Nosotros estamos perdidos.”

The man snorts and makes a comment about it being a miracle that they made it out of the desert alive. Then he says that they’re on highway 651, as if that means anything to Lance.

“Right…” Lance says in English, annoyed, and taps his finger on the counter. The guy stares at his finger like it might grow teeth and bite him, so Lance quickly stops doing that. “Eh, por favor, ¿Qué tan lejos estamos de la frontera? ”

“¿La frontera? Si sigues la carretera, serán unas 2 horas en coche desde aquí. Pero nunca lo conseguirás a pie.”

Behind him, the bell to the door rings, and Lance looks over his shoulder to see Keith walking away.

Lance thanks the man in a rush and runs to catch up with Keith, who has already started up alongside the road again, walking at a brisk pace.

“Hey, what the hell, man?” Lance says when he catches up to him. “Why’d you run off like that?”

That’s when he saw Keith shouldering a thin backpack.

“Where did you get that?” he asks.

Keith ignores him and opens the backpack to give him a bottle of water. “Here. Drink this.”

“Keith,” Lance hisses and looks behind him to make sure the guy can’t see them through the window of the kiosk. “What the hell are you doing, stealing from a gas tank?”

“Saving our lives,” Keith snaps and shoves the bottle into Lance’s chest. “Have you forgotten that all our supplies were destroyed in the crash? We’ll need water if we want to survive this heat.”

“What if he calls the police?”

“From the look of that place, it’s not the first time it’s been robbed. And it won’t be the last either.”

Lance shakes his head, but he doesn’t know what to say to that. Keith might be right, but it didn’t make this any better. He tells himself he’ll pay extra next time he buys something, and contends with that enough to drink from the water, even though it twists something ugly up inside of him.

It seems Keith stole more than just water and a backpack. He also took some bags of chips and convenience salads, a couple of protein chocolate bars and two tourist t-shirts that say “Beach Please” with a smiley wearing sunglasses.

“What the hell are we supposed to do with these?” Lance says, in regards to the t-shirts.

“Cover our armour. Eat this,” Keith says and gives him a chocolate bar that was already half-melted. “You saw how that guy stared at us. We’ll look less suspicious this way.”

“Right,” Lance says, flatly, his mouth full of chocolate, “because there’s nothing less suspicious than a guy in black tights and a shirt that says Beach Please.”

“It wasn’t exactly a fashion store, asshole.”

“Besides, why are we suspicious? It’s not like we did anything wrong. Except stealing,” Lance adds under his breath.

Keith throws him a glare that says he heard him. “When people get suspicious, they get scared, and when they get scared, they don’t care if you did anything wrong or not, all they care about is having someone to blame.”

Lance didn’t say anything to that. Just muttered to himself and ate the rest of his chocolate.

“Anyway,” Keith says and takes a sip of his own bottle. “Did you figure out where we’re going?”

“Looks like we crashed on the other side of the border from home. Newspaper talks about a town nearby, hopefully a midpoint between here and the border. Maybe we can pitstop there, or something.”

Keith eyes him from the corner of his eyes, sensing that Lance isn’t saying everything. “Alright. Let’s say we get across the border. Then what?”

“Then, we make our way to The Galaxy Garrison.”

Keith stops in his tracks and stares dumbfoundedly at Lance. “Did you forget that the last time we were at the Garrison, we were wanted suspects and defectors?”

“Look, I’m not thrilled about it either, but they’re our only chance of getting back out there. Unless you know of another institution that has the technology to breach the stratosphere.”

Keith doesn’t say anything to that.

“Besides,” Lance says, and takes a sip from his water bottle. “I checked the date. We’ve been gone for a few months, but we haven’t been gone from Voltron for more than a day. This could be our chance of warning Earth about the war before the Galra have a chance to get here.”

“Who’s to say that they will believe us?” Keith says, “It’s not like we have the lions here as evidence of an intergalactic war.”

“Who’s to say that they won’t? Maybe we can find a way to convince them. We still have our armour and our bayards. Maybe that will be enough.”

Keith shakes his head. “You’re being way too optimistic.”

“Maybe. But it’s better than admitting defeat and dying of heatstroke out here.” Lance gestures to the wide and wild terrain surrounding them.

Keith looks at him for a long while, like he is measuring him, or like he doesn’t really know what to do with him. Finally, he sighs and starts walking again. “Fine,” Keith says, but he doesn’t look happy about it. “How do we get there?”

“We’re a two hour drive from the border—”

“Shit. That’s gonna take us all week!”

“I didn’t say it was gonna be easy!” Lance exclaims out of frustration. Or maybe it’s the heat and the sweat dripping down his back. Or Keith is being a butthead. Or maybe all three.

Keith holds up a hand as if to placate him, but he looks annoyed, so it doesn’t really help. “It’s fine,” Keith says, annoyed. “The things I stole should last us for tomorrow. But after that, we have to restock supplies somehow.”

“We can probably make it to the town tomorrow if not within the day. We can stock up on supplies and figure out how to get to the border from there. Maybe hitchhike or something, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

Keith sighs and rubs at his temples, like he has a significant headache he can’t really get rid of. Lance’s head pounds in sympathy, though possibly also for unrelated reasons. “The universe really couldn’t make it easy for us, could it.”

Lance dismisses this with the wave of his hand. “Don’t worry so much, Mullet. It gives you premature wrinkles. Let’s just worry about surviving this heat for now, okay?”

Having said that, Lance severely underestimates how difficult and harrowing walking would be. Even though they travel alongside the road, no car ever shows up in either direction that they could potentially hitchhike on. Not even a truck, which is honestly a little suspicious. Usually these roads are used as supply lines across the border, but Keith and Lance have been walking for hours and there hasn’t been a four-wheeler racing by. Not even a police car.

It looks like Keith was right about that one. Maybe the guy thought their stolen goods were petty enough that it didn’t need the police’s involvement. Lance doesn’t know whether to see it as a blessing or a curse. At least the police would have vehicles that would get them out of this heat. On the other hand, it might have severely delayed their plans to get to the border.

This means that they cross most of the distance on foot. Several times, Lance has to swallow his pride and ask for a break, particularly when his head feels woozy. Keith usually grants him a short break and some water or some chocolate and then he reminds him that he won’t carry him, as if that would make Lance feel better.

It doesn’t.

He doesn’t know how long they walk. It feels like hours, and indeed it has been, because then the sun clips in half and the sky turns pink and soft and the temperature drops significantly. Luckily, their armour, built for the vacuum that was outer space, has built-in thermoregulation, so they won’t freeze to death as Lance initially thought.

Still, they decide to make camp. They haven’t made as much headway as they would have liked, but they are both tired and their feet are sore, and they thought maybe getting some sleep would help not only with their heads, but with their moods, too.

Keith puts the backpack with Lance and tells him to sit somewhere in the vast desert plains and then he leaves him there, to scavenge for broken twigs and whatever else he can find.

Lance lets him play caveman for a bit, and satisfies himself with drinking the last of his water bottle. They still have a few left that could probably last them for the trek tomorrow, but he isn’t sure about after that.

He checks his wrist-tech to see how much they have walked. Shit. It isn’t looking good. At this rate they wouldn’t get to the border until at least a few more days. Maybe Keith really does need to carry Lance, if he is dragging them down this much.

Keith comes back with an armful of dry twigs that he probably got from desert shrubs, which honestly impresses Lance. He drops them all on the ground before he sifts through them and picks two.

“What are you doing?” Lance asks curiously.

“Making a bonfire,” Keith answers tersely.

“Do you even know how to make one?”

“Yes.”

And so he does. Because of the dry air, the branches practically burst into flames as soon as Keith rubs them together. Keith sits back, satisfied, and throws a smirk Lance’s way, for good measure.

Lance sniffs. “Alright, I’ll give you that one, Mullet.”

Keith’s smirk disappears and he makes for snatching the backpack out of Lance’s hands. “It’s not a mullet.”

As the sun vanishes and the only light they have to go by is the stars and the fire, Keith fishes out the salads he stole and hands one of them to Lance. “Dinner,” he says, but he doesn’t need to explain.

Lance looks sourly at his measly salad and wishes for the first time that he hadn’t taken Coran’s goo for granted.

They are silent as they eat, and even though it isn’t much, Lance does feel a little better, physically. Emotionally, he is still in the gutter, but there isn’t really much he could do about that.

While Keith eats, Lance decides to pull up the wrist-tech again and look at their surroundings. Lance hoped that there would be something nearby that would catch the tech’s radius, but it still just gives him the coordinates of his location rather than the name.

Thankfully, knowing the name of the town severely helps in making their way there. Now the town shows as a red dot on his map, but since all the Ancient Alteans knew of Earth was its name, it doesn’t show him much else. Hopefully, at the town they can restock on their supplies, probably get some actual food that wasn’t a day old salad and some melted chocolate bars. Maybe even get a map that doesn’t glitch half the time.

“If we continue the way we have been today,” Lance says, “we should make it to the town before sunset tomorrow.” He turns off his wrist tech and takes off his chest plate. He plans to use it as his pillow.

The fire casts a warm orange glow on Keith’s face as he chews the last of his dinner. “We’ll make it even earlier, if we wake up in a few hours.”

Lance snaps his eyes to Keith. “A few hours?”

“It’s better if we travel when the night is cool,” Keith says as he packs away the eaten dinner containers in the bag. “We won’t get worn down by the heat.”

Lance falls over dramatically, staring up at the stars, arms spread and everything. “But sleep.” He pouts.

“You can sleep once we get back to Voltron.”

“As if Princess Allura would ever let me sleep in when there’s drills to do,” Lance mutters to himself.

Out here in the desert, there are no lamplights to pollute the night sky. Every star is there for the naked eye to see, as well as the lovely blue veil that coats them. You would think that the stars compete to shine the brightest, but actually they aren’t competing at all. Their light is a source of their love for each other. They shine that bright for the other star. At least, that’s what his tío used to tell him.

¿Que? Lance would say incredulously, disbelieving. Stars don’t love. They’re too far away to know anything about that!

No, mijo, his tío would answer, wagging a finger sternly, as if this is the most serious conversation to be had. Las estrellas aman porque tú amas. La luz que ves en el cielo es el amor de tu corazón reflejado hacia ti.

Lance stares up at the stars now and wonders which one of them spat them out here. Back home. “Do you think we will? Get back up there, I mean?”

Keith has taken his chest plate off too, but he doesn’t use it as a pillow. He lies down flat on the other side of the fire, on his back so that he stares up at the stars, too. “We have to. If we don’t then…” he trails off and doesn’t continue. Instead he asks, “What do you think the others are doing right now?”

Lance looks at Keith briefly, but Keith doesn’t look back, just stares and stares longingly at the stars like if he wishes hard enough, they can take him away from here.

Lance turns back to the stars, a bit unimpressed.

“Panicking, probably. What will they do without the best paladin of Voltron?” He snickers to himself, but Keith just hums thoughtfully, his thoughts lost in the sky. Lance doesn’t know what it is, maybe it’s the night sky or the day’s trek or the warmth of the fire or Keith’s wistful, longing expression, but it sombers something in Lance, makes him want to speak quietly. Like the air is fragile, and he has to beware not to break it.

“And looking for us, most likely,” Lance adds. But he’s starting to feel weird in the quiet part of the night, so he says, “Allura probably has my picture framed by now, A whole shrine dedicated to her love for me, waiting for my return.”

Keith rolls his eyes so hard, he ends up turning his back to Lance.

“Don’t worry, my princess,” Lance says, his voice light and playful. He reaches a hand up to the stars, as if to cup them in his palm. “I will make it back to you soon.” His hand falls slowly and lands with a thunk on his chest.

From the other side of the fire, Keith mutters quietly to himself, something about delusions being a symptom of concussion. 

Lance closes his eyes and falls asleep.

Chapter Text

They start their second day of walking early. True to his word, Keith wakes up a few hours later and shakes Lance awake, too. And shakes and shakes and shakes. Lance wipes the drool off his face and finally wakes up and stretches, but it is a battle that he thinks he will surely lose.

Even though the salad was a day old, Lance thinks it really helped rejuvenate him. That, and getting some rest after a long day of walking did wonders for Lance’s concussion. He no longer felt lightheaded and nauseous and he felt pretty good about tackling the day’s trek.

That was before the sun rose.

Their suits do have auto-thermoregulation, but it was made specifically for the deep arctic temperatures of the vast, dark abyss that is outer space. Thus, it was designed to keep heat in . They last about an hour before they strip halfway naked. For Keith, though, this is a bad idea. Ten minutes into walking like this, the curve of his shoulders glow a dangerous red.

“Keith,” Lance says, eyeing his scalded arms. “You should put your suit back on.”

“Do you want me to die?”

“Ugh, whatever. It’s too hot to argue. You can get sunburnt on your ass for all I care.”

By the time noon rolls around, they are starving. The salad they ate last night was not nearly enough to rejuvenate them and it seems the heat is even more relentless than they anticipated, because they are already down to their last water bottle. They aren’t sure how long they’re going to last like this, and their sour circumstances really drags their mood back to the gutter. They start bickering again, nastier than usual, and even though they both know it’s because of their stress and paranoia, they can’t help but take it out on each other. There’s no one else around, after all.

Lance doesn’t ask for as many breaks, which means that they get farther, faster, but the road just keeps going and going that it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Cars do drive by, but none of them stop when they hook their thumbs up, probably because they’re half-naked and look like they’ve just been dragged through the desert by their hands. So they continue walking because there’s nothing else to do. If they stop, they’ll die.

And just when Lance is ready to give in to the heat, and lie on the desert ground to roast until his days are over, he blinks against the dust and sees a tall tower.

He blinks again and wipes the sweat from his eyes, and yet the tower stands ever tall.

“Am I losing my mind or am I seeing a town?”

“Not losing your mind,” Keith says, almost in a wheeze. He looks at the tower as well, dumbstruck, like he hadn’t really expected to reach anywhere in the desert.

They look at each other for a second, and then they run toward the building, throwing caution and common sense to the wind at the prospect of some shelter and some water.

They get there out of breath, and sweating the last of their water out through their pores. The town looks worn down, old and sparsely populated.

Lance looks around and spots an old water pump, and he dashes there immediately, not even thinking about whether Keith is with him until after he’s soaked his head in cool spring water. Pumping the water out is the most painful thing he’s ever done, but once his head is under the cool stream, he forgets the pain in his muscles immediately. When he doesn’t feel like he’s on the verge of a heatstroke anymore, Lance shakes his head to get the water out of his eyes, and he takes this opportunity to have a look around, while Keith takes his turn.

It is afternoon, but even so, barely anyone is in the streets. There are a few bars lining the alleys, with single male customers sitting outside and squinting against the sun at them, trying to determine if the foreigners are a part of the desert mirage. With the way that they stare at them, Lance thinks that this isn’t the sort of town that tourists usually come to. Although, it probably doesn’t help that they are both mostly in spandex that’s rolled all the way down to their hips..

There are other shops nearby, too. Kiosks and drugstores and local thrift stores. Most of them are closed for the day, though, probably because of the heat, but he does see a kiosk that sells cigarettes. And probably some maps too…

Keith surfaces and steps back, using the water that drips from his hair to spread around his face and neck. He looks around while Lance pumps a bit more water to wash his hands and arms.

“Let’s get what we need and get out of here,” Keith says. Lance catches the tension in his voice, and follows his gaze to the locals, who stare at them in turn with suspicion. Lance looks away quickly, but Keith keeps eye contact, staring them down.

“Stop that,” Lance hisses. “You’re only gonna look more suspicious. Just act like this is your hometown.”

“They know we don’t belong here,” Keith says, still staring at a local man sipping a glass of beer slowly, eyeing them like he’s itching for them to provoke him. “Anything we do is going to seem suspicious to them. Smartest thing to do is get supplies and get out of here as fast as possible.”

Lance rinses his hands and arms, a little faster than before. They roll their suits back up after refilling all of their water bottles, and throw over the t-shirts Keith had stolen in an effort to look less suspicious. Although, by the frown Keith casts the Beach Please on his chest, Lance assumes he feels the same about it as he does.

Lance makes his way to the kiosk he spotted earlier, and takes another paper from the newspaper stand. One of the articles confirms their location to him, but when he turns around to tell Keith, he turns to air. Keith isn’t beside him. He must have gone his own way, but why he went without saying anything to Lance, Lance doesn’t know.

Lance rolls his eyes, and decides it’s not his problem. If Keith is going to make this even more difficult than it needs to be, then maybe they were meant to go their separate ways. Lance pushes Keith out of his mind and turns back to the newspaper, scouring through it for any other clues that may help them.

Since they’re on the other side of the border, any news about the Garrison is unlikely, but Lance still hopes to get a glimpse of something, maybe some wanted posters of them, but The Galaxy Garrison isn’t even hinted at. Grimacing, Lance puts the newspaper back on its stand and goes inside.

It’s not a big kiosk, a small, dingy place with the basic snacks and beverages, as well as other necessities, like lighters, socks, hats, sunglasses, maps and magazines. All of the different varieties of cigarettes are lined neatly behind the counter, which was empty, unlike the gas station. Lance is glad and hopes the clerk doesn’t come out any time soon.

He makes his way to the maps, when his eye catches on something. A little rotating stand on the counter displays a bunch of beaded catholic rosaries of all kinds, wooden and metal and plastic, in all colours as well. But the one that Lance is looking at is a bright, pasty pink, the beads made of reflective glass that catch the overhead lights of the shop. The beads are interrupted intermittently with their metal counterparts and off the chain hangs an elaborate metal design of the cross, in a dark, almost dirty, golden metal.

It matches his grandmother’s rosary almost exactly. Except, hers didn’t have anything interrupting the chain, and the cross had been silver, with her name inscribed on the back of it. It had been a gift to her from her husband, Lance’s grandfather, on their ten year wedding anniversary. He wonders where it is now, since she died a few years ago.

Lance touches the beads carefully, feeling their glossy sheen and the cheap paint that coats the glass, and is reminded again that he is on Earth. But for the first time since he crashed does he realise that he’s back on the same planet as his family.

Noise jostles him out of his stupor. He snaps his head up to the counter, snatching his hand away from the rosary in the same move, but it’s still empty. The noise had come from outside, and Lance looks to see Keith standing by the entrance and holding up a white plastic bag by his head. He shakes it a little, as if reminding Lance that he found what he was looking for.

Lance goes out to meet him, feeling annoyance twisting inside of him. “Where the hell did you go? You don’t think you should have given me a heads up that we were gonna split?”

“Relax, I thought you might be busy here while I went looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“Around. Found this.” Keith pushes the bag to his chest. Lance catches it when Keith lets go and peers inside. It’s stuffed with clothes, as Keith says. Lance sees jeans, shirts, even socks. Keith continues explaining, “Our suits make us more suspicious. If we want people to help us, we need to look more like them and blend in.”

Lance picks out an item, a red-orange vest that feels damp to his hands. “Where did you get this?”

“Found it on the curb.” Keith says, simply.

Lance looks at him disbelievingly. “On the curb.”

“Okay, I found it in the trash. Do you want to get out of these shirts or not? We might get people to help us more if we fit in.”

Lance can’t argue with that, especially not when he peers down his Beach Please shirt again. The smiley with the sunglasses looks almost mocking to him now. He can’t deny that he and Keith make quite a sight with their armour covered in dirt and a cheap tourist t-shirt thrown over to top it all off.

“Where are we gonna put our suits?” He asks, instead.

“We can compartmentalise them in our holsters for now, with our bayards.”

Lance digs further through the plastic bag, but then frowns. “Aw, there’s nothing blue in here.”

Keith gives him a glare.

“What? Blue’s my colour.”

“Just pick something.”

Lance takes the grey shirt for himself and throws the godawful red-orange monstrosity at Keith. He can definitely understand why someone would throw that out. Miraculously, the two pairs of jeans in the bag fit both of them pretty well, and Keith matches his vest with a white T-shirt that hangs a bit too loose around his shoulders. The clothes look clean, and Lance doesn’t find any holes anywhere, but they do look worn. Still, it is an amazing fit for both of them, considering Keith found it in the trash.

They can fit their undersuits in the bag Keith stole yesterday, and they put all of their armour plates in their holsters, which Lance transforms into a bracelet, while Keith transforms his into a belt. It goes well with his T-shirt, so it doesn’t stand out too much. Keith rolls his eyes when he sees Lance giving him an approving nod.

Their boots, though, are heavy and definitely stand out stark white against their more demure, dusty clothing.

Lance looks up at all the power lines, but it seems his luck’s run out, because he doesn’t spot a single pair of shoes hanging once. They will have to get those once they crossed the border.

They wind their way back to the water pump, trying not to look suspicious. Worst case scenario, the people in the town are gonna look at their ragged clothes and assume they’re either lost or homeless. Lance hopes the former.

The water sates their thirst and postpones their heatstrokes, and now that they are wearing clothes that don’t put a beacon over their heads, their bodies decide to wake up as if from a long slumber. As if they agree, their guts start emitting a large rumbling sound at the same time.

They go back to the central district and pick a bar. They stare at the menus for some time, and balk at the prices listed beside the meals, and clutch their stomachs as their hunger intensifies. They decide to just try their luck at one of them, and make their way into one of the diners.

Lance approaches the waitress and tries to convince her that he and Keith were mugged and don’t have any money, but as soon as she hears that, she turns away from them and ignores them until they leave.

At another bar, Lance tries to sweet talk the bartender, but then he gets to the no-money part, and the bartender instantly loses interest. When they start bothering the other customers in the bar, they’re thrown out.

Their success rate is at an all time low. They try every bar and diner in the area, but each one turns them away as soon as they understand that they can’t pay for their meal. Although, one clerk at a minor convenience store does offer his phone for a phone call, but Lance doesn’t know who to call, nor what good it would do. Anyone he could call couldn’t help him while he was on this side of the border.

Finally, they pick one of the last bars to try out. They make it inside and stand hesitatingly at the entrance, looking at the crowd and watching them sit in their groups, some sneaking glances their way upon their entrance. Lance takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and wishes for luck, and then makes to beg another bartender, but Keith holds out a hand before Lance can step forward.

“I’ll get us some food,” Keith says, mysteriously. He gestures vaguely at a nearby booth while he scans the crowd. “Wait here.”

Lance is about to protest, but Keith is already gone, and he is so weak with fatigue and hunger and honestly maybe a little concussion that he just sits and waits.

It has started getting later, and it seems this town only comes alive at night, though not by much. Still, it means more people are out.

Keith was right about fitting in. People don’t seem to look at them as much as they did before.

Keith comes back after a while, with two full trays of the juiciest burgers and fries he’s ever seen, along with a coke and a beer. Lance’s jaw drops, but he closes it quickly before he starts drooling.

“Holy shit,” he says, as he starts stuffing his mouth with fries.

Keith starts on his burger and takes a sip of the coke, handing the beer to Lance.

Lance accepts it graciously. “How the hell did you convince him?” He asks with his mouth full.

Keith chews, swallows and then lifts his hand to show some green crumpled paper pinched between his fingers. “With this.”

Lance looks closer and sees that it’s a 20-dollar bill. He stares. “Where did you get that?”

Keith shrugs, and lifts his other hand, which is holding a worn, brown leather wallet, containing a photo of someone who clearly is not Keith. “From this.” He says, satisfied. “Other side of this bar, we have a few friends from our side of the border. Looked away long enough for me to take it. Was too busy harassing the bartender.” He takes another sip of his coke, and catches Lance’s eye, his smirk vanishing. “What?”

Lance stares at him like he’s seeing him for the first time, dumbfounded and a little speechless. “You— you stole from someone? Are you crazy?”

“I had to do something. Your plan didn’t work, and we’re starving. We can’t warn the Garrison about the war if we’re dead.”

“Someone would’ve caved eventually!”

“We can’t wait for eventually.”

“We can’t do this, we can’t do that. Why are you calling all the shots suddenly?”

“I’m not, I’m just trying to survive.”

“New rule, okay? No more stealing.”

“If you can get us supplies without money, then I won’t have to!”

They both bristle in silence, Keith shoving five fries in his mouth all at once, as if to spite Lance somehow with a mouth stuffed with food.

Lance clenches his arms around himself and refuses to look at Keith, opting instead to glare out into the crowd, as if he’s blaming them for being easy targets for Keith’s weird habit.

The hunger gets to him though. The gnawing feeling in his gut is too demanding to ignore, so he slowly goes back to eating his food, picking a fry or two and chewing them one bite at a time.

After a while, he looks up at Keith, who is pushing some of his fries back and forth with a finger. “Did you use to do this as like a hobby or are you just a prodigy in everything?” He asks.

“I’ve done it a few times.”

 Lance scoffs. “Who would have thought the star pilot of our generation could stoop as low as petty theft.”

“Does it really surprise you that much?”

Lance pretends to think about it, then digs into his burger. “Nah,” he says with his mouth full. “I knew there was something fishy about you. Nobody’s that perfect.”

It was Keith’s turn to scoff. “I am not perfect.”

“Clearly.”

Keith gives him a look.

“Where the hell did you learn to pickpocket, anyway?”

Keith looks up at him from under his eyelids, considering him. He’s probably wondering if Lance is gonna judge him for the answer, which is a fair assumption. “Got mixed with the wrong crowd when I was younger,” he decides to say.

Lance looks at him sideways, leaning back. “Like... a gang?”

“Not a gang,” Keith says, sourly. “Just some kids who liked to stir trouble. Petty theft, vandalising, trespassing… Didn’t spend any time in juvie since it was my first offence. That and… Shiro had just enrolled me in the Galaxy Garrison. Pulled some strings. The Sheriff let me go on a warning. I never did it again.”

“Of course you would have that kind of luck.”

“It wasn’t luck,” Keith says, fiercely. “That was all Shiro.” Then, the look on his face softens, turning quieter. “I owe him everything.”

The vulnerable look Keith is wearing is making Lance uncomfortable, so he goes back to eating his food and doesn’t ask him anything else.

They eat the last of their meal, and then talk about supplies. If coming to the town took a day, then that means they’re still a week away from the border if they continue on foot.

“What we need is a map,” Lance says at one point.

“Maps cost money, too, genius.”

“We still have twenty dollars.”

“Twenty dollars isn’t gonna get us to the border.”

“It will, if we have a map.”

Keith’s eyes grow sharp, starting to look at Lance like he isn’t sure there really is a brain in his head. “And I assume we spend the remaining 18 dollars on a teleportation portal.”

Lance’s mouth flattens into a thin line. “A map doesn’t cost two dollars.” He mutters.

“Neither does a car,” Keith says, as he eats the last of his fries. “You want to warn the Garrison about the war? Then we gotta do it. Fast.”

“Alright, smart guy, what do you suggest?”

Keith looks sideways, back into the crowd, then looks at Lance through the corner of his eye, silent.

“No.” Lance says.

“Lance—”

“Keith, we can’t steal a fucking car.”

“Why not? We’ve gotten this far—“

“It’s only asking for trouble. One of these times you’re gonna steal from the wrong guy and then we’ll have more to worry about than getting back to Voltron.”

“We won’t make it on foot. We don’t have enough supplies, which also cost money, by the way. It was a miracle we even came by the gas station when we did. Who’s to say there’ll be another one between here and the border?”

“Look, I get it. But there must be another way.”

They’re silent for a while, Lance crossing his arms and feeling the tension between them rising the longer it goes on. Then he says, “Let me try catching us a ride first. Maybe someone is headed for the border and we can hitch a ride.”

Keith looks at him for a long moment, then shrugs and looks away, taking a sip of his coke. “Have a go.”

And so Lance does. Lance scans the crowd before he approaches anyone, and picks out an elderly man with a thick moustache who could look like a lorry driver. He gives him the same spiel about him and Keith getting mugged on their holiday, and that they’ve been walking all day, but need to get back home across the border, and could they hitch a ride with him?

The man responds that he hasn’t left this town in 15 years. When Lance asks some of the other customers, none of them are heading that way, even if they are headed out, nor do they know anyone who is. Lance, in his final attempt, asks the bartender discreetly if this town has any export supply lines, or pit stops. But the bartender gives him a lopsided smile and shrugs, saying he wouldn’t know anything about that. When Lance asks him who would, the bartender, again, shrugs.

Empty-handed and a little bit defeated, Lance goes back to the table. He doesn’t want to look at the smug look Keith is probably giving him.

Keith doesn’t say anything, when Lance sits back at the booth, though Lance expects him to. They sit for a few minutes in a strained silence, playing with the last of their food and sipping the last of their drinks.

“I don’t like it,” Lance says.

“Neither do I,” Keith says.

Lance looks at Keith, not believing him fully, and works his jaw, but he doesn’t have anything else to say. It was his idea to get to the Garrison in the first place. But Lance doesn’t know what else they should do. Wait in the desert for Voltron to happen upon them, and most likely die of dehydration and heatstroke? As Keith said, they weren’t anywhere near the Milky Way. The chances of Voltron coming to get them were about the same as them getting out of here on a flying donkey. Going back to the Galaxy Garrison just seemed the obvious choice. Where else were they supposed to go?

“Fine,” he says finally, but he doesn’t look at Keith when he says it, nor when Keith gets up to strip his next victim.

It costs a little of his pride to give in, but the sooner they get to Voltron, the sooner they can both get back to detesting each other. Really, Lance is starting to think that the worst part about this whole thing is the fact that they have to depend so much on each other. And he hates to admit it to himself, but if it wasn’t for Keith and his weird pick pocketing habit, he would have probably starved to death in a dark alley by now.

Lance drinks the last of his beer and hopes it all goes to his head quick enough to make him forget today.

Lance sits and waits, twirling his beer glass around its own circumference, and is starting to wonder what’s taking Keith so long, when he hears a commotion near the bar. Lance looks over his shoulder to where he sees Keith standing off against a guy twice his size and twice his age.

The guy is well-built, his arms coated in sleeved tattoos, all the way up to his shaved head. He is clutching Keith’s wrist in a steel grip, so strong that Keith can’t yank it free, though he’s trying. One of the bartenders, a middle-aged guy in an open black dress shirt, tries to placate the man with raised palms, saying something about not causing a fight on this beautiful night, but it is more pleading than it was demanding.

“¿Qué tenemos aquí? Huelo las bolas de una puta rata,” he hears the guy say, and Lance immediately abandons their table, making a beeline for the bar.

“Señores,” Lance cuts in, and steps between Keith and the guy, but the guy still doesn’t let go of Keith’s wrist. “Hablemos de esto, por favor. Estoy seguro de que ha habido un malentendido.”

“¿Malentendido?” he says slowly, not taking his eyes off of Keith, who is staring defiantly back. He probably doesn’t even understand what the guy’s saying. Then the guy starts laughing, looking over his shoulders at his goons who laugh with him. The rest of the bar is silent, everyone looking and holding their breath with what comes next. “¿Malentendido? No. Un malentendido ocurre con la boca. Este ratero es todo manos.”

Then, he shoves Lance away with one hand and slams Keith’s wrist on the counter with the other. Keith grunts in pain, and the bartender starts spewing a bunch of pleas the tattooed guy’s way, but it never reaches him. The guy’s smile has vanished, the mirth he laughed with a second ago, gone. Now, his eyes are sharp, wide and threatening, his nostrils flare as he stares Keith down.

“¿Crees que me podrás robar, ratero? La pena por robo es la pérdida de una mano.” He says, and then reaches for his belt, from where he draws out a long machete.

Lance’s heart stops, and by the look of it, so does Keith’s. Keith fights against his grip more ferociously than before, Lance can hear the flare with which he breathes through his nose in panic. Behind the bar, the bartender/owner has started to raise his voice too, begging the man not to escalate something so minor.

For a split second, he sees Keith reach for the back of his jeans. Then, everything happens at once. Lance doesn’t know what exactly happened. Someone must have twitched, or stepped or thrown a punch, but Lance is suddenly surrounded by a full-scale brawl. Fists were flying left and right, connecting with cheeks, guts and noses. Someone clocks Lance on the side of his head at one point, but the adrenaline kicking in his veins keeps him upright and fighting.

Somehow they end up outside, him, Keith and the guy and his goons. The guy is swinging his machete, and Keith is evading with all he’s got. Lance waits for him to summon his bayard and meet him blade to blade, but suddenly he’s got his hands full with the goons and he can’t make sure that Keith isn’t being cut to pieces, although the distant clanging sound tells him that Keith managed to summon it somehow.

There are three of the goons and one of Lance, but where they learned all of their fighting on the streets, Lance learned in the combat room in space. Fighting Allura one on one was like fighting ten of these guys. Their moves were unrefined, impulsive and unthinking. They threw the punch first and thought after, which Allura always taught him was the fighter's first mistake. Although Lance is half their sizes, he didn’t have to swing them over his shoulder to win. He just has to outsmart them.

And outsmart them, he does. He uses his surroundings to help them fight each other, using their unguided movements against them and against each other. Before long, they are all lying on the ground, knocked out without Lance having thrown a single punch.

When he looks back at Keith, he sees that Keith has gotten hold of a knife from somewhere, and he was now fending off the frenzied attacks of the tattooed guy with desperate swings. Each time, the blade of Keith’s knife meets the swing of the guy’s machete in a terrible discord, and Lance can see that Keith is starting to get overwhelmed by the guy’s unrestrained strength and ferocity.

Without missing a beat, Lance immediately summons his bayard and aims. Just as the guy knocks against Keith’s blade, and swings again, Lance pulls the trigger. He immediately hears someone cry out, and he sees the thug clutching his hand, his knife shot away into the shadows. Keith starts running immediately, and so does Lance.

At first, Lance doesn’t follow Keith. The guy’s thug friends had started to recover and were now trying to catch him, shouting insults along the wind as if that would slow Lance’s speed. But it doesn’t. The wind is with him on this one, and he has just had a hearty dinner, so he runs at a speed just out of their reach. Still, losing them takes way longer than Lance likes, and he’s worried that if they are separated for too long, they’ll lose each other, or worse, the thugs will gang up on one of them without any backup.

Once Lance loses the thugs behind him, he circles back to the direction he saw Keith running in. He slows down near dark alleys and whispers Keith’s name, but he never receives an answer. Then, finally, he runs past another alley, when he catches something in the corner of his eye.

He rounds back to the dark alley, and spots the gleam of a white boot sticking out from behind one of the dumpsters. Behind it sits Keith, panting, his head lowered towards his knees.

“Keith,” Lance hisses, and Keith snaps his head toward him.

That’s when Lance sees that Keith is clutching his arm, blood running between his fingers.

“Fuck! Did he cut you?”

Keith scowls, “What does it look like, genius?”

Lance starts pulling at his hair, not sure what else to do with his hands. “I knew stealing was a bad idea. I told you, Keith, I told you. I told you that guy was bad news, but do you ever listen to me? No!”

“Shut up, they’re gonna hear you.”

“And now you’re all fucking cut up and shit. Ugh, you just had to steal from a fucking gang leader, didn’t you?”

“Will you calm down? It’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad? Keith, you’re literally bleeding out.”

“I’m not bleeding out.”

Lance looks at him impatiently, “I see blood, Keith. Blood. You know what that means? Bleeding out.”

Keith rolls his eyes, but his breath is still heavy.

Lance crouches beside him and takes hold of his arm. “Let me have a look.” Keith flinches away, but Lance just tuts. “Sit still.”

The cut isn’t deep, but even so, Keith’s arm is drenched in lines of blood. None of it got onto his shirt, so they don’t need to wash it, or steal another one. Still, Lance isn’t sure what to do about his cut, since only clutching it isn’t gonna do much to stop the flow, especially not after Keith’s heart racing from running.

Lance looks at it with dismay, and shakes his head again, muttering under his breath about Keith being reckless, and how he should have been more careful, and that’s what he gets for being stranded on Earth with the most hot-headed one from the team.

Keith winces when he tries to wipe away the blood on his arm, so Lance softens his touch around the cut, dabbing carefully at where the skin split, but all he’s doing is just smear it around. Lance doesn’t have anything to stop the blood with. He considers ripping some of his shirt to wrap around, but his shirt isn’t the best material, and he’s worried it will be dirty enough to infect the wound.

Lance exhales sharply in annoyance at his own helplessness. “Really, Keith,” he continues, “I don’t understand why you would ever choose him to steal from. I thought pickpockets were supposed to be smart and yet here you are. You could have stolen from anyone in that place, but nooooo, you had to pick the meanest fucker in the bar of all people.”

Keith leans his head back against the dumpster and closes his eyes. A bead of sweat is starting to form around his brow. “The meanest fucker in the bar,” Keith says, then lifts his lip in a crooked smile, “with a hoverbike.” He lifts his cut arm to show his hand, covered in blood, clutching the black activation keys of a hoverbike.

Lance is speechless for a solid second, staring at the activation keys, and Keith’s tired, but satisfied smile. Then he says, “you’re insane.”

Keith’s smile drops and he rolls his eyes.

“Like actually insane. Do you know that? When we get back to the castle, I am putting you in a medpod asap, since you clearly got something going on up there—”

Suddenly, he hears something. The shift of an object or the scrape of a foot. Lance instantly stops talking, and Keith’s eyes become alert too, wide and searching in the darkness over Lance’s shoulder. They both keep incredibly still, breathing slowly, and listening.

Then Lance hears it again, a scraping sound against the asphalt from behind him, and he immediately whirls around to his feet, his bayard activated and ready to aim and shoot.

On the other side of his blaster is the winding alley cast in shadow by the street lights. It takes a while for Lance’s eyes to see through the darkness and make out a shape. Someone hunched over, wearing rags that drape over their arms and touch the ground in folds. Their arms are raised, and something is clutched in their hand that is shrouded by the gloomy night.

“Muéstrate.” Lance demands the silhouette. He keeps his voice high enough for the shadow to hear him, but not too high to alert the thugs to come back for them.

His grip tightens as the shadow moves and obeys, stepping forward into the dim light of the street lamps on the main road.

It is a haggard, old woman, dressed in old clothes that are filthy with spots of dirt, grease and food stains, and torn at the ends. Her hair must have once been braided neatly, but was now escaping its braids in tufts, the strands dry and frizzy. She is wearing knitted gloves without fingers, and in her hand she clutches something white. Her hands shake, but her legs do not, and while she doesn’t meet Lance’s eye, something tells him that she sees him anyway.

Lance eyes her some more, and gives a brief glance to Keith over his shoulder, who is still bleeding from his wound, unsure what to do. He looks up at Lance like it’s all in his hands now.

Lance looks back to the woman and readjusts his blaster. "¿Qué quieres?" Lance demands, keeping his eyes on her.

The woman does not answer, but under her breath she seems to hum and mutter. Then, she opens her hand and lets the white thing fall to the ground. She uses her old sandal to kick it towards him, gently, giving Lance time to see properly what it is in the faded streetlight.

It lands between them, and Lance sees that it’s a bandage roll, the kind made of cloth to wrap around a wound. Although the woman looks unkempt, the bandage roll is clean.

Lance is so surprised by the thing, that he stares. Keith shifts behind him and Lance looks again at the lady, then the roll and then over his shoulder at Keith, who also looks at the bandage roll, uncertainly.

Lance is unsure what to do. With the night that they have had, there is no telling what this woman would do once Lance turns his back on her. His adrenaline is pumping now, but he still feels queasy from the crash and he really isn’t sure he would be able to handle another fight.

The woman must have seen his hesitation and understood, because she backs away into the shadows again, disappearing into the night.

Lance stands stunned, staring into the darkness with a little bit of a pull in his chest. An image of the rosary from the kiosk creeps unwillingly into his mind and he is reminded again of the beautiful rosary his grandmother used to hold in her hands. At the kiosk he had wondered what had happened to it, but now he remembers. His grandmother gave it to Lance’s mother when they’d moved close to the Galaxy Garrison, once Vero had been accepted.

His mother wasn’t very religious, but she cried when his grandmother gave it to her.

Behind him, Keith shifts again, pulling Lance back from his thoughts. Lance shakes the memory out of his head and immediately goes to pick up the bandage, his blaster disappearing back into his bracelet. He goes back to Keith’s side and takes another look at the wound.

It is still bleeding, but not as heavy as before. Lance thinks that the bandage will help immensely in stopping the blood, especially when he rolls it out and he finds a thick band aid pad to put on the wound itself. Keith hisses again when Lance puts the pad on the open wound, but otherwise doesn’t make a sound as Lance wraps the bandage around his arm.

“This should be enough to stop the blood, but I think it will scar. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” Keith clips out. He’s looking at his shoes with a frown and a wrinkle in his forehead, almost as if he’s annoyed.

Lance’s mouth pulls. “Dizzy? Tired? Like you wanna vomit to your right?”

“I said I’m fine.” Keith says, but his tone sounds more tired than anything else. Lance starts to worry that maybe the blood loss is getting to him after all, but then Keith springs to his feet the second Lance ties the knot on the bandage.

“You’re welcome,” Lance mutters under his breath, this time annoyed. He stands up and sees Keith ready to respond when his eyes catch something over Lance’s shoulder. Lance immediately swings around in front of Keith, his blaster ready, pointing yet again at the shadows, where the woman from before stands half-shrouded again.

The woman keeps her hands up, just like before, and speaks to Lance in a frenzied speech of half-gibberish, half-spanish.

“What is she saying?” Keith asks, tense.

Lance keeps his eyes on the woman, but shakes his head a little, incomprehensibly. “I don’t know, it’s hard to understand. Something about getting out of here as soon as possible.”

The woman speaks up again, this time a bit more clear.

“She says we should head north before dawn,” Lance translates, and then lowers his blaster. Now that she did so much to help them, it feels a bit rude to point a gun at her. “They’ll be looking all over town for us, if they aren’t already.” Lance thanks her in Spanish, but the woman doesn’t respond, or really seem like she heard him.

“Does she know them?” Keith asks, apprehensively.

Lance asks her the question, and the woman looks pensive and sad, her gibberish increasing under her breath. Then she answers with wet eyes.

“She says that they killed her son. They thought he was mooching off his boss, the one who grabbed you, so they shot him. Then, they took her house, as reparations,” Lance can’t help the disgust that seeps into his voice at that word. “She’s been on the streets ever since.”

Lance puts away his blaster now, a sick feeling welling up in his gut. The woman takes that as a sign to lower her hands, and perhaps she sees that they have grown less suspicious of her, because then she also approaches them, slowly.

Keith, behind Lance, tenses up, and Lance can feel him grabbing for his belt, but Lance, oddly, does not feel intimidated at all. There is something about her, again, that reminds him of his grandmother. Perhaps it’s the braids, or perhaps it’s the way she looks at him, as though she remembers him from a time long past, with a certain familiarity that wakes a dormant longing within him.

She reaches up to put a hand on his cheek. Keith grabs Lance’s shoulder in alarm. Lance grips his hand to stop him from moving, or maybe to stop himself, he’s not sure, but then the woman speaks again.

“Te pareces a mi hijo,” she says, softly.

“She says—” Lance opens his mouth, but his tongue is dry. “She says that I remind her of her son.”

Keith’s grip on Lance’s shoulder tightens, then loosens completely. His hand slips out of Lance’s, and Lance hears a soft click.

Lance takes the woman’s hand in both of his and realizes that they are both covered in Keith’s blood. Nonetheless, he wraps his fingers around her dry skin. “Gracias por tu ayuda, abuela. Nos vamos ahora,” he says, quietly.

The woman is looking at their hands now, as if she’s forgotten where they came from. Lance thinks she might be frightened by the blood, and moves to let go of her and walk away, but then she closes her other hand over his and starts muttering under her breath. Lance listens intently, thinking that she is talking to him, but once he makes out what she’s saying, he draws back and feels a shiver run down his spine. She is praying for them.

He quickly thanks her again, and then slips his hands out of hers, but she doesn’t seem affected by it at all, continuing to mutter to her hands wrapped around the air.

“Let’s go,” Lance says and ushers Keith out of the alley.

Keith looks curiously over his shoulder at Lance, then at the woman, who is standing alone now in the alley, bent over her hands while her mouth moves silently. “What did she say?”

Lance swallows, but does not look at Keith. “Nothing. Just gibberish again.”

They decide to leave immediately, under the cover of night, as the woman suggested. They only make a detour back to the water pump to clean their hands from Keith’s blood, but it’s dark, so Lance isn’t sure how much they actually manage to get off.

It takes them a while to find the hoverbike, since they aren’t too keen on going back around the place they were hunted, so they go around and scout the area to determine if it’s safe. It’s well into the night now, but that doesn’t stop a few goers from buying themselves a beer. Still, it seems less crowded than it was before, so Lance and Keith inch forward toward where the bikes are parked. 

But the woman was right. They were waiting for them. They must have realised what Keith stole, because they have set up a perimeter around the area, lots of guys with tattoos prowling around and keeping a look out. Lance and Keith can’t get any closer than a few alleyways away, and there are too many goons and they are too tired to fight them all off.

“Great,” Lance says from behind Keith. He’s still feeling a bit on edge by what the woman said, so his tone comes out harsher than he means it to. “I knew this was a bad idea.”

“How was I supposed to know they’d guard the hoverbike?” Keith snaps back over his shoulder.

“Obviously, they’re gonna notice something’s missing! You were trying to steal from that guy, it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together.”

They look out past the alleyway at the goons for a while, each spinning thoughts. They can’t take the hover bike now, they know that’s what they’re after, and they don’t exactly have another vehicle ready to get out of here.

“We really can’t stay now,” Lance says, dejected. “They’re gonna look for us all over town, and it’s not a very big town. We need to get out of here as soon as possible.”

“Maybe I can help with that.” A voice says behind them.

It takes all of Lance’s strength not to yelp out loud, but it’s a near thing. Instinctively, they grab for each other, Keith clutching at Lance’s shirt and Lance clutching at Keith’s wrist.

They face a man who looks like he could be Shiro’s age, even though he is nothing like him. Where Shiro is bulky and boxy, this guy is lithe and limber.

“Who are you?” Keith demands, the hand that’s not clutching Lance’s shirt making its way to his belt.

The guy glances quickly behind them urgently, towards the thugs, then looks back at them and holds up his hands. He speaks English, but slowly, and with a school accent that’s hard to shake off after 9th grade if you don’t have someone to practice with. “Do not be afraid,” he says, calmly, almost placatingly. “I am Miguel. If you want to make it out of this town safe, come with me. I can help you.”

Keith takes a step forward, but Lance tightens his grip around his wrist to prevent him. “How do we know you aren’t one of them?”

“If I was, I wouldn’t need to hide with you here. Please. We do not have much time.”

Lance looks at Keith, and finds that he's already looking at him, putting his full trust in Lance's decision. The thought makes him nervous, but also... good. Important. He doesn’t move until Lance nods, and then they both follow the man, side by side.

“Why are you helping us?” Lance asks.

“Those cholos have terrorised this place long enough,” he says, with surprising venom. He looks at them over his shoulder, as he says, “but you are too young to get involved. You do not deserve their severe punishment for a foolish mistake.”

Lance has half a mind to tell him that they have faced far worse than a couple of small town street thugs, and anyway, he wasn’t that much older than them, but he refrains, if only because the man has promised to get them out of here. At “the foolish mistake”, though, he gives Keith a pointed look, which Keith promptly ignores.

They are quiet as they move. They might have more men lining the streets to widen the search, so they keep their questions for when they arrive. He takes them out of the central district and down a couple of winding alleys, but Lance has a feeling this is less about speed than about obscurity. The man was taking precautions, and Lance is very grateful for that. Still, he keeps a look out as well, glancing over his shoulder as frequently as they change streets.

They emerge from the end of an alley by way of scaling the wall that cuts them off, helped by a bunch of boxes and crates lined up against it. On the other side is an empty street, the road illuminated ominously with the faded yellow light of the street lamps. The night has fallen heavily, and outside the eye of the lightbulbs, the darkness is impenetrable with the naked eye.

They stay there shrouded in the shadows for a half beat, while Miguel looks from side to side to make sure it is empty. Then he whispers, “Vamanos,” and crosses the street. They make it safely on the other side, all the way to the driveway of a shabby looking house that looks like it needs a healthy new coat of paint.

The light is on inside, but Miguel doesn’t go to the front door. Instead he veers off towards the garage, pushing the sliding door up. He struggles a bit under his slender arms, so Lance and Keith step in to help him lift it all the way up.

He nods to them in thanks and motions to the frankly beat up, rusty blue car inside. “I will take you in this. Tell me, where do you need to go? I can take you as far as 3 hours south, but no further.”

“How about two hours north?” Lance countered, eyeing the car inside, it was a bit dirty, with forgotten papers and empty cups strewn about in the backseat. He looks up to catch Miguel’s eye. “We need to get to the border.”

Miguel looks thoughtful, if a bit hesitant, but not surprised. Eventually, he nods. “Okay.  I can do that.” Lance sees that he looks between him and Keith curiously, probably wondering what they were doing in such a small town and stirring up trouble so far away from home. But he must decide that the answer was not worth the trouble, because he does not ask, instead motioning to the car in front of him.

“Please. Have a seat,” he says, then turns. “I will be back.”

Keith quickly steps in front of him to block his way, “Where are you going?”

Again, Miguel throws his hands up placatingly, though he does not seem afraid. He gazes back at Keith’s mistrustful eyes with a patience that reminds Lance of his Tío . “No te preocupes, do not worry. I only need to say goodbye.” He waits to see if Keith will agree, but Keith says nothing, and Lance supposes he takes that as permission.

He backs away slowly, thrusting his hands up once in reassurance, then turns around to the door on the side of the garage. It must lead to the living room, or somewhere close to it in the house, because Miguel doesn’t actually leave the garage, only opens the door an inch to poke his head through. He says something low in Spanish that Lance can’t quite catch, but he catches a few phrases here and there like, the garage, be back soon, and take care of mom.

At that, Lance’s heart clenches, and he starts to wonder if this is really a good idea. But before he can say anything, or really act on it, Miguel closes the door, locks it and settles in the driver’s seat to start the car.

Keith and Lance take that as their cue to follow, settling both in the backseat with the middle seat between them. Miguel only takes a moment to adjust the mirrors, and then he takes off. He makes it to the highway in less than five minutes, and then they are well on their way. 

His head heavy, Lance rests his forehead against the window and closes his eyes, hoping that the churning in his gut settles sometime soon.

At one point, Miguel asks what their names are, which Lance answers, giving his Spanish name, Leandro, instead of his English name. At that Miguel perks up, looking more closely through the rearview mirror at Lance.

“Leandro,” Miguel says thoughtfully, and takes another look at him through the mirror. “¿Hablas Español?”

“Sí.” Lance answers, but Miguel must have caught the tired tone in his voice, because he doesn’t ask much more after that.

After a while, Lance feels extremely dizzy again and he asks Miguel to stop the car. He just manages to get out to the side of the road before he vomits. He hears Keith saying something, but he can’t make out what, and then he feels a hand on his back. He spits a couple of times, and sees from the corner of his eye that Keith isn’t comforting him, but handing him a bottle of water. Lance takes it, and rinses his mouth, but he still feels dizzy, so he lies on the ground, arms spread wide and hopes that it will pass soon.

Keith, seeing that Lance isn’t getting up anytime soon, sits beside him.

They spend some time there, on the side of the road, under the cool night sky and the stars.

As Lance looks up at the sky on his back, his mouth sour with bile, and his spirit halfway back down the gutter, he stares at how the stars blink above him, as if they’re greeting him. As if they’re trying to tell him something.

“Keith,” he says, his voice more hoarse than he wants it to be, “how did we get here?”

Keith leans back against his hands beside him and looks up too. But he must see something different than Lance. There’s a caution in his gaze that Lance can’t imagine within him. “I don’t know.”

“What do you remember?”

“Voltron,” is Keith’s immediate answer.

“Yeah,” Lance says slowly, “I remember Voltron, too.” He closes his eyes and rubs his forehead.

In his mind's eye, Lance sees the castle hall as he makes his way to the control room. There he meets everyone else, waiting for him to discuss their plan to rescue Allura. He remembers fighting the Galra sentries, he remembers watching Keith take on Zarkon alone in his idiocy. They all made it to the wormhole, trying to escape when—

“Haggar.” Keith says, quietly.

Lance opens his eyes to the dark ocean above him, his head spinning like a dysfunctional merry-go-round. “I remember Haggar, too. How did we get here? Do you think she sent us here? Why would she send us here?”

“To get rid of us?” Lance says at the same time as Keith says “to punish us.”

Lance glances sidelong at Keith, and realises that it isn’t caution he sees in Keith’s eyes as he stares at the stars. It’s longing.

He considers asking if it was really that bad for him here, but then he remembers Keith mentioning the crowd he got involved with and decides it’s a stupid question. Lance’s mother would have killed him if he ever so much as thought about stealing, let alone hang out with a bunch of kids who did. Keith hadn’t mentioned his mother, which made Lance think she probably wasn’t in the picture. But then again, he hadn’t mentioned his father either. And Keith couldn’t have been that alone, could he? He must have had someone, right?

He thought about everyone who had been around him growing up, and he couldn’t imagine being without even one of them. Maybe he would have considered his life a punishment, too.

“Why did you start at the Garrison?” He asks instead.

Keith doesn’t look shocked at the question, but he’s quiet as he stares at his feet. After a while, he shrugs. “Shiro wanted me to. He thought it would be good for me. I don’t know. Shiro’s the only person who’s ever believed in me. I don’t know what he saw, but he must have seen something. And I guess I wanted to believe in that, too.”

Lance turns back to the sky, but he closes his eyes. He has to. Because now he has to erase everything he’s ever thought about Keith. He starts to feel guilty about picking a fight with him. It is an entirely unpleasant feeling, and he hates that it managed to creep itself in there, but there it is. He starts to see Keith’s pickpocketing less as a weird habit and more as a consequence. Most of all, he sees Keith’s talent and dexterity as less inherent, and more earned. And he doesn’t know what to do with that.

Lance blows out an annoyed sigh and mutters, with his eyes squeezed shut, “God, you’re so annoying.”

To his surprise, Keith laughs, quietly, under his breath. It doesn’t sound as humourless to Lance as it may seem to others. “Yeah, well, you don’t exactly have a winning personality.”

Lance glares at him, but Keith just smiles back, satisfied. Lance hates him for that, too.

“I’m fine now,” Lance says. “Let’s go.”

Keith gets to his feet and dusts his pants off, then extends a hand to Lance. Lance looks at it for second, feeling an odd sensation somewhere inside him, and then he takes it, letting Keith pull him up and steady him on his feet. Keith grabs the bottle from the ground and hands it to him, then makes his way back to the car, where Miguel is leaning against the open car door, looking up at the stars.

Lance takes a moment to watch Keith, thinking. Then he decides that he’s done enough thinking, and he swigs some more water to rinse his mouth again.

He assures Miguel that he’s alright, and that they should keep going, and he slides in the back seat with Keith. They don’t talk for all the rest of the drive, opting to each stare out of their respective windows. Lance leans his head against the cool window glass, and cranes his neck to watch all the stars.

The drive is shorter than he anticipated, probably because he dozed off a bit on the way, but suddenly Keith is nudging him, and Lance realizes that Miguel has slowed down.

“We’re here,” Keith says, somewhat grimly, and Lance doesn’t understand why until he spots the border.

The road is lined with military officers, and rows of cars are waiting their turn to show their documents, and get through to the other side. 

Lance and Keith don’t have any documents. They have no way of getting through.

Chapter Text

Of course there’s border control. How could they have been so stupid! Neither of them have any visa or passport, they would never get through.

“Lo siento, niños,” Miguel says, regretfully, “I cannot get you across.”

“It’s alright, Miguel. We should have thought this through.”

They would have to go through some other way.

Miguel says that he can drop them off at a nearby town, only 2 hours away on foot. Lance and Keith agree, if only to book a motel to rest at. The ride was the first time they really stopped moving since last night, and their bodies seem to take the opportunity to make them feel just how exhausted they actually are.

Miguel drops them off at the nearby town, as he promised, and he hands Lance a couple of bills to take with him, before he can leave. Lance tries to refuse, but Miguel insists. “No es mucho, pero mi mente estará tranquila. Por favor, tómalo.”

Lance hesitates only a moment, before accepting the money. He quickly stuffs it into his jean pocket and opens his door. Just before he gets out, he hears Miguel say, “Buena suerte para ti.”

“Gracías, Miguel.”

Lance and Keith stand side by side and watch as Miguel turns the car around, and out of town. Lance shows Keith the money Miguel gave him, who stares for a moment, then nods curtly and looks around.

He spots a motel further down the road. Luckily, it’s the kind with twenty-four hour check in, though, the receptionist, a withered old lady with a cigarette sticking out of her mouth, looks pretty sourly at them for distracting her from her soap opera.

They use a good chunk of what Miguel gave them on a single night with two beds. Luckily, it also seems to be the kind of motel that doesn’t require any ID to check in.

Lance just about snatches the keys out of her hands and leads the way to their room. Check out is at 10 am, she says after them, and Lance throws her a thumbs up over his shoulder, but doesn’t slow down. They don’t say a word to each other, nor do they look much around once they get inside. They lock the door and just make it to their respective beds before they pass out like a light.

Lance must sleep deeply, because he doesn’t remember dreaming. If it wasn’t for Keith shaking him awake, Lance would have slept right through the check out deadline. How he manages to wake up so early and have so much vigour left in his body is beyond Lance. Maybe that’s why he looks so sour all the time.

He tries to swat him away, but Keith just digs his hands under Lance’s back and rolls him over with such force that Lance falls off the bed and lands on the floor with a thunk.

“Agh!” Lance moans, and rubs his back. “You just have to spoil everything, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Keith says, flatly, from somewhere in the room.

Well, there’s no sleeping again after that, so Lance makes sure to curse Keith a thousand times under his breath as he gets up.

Even though they don’t have anything with them, Lance still goes to the bathroom to freshen up. He washes his face and feels a little more human, but he is starting to think that it is their current circumstances making Keith frown so much, because Lance is wearing a matching one when he looks in the mirror.

He has some sagging bags under his eyes to go with the weariness, but otherwise, he doesn’t look much worse for wear. His clothes do look used, but they look like they fit him, even if they don’t suit him. He has never looked fashionably worse in his life, and he starts to regret ever looking in the mirror.

His head wound is starting to heal, though, looking much better after Lance washes away most of the dried blood and dirt from the desert. He tries to rinse his face some more, but the colour of the water is looking questionable, and he doesn’t want to erase all the hard work his products have made until now, so he settles for just the necessary places.

What he really needs is a shower, but he has more important things to worry about before he can even get to one. What he finds that he misses the most is actually his toothbrush. He has never considered how much brushing his teeth contributed to his self-esteem, until he is suddenly cut off from it. He feels like the inside of his mouth is rotting away by the second, and that if he checks now he will definitely see the decay on his teeth. He decides to refrain, if only to keep his sanity intact.

He washes his face again, just to relish in this fresh source while he still can, and he even tries to wash his hair a little bit and get all the dirt out, but without shampoo, it just feels like he’s making mud on his head. Still, he tries for as long as he can, until Keith starts pounding on the door for him to hurry up.

He uses the towel to dry off most of the water, before he finally gets out. Keith doesn’t say anything about his wet hair, but Lance sees, as he leads the way to the reception desk, that Keith’s hair is damp at the nape of his neck, so he must have had the same idea. Maybe this whole thing is getting to Keith more than he is letting on.

Now that he thinks about it, Keith hasn’t really shown any fatigue since they’ve crashed. He’s been a surprisingly stable source of quiet strength and he’s made sure that they survived this far. The thought that Lance is drawing strength from Keith goes against everything Lance believes in, especially since they met. He stopped thinking about it yesterday, but now he can’t stop. It is on his mind all through handing the keys back and finding their way into the central district. Even now, as they walk side by side in the heat, Lance is keenly aware of Keith with the bag on his shoulders, squinting against the harsh light, and the damp tips of his hair drying in the sun.

Abruptly, Lance takes hold of the handle of the bag and tries to drag it off his shoulders. “Give me that. You’ve held onto it long enough.”

Keith gives an undignified and surprised squawk by the unexpected pull. “Wha—?”

“What, I can’t carry the bag ‘cause you stole it? Finders keepers, is that it?”

Keith looks at him, confused, “What? No, I just—”

“Give it!” He manages to wrestle it free of Keith’s shoulders before he can protest, and slips it on his own. He tests the weight, but it’s surprisingly lighter than he expected. He adjusts the straps to make it more comfortable to carry, but in doing so catches Keith’s eye who is giving him a fierce scowl.

“I don’t get you,” he says, sourly, shaking his head.

Lance doesn’t do anything to help him out on that. Maybe then Keith can get a taste of his own medicine.

“How’s your arm?” Lance asks.

Keith looks surprised, which fights with his deepened bewilderment. “Fine,” he says, slowly, as if suspicious.

“Is it infected?”

“No.”

“Did you check?”

“…No.”

Lance stops him in his tracks. “Keith,” he says, “It’s important to check if your wound has festered. If there’s a trace of infection, you need penicillin, antibiotics. And since we’re out here in the middle of nowhere, basically means we’d be fucked.”

“You mean I would be fucked,” Keith mutters, looking away, but he doesn’t protest when Lance starts unravelling his bandage.

“As unfortunate as it is, we’re in this together,” Lance says, sighing. “If you’re fucked, I’m fucked. And vice versa.”

Keith doesn’t respond to that, which Lance is surprised by but not ungrateful for. There are some things he doesn’t want to argue about and keeping wounds clean while they heal is one of them. If Keith’s gets even a whiff of inflammation in there, they’re all fucked, including the whole universe.

Lance isn’t like Keith. He isn’t resourceful enough to manifest antibiotics out of thin air. So he checks on Keith’s wound mostly for himself. If Keith gets sick there’s nothing Lance can do to help him.

The wound is fine, if a bit red. It looks like Keith didn’t wash it clean from the dried blood, which was probably the smartest thing he could’ve done considering their water source this morning. But maybe Lance can fix something up for him, after all. At least as a prevention method.

He gives the loose bandage to Keith who holds it questioningly and watches him take the bag off his shoulders.

“What are you doing?” Keith asks as Lance pulls out a water bottle.

“Cleaning your wound. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this yesterday.”

“Don’t.” Keith grips Lance’s hand before he can open the bottle. “That’s our drinking water. We might need it.”

“Relax, Mullet, we can buy more for breakfast. Besides, didn’t you hear what I just said about being fucked? This is more important. If your wound gets infected no amount of water is gonna save us.”

Keith considers that, then lets go of Lance's hand, letting him work.

Lance takes the bandage and rips some off, deciding that he doesn’t need the whole length to wrap around Keith’s arm. It’s the cleanest thing he’s got, so he pours some water on it then takes Keith’s arm in his hand and starts rubbing the dry blood off.

Lance keeps trying to gauge Keith’s reaction, to see if he has any objections, but he never does, only stares at him and his hands as they work.

“Does it hurt?” Lance asks, after he’s got most of the dried blood. He must feel a little bit of pain.

Keith shakes his head. “Stings a bit. But I’ll be fine.”

“Macho.” Lance teases.

Surprisingly, Keith smiles. It’s like his laugh yesterday in the darkness of the stars, quiet and rough, but not humorless, not derisive. It’s almost… fond. “Not trying to be macho,” he says.

They’re back to Lance being bewildered by Keith, so Lance decides to focus on the wound and cleaning it the best he can.

He inspects it a bit more closely, but doesn’t see any sign of infection, by some miracle.

“Does it feel hot?” Lance asks.

“A little.”

Not a good sign. It might be the heat, but Lance is afraid it’s the first symptom of inflammation. He blows on the wound, hoping to cool it at least a little bit. When he feels around the wound, it doesn’t feel warm against his skin.

“Better?” He asks Keith, looking up to find him glaring at the sun, his cheeks red.

“Uh, yeah, whatever.”

Lance panics at the sight of his red face, feeling his forehead immediately with the palm of his hand. “You running a fever? Why’s your face so red? I thought you said you didn’t feel sick.”

It seems Lance has reached the limit of Keith’s tolerance, because Keith scowls and swats his hands away, crossing his arms. “I don’t. I’m fine. Let’s get moving.”

“Woah woah woah.” Lance quickly grabs the neck of his vest before he can leave. “Not so fast. I haven’t rewrapped it yet. I know it’s hard, but try to hold on to the last shreds of your patience, will you?”

Keith clenches his jaw, but lets Lance work. “Just hurry up.”

Lance clicks his tongue, annoyed, reapplying the band-aid pad on its clean side to the wound and starting to rewrap the bandage. “You know, a little appreciation would be nice.”

Keith closes his eyes, but doesn’t answer immediately. It’s not until Lance has finished wrapping the whole thing and tying a knot that Keith turns, looks deeply into his eyes and says with a soft voice, “Thank you, Lance.”

Lance is so taken aback by this that he splutters for a good whole minute before he manages to stammer out, “s-see? Was that so hard to say?” He yanks the sleeve of Keith’s T-shirt back over the bandage to hide it, and hopes he hides his own fluster too. “You’re all set. Let’s go.”

It’s almost noon, which means that most of the small cafes and breakfast places are open, but they are few and far between.

They pick a place that is a bit more crowded, not wanting to be overheard by inclining parties, and sit at a table in the corner. Keith doesn’t have to do any pickpocketing for this one, with Miguel’s money covering a fine breakfast for the two of them. Lance isn’t the type of person to really know the difference between all the bread types laid out, and neither is Keith, so they just pick something and hope it lasts them through the day.

Although Miguel’s charity feeds them for the morning, it doesn’t leave much to spare. They have enough left for maybe a bus ticket, but Lance doesn’t know any buses that are cheap and cross national borders. They will have to come up with something, or they are gonna have to cause some trouble again, which, after the night Lance had yesterday, he would rather avoid repeating.

They both cross out the border as an option. They might not have any visa or passport, but since they are both members of the Galaxy Garrison, an astro-investigative branch of the military, they should both be in the system. But going through border patrol and expecting everything to be all fine and dandy is to be deeply delusional about the way they split from the Garrison.

They might be able to convince them they’re from the Garrison, but that includes everything that comes with it. Last they saw of Keith, he had broken into a classified facility and kidnapped a high-ranking officer, effectively becoming a criminal. And last they saw of Lance, he had snuck out of bounds in the dead of night to aid and abet the escape of said criminal. If they recognised them at the border, they could charge them with defection, sabotage, conspiracy… They could arrest them right then and there, which would put a serious wrench in their plans to warn them of the war.

“Why are we warning them again?” Keith mutters darkly, chewing on his bread.

Lance throws him an incredulous look. “Uh, because this is our home, and we need to defend it?”

“If we do our job right, we won’t need to.”

“Well, right now we’re not up there to do the job. Now that we’re down here, we have to do what we can. Telling them is defending them.”

Keith doesn’t look convinced. “You know they won’t believe us, right? One of us already tried warning them, and look how they treated him.” Lance doesn’t know who he’s talking about, until he says, “strapped him to a table and knocked him out for tests. That’s the warm welcome we’ll get, too. Is that worth defending?”

“It doesn’t matter what they did or what they will do. If we start thinking about who deserves defending, we operate on the same logic as the Galra. We’re no better than them,” Lance says. “This isn’t just about the Garrison, Keith. It’s about everyone else, too.”

What he doesn’t tell Keith is that he has very selfish reasons for wanting to tell the Garrison. For wanting to give them an inch. In truth, all he cares about is a house 10 minutes from the beach, and the people who live there.

Keith doesn’t give a rebuttal, either, just looks at him oddly, like he’s studying him. Maybe he sees right through all of the bullshit.

“What?” Lance says, a bit defensive.

Keith doesn’t answer immediately, but takes a few seconds longer to stare at him. “You just— You sound like—” he shakes his head, and looks away, a scowl making it onto his face, but it seems more directed at himself than at Lance. “Forget it.”

Lance gives him a look. He has to remind himself that they’re both under really stressful conditions right now, and that fighting isn’t gonna help anything, so he leaves it alone.“Besides, the reason we need the Garrison is because they’re our best chance of getting back out there. Warning them is just a courtesy.”

“How do we even get there in the first place?”

“The nearest city is an hour from the border by car, so most people would travel in a vehicle. I’m thinking, strongest border control is on the road, which makes sense. But, that means there must be weak points. They are both big countries, there’s no way they have control lined all across the border. There’s gotta be a hole somewhere, but the question is where. And when.”

“We could scout the areas and take notes on their shifts. Even if they have patrol, they’ll have changing guard. When they change, there’ll be a window.”

“Scouting first,” Lance considers, finding himself nodding along. “Good idea.”

“Wow,” Keith says, with a crooked grin, “I never thought I’d hear you say that.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it!” Lance says indignantly, taking a big bite out of his food so that he doesn’t have to look at Keith.

They finish their breakfast and decide to go scouting immediately. Before that, Lance finally buys two copies of a map to pinpoint their location exactly, one with an overview of the town they’re in, and another that includes an overview of the town across the border.

He was right when he had first landed, guided only by clues in the newspaper, that once they cross the border, they could make it to the Garrison, but he was wrong about how long it would take. The town they’re in isn’t in the same area as the Garrison, nor is it even in the same vicinity. Once they get across the border, they would most likely, granted they manage to find some sort of transport, land in a town an hour from the border, but that town itself is a 4 hour drive away, and crosses a state border.

It would be a pain in the neck to find anyone to hitch-hike with across states. They might have to rely on cargo trucks as the safer option. Lorry drivers are less likely to be up to no good, not wanting to jeopardise their job or the cargo they transport. After last night, Lance isn’t willing to put himself or Keith any kind of danger, again, no matter how desperate they are. It simply isn’t worth it.

Miguel mentioned that the border was only 2 hours away on foot, but that’s if they follow the road. Lance decides to take a detour, using his map to carve out a path through the forest nearby. He finds out that a river separates him and Keith from the other side, and he sends a teasing grin Keith’s way when he discovers this, saying, “you remember your loafers?”

“Won’t need them.”

“Tch, show off.”

They won’t be going through the river though, as it is the only thing separating the two cities from each other, and therefore may contain the strongest control. They would have to go around, and when Lance looks closer, he sees mountains to the west of the city. That’s where they’ll have the biggest chance of finding a weak spot, even if it lies in the middle of nowhere. It seems the border from the mountains is the midway point between the headquarters for customs and the next city over, so if they planned to walk the whole way, they would have to be prepared to walk for long.

Lance is optimistic about their chances of surviving another trek through the desert, because this time they’re in better shape. They’ve had a restful sleep and they have enough money left for a hearty dinner, maybe even a few days more at the motel, if necessary (which Lance hopes it won’t be). The big question for them though, is if they can sneak past the border, if the weak point that they are reliant on even exists in the first place.

It takes them 2 hours to walk to the mountains, and another hour to get close to the border. The hike is hard and treacherous, as these plains haven’t been made for a hiking trail. Several times, Lance almost slips and is doomed to roll down the mountain to his demise if it isn’t for Keith saving him each time. Keith is a bit more dextrous and nimble as he climbs, which annoys Lance so much that he snaps at Keith the next time he almost slips and Keith offers his hand.

“I don’t need your help!”

Keith looks taken aback by his tone, and it seems for a moment that he wants to retort something just as sour back, but then he schools his scowl, and says in an even tone, “I know. But it’s easier if we help each other.”

His words sting, but not because they hurt his pride. They sting because he didn’t expect Keith to acknowledge his capability. He can see that when Keith says, ‘I know’ he means it, and that he equally means it when he says it will be easier for them both if they help each other. His words sting, because they contain in them something that Lance has wanted ever since he came to Voltron. Acknowledgment.

They also sting, because he hates that his strong desire for affirmation feeds into his worst habits. He felt guilty yesterday for starting a fight with Keith over nothing, but here he is again, spitting his words out with venom made to hurt.

He doesn’t want to be that guy anymore, but he doesn’t know how to be anyone else.

He eyes the hand Keith has held out and feels himself struggling to decide what to do. The answer obviously lies in moving on from who he was —  the envious, the brash, the insecure, the runner-up — but who else is he striving to be? His first thought is Shiro, the guy who has been his hero ever since he started at the Garrison, and he saw Shiro’s demonstration of piloting an aircraft. But the image doesn’t fit exactly with what he’s been through here.

He can’t ask himself here what Shiro would do, because Lance has done things and probably will continue to do things that Shiro absolutely would not do, even if it meant for his own survival. Lance tried his way, and he failed, seeing success in Keith’s way of doing things. But asking himself what Keith would do doesn’t work either, because Keith is too impulsive to see further than the tip of his nose. He’s been the cause of most of their troubles, even if they helped them survive.

No, it won’t do to think of either of them, because neither of them can help Lance in finding who he wants to be. He has to find that within himself. And even though he has no idea how to do that, he thinks he’s pretty sure the start lies in taking Keith’s hand.

Keith’s right of course, and Lance hates that he’s right. They travel across the mountain plains much easier, now that they use each other for balance. Even Keith moves much swifter and fluidly than he did before, which is the only thing that makes Lance feel better about this. He’s glad that Keith is walking in front of him, leading the tricky path, so that he can’t see the mortified look on Lance’s face. He’s even gladder that no one from the team is here to witness it. They would never let him live it down.

Lance tries to focus on where they are going and placing his steps after Keith’s, instead of how Keith’s hand feels like a cool relief against his own, especially in the blazing heat. They come across a small creek that Keith skips over, but he never releases Lance’s hand, only turns around and squeezes, to make sure that Lance can use him as a steadying weight for his skip. Lance has to practically shove Keith forward to make sure that he doesn’t see his embarrassment.

They travel like that for a while. There is a patch at one point with a dense line of trees that shields them from the sun, and they decide that it’s the perfect spot to take a break.

Keith lets go of Lance’s hand to open the backpack and take out two water bottles, while Lance takes that moment to reconsult the map. He accepts the water bottle Keith gives him with an absent thanks.

Keith leans in close to look over his shoulder at the map, curious how long they’ve travelled.

“We’ve come up this whole way here,” Lance says, tracing the path with his finger. He spots an ambiguous shadow close to where his finger stops. “We must be here, under the trees. If we continue north like this, we should come close to the border soon.”

Keith looks pleased and about as proud as Lance feels. Lance hadn’t expected himself to be able to travel this far without feeling dizzy, but maybe vomiting yesterday did a lot to alleviate his symptoms.

They stay under the trees for a little while longer before continuing their trek onwards. Lance asks Keith again about his wound, and Keith tells him again that he feels fine. Lance has half a mind to check it again, just in case, not trusting Keith to know what pain would even feel like, but he ultimately decides against it, worried that the premature exposure will infect it somehow, anyway, and decides to trust Keith to know and tell him, if he feels anything.

Once they start moving again, they get to the border soon after that, just as Lance promised, inching closer and closer to the area marked on the map, but they don’t get far. The border patrol perimeter is much larger than indicated on the map, so they have to duck and scout much further from the border than they thought, watching as soldiers in thick and extensive gear walk back and forth along the perimeter.

Lance grits his teeth against this setback. Of course they would have perimeters around the thing. God forbid people come and go as they please.

Lance is annoyed by this obstacle, but Keith suggests that they take the opportunity while they’re here to gather information about the shift rotations and limitations of the patrol.

But they don’t find much. It took forever for them just to get out here, and soon night falls over them without them having a solid plan for crossing. They realise they might have to scout over several days, which really sets Lance’s worry off.

It doesn’t help that he sleeps terribly at night, always waking up as if from a nightmare, but he can never remember what he dreamed. All he’s left with is a creeping anxiety that won’t leave him the rest of the day. He starts to think that they’ll be stuck here forever, and their funds dwindling with each day that passes is only proof of that.

The second day in this town, they realize they might not make it to the other side any time soon, so they start counting their money. Miguel was charitable, but he was also impulsive. He didn’t give them more than he had available on his person, which means that Lance and Keith could only pay for so much. They decide to sacrifice their beds for proper food and go to the nearest food store to stack up over several days. They also buy a pair of binoculars so that they can watch at a safe distance. They put it all in the backpack, make sure they have enough water and then go to the mountains to scout properly.

They stay there for a few days, taking turns to use the backpack as a pillow at night, while the other takes notes on night shifts. Lance is already starting to miss a proper bed, but the view of the stars from underneath the trees is almost enough to make up for it. They rarely light a fire, and if they do they make sure to stay far away from the border that they won’t get spotted.

The fourth day scouting, and Lance gives Keith his lunch for the day, he realizes that’s the last of the food they brought with them. He starts to panic and recounts what Miguel gave him, to see if he has any change left, but it looks like they’re down to their last day, if they want to have dinner that night as well. When Lance shows Keith, Keith frowns, but doesn’t say much.

They do the same thing as they’ve done over the last few days, scouting patrolling areas, trying and hoping to find something, anything that might help them squeeze through. They make sure to scout several different areas to really cover their bases but their efforts yield much the same results.

They sit there for hours, watching as soldiers march back and forth. The only time they move away from their placement is when they greet their colleagues for their change of shift.

Keith thinks they can make it to the other side if they’re quick and silent, they just need the right moment. Lance doesn’t see any right moment coming along. The most they find is while they’re watching casually, leaning back on their hands and making idle talk, when suddenly one of the guards moves away from the border, and not because of any shift change.

Lance sits up, knocking Keith’s arm. “Hey, look.”

Keith leans forward, eyes locked through the binoculars and attentive. “Where are they going?”

Lance asks for the binoculars squinting his eyes to look through the glass as the guard seems to march to a spot a little ways away, then turning their head, back and forth, searching the bushes and the nearby shrubbery, almost like they’re looking for something. “I think they heard a noise.”

“A noise?”

Lance keeps watching, hoping to see just how far the guard is willing to go to investigate. It turns out to be disappointingly close, but maybe this guard in particular was just too jumpy to want to investigate further.

“We need a distraction,” Keith says, decisively, which is uncannily close to what Lance said just before Keith’s infamous distraction pulled them all together, into the stars.

It’s such an unexpected memory intruding upon him all of a sudden, that Lance doesn’t know what to say in response for a good few minutes. That is, until Keith gets up to move, and Lance has to hastily draw him back.

“Hold on, mullet, we can’t just barrel through there. We don’t have a plan!”

“We don’t need a plan. Come on, this is our chance!”

Lance shakes his head. “Of course we need a plan. We don’t even know where we’ll be going once we get there. By the time we even figure out which way is up, we’ll be spotted!”

“Then what do you suggest?” Keith says, annoyed, but he doesn’t direct his glare at Lance, aiming it instead at the guard, who is making their way back to their post.

His gut takes that opportunity to whine. Loudly. He looks at Keith sheepishly, feeling his face grow warm. “Uh, I suggest dinner. We can sketch a plan while we eat.”

They make it back into town quicker than they came, because now they actually know the way back, and they find a decent spot for a decent meal. Lance uses the last of Miguel’s charity, and starts to really feel the urgency of their situation. He’s tempted to just go with Keith’s plan, make a big distraction, and run blindly for the border, hoping for the best, but the risk is too high. One of them would have to provide the distraction in the first place, meaning there’s a chance that one of them won’t make it. Maybe it only takes one of them to warn the Garrison, but Voltron is still missing two paladins.

Although, maybe that part isn’t even as important as Lance thinks. He looks at Keith while he eats and starts thinking. Even though Keith is impulsive, his instincts are undoubtedly the reason they’ve made it this far in the first place, as much as Lance hates to admit it to himself. He’s resourceful and brave and all around gets shit done, all qualities of an elite soldier. There is no doubt in his mind that Keith is a much greater asset to Voltron than Lance, and though that thought fills him with the age-old contempt, it also just makes him resigned to his fate. If only one of them makes it back to Voltron, it has to be Keith. It’s the only outcome that makes sense.

He doesn’t say any of this out loud to Keith, though, even though he knows he would agree. Once he starts thinking in that direction, he is already dooming himself. No, he can’t afford to start catastrophizing before it’s necessary, but he knows within himself what choice he will make if he’s ever faced with the ultimatum.

Keith catches his stare mid-chew and stops, his eyes turning defensive. “What?”

“You’re eating like you haven’t seen food in days.”

“You said to eat up!”

“With decorum. Maybe even some manners.”

Keith snorts, taking another bite. “Like you’re so prim and proper. I’ve seen you snort milk out of your nose.”

“I was laughing at a joke,” Lance says, indignantly, “I think I’m excused.”

“You were laughing at your own joke. As the only one.”

“Don’t act like I didn’t see you smile, Mullet. You thought it was hilarious, too.”

“Yeah, hilariously stupid.”

“Say what you want,” Lance says slyly, “I know the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That you don’t hate me as much as you’re letting on.” He throws Keith a teasing, knowing smile. “In fact, I think—”

“Wow,” Keith says, his tone sharpening. “That’s a first.”

Lance is taken aback by his sudden shift in mood, feeling his defences rising up automatically. “Hey! Says the guy who shoots first and asks questions later.”

“Better than doing nothing,” Keith says, tearing his eyes away from Lance and back to his food. His shoulders seem strangely tense, and Lance is having another moment of bewilderment. He thinks he’s pretty good at reading people, but Keith is a pure enigma to him, right now.

“What are you talking about? If it wasn’t for me, you’d have bulldozed your way through the border and gotten caught within a second.”

“There’s nothing else we can do,” Keith says, looking sharply at Lance.

“It’s not a good plan,” Lance says bluntly. “It’s too risky.”

“All plans have risks,” Keith responds. “We’re out of money. We have to cross tonight.”

Lance looks away, his mouth pulling. “Yeah. You’re right.”

He hears Keith sighing across from him, and sees when he looks that he doesn’t look as annoyed as he did before. Keith considers him for a while, as if looking him over, but he doesn’t say anything. He looks at him much the same way he did on their first day here. Like he’s measuring him.

“What?” It’s Lance’s turn to be defensive.

Keith narrows his eyes. “Dizzy?”

“No,” Lance says, wondering what Keith is thinking.

Keith stares at him in turn, unhelpful. He gestures with his head, as if he wants Lance to continue. “Then what?”

Lance looks at him for some time, a bit amazed that Keith is able to read him so well. That he is able to read him at all. Lance has always thought of himself to be pretty good at reading people, so he can also tell when they can read him. No one has been able to see through him as much as Keith has been able to since they crashed.

Maybe it’s because they’re constantly together, that no one else is around. Maybe the fact that they’re back on Earth is rubbing the veneer off of Lance’s masks. He can’t tell, but he feels a bit apprehensive around the idea that Keith can see right through him. He never thought that it would be Keith of all people who would be able to see past all of his bravado, right into the very insecure depths of his soul.

Worst of all, it has him thinking something crazy, that maybe he can tell him the truth, and let him in. That he’s scared. He’s scared he won’t make it to the other side, that he will be stuck here forever, on the other side, forever removed both from Voltron and from his family.

The thing is, he wants to cross that border more than anything, because he might get a chance to see them again, even if it’s from afar. He thinks he would be content with that. To watch them at a distance, just to make sure that they’re alright. That they have been and will be okay without him.

The thought stings, but he thinks it’s something that he has to come to terms with. If he can just know that they’re alright, he can go back to Voltron in peace.

But he’s not ready to voice all of that. He’s not ready to accept that Keith might be his friend. So he doesn’t say anything at all.

“Nothing,” he says at last, looking away. “Let’s go. It’s past sunset now.”

Keith frowns, almost as if he’s disappointed, but Lance pretends not to see it, rising from his seat.

He leaves the diner first, feeling a little bit like he’s suffocating in there. He welcomes the cool night air gratefully, breathing in deeply to stop his turning thoughts. After a while, Keith joins him, and they start the trek back to the border together, neither mentioning their conversation.

They traverse the tricky mountain hand in hand again, trying to keep their balance, but it’s even harder to follow in Keith’s footsteps when it’s dark, so they have to travel closely together.

They get to the same grove of trees as they did the first time they came, when all of a sudden, Keith stops in his tracks. He inclines his head to his right, his eyes searching the darkness.

“What is it?” Lance asks, but Keith shushes him. He strains to hear any minuscule sound, but there’s nothing.

Then, Keith drags Lance with him by the hand towards some nearby bushes, crouching low behind them. “There’s someone here,” he whispers. He separates some of the branches from each other to peer in on the other side. Lance does the same, his heart in his throat.

On the other side of the bushes is a man, sitting on the ground with his leg outstretched, and a woman sitting over him, her hands busy tending to him. They’re both illuminated dimly by a little flashlight on the ground beside them. Behind them are two children, one of them crying silently in the darkness. The woman tries to comfort the kid while she’s looking around, shushing them gently. That must have been what Keith heard.

“It’s a family,” Lance whispers, surprised. He glances beside him to where Keith is watching the family curiously.

“He’s injured.” Keith observes, and Lance sees that he’s right. Two crutches lean against a rock near where the man is sitting, and his pant leg has ridden up to reveal white bandage on his ankle.

“Injured...” Lance echoes, his mind racing. The bandage and the crutches imply previous treatment, so he didn’t get it hiking these mountains. “What are they doing hiking these mountains on an injury? In the middle of the night?”

“Probably same reason we’re here.” Keith muses. Then he gets quiet, looking lost in thought.

“Yeah...” Lance says, his thoughts turning as well. He’s on the cusp of a thought, at the very tail ends of one.

When he looks at Keith, he sees that he’s wearing much the same look that Lance must be wearing, a gleam in his eye that Lance recognises in himself as the light of an idea. They look at each other, their thoughts reflected in each other's gazes.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Lance says.

“If you’re thinking that they might know a blindspot, then yes.”

“Why have they stopped here?” Lance wonders.

“One of his crutches is broken,” Keith answers immediately. He points to the man, over the bushes. “Look.” But Lance can’t see anything. Whatever Keith’s pointing at must not have been caught by the light. “If we help them, they might take us with them.” He looks at Lance, and though Lance can’t see well in the darkness, he can feel Keith’s significant look. “We’ll definitely get across. No risks.”

“All plans have risks,” Lance responds, echoing Keith’s words, but he’s feeling his heart lift as he considers the family again. Then he nods. “Let’s do it.”

They both rise out of the bushes at the same time, making their way towards the family but once the woman hears their footsteps, she swivels quickly around, aiming a gun in their direction. Lance hears the soft click of the safety being pulled off.

“¡No te acerques más!” she barks.

“Woah, woah,” Lance says, throwing his hands up. He sees in the corner of his eye that Keith doesn’t follow, scowling and reaching for his belt.

Lance panics, thinking Keith is summoning his bayard, which would escalate this whole thing and ruin the plan, so he takes Keith’s hand again and puts all his strength into holding him back so that Keith has no choice but to stay put. It doesn’t stop the woman from aiming her gun towards Keith, though.

“Hey,” Lance says, his raised hand jerking in front of them to get her attention. It works, because she aims the gun back at him. “We’re not here to hurt you,” Lance says, calmly. “I’m Lance. This is Keith. We saw that you were struggling, and thought you might need some help.”

The woman doesn’t look convinced, eyeing Keith’s scowl. “You thought wrong.”

Lance shakes Keith’s hand in an effort to make him snap out of it, hissing under his breath to put his hands up. Keith does after a moment, raising both his hands without letting go of Lance’s.

“We want to help you,” Lance says again, taking his eyes off Keith and back to the woman. He sees her briefly looking at their clasped hands, and has to fight to push down his embarrassment. Thinking that maybe she’s bothered by it, he lets go of Keith’s hand, keeping his hands raised.

“Why?” the woman demands. The man beneath her looks stressed, beads of sweat forming on his brow, though Lance doesn’t think it’s from their presence. The kids behind her whimper delicately, looking at Lance and Keith with wide eyes.

“I’m sorry if we scared you,” Lance says, more to the kids than anyone, and works his voice to a softer, more delicate tone. He looks back to the woman. “But I think we can help each other.”

“You know there’s a blindspot, don’t you?” Keith says, impatient. Lance curses him internally for his lack of tact.

The woman frowns. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re here on a family camping trip.”

“No one hikes on an injury unless they’re desperate,” Keith responds. “And they don’t bring a gun with them.”

“There’s a lot of coyotes in this forest,” the woman answers, keeping the gun aimed at them.

“That doesn’t explain the injury.”

“He was bitten by one.”

“And I assume you got the crutches from the coyotes, too?”

“We don’t care how you got the injury,” Lance interjects quickly. “But we can help you get to where you need to go, if you take us with you.”

The man shoots his eyebrows up, but the woman seems conflicted, on the verge of deciding, and going from the look on her face, it seems to Lance like she’s deciding against them.

“Look,” Lance says, almost in a panic. They’re their only chance of getting across the border, if he lets them slip through his hands now, he and Keith are doomed. “We’re all desperate and scared. But the truth is none of us can do this alone. You show us where to go, and we’ll get you across.”

The man leans in close to the woman’s ear and says, “mi Vida, deberíamos dejar que nos ayuden. Solo te estoy restrasando y no puedes cargar con todo tu solo.”

Lance feels hope flare up in his chest, but he tries not to look at them too intently to give away that he understands them. He doesn’t want to make the woman more suspicious, so he looks at Keith instead, and involuntarily takes a sharp breath.

While the man tries to convince the woman to let them help and Lance has been sending pleading looks their way, none of them see one of the kids before she's already made her way to stand in front of Keith, peering up at him curiously.

At hearing his sharp intake, the woman snaps her head back to them, her eyes widening at her kid. She snaps at her to get back here, but the kid doesn’t listen. She stares up at Keith as if she’s made a new discovery, tilting her head sweetly and endearing herself to Lance already.

Keith looks uncertainly to Lance, unsure what to do. Lance shrugs back at him, with no way to help him. Keith looks back at the kid and says, nervously, “uh… hello?”

The kid stares at him for a while, then says, “your eyes look funny.”

The woman flattens her mouth, but the man looks embarrassed, covering his face with his hand. “Cariño, eso es grosera decir,” he admonishes quietly.

Keith lifts his eyebrow at her. Lance starts sweating, begging Keith inwardly not to be rude back to the kid. “Yeah? Funny how?”

“Like the sun!”

Keith is so surprised by that answer that he’s shocked into smiling, a little rough chuckle escaping his lips in disbelief. He looks briefly and uncertainly back to Lance. “That’s very… sweet of you to say?”

Lance breathes a sigh of relief, and smiles at the kid. “You know what else is funny looking? His mullet.”

“Yeah!” The kid says, laughing.

“Hey,” Keith says, and touches self-consciously the back of his neck where his fingers tickle his hair, “well, you know what? He has lion-shaped slippers.” He tilts his head back towards Lance, smiling teasingly.

But if Keith hopes the kid will laugh, he is sorely wrong, because instead the kid's eyes sparkle the same way Pidge’s does whenever she looks at the castle’s inner workings.

“What!” Comes from behind the woman. The boy runs over to his sister to join her, starstruck. “I love lions! Can I see? Can I?”

“See, Keith? They appreciate the small joys in life.” Lance looks back down at the kids. “Seems I forgot them at home, kiddos, sorry. Maybe next time, I can give you each a pair, okay?”

“Yay!”

“Mamá,” The boy says, looking back. “I want to go with this mister. Can I? Please?”

Lance tries to look as pleading as the boy does, and hopes that his practised puppy dog eyes work as well on her as they do on his mom. It doesn’t seem to be the case, but the woman does soften at the look her son gives her.

When she looks back at Lance and Keith, her face hardens, but she nods, finally.

Lance is so relieved, he almost faints right then and there.

The man introduces them all to the two of them, naming his wife Rosa, himself Hernando, his son Luca and his daughter, Elena. He thanks them sincerely for helping them, interrupted by his wife, Rosa, who starts delegating tasks like Commander Iverson. Lance thinks she would fit right in at the Garrison. She tells them that one of them can help carry Hernando, since one of his crutches is broken, while the other helps with the bags.

Lance tells Keith that he’ll support the man, because of his arm wound, but Keith disagrees, saying it’s best if Lance takes the bags instead, because he might still have a concussion. Considering the winding and treacherous paths of the mountain plains, and Keith’s superior dexterity in navigating them, he unwillingly yields, handing the backpack back to him as well. If Lance topples over the side of the mountain with Hernando, even accidentally, this whole plan would be for nothing. Technically Keith could still cross and get to the Garrison, assuming Rosa wouldn’t hold a grudge for killing her husband.

Keith takes the brunt of the man’s weight, supporting his one side while the man clutches his crutch on the other. Lance helps Rosa carry their luggage. She also takes Elena by the hand, who is carrying her own little backpack on her shoulders.

They start walking, with Keith and Hernando walking in the front, but before Lance can get far, he feels something briefly touching against his palm. When he looks down, he sees that Luca is walking next to him, wanting to hold his hand. He reminds him a lot of his nephew, Silvio, so much so that Lance is almost surprised when he speaks and he doesn’t sound like him.

“Where are you from, mister?”

“From the stars, niño.”

The kid gasps. “¿Hablas español en las estrellas?”

“Sí,” Lance says, matter of factly.

Lance spends the next several hours answering every question from Luca that he throws at him (‘What do you do in the stars?’ - ‘save beautiful women. And kick evil alien butt,’ ), ranging from his favourite animal to what kind of superpower he’d choose for himself. There are occasional quips and questions from Elena, but mostly she seems to like to listen to them.

Lance is thankful to the kids for breaking the ice. Not only do their enthusiasm seem to bleed into their parents' trust, but it also helps to make him forget his anxiety at what is to come.

Lance isn’t just a passive listener, though. He shoots back as many questions as he gets, which Luca only seems overjoyed by. They spend the next few hours feeding off of each other's energy, their conversation like a never-ending waterfall.

He learns a lot about the family and especially Luca, and through subtextual clues in Luca’s answers and rants, he gets an inkling for why they’re out here in the first place. Luca mentions that his Dad was an officer in the military, but that he had to stop working there because of his injury. He tells him this in connection with a story about career day at his school, where his dad presented his job, and how cool Luca thought he was, and how sad he is now that they have to leave their home.

Lance doesn’t ask why they have to leave, but instead tries to comfort him, talking about his own experience moving far away from everything.

“You had to move away too?” Luca asks, surprised. His eyes are so big, Lance thinks if they get any bigger, he will swallow the whole world with his gaze.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Lance looks towards where Keith is slowly inching forward with Hernando’s arm across his shoulder. He doesn’t even look like he’s having a hard time, pulling his weight. He just does it, so effortlessly.

“Who else is gonna kick evil alien butt?” Lance settles on saying.

“Up in the stars?”

“Yeah. Far, far away from home.” He smiles at the kid, hoping it doesn’t come out as sad as he feels.

“Away from your mom?” Elena pipes up.

“Yeah.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Very much.”

Elena gets very quiet, then buries her face in her mom’s neck. “I would miss my mom, too, if I lived in the stars.”

At that, Rosa smiles softly, caressing her daughter’s hair back. “Would you? Even if I scold you, sometimes?”

Elena nods.

“I’d miss you too, mamá!” Luca cries. He lets go of Lance’s hand and runs ahead to tug at his mom’s, but it’s occupied by the straps of the bag she’s holding.

Lance quickly takes the bag out of her hands to let her hold her son’s hand, and she smiles at him, both surprised and grateful.

“Not as much as me!” Elena says, lifting her face and pouting at her brother.

“I’d miss you even more!” Luca says, grinning.

Lance watches them fight over their mom’s affection at a distance, feeling a weight clenching in his chest the more he does so. His throat starts to burn, and he tries not to stare too long at the way Rosa looks at her kids in adoration.

When Rosa glances his way, he quickly averts his gaze, his eyes finding Keith in front of him again, but this time he’s already looking at him from over his shoulder. Hernando is saying something to him, but Lance can’t hear what. Whatever it is, it makes Keith smile as he looks at him.

Lance feels weird about that, but at the same time he feels himself relax, relieved, and not feeling as alone knowing that Keith is here, that they are in this together. And in the end that is what makes him smile back.

Their road to the border takes longer than when it was just Lance and Keith, mostly because of Hernando’s injury but also because of the kids. Rosa has to take Elena up into her arms at one point, and Lance offers Luca to ride his back. Rosa tries to take the bag back from him when Luca climbs onto his back, but Lance casually declines, saying he needs to train his muscles to be able to lift the tough guy on his shoulders. At the comment, Luca straightens and starts pounding his chest like an ape, making his mother laugh.

It also takes longer because they take another route than when Lance and Keith came scouting. Lance doesn’t recognise the path, and he can’t check where they are in relation to the border, because he can’t reach the map in his back pocket with his hands full. Lance tries not to get too hung up on it, and decides just to trust that they are leading them the right way.

They travel like that for hours. At one point, Lance has to ask Luca to hop down from his back to give him a break, but he switches the bag in one of his hands to the other, so that he can still hold his hand while they walk.

Then, Hernando turns to look over his shoulder at Rosa, pointing up ahead. “Ése es la marca que mencionó Julio.”

Lance automatically looks around to see what he’s pointing at, but his eye doesn’t catch anything that stands out.

Hernando must see his confused look, because then he says, in English, “We are close. The border is past the coming river. Do not worry. It will be empty. Once we cross, we are safe, but we have to be very quiet.”

When they get to the river, there is no control, just as he promised. But crossing the river quietly turns out to be much more difficult than Hernando made it sound. The rush of the water does enough to mask the sound of their wading, but the rocks beneath their feet are slippery, and in the dark, it is hard to see where they need to step to keep their balance. They keep having to catch themselves to avoid slipping in and being washed away with the stream, having to break the surface tension with a great, wet splash.

Lance holds on extra tight to Luca’s hand, not wanting him to be swept away, but Luca actually handles it much better than Lance expects.

The people who struggle the most are unfortunately Keith and Hernando. The stream makes Keith’s balance suffer, and the slippery rocks don’t allow for a good foothold for Hernando’s crutch. They make very little headway, falling behind the group. At one point, Hernando slips, and he loses his crutch, having to watch it get swept away by the stream. Lance quickly snatches it, when it crosses his way.

Rosa makes her way to go back and help them, but before she can, Lance gives Rosa the crutch, telling them to go ahead and that he will go back to help them.

Rosa hesitates, her eyes flicking between Lance and her husband, clearly undecided on the amount of trust she has in him, but she doesn’t hesitate long. Though she doesn’t look happy about it, she agrees, sending a worried look her husband’s way. Once Lance helps them get to the bank safely, he turns around and wades back to Keith and Hernando.

Even though the situation is serious, he can’t resist saying, “Hey, Keith! Bet you wish you had those loafers now!” on his way there.

Keith shoots him a look once he arrives, but Lance just smiles at him. He takes Hernando’s arm on the other side of Keith, and does as Keith tells him, when he instructs them to match their steps.

“We have to act as his crutches to get across faster,” Keith says, over the roar of the stream. “So we have to lift him at the same time. On my count. One, two, three!”

They both lift Hernando as well as they can, enabling him to take a step with his uninjured foot. Then, Keith and Lance synchronise their own footing, following closely behind Hernando. They travel across the stream much quicker and more stable than before, but it also takes a lot of energy and strength. By the time they reach the bank, Lance is exhausted and his arms pound in sympathy.

Rosa receives her husband from them the minute they get to land. She kisses his cheek and hugs him, letting Keith and Lance catch their breaths. When he is released by his wife, Hernando claps them both on their backs while they wheeze, saying, “¡Chicos fuertes!” and sounding as proud as Shiro did when they had formed Voltron the first time. Rosa shares his smile, beaming.

Lance can’t help but feel pleased at his compliment, and when he glances at Keith, he sees that he’s wearing a matching, satisfied smile, looking up at Hernando. It seems his pride needs no translation.

Once they’re ready again, Lance retakes the bags he was holding before, as well as Luca’s hand, who beams up at him with the warmth of a thousand suns. Rosa gives her husband his crutch back, and Keith takes Hernando’s arm around his shoulders again.

Hernando reminds them to be quiet from here on out, saying that while no one is patrolling at the moment, sometimes the officers get paranoid and send extra guards.

They seem to be safe for a while. They make their way through the terrain, avoiding sensitive branches under their feet. Crossing the river must have been the hardest part, because Hernando and Rosa seem to regain some of their vigour and they march confidently forward until they reach another point where Hernando points up and smiles at his wife.

“The clearing is just up ahead. We’re almost there,” he explains, quietly, and Lance feels relief flood through him like a tidal wave. He picks up his pace, wanting so badly for this part to be over, but he doesn’t get far before he hears it and he’s not the only one. They all seem to freeze for a second, as if confirming what they heard.

Footsteps.

They really pick up their pace now, but then Lance hears a loud thump, and he whirls around to see that Luca has fallen over a branch, falling behind. In the same breath, he hears Rosa gasp behind him, and before he lets her panic, Lance turns around, quickly gives her the bags and whispers, “go. I’ll get him.”

Rosa, having just witnessed him carry her husband across a river, doesn’t hesitate, putting her full trust in him. Lance doesn’t take it for granted nor waste any time. He takes off immediately,  hurrying to Luca as quietly and quickly as he can, as the footsteps pick up in their direction.

He just manages to reach him, when the guard comes into view. But he’s in luck, because the guard hasn’t seen them yet. Lance doesn’t try his luck any more than he has to. In one fell swoop, Lance picks Luca up in his arms and rolls behind a big tree trunk just before the guard turns. His hands shake as they cover both his own and Luca’s mouths, masking their quick breathing.

When he looks ahead of him, everyone else has disappeared, but the guard is looking in their direction now. They can’t make a run for it, they’ll get caught! They’re trapped between the border and the guard, and the guard must have heard their scuffle, because Lance can hear his footsteps inching closer and closer to their hiding spot. Lance’s heart pounds so hard, he’s convinced it’s only a second away from leaping straight out of his chest.

He panics, his mind reeling with failed plans and impossible escapes, and just when Lance thinks that it’s all over, closes his eyes to send a prayer to anyone who will listen, a sound comes from the other direction. It sounds like rocks knocking against each other, but Lance doesn’t care what it is, all he cares about is the guard’s footsteps retreating in the opposite direction from where he and Luca are hiding.

Even when Lance doesn’t hear him anymore, he removes his hand from his mouth, but he’s too afraid to take a peek from around the trunk. He starts thinking he has to take the risk, when he hears a rustle of branches.

Lance feels his shoulders tense, his heart picking up speed as he anticipates the guard finding them, pointing the gun at them, possibly shooting them on the spot if he deems them a big enough threat, and he starts thinking that this is it, he’ll never make it to the other side, when Keith rounds the corner of the trunk, holding his finger against his mouth.

Lance breathes a sigh of relief so big, he’s convinced he loses at least three pounds of air. Lance has never been so glad to see him in his life. He releases Luca and indicates to him to stay quiet, and then they both follow Keith out of the grove of trees, quietly and carefully, not wanting to make any sounds that will attract the guard again. When Lance spots the clearing, he picks Luca up and runs. And he doesn’t stop running until he sees Hernando and Rosa waiting for them on the other side, far, far away from the border.

They hold out their arms for Luca, and Lance gives him over happily, feeling the strength in his legs leaving him. They start buckling the second Luca leaves his arms, but luckily Keith is there to catch him.

“You okay?” Keith asks, as he lets him down gently to sit on the ground.

“Just peachy,” Lance wheezes, trying to catch his breath. Keith gives him more water to drink, which Lance takes gratefully.

“Man,” he says, after taking a swig of water. “Infiltrating a Galra base is nothing compared to that.”

Keith laughs, his eyebrow lifting teasingly, “too much excitement for you?”

“More like too many heart palpitations.” Lance looks at him, feeling something raw climb its way up his throat, and he thinks it bleeds into his eyes, because Keith returns his gaze, unflinchingly, watching him. “I thought we weren’t gonna make it. I thought— but you came back.”

Keith’s smile softens into something more quiet, more genuine. He doesn’t look away from all the complicated emotions Lance is sending his way. “You’re fucked, I’m fucked, right?”

It sounds so absurd coming from Keith that he can’t help but laugh. “Right.”

Lance closes his eyes and leans his head back, the feeling inside of him too big, too overwhelming, too raw to expose Keith to any longer. But he feels so vulnerable, so touched by Keith’s unyielding loyalty that his head spins with all the mixed emotions he’s just felt in the last half-hour. Definitely too much excitement for Lance’s poor heart to take. He can’t quite get a grasp on what exactly he feels, or why, just knows that Keith’s presence beside him is grounding in the face of the storm that is going on inside of him. Him being here makes it all a little more bearable.

Their conversation catches the attention of the family again, because they direct their weeping gratitude towards them. “Thank you. You are our heroes. Bless you. Bless you.”

“No thanks needed,” Lance says, and he means it sincerely. Even if they didn’t know the blindspot, Lance wouldn’t have hesitated to swoop in and save the kid from the guard. But Rosa thanks him again and again, stroking Luca’s hair and kissing his face where he’s cradled between his parents. Elena starts crying, too, empathising with her parents relief.

They don’t move again until Lance has regained some strength in his legs. Hernando, drying his tears with his palm, tells them to come with them. There’s a bus ten minutes away that will take them to the nearest city. Keith and Lance agree, because they don’t really have any other plan on how to get there, so they take up their roles again and start walking.

However, it looks like this wasn’t part of the plan. When they come to the area where the bus is waiting, an old rusty thing that looks ten minutes from collapsing into a million different parts, a man, whom Lance presumes to be the bus driver, catches sight of them and immediately frowns at Lance and Keith.

“¿Qué carajo crees que estás haciendo? ¿Traer más carga?” He hisses at Hernando, eyeing Lance suspiciously, probably thinking correctly that he understands him.

Hernando defends them, saying that they’re the only reason they made it in the first place, and that he’s sure two extra people won’t be any trouble at all.

Lance thinks the bus driver is going to refuse them anyway, but he just huffs, annoyed, then points at Hernando. “Si nos pillan por culpa de ellos, te echaré debajo del autobús.”

Hernando doesn’t respond, just nods. The bus driver shakes his head, and leaves them, shouting for everyone to gather close. Everyone who is taking the bus starts huddling close to hear the bus driver. He doesn’t speak very loudly, most likely because they are still too close to the border.

He tells everyone where they are going, the name of the city, how long it will take as well as what they can or cannot expect once they get there. He basically tells everyone that they’re on their own as soon as they arrive, which is fine by Lance. He doubts this guy can get them to the Garrison, anyway. Then he tells everyone to climb in.

Keith and Lance do, climbing into the back with several other people, mostly men and boys, but they sit with the family and talk with the kids through the whole drive.

It doesn’t take long. Lance was right when he estimated the city to be an hour away, so he isn’t surprised when the bus driver announces their arrival, but he is surprised by the dread he starts to feel at the thought of splitting from the family. Hernando’s compliment and Rosa’s warm smile had been great encouragement, but what really made their way into his heart was the kids. Their enthusiastic and surprising resilience in the face of what they just did, has been a grounding tether that Lance didn’t know he needed until he’s faced with its absence.

Keith seems to sense his distress, because he puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes, his way of showing him comfort. It helps, but only until they all get out of the bus and Luca comes to him crying, hugging him around his waist.

“Come and visit me from the stars. Don’t forget about me!”

Lance is so touched, he is utterly speechless. Beside him, Keith is attacked, too, by Elena’s hug, but she is crying more fiercely than her brother. Keith looks at a loss, but he tries to comfort her anyway, looking as touched as Lance feels.

Keith crouches down until he’s at eye-level with her and tells her, “You are strong. Like a lion.” It seems to be the right thing to say, because she stops crying immediately, gazing up at him with her big wet eyes.

Lance turns to Luca and returns his hug. At this moment, he reminds him so much of Silvio that he pretends it’s him for a moment. Maybe then he will know what to say. Something encouraging, like Keith. But all he ends up saying is, “I will never forget you.” And then he can’t say anything more, or he might just start crying, too.

Keith frowns beside him, but Lance can’t tell if it’s worry or disappointment.

Rosa and Hernando step up after paying the bus driver. Rosa gives Lance and Keith each a hug, and Hernando shakes Keith’s hand very vigorously, clapping his shoulder in gratitude. When it’s Lance’s turn, Hernando takes a second longer to look at him, really look at him. He looks so familiar in that moment that Lance’s heart twists inside of him.

“No tengan miedo,” he says softly. He squeezes Lance’s arms the way his tío used to do when he wanted to give him some courage. “Os tenéis el uno al otro. Mientras sigáis juntos, estaréis bien.”

Lance glances at Keith, who waits for him patiently a little ways away, not too far to be unseen, but not to close to overhear. Lance sighs, feeling his heart untwisting itself bit by bit. He turns back to Hernando and manages a smile. “Gracias.”

“No,” Hernando says, sincerely. “No, te estoy agradeciendo.”

When Lance rejoins Keith’s side, Keith immediately uncrosses his arms and looks him over. There’s a wrinkle between his eyes that’s too reminiscent of a worried frown, and that softens the tension in Lance’s chest even more. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” Lance says, unhesitatingly.

Keith doesn’t look especially convinced, but the look on Lance’s face must have proven something, because his frown lets up, and he nods, starting to look around. “I got some more money from Rosa. She insisted,” he adds, when Lance looks questioningly. “I think we have enough in here for a couple days.”

“Alright, let’s go find a motel. I’m ready to crash about ten minutes ago.”

They find a motel not far from where the bus let them off, but it must not have been the only one, because the receptionist declines them, saying they have no places left for more immigrants. She sends them away to look further down the road, and it takes them another 10 minutes just to find a single room.

“The only rooms we have left are double beds,” the receptionist says, a teenager who looks like he’s itching to be anywhere but here. He looks between Keith and Lance as if determining their present state of mind and how far they are willing to pay for such proximity.

Lance waves his concern aside, saying they’ll take anything. When he gets the keys, the receptionist tells them the directions to get to the room, and Lance takes off immediately, Keith following close behind.

Neither of them talk about it until they get there, standing in front of the bed and staring at it as if they don’t know how to use it. Before it can get awkward, Lance quickly gathers the extra pillows into a neat line in the middle of the mattress, and says, “Look it’s fine. As long as we each stay on our side of the bed, it doesn’t have to be weird.”

“It’s not weird,” Keith says, but Lance doesn’t turn around to look and see if he means it.

“Exactly.”

He avoids looking at Keith as he gets ready for bed, which only consists of taking his shoes off. But once he lies down, even though he feels exhausted by everything that happened today, he can’t seem to fall asleep.

His heart is pounding something fierce, and he stares up at the ceiling while his thoughts run a mile a minute. After a while, he sneaks a glance at Keith, even though he told himself that he wouldn’t look at him while they share a bed, and he sees that Keith is just as wide awake as he is.

Keith catches his gaze when he looks, and it seems his thoughts are running just as wild as Lance’s are.

“That was pretty crazy. That we did that,” Keith says, kinda breathless.

Lance starts laughing. He can’t help it, because it finally dawns on him that some of the rawness in him is the disbelief that they did it. They did it. They crossed the border. They’re almost home now.

Keith smiles, a few laughs bubbling out of his mouth, sounding a little bit giddy.

“What are we doing, Mullet?” Lance mutters to the ceiling.

He hears Keith trying to settle his laugh, settling a little deeper into his side of the bed. “Trying to get back home,” he says, echoing Lance's thoughts, as seems to be a habit of his.

Lance closes his eyes, but what he sees isn’t the stars, it’s the lulling rhythm of the waves, crashing onto the shore again and again. “Home,” Lance says, and is completely aware that they are talking about two different places.

Chapter Text

That night, Lance has a nightmare. 

In fact, the whole week leading up to their crossing of the border, Lance slept terribly, waking up in cold sweat almost every night. He could never remember what he dreamed, only left with a sort of vague dread that clung to him throughout the day.

But this time, he remembers.

It starts in a hallway. Lance recognises the design of the walls to be the ones of the castle, and the only sound he hears is his boots echoing ominously against the empty corners. All the light that usually run blue, run a deep, sinister purple. He marches down each hallway, on patrol, trying not to let the whispers of the dark get to him. He starts getting the creeping feeling that he’s being watched, but there’s no one there. He rounds corners and is sure he will catch someone, only to find nothing. He’s not wearing his paladin armour. The arms holding his paladin blaster are coated in the orange sleeves of his Garrison uniform.

The further he walks down the halls, the more dread he feels, the harder it is to see. He feels the sweat down his back the same way he feels eyes on his neck. He knows he’s going to see something, he’s going to walk into something, and the anticipation is killing him, filling his chest with an anxious buzzing that won’t let up.

The walls around him become clouded, as if he’s walking through a fog. He has to squint against it, catching an amorphous shape, a black cloud hanging in front of him. The fog catches in his lungs, and he starts coughing, unable to breathe. Through the mist, he sees glowing purple eyes, and a sinister smile. He tightens his grip on his bayard, knowing he has to react, but his hands don’t respond to him, locked in place. A finger points at him through the fog, and he hears a menacing laughter as he is struck with a powerful shot of purple lightning.

Lance jerks awake, his breath rattling hollow in his chest. He feels the sweat down his back, and looks around for any fog, but there’s nothing. What he sees instead is a ceiling covered in water spots, cracks in some places and fixed with poor handling, and just the simple sight of such a mundane thing has him remembering that they’re on Earth. He’s never seen caulk tape anywhere but here.

He reaches out instinctively, his hand automatically seeking the puzzle cube underneath his bed that hides a picture of him and his tío, but instead, his hand knocks into something softer before it makes it under the bed. Lance jerks it back to himself, startled. 

He’d accidentally knocked his knuckles against the wall of pillows he made yesterday. To make it less awkward for him and Keith, since they’re sharing a double bed, the only type of room left to house them. Because they have just crossed the border, and they arrived in the middle of the night, exhausted.

Lance lets out a breath as he remembers where he is and why. He hasn’t had a nightmare that terrifying since he was a kid, and it takes a while for him to shake the clinging sense of horror and fear. He looks at Keith beside him, to see if his shifting accidentally woke him up. It didn’t. Keith remains sound asleep, his shoulder rising and falling rhythmically, calmly, soothingly. For some reason, Lance stares at him, can’t tear his eyes away, and he finds himself matching his breathing, feeling a little bit more sane after a few breaths.

In the dark, as he watches Keith sleep, he starts thinking about how this is a rare chance for him to see someone as active as Keith in a restive state. He finds out that Keith frowns, even in his sleep, a deep wrinkle forming between his brows, which Lance thinks is sad. He reaches over the pillow wall to try and smooth his brow with his thumb, but it doesn’t work, only makes the frown worse, so Lance doesn’t try again.

He starts wondering what they’re gonna do, once they get to the Garrison. He’s worried that Keith is right, and that the Garrison will dismiss their warning and throw them in jail without helping them. He’s worried his plan won’t work, and he’s doomed them to stay on Earth until the end of time. He’s worried that it’s his fault that they ended up here to begin with.

He sits up abruptly, feeling the dream come back to him with a vengeance, and this time, he accidentally does wake Keith.

“Lance?” Keith says, groggily, his voice rough with sleep that makes Lance feel guilty.

“Sorry,” Lance says, his throat tight. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

Lance must not have controlled the tightness of his tone enough, because Keith says through a sigh, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“Must really be bothering you if you’re letting it affect your beauty sleep.” 

Lance can’t help but smile. It is so like Keith to try to tease him while he’s half-awake. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

There’s a beat of silence, then the rustle of the sheets as Keith sits up. “Well?”

Lance hesitates, but the tender hours before the dawn get to him, seep under his skin and warm his bones, enough for him to let go. “Keith…” he says, seeking the darkness for answers. He sees the purple lightning strike him in his dream, again and again, powerless to stop it. “What if we’re here because of me?”

“What?”

“What if I really messed up? What if I’ve doomed the whole universe because of a mistake?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Look, let’s face it. I’m not as good a pilot as you. And I mean, of course, I’m not that good of a paladin, either. Pidge is the brains and Hunk is the genius and Shiro’s the muscle and--and you’re always doing things like flying into asteroid fields and dodging attacks and cool junk like that. But me? What have I done? What do I do?”

“The Blue Lion chose you, that’s all that matters.”

“Maybe—” Lance says carefully. “Maybe the best thing I can do is just. Take a step back.”

Keith sits up properly now, facing Lance. “What are you talking about?”

“Look, this is serious. We’re in a war with some strong enemies, and I’m just a boy from Cuba, I don’t know anything about war. If we want to have a chance to win, we have to put our best soldiers out there, right? I don’t know if that’s me.”

“Are you kidding?” Keith says, sounding much more awake now than before. “We wouldn’t have made it this far if it wasn’t for you.”

“You mean, if it wasn’t for you.”

“No, I meant what I said. Without you, I probably would have died with only one hand, trying to steal from a thug. You’ve had my back since we got here.”

Lance sighs, feeling the tightness in his chest soften a little bit, but not entirely gone. “I don’t know...”

“Look, don’t worry about what we do once we get back and let’s focus on getting back to Voltron in the first place. That’s where we belong. Both of us. 

“Yeah… okay. Thanks.”

They both settle back down to sleep, and when they’ve found their places, Keith removes the pillow right between their faces and peeks through. “And Lance?” He says with a reassuring smile, his voice still rough with sleep, “Don’t let anything get in the way of your beauty sleep.”

He replaces the pillow back into its rightful place in the wall between them, but not before Lance returns his smile.

Lance closes his eyes and falls asleep with Keith’s reassuring smile lingering behind his eyes, and his own still lingering on his lips.

The next morning they each want to take a shower before they move on. Lance checks the en-suite bathroom, just to take inventory, and is pleasantly surprised in finding a small toothbrush wrapped in brand new plastic wrap, lying ready to use for their new guests.

Lance is so excited about finally having a toothbrush again after so long, that he completely forgets about his rule of not looking at Keith and immediately shows it to him, like he would show a diamond.

Keith just seems amused by his enthusiasm, clearly not seeing the true significance and importance that an instrument of hygiene such as the toothbrush has for Lance. 

After brushing his teeth and showering, Lance feels much more human than he has since they crashed. He wishes he could do something about his dirt streaked clothes, though. Sleeping in the forest for a week made them look even more dishevelled than before.

Lance makes sure to check Keith’s wound before he showers to see if it’s healed alright. The cut wasn’t very deep, but it was deep enough to scar. When Lance unwraps it now, he sees that it has managed to heal into a thin pink line across his arm, just below his shoulder. He tells Keith that he should be safe in washing it, but he still reminds him to be careful. Keith just rolls his eyes, and turns his head away before he tells him not to worry.

It takes them two days to figure out how to get to the Garrison from here. The money they have isn’t enough to make a taxi go cross-state. Lance doesn’t want to risk stealing another vehicle so they start thinking of how to get there clean. Since it’s a town full of immigrants, Lance asks around how to get across states. Most of the other immigrants have arranged something with the family they have here. Others have connections, or aren’t planning on leaving the city they’re in. A few select mention hitchhiking. Lance’s mouth pulls at that one, but it might be their best shot of getting out of here. 

Keith says he knows a spot where cargo trucks gather, a favorite diner of theirs where they can ask around. When Lance takes out the map again, Keith stops him, shaking his head. “I know where to go. Come on.”

“How are we going to convince anyone looking like this?” Lance says, despondently, following Keith. Even though Keith had found their clothes in the trash, a story Lance believed less and less the more the days went on, they had at least been clean. But now they looked like they have been sleeping in a dumpster in the back alley of a sleazy restaurant.

Keith looks around. “Actually, it will help our case. The more dishevelled we look, the higher the chance they’ll take pity on us. We might not even have to pay them.”

“Pay them?”

“Yeah? No one is gonna want to take two dirty guys with them cross-state for free. Would you?”

“Miguel did.”

“There are very few Miguels in this world. We were lucky he found us, but relying on our luck can only take us so far.”

Lance couldn’t disagree with that. But he looks at Keith a bit curiously, from the side of his eye. “How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been here before.”

“Here as in this town or here as in this situation?”

“Both,” Keith says and stares at Lance as if daring him to make fun of him.

But Lance just shrugs and accepts that answer. Given everything that Keith has revealed to him while they’ve been on this journey, it doesn’t exactly surprise him but… it does make something pull in his chest. He can’t imagine what situation he would have to be in to know any of this stuff. It would have to look at lot like what they’re doing here. Well, maybe it was…

They keep some of the money for that, since Keith is sure they won’t do it for free. He says they should save at least $20 to give to the truck driver that takes them to the neighbouring state.

Keith leads him down a few streets until they get to a diner that’s just a mile from the highway. Sure enough, a bunch of trucks are parked in the giant parking lot, idling by while their drivers are inside for a fresh cup of coffee. Keith and Lance go inside and immediately stand out against all the other customers, most of which consist of either lorry drivers, or small trailer-families looking for a cheap breakfast. Lance looks down at his dirty clothes again and tries not to wince.

He takes a step towards one who looks a bit kinder than the others, but Keith stops him, shaking his head. He drags him to a nearby booth and gives Lance one of the menus, looking through it as if he’s just here for a Sunday brunch.

“What are you doing? Shouldn’t we start asking people?”

Keith hushes him, looking out of the corner of his eyes. Then he answers in a low voice, “This isn’t next door. People are a lot less nice about asking for favors and a lot more suspicious.”

Lance thinks of the thug Keith fought in the alley way and wonders in what world he could ever think people over there are nicer than here. 

He looks around and doesn’t see people looking at them much, compared to when they had first landed. To be fair, back then they had stripped halfway naked and had looked like they’d been dragged through the desert by their hands. They’re not much better off for wear this time around, but it helps that they are wearing a lot more clothes.

Lance lets Keith lead the whole operation. The waitress comes by, pours their coffee and takes their order. They sit and scout over possible drivers while they nurse their warm cups. Lance suggests several, but Keith seems to have a specific type in mind, because he keeps shaking his head. They focus on their breakfast when it comes, and then, just as Lance takes the first bite of his omelet, Keith says, “there’s our guy,” while looking out of the window.

Lance follows his gaze mid-chew and sees a short, frumpy-looking guy walking towards the diner, wearing dirty overalls and pulling at the back as if he’s fixing a wedgie. 

“Really? Him?” Lance says, looking between Keith and the man. He follows him with his eyes as the man walks towards the entrance. But instead of opening the door, he walks right into the window pane, stumbling back and blinking in confusion, then continues his way inside as if he hasn’t just caused himself a mild concussion. “Does he even know how to read the road signs?”

“Trust me. He’s our best bet.”

Lance looks sceptically over his shoulder as the guy takes a seat at the counter, hailing the waitress down for a cup of coffee. He turns back to his eggs and shrugs. “Alright, if you say so, man.”

While Lance finishes his food, Keith approaches their mark. He starts casually, sidling up to the counter in the guise of asking for more coffee. The man notices him, but goes back to his coffee, scratching his head. Keith doesn’t look at the man at all until he gets his coffee, then, as he turns around, he slows, as if noticing him for the first time. 

Lance watches in rapt attention as Keith strikes up conversation. He expected Keith to turn on the charm and basically change into a whole other person, but Keith looks much the same as he always does, frowning. He says something that has the man scratching his head, looking unsure. Lance’s heart drops, certain the man is gonna shake his head in apology, maybe even throw profanities, but in the end, he doesn’t do any of that. The man thinks it over, then nods. Keith looks satisfied, then makes his way back to Lance with his still steaming cup of coffee.

Lance looks at him expectantly, but Keith doesn’t look back. He’s patient all until Keith settles into his seat, and then he can’t take it anymore. “Well?” Lance says, expectantly, his mouth full of eggs.

Keith looks at him for a second, dragging out the suspension. Lance is about to tell him off for being dramatic when he finally speaks, “He’s gonna take us across, but not all the way to Platt City. He’s gonna drop us off two towns over, and we’ll have to figure out the rest ourselves.”

Lance sighs in relief, feeling a massive weight lifting off his shoulders. He swallows the last of his breakfast, then watches Keith consideringly. “What did you tell him?”

“The truth.”

“That we fell from the sky?” Lance says with a teasing smile.

“No,” Keith rolls his eyes. “That we’re on our way home.”

Lance purses his lips and nods, but doesn’t say anything else. He feels a pull in his chest, both from anticipation, but also from guilt. Lance might have opened up a little during the tender hours of the night, but he wasn’t entirely honest. He didn’t tell Keith everything.

When Lance finishes his food and Keith finishes his coffee, they meet the driver outside on the parking lot. They each shake his hand and introduce themselves, and he introduces himself as Michael. 

Turns out Keith had struck a deal with him. Not only were they gonna give him 15 dollars, but Keith was going to be driving most of the way, while Michael takes a nap in the back. Apparently he’s been driving for almost 17 hours straight, having taken a wrong route and was risking coming late to his next destination. Keith had spotted his sleepiness a mile away, and had offered to drive for him if they could tag along.

Lance would be freaked out if he wasn’t so amazed by Keith and his resourcefulness. It also makes him a great deal more curious. He keeps sneaking glances at Keith, sitting beside him in the huge truck, while Michael snores away in the hammock behind them, but he doesn’t ask. At least not yet. 

Instead, he talks about anything else. The coffee, the great night of sleep, as well as his newly improved hygiene, really did wonders for replenishing his energy. For once, he doesn’t talk at all about Voltron, the Garrison or how to survive. He talks about anything else. Like, how his favourite food is garlic knots, and how he always wanted to learn how to surf as a kid, but he never got the chance to before he went to the Garrison.

Keith listens to him idly, responding minimally, but humming here and there to show that he is still listening. The only times he reacts is when Lance tries to brag about something and he counters with a snarky response, doubting him. 

“I’m telling you, Mullet! All the way across the street!”

“No way! No pre-teen has that much range.”

“Maybe you didn’t, but I did.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Or when Lance says something so ridiculous that it makes him laugh.

“So, I was standing there, no kidding, in full bunny costume, absolutely drenched, with only my face cut out, in front of the mall cop just trying to look as nonchalant as possible—”

Keith roars laughing at the image, so loud that Lance looks back to see if Michael stirs, but he doesn’t.

Lance didn’t know that Keith’s nose folds in wrinkles when he laughs, until now. He also didn’t know that he can suffer from road-rage, honking at several cars on the highway and going way over the speed-limit for a truck this size, but Lance can’t say that he is much surprised by this particular development. Keith does stop honking at people, though, after Lance threatened to take over, if he honks at one more car.

Mostly, the ride is nice, much nicer than Lance thought it would be. He was prepared for it to be a reprise of the disaster with the hover-bike, but aside from Keith’s occasional road-rage, their trip is all around smooth. And miraculously, Michael doesn’t stir or wake up a single time, snoring all the way across the state border.

Before they know it, they’ve arrived at two towns from Platt city. Michael has slept soundly in the back of his own truck for four hours and become 15 dollars richer by doing so, and Keith and Lance are that much closer to the Garrison.

They’re dropped off at a local gas tank, which is much more central than the gas tank in the desert across the border, only being 20 minutes on foot from the city. They ask around for the nearest bus and train station, and are directed north for half an hour on foot. Once they get there, they ask when the next train to Platt City leaves. They’re told the only transportation they have to Platt City at the moment is a replacement bus, last one on schedule, that is leaving an hour from now. They’re told that the bus stops in several key points along the way to Platt City, same stops as the train it’s replacing. They have enough to cover two tickets, which are cheaper than the train would have been, so they purchase those, and then take a seat in the waiting room until the bus arrives.

Not a lot of people join them inside the bus, which makes sense, since Platt city was mostly inhabited by Garrison personnel and the other military factions, as well as their families. It was an army city more than anything else, but that was all fine by Lance, because it means that they have more privacy between them while on the road than they would have otherwise. They’re only accompanied by an elderly lady on the opposite row, two seats down, a lone guy in camo gear sitting in the very corner of the back seats with his hat over his eyes and his arms crossed, and a group of middle-aged people sitting way in the front, chatting idly. 

No one sits in front of them, and no one sits behind them either, and the motor is loud and puckers enough to mask any conversation they might have. The instant the wheels start turning, Lance glances side-ways at Keith beside him, who’s leaned back in his seat, arms crossed and his eyes closed. But Lance knows that he’s not asleep. 

“So…” he starts, keeping his voice low. “I gotta ask, man.”

Keith sighs, resigned, as if he always expected Lance to say so. He uncrosses his arms and opens his eyes, but he doesn’t look at Lance. “Go ahead.”

“Why do you know so much about hitchhiking?”

“As I said, I’ve done it before.”

“But why?”

Keith hesitates, chewing at the inside of his cheek, but when he finally looks at Lance, he doesn’t hesitate. “My dad died. When I was 10. He was a fireman and… anyway, I was put in the system after that. At first I stayed in state, even got placed with a foster family for a bit, but… they couldn’t keep me. And after that, the home I was assigned to got defunded and they had to close up shop. They thought it was easier to send all the kids next door instead of keeping them in house, I guess, I don’t know, but I didn’t want to leave. I’d always had this plan that once I made it to 18, I’d go back to my dad’s house and just live there by myself. The deed is still in my name. My dad left it for me when he died. So, I hitchhiked back.”

“As a kid!?” Lance says, incredulously.

“Yeah,” Keith says, with a humourless laugh that spears an arrow directly between Lance’s ribs. He sounds so… weary. Like he knows just how absurd it sounds. Nothing at all like the way he laughed in the truck.

“What about your mom?” Lance asks, but he has a feeling he knows the answer.

“Never knew her,” Keith answers, simply. “Left before I could remember. Dad never talked about her or… anything. This knife is all I have left of her.” He reaches back to his belt and pulls out a sheathed knife the size of a dagger. Keith takes hold of the hilt and unsheathes it, exposing a glinting, beautiful knife made of dark material and a purple emblem at the base of the hilt.

It’s first now that Lance realises it’s the same knife he used to defend himself with when he’d fought off that thug he’d stolen from. Every time Keith had reached for his belt, he had reached for his knife, not his bayard. Lance feels stupid for not having noticed it before now.

“Wow,” Lance says. He touches the blade of the dagger with delicate fingers, brushing just lightly before pulling back. “Mysterious…”

“Yeah,” Keith says, and his voice has softened now from its previous dryness. When Lance looks, Keith is peering down at his knife with a faraway look, a slight frown forming between his brows. A frown that looks very much like the one he wears when he’s asleep.

Lance’s stomach twists. He can’t imagine going through what Keith did, and he definitely can’t imagine being as strong as Keith is. Despite going through all of that, he still kept going, still became an amazing pilot whose shoes were too big to fill. 

Keith looks back at Lance from under his eyelashes, his eye turning sharp and guarded again. “Don’t pity me.”

“I don’t pity you,” Lance says, automatically, because he doesn’t. He doesn’t know when he stopped lying to Keith, but he isn’t gonna start now. He keeps his gaze and feels much the way he felt under the yellow lights of their last dinner yesterday. Like Keith was meant for more than this life. Like he’d always been destined for the stars.

“I just—” Lance says, after a beat, realising first now that their shoulders are touching. He leans away to look at Keith better. “It’s unfair that you’ve had this badass knife this whole time. I mean, come on! It’s like you’re trying to look cooler than me.”

Keith’s face clears of his frown, turning blank for a second as he blinks. Then, his lips turn up into a smug smirk. He twirls the knife once in his hand. Show off, Lance thinks. “Oh, I can assure you,” Keith says with a crooked smile. “I am not trying at all.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know I have a very fine collection of hunting rifles. One of them even has my name engraved.”

“Really?” Keith says, almost unbelievingly, but something in his gaze is more curious than teasing.

“Yup,” Lance says, looking sideways at Keith and feeling satisfied. He holds his open palm in front of him and spreads his fingers apart for emphasis. “All five letters, baby.”

“Why a hunting rifle?”

“That’s how I was taught.” Lance mimes the motion of looking through his rifle’s view, squinting one of his eyes shut. His hands pretend to hold the holster and the trigger, and he sweeps the bus with his gaze until he settles it on Keith. “Takes a lot of patience. Not that you’d know.” He says, and mimes pulling the trigger. With sound effects and everything.

Keith places a hand on his chest with a deadpan look and says as monotonically as possible, “Ouch. You got me.”

Lance drops his mime and snickers, throwing an arm around Keith’s shoulders. “Oh, don’t worry, Mullet. I can show you a few tricks. Better you learn patience from me than the hard way.”

“Oh yeah?” Keith says, raising an eyebrow. “And what’s the hard way?”

Lance opens his mouth to respond, when his eyes catch the view outside the window. He sees just the tail ends of a park before the bus turns the corner, and they enter the outskirts of a suburban area. The trees are green and the road is bumpy, and further down the road is the little asian store that sits mostly empty, selling only dry goods and cooled drinks. He often spots the owner sitting idly by the counter, fanning himself lazily while he waits for customers, his most frequent demographic being middle school students looking for an after-school snack.

“Lance?” He hears Keith say distantly, but more pronounced in his ears is the sound of the road beneath them, where the wheels dip into the crevices of the old asphalt. When the bus slows before a great, lion statue belonging to a local temple, Lance is on his feet and by the bus doors in an instant, his body moving with the bumps of the road, anticipating them. 

“Lance, what is it?”

On the other side of the glass, he sees a group of people waiting by the stop, but their gazes glide passively over the bus when they realise it’s not the one they need. They step aside as the doors open, and let Lance step out and sweep past them to the bus sign.

“Lance!” He hears behind him. “This isn’t our stop, what are you doing?”

Lance opens his mouth, but he can’t speak. He stares at the bus sign and feels his heart beating in his throat. He knows this stop, just like he knows the lion statue and the temple and the asian store down the road. He knows because this was how he came home from school when he was younger. 

“I have to go,” he says finally, the words almost getting stuck on the way out.

“What?”

Lance spins around to face Keith, desperation clinging to the spaces between his ribs. “I have to go. Just to see her, once. I—I haven’t seen her in— I need to see her.”

Keith stares at him, looking between him and the bus sign, his expression unreadable. “See who?”

“My mom.” Keith’s eyebrows shoot up, and Lance starts forward before he can say anything, clutching his shoulders, his tongue stumbling over his words. “I-I have to— she never got to say goodbye. I don’t have to tell her where I’m going or where I’ve been and we still have enough money for the trip back and the train. Please, Keith.”

There’s a short silence between them that tightens an old ache in his chest the longer it goes on. He’s sure Keith is going to say no, sure that when he opens his mouth, he’s going to give him all the reasons why this is a bad idea, and Lance prepares a counterargument already, a reason so undeniably good that Keith can’t refuse. 

But he never gets the chance to use it, because then, ever so slightly, Keith nods his head, albeit reluctantly. “Okay,” he says.

Lance was prepared to make a whole speech to sway Keith his way, but when Keith says ‘okay’, Lance’s breath leaves him entirely. He doesn’t hesitate or let Keith change his mind, so he beams at him, and then grabs his hand to haul him down the street.

He positively sprints his way home with Keith in tow, and it doesn’t take long before they round the corner and they arrive at a cozy, light blue, little house situated on a lightly elevated hill. Lance stares up at the way it seems to loom over him, standing at the very end of the little pebbled path that leads to the front patio.

He never thought he’d see this place again. He’d always hoped, after the war, that he’d survive and he’d come bearing flowers, gifts, medals of honour, to prove that it was all worth it, to show them that he hadn’t left them behind for nothing. But here he is, a little early, empty handed, with nothing to show for his absence other than Keith.

They stand shoulder to shoulder as they both stare at the front door, but Keith doesn’t rush him. He lets Lance stand at the end of the pathway as long as he wants to, without saying anything, just a calm, stoic presence beside him.

Lance closes his eyes and breathes out, willing his nerves to settle. He clenches his hands, and when he opens his eyes again, he starts walking up to the front porch.

The steps beneath his feet creak familiarly under his heavy Voltron armour boots, and the wood of the banister against his palm is smooth and worn. He settles in front of the front door, hears the steps creak again under Keith’s boots before he clutches the doorknob.

It turns and opens smoothly, unlocked, just as it always was when Lance was on his way home from school. He doesn’t know why, but his breath catches somewhere in his throat as the door creaks open before him. The door reveals the little hallway that leads to the living room in front of him, the staircase that leads to the bedrooms on the second floor to his left, and to his right, the open door that leads to the kitchen. From the open doorway of the front patio, he sees a corner of the linoleum watermelon cover of the little round table in the middle, the edge of their old refrigerator with its millions of magnets. He hears the clatter of pots and pans, the scuffling of feet, general signs of life.

Lance swallows, his heart beats the speed of a hummingbird's wings. “¿Mamá?” He tries to call out. 

The clattering stops abruptly in the kitchen, and a deep, sweet voice calls back, “¿Leandro?” 

Lance’s mother, Sofia, steps out of the kitchen with a tea towel in her hand, wearing her usual kitchen apron, a white one with little lovebirds stitched red in the bottom corner of the pocket. Her hair is half tied back with a hair clip she bought at the dollar store, but the rest of her curls fall elegantly behind her shoulders, not unlike the way Allura’s hair is tied.

She looks just like she did the last time he’d seen her, apron tied and calm brown eyes coming out of the kitchen, making ready for lunch. She pauses in the doorway of the kitchen when she sees him, squinting against the sunlight pouring in from the front door. “¿Eres tu?” She says, and the sound, her voice, is so familiar, that it burns his throat.

Lance bites back his tears, swallows them down. “Sí, mamá.” He manages to croak out. 

He waits for her reaction, for her anger, for her worry, her tears, but it never comes. Instead, her face lifts into a smile, and all she says is “Ay, mijo, why didn’t you tell me you were coming back so soon?” Her eyes travel to Keith behind him. “And who is your friend?”

Lance has to take a second to blink.

So soon, he repeats in his head. He supposes he has only been gone for a couple months, which isn’t unusual now that he thinks about it. But wouldn’t she have gotten a message from the Garrison, reporting them missing? Unless… they never reported their defection.

He quickly turns to Keith before she catches on to his hesitance.“Uh, this is Keith. From the Garrison,” he says, blinking away his confusion, and thankfully Keith looks as carefully blank as he always does, giving nothing away. “We just thought we’d come by, since we were in town.”

“In town?” His mother says, her eyebrows drawing together. Then her eyes sharpen. “Oi, mijo, you’re not skipping class, are you?” She grabs his ear playfully. “You know what I’ll do to you, if you are.”

“Ay, sí, sí, Mamá. Don’t embarrass me in front of Keith.”

She releases Lance’s ear and smiles at Keith as if she hasn’t just threatened her son. “Nice to meet you, Keith. Welcome! I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“You have?” Keith says, amused, casting a look at Lance while he shakes her hand. Lance feels the blood in his face leave him.

“Sí! Lance talks about you all the time—”

“Not true!” Lance says, shrilly. “Only to insult your mullet!”

“Ay, Leandro, don’t be so rude to your friend!” She turns back to Keith, settling her hands on her hips with the tea towel still in her hand. “You know, Lance almost never brings home his friends from the Garrison. Never has time to visit his poor, lonely mother.”

“You’d think he was hiding something…” Keith says, with a glint in his eye.

Lance’s mother brightens again. “Right? That’s what I always say. I say, Leandro, what are you hiding, huh? Why don’t you want me to meet your friends? Are you embarrassed of me? Of your own mother?”

“Lance,” Keith says, and shakes his head admonishingly. “You own mother.”

Lance crosses his arms and pouts. “I can’t believe you two are ganging up on me.”

Keith and Lance’s mother snicker at each other.

Then, suddenly, they are interrupted by the door to the living room swinging open. Out comes Lance’s youngest older sister, Rachel, with Marco, his youngest older brother right behind her. 

“What is going on out here—” Rachel starts saying, but when she spots Lance, she gasps. “Lancito! Haven’t seen you in forever!” She hugs him and kisses the side of his face, but not out of any love for her sibling, but because she knows it annoys him.

“Ew, stop!” Lance protests, and tries to wriggle out of her grip, but she’s much stronger than she looks. “And I told you not to call me that.”

“And who’s this?” Marco asks, sizing Keith up, looking him up and down.

Keith extends a hand, politely. “I’m Keith.”

Marco pulls his lips down to an exaggerated frown as he stares at Keith’s hand, pretending to weigh him in his mind, but it’s quickly replaced by a fierce, crooked grin. “Nah, bring it in man,” he says and opens his arms, not letting Keith decide anything before he’s pulled him in for a hug. “Don’t you know we’re a hugging family? Lancito, you didn’t tell him we’re a hugging family?”

“Keith isn’t exactly the hugging type,” Lance mutters, and finally manages to force himself out of Rachel’s embrace.

“I don’t mind,” Keith says, as Marco lets him go.

“See? He says he doesn’t mind,” Marco says, with his arm still around Keith’s shoulders. Lance looks pained once again.

Lance’s mother interjects with a click of her tongue, “Marco, leave that poor boy alone. You can’t scare him off before he’s helped me with dinner.”

“Dinner?” Lance asks.

“Sí, you are staying for dinner, right?”

Lance looks uncertainly at Keith, “I don’t know, I mean, we were just passing by--”

Lance’s mother clicks her tongue again, making a cutting gesture with her hands, instantly silencing him. “No hay duda. You are staying for dinner. You think just because you live in that school now, you get out of helping?” Before Lance can respond or argue, she’s already moved on, settling her sharp gaze on Marco.

“Marco, you get groceries. Get the chicken fresh from Guero, not by Paul, that yuma is always trying to take my whole arm. The rest stay with me and help in the kitchen.”

“On it, boss,” Marco says, saluting, then he turns to Keith. “You wanna join? I might even let you ride with Carlita.”

“Who’s Carlita?”

Marco takes them all to the garage, standing before a big structure hidden underneath a white linen sheet. He sweeps the linen off a gorgeous, black, electric hoverbike with a big, dramatic gesture, clearly expecting a grand reaction.

And Keith gives it to him. He starts forward, his eyes roaming over the bike in appreciation and his hand gliding across the smooth, newly waxed exterior. It is smaller than his own red hoverbike that they all ran away from the Garrison with, but it looks sturdier, made for more than one passenger. 

“Wow,” he says, and Lance hears a little bit of awe in his voice. “She is a beauty.”

Marco grins, satisfied with his reaction. “I knew you were one to appreciate a fine Hover. You wanna take her for a spin?”

“Uh…” Keith looks uncertainly at Lance, who can only shrug, even though he feels nervous at the thought that Keith will be alone with Marco’s big mouth.

Keith turns back to Marco and nods. “If you don’t mind.”

Marco clicks his tongue. “If I don’t mind, he says. Ay, Lancito, why haven’t you told him anything about us? Doesn’t he know we’re a gracious family?”

“It must have slipped my mind,” Lance mutters, irritably.

“Ay, I keep telling him to throw it out. Those things are so dangerous, you know?” Sofia says.

“Mamá, no te preocupes, I have a license and all.”

“At least wear a helmet.”

“But helmets kill the vibe, Mamá.”

Keith looks between them and says, “it’s okay. I think I’ll feel safer with helmets on, too.”

Sofia brightens and goes up to Keith to pinch his cheek. “You see? Awww, such a good boy. Everyone can take some lessons from Keith, this is how you listen to your mother.” Her pinch in his cheek leaves a red mark, though curiously it also colors his other cheek, even though she didn’t pinch that one.

Keith looks more pleased with himself than Lance wants to allow, so he quickly says, “Just make sure the helmet’s big enough to cover your mullet, too” 

What Lance failed to foresee was his mother’s fierce scowl. She kicks at him, shepherding him towards the doorway back to the house with an unrelenting glare. “¡Ya, Chico grosero! ¡Me tienes hasta último pelo! ¡Entra ahí! ¡Dalé! ¡Antes de que te dé una patada! I am sorry about him, Keith, I don’t know who raised that boy. Go! You two go. Before I lose my mind.”

“Don’t worry, Mamá,” Lance says from the doorway. “Keith knows I’m just teasing, right, Keith?”

Keith takes a moment, then looks up from beneath his lashes, his mouth pushed up into an almost imperceptible pout. “I keep telling you it’s not a mullet, but you always make fun of me.”

Lance blanches, and both Rachel and Marco start saying ‘ooooo’ under their breaths. Lance’s mother’s face becomes a thundercloud, and she starts sending off a bunch of threats and lectures Lance’s way in rapid Spanish. Lance ducks under her hands and hurries inside, but not before he catches Keith’s triumphant smile. 

Just before he makes it inside, he hears Marco say, “wow, you are diabolical. You should come by more often.”

While Marco and Keith have fun skidding wheels on Carlita, Lance and Rachel help mamá with prepping the food, peeling vegetables, cutting and mincing.

Rachel asks how come he’s visiting and why he’s covered in dirt and Lance has to make up a story about a made-up Garrison assignment involving digging old machine parts out of the dirt like some kind of crazed archaeologist. He also has to explain why he didn’t tell them that he was coming home, so shortly after that he tries to change the subject to talk about Rachel.

He hasn’t seen her in months, but she looks much the same that she did the last time he saw her. She seems a little bit brighter though, and he finds out that it’s because she’s enrolled in a local art program.

“I don’t know if that’s the direction I wanna go, yet,” she says as she cleans her knife. “I was thinking more graphic design related, but this might be good, too. I’m just feeling it out for now, though.”

Lance feels a sting of pride within him. He didn’t know Rachel had ever thought about going the art route, but then, his Garrison schedule hadn’t left much room for them to talk. He asks if he can see any of her drawings and she says absolutely not.

“Come on! They can’t be worse than Marco’s stickman comics.”

“Nothing beats Marco’s stickman comics. Still a no, though.”

They snicker quietly together, as if hiding their joke from Marco himself, even though he’s not there, and Lance basks a while in the silence as they work. 

Then, Rachel turns to him and says, slyly, “Hey… Your friend is kinda cute. He got a girlfriend?”

Lance almost drops his knife in horror. “What! Keith? No no no no no no, haha, no way, no. All Keith has his eye on is knives and hover bikes! Besides, you don’t want Keith, he’s so—”

Rachel peers at her brother oddly, raising an eyebrow. “So what?”

Lance panics. “Broody and emo and competitive and impulsive. He always argues just to be a contrarian and—and, I mean, who sports a mullet these days, am I right?”

Rachel looks amused at him. “I was just joking.”

Lance turns to his mom the instant she comes through the door again, to change the subject. “Is Tío going to join us for dinner?”

“No, Leandro. You know Tío has duties outside town on Wednesdays. Didn’t Vero tell you?”

“Right.” Lance says, quickly. “I forgot for a second.” It must have been a new development while he was gone.

When Marco and Keith come back with the groceries, Lance’s mamá shoos Lance and Keith out of the kitchen so that Lance can show Keith around before they eat. “And change your clothes, too! You’re tracking dirt everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me you fought a bull on the way here.”

Lance shows Keith his childhood bedroom and lets him look around while Lance fishes fresh clothes out of his dresser. When he looks their clothes over again, he cringes, feeling a little guilty for mucking the house down. Keith doesn’t look much better, although his ride with Marco seems to have put new life into him. His eyes gleam as they roam over the posters and stickers on Lance’s walls and his windswept hair makes him look wilder than usual. There’s an energy around him that seems to thrum and take space, making his bedroom feel a little bit smaller.

“Looks like your mullet didn’t make it into the helmet after all,” Lance says by way of giving him his clothes.

Keith snaps his eyes away from the posters and starts combing his hair with his fingers, almost self-consciously. “Is it that bad?”

Lance blinks, because Keith doesn’t scowl or retort in any way, and it throws him off enough that he blurts out. “No. Not at all.” 

There’s a beat where they just look at each other, both unsure what to say and it dawns on Lance that Keith is standing right in the middle of his childhood bedroom. All the niche interests he had as a scrawny kid, all the abandoned projects and short-lived crushes, they all had a life, if brief, in this room, and now they were all laying bare before Keith, the guy who had to get kicked out for Lance to even come close to his dream. The guy who even helped him catalyse it.

“Uh, here.” Lance says, to try and snap out of his thoughts. He hands Keith his new clothes and crosses his arms, feeling slightly exposed. “You can change in the bathroom down the hall.”

Keith glances down at the clothes curiously, then gives Lance a small smile. “Thanks.”

Lance watches him go all the way down the hall into the bathroom before he gets changed himself. He’s feeling slightly out of his own depth. When he imagined coming home after the war with medals and gifts and whatnot, Keith had never been there. Well, not never. He’d shown up a couple times as a bystander, giving him a thumbs up as he was given a golden prize and the key to the city or something. But now that he is here, well… part of the surrealism is that he doesn’t even look out of place. He came through the front door with Marco as if he’s done it a hundred times, putting the grocery bags on the table and smiling at mamá’s warm greeting so casually and nonchalantly, it was as if he’d practiced it. Seeing that, seeing him here, in his childhood bedroom, just makes him feel weird. It’s like a clashing of two worlds. He feels more and more insane the more he runs their conversation over. He forcefully shakes his head, and decides to let it lie before he loses his mind.

He feels better after he’s changed into fresh clothes, though. He feels more like himself than he has since he crashed, and he sweeps an appreciating gaze over his old room, even if he hasn’t been here for a while. There are stickers and toy models that he forgot he had, but remember vaguely loving when he was a kid, like an old toy plane he got for his 12th birthday from Luis. Stickers from friends in class who had extra and passed them around, from events he went to, summer camps he completed… they are all here.

Lance feels an idea strike through him and he instantly opens his closet and looks through all his bric-a-brac lying at the bottom. Then, he moves on to the top of the closet when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for. He looks through his desk drawers, his dresser drawers, his old schoolbag. As a last resort, he drops down flat to look under his bed. He finds a dirty old sock and discarded paper drafts, but he doesn’t find what he’s looking for. He sticks his arm through, hoping to feel it with his hands, but all he feels are dust bunnies tickling his fingertips.

“You looking for something?”

Lance yelps and jolts up to see Keith standing in the doorway, wearing his new clothes. Or rather, Lance’s old clothes. They complement him better than the clothes he found in the trash and were covered in dirt, but Lance has another surreal moment of lightheadedness as he realises that he’s looking at Keith wearing his better-fitting clothes. Keith must have combed through his hair as well, because it doesn’t stand out as wild as it did before.

Lance goes back to looking under his bed. “Yeah,” he says, before he says something stupid. “Your non-existent fashion-sense.”

He hears Keith sigh behind him, and turns his head quickly enough to catch his eye-roll, too. “Good one.” Keith says, deadpan. “These are your clothes. That you picked out.”

Lance grins as he continues to feel under his bed, pushing his hand deeper until he feels the cool wall against his palm. “And thank god I did. Maybe you should take this as an opportunity to learn style.”

“I thought you were teaching me patience.”

“Two birds, one stone.”

“That’s not what that means.”

Lance draws his eyebrows together when his hand comes out empty. “Damn. Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

Lance gives up on searching under his bed and stands up, walking over to his desk to sit on his chair instead. “I used to have this cube thing that would show me a picture of me and my tío every time I solved it. Must have gotten lost in the move.”

Keith seems to be reminded of his snooping before, and goes right back to Lance’s shelves to look through all of his items one by one. 

“You looking to buy?”

Keith gives him a flat look. “Sorry. Forgot my wallet back in space.”

“No worries. I take compliments, too.” Lance teases with a grin and a wink.

Keith chugs a signed baseball at him, but Lance catches it with ease, though he pretends to cool his hands off, shaking them while sucking his teeth. “Compliments are made with words, Keith. Not violence.”

“I didn’t throw it that hard,” Keith scoffs.

“Say that to my shattered palm.” 

Lance leaves him alone for a while, letting him look his fill. He starts passing the baseball between his hands while he watches Keith studying his things, as if they are the most interesting things in the universe. Lance doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand his rapt attention, until he remembers what Keith told him in the bus. 

Keith doesn’t have a childhood bedroom. The closest he gets to one is his Garrison dorm, which is such a depressing thought that Lance doesn’t have the heart to tell him to stop. So, he lets him look, as long as he wants, even though he feels the cruelty in that, too. As if he’s giving him a peek into the life he could have had.

“I’m surprised you survived a trip with Marco on Carlita,” Lance says, if only to shake himself out of his thoughts.

Keith throws him a sideways glance that Lance can’t quite read, but he gets a hint from the way his mouth quirks up into a half-smile. “I got to drive.”

“Then I’m surprised he survived.”

“So was he, I think.” He turns back to the shelf, where a framed picture sits of Lance and his family, taken for Christmas a couple of years ago. “He’s a lot like you,” Keith says.

“What?” Lance squawks, offended. “Marco and I are nothing alike.”

“Maybe not physically,” Keith mutters as he scours the shelves. He finds another picture, this one of Lance with his niece and nephew. “You got more siblings?”

“Yeah, these are my brother Luis’s kids, Silvio and Nadia.”

“You’re an uncle?”

“The best and their favourite, no matter what Marco tells you.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” Keith says, with a smirk, and before Lance can retort he says, “You look a lot like Rachel, though. Are you twins?”

“Nah, everyone thinks so, but there’s less than a year between us. I got the height and she got the age.”

“I bet you’re happy about that.”

“The happiest,” Lance says, raising his chin, as if basking in sunlight.

Silence settles between them again as Lance’s smile wanes and Keith reaches the end of his shelves, his eyes travelling down to the corner next to his desk where his rusty, old and out-of-tune guitar sits steadily collecting dust since sixth grade. Keith brushes his hand nimbly against the strings until they sing faintly under his fingertips.

That’s when he says, “The Garrison didn’t report us.” He turns his head to glance at him over his shoulder, his gaze heavy.

Lance looks away. “Seems like it.”

His mouth pulls, his heart twisting something unpleasant in his chest. He throws the ball between his hands again, mulling over his mother’s reaction again and again. Had the Garrison even noticed? Did they even care?

“Are you gonna tell them?”

Lance catches the ball in his left hand but doesn’t throw it again. His throat seizes at the thought of telling her, watching as the smile she gave him so warmly when he’d come home slip and distort into horror, fear. He knows that if he tells his mother that he is fighting in a millennia old intergalactic war, and has been for the past few months without telling her, that she would never let him out of the house again. She would start barring the windows and install locks on his bedroom door.

He swallows, meeting Keith’s gaze once again. “I—I don’t know. If the Garrison didn’t report us missing, there must have been a reason.”

“Might not be a good reason.” 

“Maybe not, but I don’t want to make them worry for nothing. Not yet.”

Keith looks at him for a long moment before turning back to the guitar, flicking the E-string hard enough that its out-of-tune note resonates all the way back to Lance. 

Lance has a feeling he knows what Keith’s thinking. Probably the same thing he himself is thinking. That they’ll worry anyway. That when they haven’t heard from him for more than a couple of months, they’ll start to notice that something weird is going on, even if the Garrison doesn’t report it. That they’ll probably report him missing themselves, and wait and wait and wait for his improbable return. He’s grateful that Keith doesn’t call him out on this lie; that Lance has some semblance of control, here. That he can somehow delay the inevitable that follows his departure.

Lance turns slowly in his chair to face him, unsure how to say what he says next. “Hey, man,” he starts, swallowing. “I know this wasn’t part of the plan, but what if we stayed here?”

Keith retracts his hand from the guitar and catches his gaze. “Stayed?”

“Just for tonight,” Lance says hurriedly. “I-I haven’t seen them in months and I might not see them again for who knows how long once we get back to Voltron. I just want to take advantage while we’re here. Then we can go. Please?”

“Okay,” Keith answers, after a beat, his voice as soft as the singing guitar strings.

Lance sighs in relief. “Thanks man, I appreciate it. Gotta say, I didn’t expect you to agree so easily.”

Keith doesn’t answer immediately, seeming deep in thought as he looks back at Lance’s curious eyes, but this time Lance has no idea what he’s thinking. It’s frustrating sometimes. Keith seems to be able to read Lance as if he is an open book, but Lance finds Keith to be one big enigma. He can never tell what he’s thinking at all.

Keith turns towards the window, his back to Lance and the guitar. “Yeah, well, don’t get used to it.”

Before Lance can respond, they are called back downstairs to set the table.

Lance’s mom has really gone way beyond what she normally does, but Lance suspects it has more to do with a conspicuous, black-haired visitor of his, than anything else. Still, she made all of Lance’s favourites. 

Once they’ve laid all the food on the table, they all take a seat. Lance and Keith sit on one side, and Rachel and Marco sit on the other, with Lance’s mother heading the table. Lance tells Keith that he has to try his mother’s garlic knots, they’re the best, and on Keith’s other side Lance’s mom insists on filling his plate with more food, even though she’s put enough for someone twice his size. Keith is too polite to say anything though, and just lets her pamper him with food. Lance sees out of the corner of his eye that Rachel whispers something in Marco’s ear, after which they share a look and smile to themselves. Lance sends them a suspicious squint. They never tell him what they’re laughing at.

Sofia asks a lot into Keith, which Keith is a bit baffled by, but he answers all of her questions without hesitation. He seems to have respected Lance's decision not to talk about the war or Voltron or really anything after their delinquent departure, because he gives her answers that are somehow truthful while still leaving incriminating details out. Most impressively of all is that Keith manages to share a lot of stories of Lance, which had all happened out in the great vacuum of space, in the moments between their battle on the frontlines of an intergalactic war, but he tells them in a way that leaves out all the gruesome parts, like how Lance has blown his back open to save an alien he’d known for only a few weeks and had to spend a day in a magical healing pod to recover. 

The stories all make his family laugh, though, which is the most shocking part of this. That Keith has a sense of humour, and a very good one. He can make people laugh. Of course, at the expense of Lance. Lance tries to grumble and mumble in defence of himself, but he can’t get himself to do it wholeheartedly, because the way his mother laughs rings so warmly and solidly in the room, that it echoes within him, and he doesn’t have the heart to pretend to be offended. Not even when Marco and Rachel giggle behind their hands, because it is so familiar, such a wondrously, poignant picture of his family, laughing around the dinner table, that it feels like a gift he’s been wishing for, but never dared hope to receive.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t defend himself. Lance tells as many embarrassing stories about Keith as Keith tells about Lance, until it becomes almost a competition of who can embarrass who the most, and Lance’s mother’s laugh is the score count. Rachel and Marco join on Keith’s side, to which Lance squawks indignantly, but he has enough training from his uncle to tell these stories so vividly, that their participation doesn’t diminish his effort in this game.

Lance thinks he’s won when he tells them that Keith is a terrible singer, and that he caught him once singing to himself having forgotten to turn off his comms.

“Just full-on belting—”

“I was not belting. At most, I was humming.”

“There were words in there, Keith. Humming doesn’t have words. I clearly heard lyrics.”

“Oh yeah?” Keith says, as he is so fond of saying. He leans his head on his fist as he looks at Lance, waiting for his response. “What were they then? Recite them for us.”

“You know, something about the Red—” he caught himself, biting his lip before he could say more. He looks pleadingly at his mother, who looks between them with her fingers curled around her smile. “You believe me, mamá, don’t you?”

“Unfair!” Rachel objects, defending Keith from the other side of the table “She’s your mom!”

Lance ignores her. “Mamá?” He makes sure to blink a few times more than he normally would, tilting his head so that the light catches in his eyes just right.

His mamá looks between him and Keith with extreme amusement, then she looks away with a laugh, gathering her plates. “I believe it’s time for dessert.”

Lance groans while Rachel, Marco and Keith give each other high fives. He sees out of the corner of his eye that Keith is smiling, satisfied, beside him.

Once all the dishes are washed and Marco is preparing the snacks and desserts with his mother, Rachel manages to snag Keith under her arm, saying something about it being her turn to grill him. Lance leaves him to fend for himself, as revenge for him having won their little competition during dinner. He goes outside to their garden and settles somewhere just on the outskirts of their apple tree’s shadow, where he used to fantasise about all the stars he was gonna catch, when he was younger.

He feels the soft grass tickle his neck, and notices how all the stars are exactly where he left them, too. It’s funny, lying here under the soft glow of the moon, Lance feels teleported back to his ten-year-old self, having just come home from the planetarium excursion his school took his class to. He came home and immediately found this spot, and he didn’t leave it until he could name all the stars he’d just learned there.

If he closes his eyes now, he can almost believe that he’s back on that day, that he’s just come back from the planetarium, hearing about the vastness of the universe for the first time. He can almost believe that he doesn’t know what the Galaxy Garrison is, has never heard about it, hasn’t understood that that’s where Vero is, and has been for a long time. He can almost believe that he hasn’t seen every single star that he looks at now, up close; can’t tell anyone who asks what colour they are nor how strong their gravity is.

He does close his eyes. But he doesn’t see the planetarium. All he sees is the Blue Lion’s piercing, yellow eyes, staring at him from beneath an ancient cave.

He’s jolted out of his thoughts when he hears the garden door slide open. Faintly, he catches Rachel’s indignant squawk, probably over which movie they should torment Keith with, before the door slides closed again.

“Ah,” his mother says behind him. She walks barefoot down the patio steps to him with two plates in hand, filled with fruits and desserts. She’s also taken off her apron, retired for the day. ”I see you’ve found your old spot, again.”

Lance cranes his neck to watch her. “What?”

“You used to come out here all the time and look up at the sky for hours. Just gazing at the stars. Should I turn off the lights?”

Tío used to tell everyone to turn off the lights, so they could see the stars better, and he would spend hours retelling the same stories about the constellations, again and again.

Lance sits up, accepting the plate his mother gives him.“Nah, I’ve seen them up close”.

His mother turns to him with a wild look, one he can’t put a word to, but knows is dangerous. More dangerous than anything.

“The Garrison has telescopes, ma,” he says, quickly.

She breathes a sigh of relief, and looks like she wants to hit him for it. “You scared me. I thought you’d breached the atmosphere without telling me.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, because sitting in the warm glow spilling from his childhood home, he can’t bring himself to lie to her.

“I wanted to see if I could spot them without him. If I could remember the stories,” Lance says instead.

“Oh, your Tío,” his mother says, shaking her head admonishingly, though with a smile. “I know what he told you.”

Lance snickers to himself. “It wasn’t all about girls, mamá, don’t worry. My favourite was the phoenix story.”

His mother gives him a look from the corner of her eye that Lance can’t quite decipher. She hums, but doesn’t respond. She takes an apricot in her hand, and starts slicing it. Then she says, “Your friend, Keith, is a nice boy.”

“Yeah,” Lance says and starts playing with the food on his plate, remembering how Keith agreed to stay for the night, so easily. A small smile tugging at his lips. “When he wants to be.”

“He’s very unlike all your other friends.” She hands him a slice of apricot, which he accepts.

“Really? How?”

She starts cutting off another slice, smiling. “He’s quiet.”

“Pfft, Keith’s not quiet, he’s just pretending so you’ll take his side.”

“Or he just likes talking to you.”

“Ah, mamá,” Lance sighs. “Don’t start with that.”

“¿Que? ¿Con qué empezar?”

“Ay, tumba eso, por favor.”

They settle in the silence and listen to the faint symphony of crickets in the cool night air.

“Hey, mamá?” His mother hums. “What happened to Grandma’s rosary?”

His mother turns to him curiously, her brow folding. The knife in her hands pauses, briefly. “Huh?”

“You know, the pink one.”

“You remember that old thing?” She says, and resumes her cutting. This time, she doesn’t offer any slice, taking it for herself and chewing thoughtfully.

Lance shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. I just thought about it the other day, but I don’t remember what happened to it.”

“I gave it to Vero when she moved for her job. She was so excited, but also nervous.” 

“Really? That doesn’t sound like Vero.”

“I know!”

“Why was she nervous?”

“You know, her score for the entrance exam was a cut above a pass. I never cared about that, I said all that mattered was that she was accepted. But then, after a while she started talking about moving back home and I knew that it was because she was afraid of doing something wrong. But I couldn’t let her give up on her dream like that. She had worked so hard, you know? Her work there is helping a lot of people, I couldn’t just let her do that to herself. So, I gave it to her for good luck. And anyway, it didn’t matter in the end what her score was, because she got a promotion a few months later. Isn’t that crazy?”

Lance is stunned for a long moment, unsure what to say to that. Vero never told him that when he’d seen her around the Garrison. She always seemed so sure of herself, like nothing could knock her down.

“Whenever you need it,” his mother tells him, seriously, “tell Vero to give it to you.”

Lance swallows, his mouth dry. “Right.”

He stares at his mamá for a long time and feels suddenly far removed from where he’s sitting beside her, his fists tight with dirt and grass. 

His mamá continues to cut off slices of apricot, and continues to give them to him, even though he has his own unscathed fruit untouched on his plate. He takes it up in his hand and brushes his thumb lightly over its orange-pink skin, feeling its fuzz. Although he sees it there, in his hand, underneath his fingertips, held to the point that he can feel each tiny follicle, he feels strangely detached from it, as if he is in a dream, and the fruit he holds is no more than a figment of his tired mind.

He takes a bite and swallows its juice, recognises its taste, feels it glide down his throat, to his gut, where it settles. Yet still. He feels nothing.

“Mijo,” His mother says, snapping him out of his thoughts. She starts looking worried again. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, of course,” Lance says, putting the apricot back on his plate, a single bite taken out of it. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You seem changed, in some way. Is it that school? Is it too hard on you?” She cups his face gently and looks deeply into his eyes, like she’ll find the answer there somewhere.

He closes his eyes. “No, mamá, it’s not the Garrison.”

“Whatever it is, you know you can tell me. I’ll smite whatever’s upsetting my baby.”

“There’s no need for that. I’m fine, I promise.” He says. He grabs her palm and kisses it, inhales her scent. He savours this moment, puts it somewhere deep inside of him where he will never lose it. “I just missed you, is all.”

She coos and hugs him to her bosom, wrapping her arms tight around him like she used to when he was a kid. And he wishes that Tío was here, so that he could savour him one last time, too.

Eventually they join the rest of them in the living room in watching an ancient classic, Jumanji. Rachel must have won the choice for movie selection, because Marco doesn’t like old movies, and he takes any opportunity he has to come with loud comments under important scenes, just to annoy her. Keith is unfortunately sandwiched between them, and has to take the brunt of their sibling feud, but when they aren’t waging cinematic war against each other, he seems to watch the movie with a quiet politeness that Lance wouldn’t expect of him.

Lance chalks it up to his lack of siblings. He is usually a contrarian, arguing against anything, but it seems only when it comes to Lance. Lance must bring that side out of him somehow, although Lance has no idea what it is he does that makes Keith want to argue just for argument’s sake.

Lance told his mother before they joined the rest for the movie that he and Keith are staying the night. Or rather, his mamá said that it was too late to go back now and that they should just spend the night here, to which Lance didn’t protest, agreeing easily. Once the movie is over, she ushers them quickly up the stairs to get ready for the night, not letting them concern themselves with the dishes.

Keith borrows another pair of his clothes for the night, some workout shorts and a worn old T-shirt that Lance hasn’t worn in years, and changes in the bathroom again while Lance changes in his room and gets his bed ready for sleep. He listens to a quiet conversation between his mother and Rachel in the kitchen, too far away to make out any words, though he seems to catch his name a few times, as well as Keith’s. Lance hopes they aren’t saying anything embarrassing.

It’s not until Lance is done making the bed and Keith comes back into his room that he realises that Keith has to sleep in his room. Of course, he had assumed that, since the idea came up in his head, but he doesn’t fully realise what it means exactly until they are faced with his dingy little single bed.

They stare at it, shoulder to shoulder, awkwardly, until Keith suddenly declares the floor. Lance protests immediately, saying his mom would have his head if she found out he let him sleep on the floor. But both of them refusing the bed means that they both end up on it and they quickly find out that one twin bed made for a 13-year-old boy is not big enough for two young adult men. 

As they struggle to find their place on it, their knees keep knocking against each other.

“Lance, just let me have the floor,” Keith says, after Lance accidentally kicks him. “There’s no room for the both of us.”

“No chance in hell. Either I go or none of us go. And look, there’s plenty of space.” Lance sidles closer to Keith and even clutches at his shirt to keep him from falling off. The sight almost makes Lance laugh, if the whole situation wasn’t so embarrassing.

Keith stares at him, his mouth set in a firm line, and his chin quivering with the effort not to laugh, but then he does and Lance joins him, and they struggle even more with keeping their balance on the small bed.

Once they settle down again, they manage to find the perfect position that keep the both of them teetering just on the edge. They lie perfectly still, clutching each other’s shirts to stay on the bed.

“Hey,” Lance says, drawing the comforter over the both of them. “Thanks, again, for doing this.”

Keith sends him a weird look, a half-smile that is almost mocking. “Two thanks in one day? This is getting weird.”

“I mean it,” Lance insists, looking deeply into Keith’s eyes to make sure he understands. “This means a lot to me, Keith.”

Keith stares back, and his smile wanes. “You really missed them, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did.”

Keith becomes quiet, and the darkness makes it even harder to guess what he’s thinking. Maybe he’s thinking about his own family, the one he doesn’t have. Maybe he’s thinking about what it’s like to miss someone in that way. Maybe he wants to ask, but doesn’t know how, or can’t get himself to do it. 

Lance tightens his grip on Keith’s shirt and is about to open his mouth again, but what comes out isn’t what he had prepared to say.

“You know, sometimes, I would wish we never found Blue. But then I think about how if we never found Blue, I never would have met you and the others and we never would have seen all the amazing things up there. The world is so big. And we make a great team, you know?”

Keith doesn’t take his eyes off of him, the moonlight casting through the window reflecting in his dark eyes. He keeps quiet, like he doesn’t want to interrupt this quiet moment between them.

“Anyway,” Lance says, hastily. “I just wanted you to know that I appreciate it. Really.”

“Don’t mention it,” Keith says, quietly.

Lance closes his eyes. “Goodnight, Mullet.”

A beat. Then, “‘Night.”

Lance has another nightmare that night, but when he wakes from his dream, the first thing he sees through the dark is Keith’s sleeping face. That in itself isn’t enough to completely shake him out of his fear, since waking up to Keith’s face has become a strange new routine for him nowadays, but the observation that Keith is no longer frowning in his sleep is enough to have him pause for a second and catch his breath. He notices then that Keith is clutching Lance’s shirt, holding on for dear life even in his sleep. Most likely to keep himself from falling off. But Lance doesn’t mind at all. 

He stares through the dark at Keith’s resting, peaceful face and feels all of his fear vanish in an instant. Instead, the fear is replaced by something else, something that warms him from just beneath his skin. Something that Lance has no word for, but which feels incredibly familiar.

Lance falls back asleep and he doesn’t have another nightmare the rest of the night.

When Lance wakes up the next morning, he’s alone on the bed. He finds his mom and Keith in the kitchen together, Keith nursing a warm cup of authentic Cuban coffee as he listens to Lance’s mother talk. He has the same thought he had yesterday when Keith came through the door with groceries in his arms, that it’s so strange to see him so at ease here, not at all looking out of place, but rather like he is just another part of this house, like the curtains, or the couch or the carpet.

Neither Marco nor Rachel are home, both having left for work and school, respectively, so Lance helps his mother make breakfast, while he teases Keith. He receives a few light kicks from his mother, but he thinks it’s worth it. 

Besides, Keith and his mamá gang up on him again, in that strange allied way of theirs, and Lance retaliates by spraying them with soap water from the dishes he’s washing. His mother immediately tries to put a stop to it, but even she can’t stop the force of Lance and Keith’s competitive nature, their need to be the best and win everything. They do clean up after themselves, though, once they are thoroughly drenched, and change back into the clothes that they came in, having been newly washed by his mother this morning, while they were asleep.

They repack their backpack with fresh supplies, water, and lunch made by his mom. Lance leaves his old toothbrush here, and decides to just keep the one he got from the motel a few days ago, but he does pack a deodorant and one of his old colognes that he thought he could live without at the Garrison. Even if they are making their way back to a war, that doesn’t mean they have to smell like animals.

Finally, Lance has no other excuse to delay the inevitable, it’s time to leave.

When Lance hugs his mom goodbye, he hugs her so tight that she threatens to seep through his skin and directly into his heart. That's what he wants, anyway. Unfortunately, he isn’t a good actor, and his poker face isn’t as good as Keith’s. He knows, because his mother looks at him with soft, worried eyes.

“Ay, mijo,” she says, cupping his cheek. “Don’t worry, you know you can always come visit whenever you want.”

Lance swallows the burning in his throat, “I just wish there was more time…”

“Why don’t you stay for a few more days? Go back after the weekend?”

Lance genuinely thinks it over, but finally decides, “No, Mamá, we need to go.” He squeezes her hands in his and wills himself to be present, to feel the rough texture of her worn, warm hands; to see the small spots and cooking scars, the colour of her skin that matches his own. “I’ll—I’ll see you again.”

“Of course, mijo, why wouldn’t you?” When she sees the look on his face, her expression softens into a reassuring smile. 

“I’ll see you again soon, Leandro.”

Lance manages to hold in his tears long enough for his mother to close the front door, then he hastily turns around and starts walking. Keith doesn’t say anything when he realises that Lance isn’t going back to the bus station, just follows him wherever his feet are taking him.

They just make it to the beach before Lance falls to his knees and starts crying. “Fuck.” 

Keith settles in quickly beside him, and tries to comfort him the best he can, which is not very much.

“I know what we’re doing is important,” Lance says, as he races to wipe his tears as soon as they come, but they are too fast. “We’re literally saving the world. I just wish it wasn’t so far away. I wish I didn’t have to constantly choose.”

“I’m sorry, Lance.” Keith says, squeezing his shoulder..

Lance puts his head between his knees and works to even his wheezing breaths into a steady rhythm. Keith settles his hand between his shoulder blades, and clenches his fingers until his hand forms a fist. The feeling of Keith’s fist on his back is strangely calming, grounding, as if by clenching his fingers together like that, he is pulling all the pieces of Lance back together into a complete picture.

The beach is empty save for them. It isn’t tourist season yet, but it is seagull season, so they sit there, on the warm sand and listen to the squawking of the brilliant white birds as they search for food or fight for dominance of their territory. The waves crash against the sandy shore, the sea foam reaching its white fingers as far up the beach as it can, like it’s trying to escape the lulling pace of the ocean.

Lance doesn’t know how long they sit there and watch the sea, but neither get up for some time. They sit and watch the waves and listen to the seagulls sing and feel the minuscule glass grains of sand underneath their hands.

After a while, Keith says, “You know, I’ve never seen the ocean before.”

Lance snaps his eyes to him, feeling the cool wind pick at his dried tears. “What? Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Keith. You’ve never been on a beach before?” Lance asks, incredulously.

Keith shakes his head, a small smile making its way to his lips as if he’s amused by Lance’s bewilderment.

“Do you know how to swim?”

“Barely.”

Lance looks at him for a long time, then stands up and starts taking off his clothes.

Keith gawks at him. “W-what do you think you’re doing?”

“Teaching you how to swim. Come on, get stripping, Mullet!”

“Lance—”

“Chop chop!”

Keith hesitates, but does start unbuckling his belt, albeit with a scowl and a blush painting his high cheekbones red. Lance waits until he’s stripped to a satisfactory level (all the way to his boxers) before he drags him by the hand to the water.

“Do you have to teach me now?”

“Yes, Mullet, this is our chance! There’s no ocean by the Garrison.”

They breach the waves together, their jog kicking the water up around them and showering them in cold droplets. Keith shouts profanities at Lance at the first contact of the ice cold ocean against his skin, but he doesn’t resist, just lets Lance laugh and drag him further in. 

Lance lets the coolness of the water soak into his skin as he guides Keith further and further out by his hands. He feels vindicated that he’s the one guiding Keith now, and it bolsters his confidence. Keith clutches to his hands as if he’s afraid he’ll drown if he lets go, even though they’re only waist deep in.

He teaches Keith how to float first, and helps him lie until he’s just on the seam of the surface.

“No, relax your neck, don’t look down, look up at the sky. Yes, that’s it, your chest and your stomach have to float above the water.”

“Don’t let go!”

“I won’t, I won’t, don’t worry. You feel my hands on your back, right?”

Keith nods and screws his eyes shut. He’s clutching Lance’s forearm with the points of his fingernails as if it’s the only thing keeping him afloat.

“Okay, I’m just gonna move you around, okay? Relax, Mullet, you need to relax or you’ll sink. Trust me, I got you, buddy.”

“Okay, okay,” Keith says, and he starts relaxing his muscles one by one, even the frown between his brows, until he looks completely serene.

Lance keeps an eye on that spot, vigilant against its return. He starts wading Keith around slowly, letting him float on the surface for a while.

“Feels nice, right?”

Keith hums, his eyes now so relaxed that his eyelashes fan darkly over his cheek.

“Oi, you’re not falling asleep on me, are you?”

No answer.

“I’m letting go of you.”

Keith’s eyes shoot open. “What?”

“Kidding! Keep looking up and relax your muscles. That’s it, just relax.” Lance watches him float about the water, his wet skin reflecting the sharp light of the sun. He’s closed his eyes again, and the frown is gone. Lance thinks he’s never seen Keith look so serene and at peace before. 

After a while Lance says, “Hey, Keith. Look.” And shows him his hands.

Keith turns his head and when he sees Lance’s hands raised from where they carried him, his eyes widen but then, he’s smiling, wide and excited as if he’s a kid all over again, learning to ride the bike. Lance smiles back, feeling just as proud of him as Keith looks.

He teaches him froggy style after that, as well as breaststroke. Keith does better at breaststroke than froggy style, which Lance shouldn’t be surprised by considering his arm and chest strength. Lance masters froggy style swimming himself, so he might be a bit biased. Still, Keith learns very quickly, almost as if he was born to swim in the ocean.

By the end, Keith is almost as good a swimmer as Lance is, switching between the different styles easily, but Lance doesn’t let him soak in his pride for too long, reprising their water fight from this morning. They wrestle between the waves, taking turns to drag the other under and gaining the upper hand. Soon, the sound of their laughter drowns out even the shrill cry of the sea gulls, and Lance is so caught up in the moment, in his utter, pure joy, that the next time he resurfaces from where Keith shoved him under, he falls over him and wraps his arms around his shoulders tight enough that he feels it when he gasps.

Keith, thinking that this is a trick to gain the upper hand, resists at first, fights against it, but once he realises that Lance is hugging him, he freezes.

Lance doesn’t let go. He can’t. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. He can’t even contain his breathless, almost disbelieving laughter that shudders through his chest; it comes out shakily from his mouth, stuttering its way out. 

He closes his eyes, basking in the warmth of the baking sun on his back, and he says, sincerely, and without any pretence, “Thank you, Keith.”

Keith returns his hug with tentative, wet hands, and doesn’t say anything.

They go back to the sand to dry in the sun and pass the time by finding clues of their future in the clouds. Silly things like what they will have for breakfast, tomorrow, or who they will pass on the street. Once they are dry and put on their clothes again, they leave, using some of Lance’s piggy bank savings on the final train towards the Galaxy Garrison.