Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Las Vegas is hell on Earth.

A summer in Vegas is considered mild if it hits 115 or higher only two or three times. The sprawling communities of the valley consist of a bunch of huge, transient “small towns,” with all the headfuckery that that seemingly incongruous set of words entails. And the lack of any humidity to speak of is a bitch on the skin and on any level of curl. (Lance would know. His curls are glorious at home in Cuba. There’s a reason he’s kept his hair short since moving to this state-side desert.)

But Las Vegas does have two things going for it.

One: A paramilitary base known as the Galaxy Garrison, home to aspiring space explorers from all walks of life, from all-American nerds like Katie “Pidge” Holt to international transplants and certified geniuses like Hunk Garrett to wannabe hotshot pilots like Lance himself. 

And two: hella parties. 

Parties of every type imaginable, but specifically, theme parties. And this being October the thirtieth—the day before Halloween—both touristy and local-focused venues are catering to the freak crowd tonight. 

“Lance!” Pidge says, ducking into Lance and Hunk’s tiny dorm bathroom in a cloud of rainbow glitter. “Please tell me you’re done with your guyliner.”

“If we don’t leave literally right this second, we’re not gonna find venue parking,” Hunk gripes from beyond the threshold. “And then we’re gonna have to park up on Valley View or something and I dunno about you but I don’t feel like getting murdered tonight.”

“Just pretend murdered,” Pidge confirms, examining her nails. 

“Fine, fine, I’m almost done,” Lance says, turning back to the mirror. “And stop picking at that polish. I’m not doing it again.”

Lance can feel Pidge sticking her tongue out at him as he checks his face, satisfied with the way the subtle contouring and highlighting makes him look just slightly otherworldly. He is wearing eyeliner, too: just enough of a deep navy swipe to make his eyes pop. Against the flashy silver of his long-sleeved shirt and the dark, sinfully tight jeans, he figures he cuts the figure he’s going for. 

Which is to say, slutty enough to warrant the label but not so slutty that he’s worried about getting groped. Unwanted, anyway.

He turns back to Pidge and takes in Hunk’s huge frame behind her, his customary orange headband traded out for a black one. Putting his hands on his hips, Lance smirks. 

“Alright, witches. Let’s ride!”

***

Area 15 is freaky enough on a normal night. Tonight, though, the venues hosting seasonal events are home to every flavor of goth, punk, and fabulous that Sin City has to offer. 

Lance, Hunk, and Pidge fit right in. 

As they wait in line for one of the escape rooms, Lance is pleased that he’s gotten both of them to dress up along with him. Pidge is wearing a dark graphic tee with a jack-o-lantern carved with the shape of the pi symbol, and her chunky boots have high enough platforms that he can’t rest his chin directly on the crown of her head like he usually does (and yes, he tried). Hunk is a little more subdued, but still looking both festive and like a total badass in a metallic-embroidered coat.

“Think we can set a record?” Lance asks, glancing up the few people waiting ahead of them for a chance at the haunted house themed escape room.

Pidge scoffs. “Please. With Team Punk on the case? Those puzzles don’t stand a chance.” 

“Hey, don’t write me off,” Lance says. “I may not be a genius but I’m a finder.”

“Ahem, Hufflepuff,” Pidge coughs. 

Lance narrows his eyes at her. “A lot of these puzzles involve finding little keys and shit like that. You need me.” 

Hunk grins. “That’s true. One time when one of the Jenny’s earrings went missing in the big lecture hall, Lance totally found it.”

Pidge’s glasses gleam in the low light. “She still wouldn’t agree to go out with him, though, would she?”

“Oh shut up…”

It turns out that the puzzles inside the haunted escape room require all three of their skill sets to solve. The first room—a tiny little thing meant to be servants’ quarters, with a fireplace that turned out to be the secret passageway into the “manor house” proper—does involve a key puzzle as well as an obscure literary reference that took Pidge’s encyclopedic knowledge to get passed. Hunk takes them easily through a portion of the next area, a ballroom with black and white checkered tiles, that requires a complicated mechanical solution. (Although, he’s also the first one to get jump-scared by one of the actors popping out of a fake window—so scared, in fact, that he literally shrieks like a little girl. Pidge’s words, not Lance’s.)

The fifth area, meant to be an attic flickering with lightning from a storm outside, is where Lance’s “finder” skills truly pay off, though.

“What the actual-”

He’d just been riffling through the chest of drawers for one of this room’s keys when he finds it. The knife is huge: a mean looking thing with a black metallic handle and a sheath as wide as his palm. It also has a glowing purple symbol etched into its pommel. The glow brightens when Lance reaches into the drawer and wiggles the blade just slightly out of its holster and sees that the blade’s surface is carved with runes that shine a faint, sickly lavender. Eyebrows screwed together, Lance runs his thumb along the edge and-

“Ow, shit-”

It is definitely not a prop. 

That’s a fucking portaje.

When Lance was fifteen, he’d gotten his own portaje—the magical knife that a brujo uses to sever the ties between souls and their anchors in this world. 

“Will you swear to use this blade only for its true and just purpose, to release souls from this realm when it is their time?” his abuelo had asked. 

“I will,” Lance had sworn, with all the gravitas his still-cracking voice could manage. 

In a fire lit ceremony in the very old church on his family’s land, his abuelo had handed him the portaje, hilt first, and Lance didn’t have to run his thumb over the edge to know how sharp it was. His brother Marco had helped him sharpen the thing himself. Luis had helped him shape the leather that wrapped its pommel, made from the skin of an animal that had lived and died on the very land they stood on, then, during that solemn ceremony. 

It’s a little thing, as magical knives go. Something Lance can keep in a pocket of his jeans. But Lance has known men who have pocketknives as portajes, and he knows from having used his own that it doesn’t take a huge blade to sever the tie between a soul and their anchor. Just true aim and an iron stomach.

Whatever the size and shape, however, a portaje is not a Halloween decoration.

When Lance sticks the sheathed blade into the back of the waistband of his jeans, he’s barely thinking at all. He just knows that it can’t stay here, in a drawer in a haunted escape room, where any non-brujo passerby could seize it and take it home as a souvenir—or, worse, hand it over to the police.

***

Lance is thinking a lot about the cops—and specifically that maybe he shouldn’t have moved a potential murder weapon—when they’re at their next stop: a vaguely Tim Burton-esque art installation on the other side of the Area 15 complex.

“-hear that someone got killed behind the scenes during the setup?”

Hearing it in passing, Lance almost doesn’t clock what the duo is saying. But then the little redhead turns to her much taller girlfriend and shrieks a far-too-interested, “Shut the fuck up!”

“Ez, I’m serious! I know one of the guys on the crew and someone died! They still haven’t caught the guy that did it.” 

An unkind snicker. “Maybe the place is haunted, now. That’d add to the vibe…”

He doesn’t hear the rest of the conversation because a wave of nausea overtakes him that almost sends him to his knees on the dirty floor, sticky with spilled drinks. And then Pidge is tugging on his wrist, pulling him forward a step because he’s created a traffic jam in the walkway behind them.

“You okay, buddy?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. At the genuine concern in her tone, Hunk turns, a sharp little flick of his headband following the gesture. 

“Lance?” 

Lance shakes his head. “Yeah. No, sorry, I’m good.”

They both frown at him. But when Lance turns to face the direction they’re meant to be heading, intent on taking a big step forward, it’s nothing compared to the scowl on the face of the guy standing directly in his way.

“Cheese and crackers-”

Jumping away from the spirit—because this guy is a spirit, that much is clear—Lance tries desperately not to fall backward over Hunk’s feet. He barely manages it. In fact, he doesn’t manage it; Hunk grips his shoulders and barely keeps him from eating it.

“Whoa-”

The spirit holds out one of his pale, half-gloved hands. “Hand it over.”

Lance feels his jaw drop. “Excuse me?” 

“My dagger. Give it back.” 

“Even if I wanted to,” Lance wheezes, “And even if you could take it, I’m not about to hand something like that over in a crowd full of-”

“Huh?” 

“Who are you talking to?” Hunk says, squeezing one of his arms while Pidge continues looking at him like he’s sprouted wings.

“S-sorry,” Lance mutters, blinking and shaking his head but not taking his eyes off the spirit, who has stepped further into his space. The dead boy’s eyes are lit with an internal, unnatural glow that echoes the shine of what is apparently his knife.

And it’s then that Lance realizes he knows this spirit.

He would know that mullet anywhere.

“Keith??” 

Chapter Text

Lance books it out of the double doors and into the trippy garden outside Area 15, where neon lights make the abstract statues shimmer with pinks and silvery purples, with an angry ghost on his heels.

Correction: A pissed off, self-righteous ghost who believes he’s been robbed; a concerned BFF who probably believes he’s going to have to check Lance into the mental ward; and a nosy little nerd who won’t take being brushed off as an answer.

“Lance! Who were you talking to?” Pidge badgers, shouldering past a shell-shocked Hunk and stepping right through the “who” in question.

“Nobody!” Lance hollers back, trying to get them as far away from the throngs of festively-dressed people as possible. He still winces as he looks back, seeing Pidge’s ire and, more cuttingly, the look on Keith Kogane’s face as he takes in the unsettling revelation that he’s just been phased through.

“What the-”

“I dunno, man,” Hunk says, interrupting Keith but having no way of knowing it. He pulls up on Lance’s other side, opposite a Pidge who is literally hopping mad. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you talk to thin air. Should we be worried? Are there like… meds you’re not taking, or something?”

“Ugh, no!”

Lance makes himself stop stalking forward. They’re far enough from the maddening crowd that he can afford to break down a little. He brings both hands to the back of his neck and pulls down, hard, trying to stave off the inevitable tension headache that this absolute cluster of an evening is going to leave him with.

“Listen,” he says, taking one big step so that his feet hit the curb leading into the parking lot. He turns around so he can look both Pidge and Hunk in the face. “I will tell you what’s going on. Promise. I just need you to trust me. And uh… let me take care of something first.”

After a tense moment, Hunk gives a terse nod. The reluctant smile he offers Lance doesn’t reach his eyes—but Lance still knows he means it. “Can do.”

Forcing himself to take a deep breath, Lance asks, “Do you think you and Pidge can take a Lyft back? I can even spot you, just… There’s an errand I need to run.”

Pidge narrows her eyes—but Hunk places one arm in front of her before she can march back into Lance’s space. “Yeah, we can do that. You can Venmo me, or whatever, if that makes you feel better.”

Leaving them to it, Lance nods and steps back toward the “something” he has to take care of.

Keith is still standing where Pidge walked right through him, staring at his hands. He curls his fingers tightly, as if trying to see if his fingers will phase through his palms. He doesn’t look up as Lance approaches him, even though Lance knows damn well that Keith notices. So Lance steps close enough that Keith’s eyes have to be tracking the stark white of his trainers. 

“I didn’t believe it,” Keith finally says. “Not until just now.”

“Yeah,” Lance says quietly, scratching at the hair behind his ear. “It’s a trip.”

Keith nods. And then he looks up—and those unfathomable lavender eyes are filled with a horror and a helplessness that Lance hates that he recognizes.

“I’m… dead?”

At Lance’s hesitation, Keith’s eyes go wide.

Now, spirits can’t cry. And the young man Lance knew in life wasn’t the type to cry in public. Or at least, he’d never seemed like he was. But the tells are there, all the same. Airless, his shoulders lurch with a quickening breath. He swallows. His eyes dart left and right and then blink dismissively, disbelievingly.

Lance’s breath catches in his throat, and it hurts. 

Look. The last Lance was aware, Keith Kogane was alive.

Distinctly, gloriously alive, and probably off setting yet another record in the flight simulator. Both an overachiever and kind of an antisocial asshole, so busy with said overachieving that of course he wouldn’t have noticed someone like Lance McClain.

Even if Lance knew that he stared.

But the staring wasn’t his fault, okay? That, or any of the other little obsessive little tics Lance had developed where Keith was concerned. It’s just that when Keith was around, his entire brain was lit up with the desire to pummel him into the ground. (And maybe kiss him while he was down there but that was neither here nor there.)

It takes some convincing to get Keith into Lance’s car. But he manages it with a little bit of his patented, deflective humor.

“I mean,” Lance says, trying to make his tone as jovial as possible as he opens the passenger-side door. “It’s not like you can get re-murdered.”

Keith scowls at him, but he climbs into the passenger seat.

“We shouldn’t be sitting in a crowded parking lot while I yell at you, anyway,” Lance says, tossing his arm over the back of the passenger seat, so near to Keith that he’d feel his body heat if he had any. He throws the Camry into reverse.

“Yell…?”

Keith takes a second to chew on that word, and then he balks, giving Lance the deadliest side-eye he has ever seen. Lance tries not to see the way the ghost at his side shifts into something slightly feral. “Who the fuck do you think you are to be yelling at me, especially when I’ve just found out I’m a goddamn ghost and you’re apparently the only one who can see me?” 

“Who do I think I am?” Lance snarls. “I think I’m the one who recovered your tether from a drawer in a fake-haunted house and saved your ass from turning it into a real-haunted house! ”

“That’s not what I mean!” Keith throws his hands up. The way Lance pulls onto the frontage road alongside Interstate 15 jostles him a bit—because he hasn’t yet realized that the physical world can’t jostle him, not anymore—but he still manages to scoff. “Do we know each other?”

Lance sighs. So, the moment between them just a few minutes ago—when Keith had had to confront his new reality, one that only Lance could acknowledge—really was just the shocking intimacy between a brujo and a newly-deceased soul. Keith mutters something else that’s too dim for Lance to parse, but he isn’t sure he’d hear whatever it was Keith said next, anyway.

“Yeah, we know each other. Barely,” Lance says under his breath. “And from what I know, it just… It figures your tether would be something like this.”

“Something like what?”

Lance snorts, hard, and doesn’t answer.

After a few long moments of the dull orange street lights passing over them, Lance hears Keith say, “Pull over.”

“In a minute.”

“Pull. Over.”

Lance sits up straighter at the tone. He doesn’t know how long Keith’s been dead. It can’t have been long, because it’s Thursday, and Lance just saw him in class on… what, Monday? But Keith certainly wouldn’t be the first wrathful ghost to go maligno within a matter of days if not hours. So he does as Keith asks.

The quiet click of the hazard lights is the only sound for a long moment. Then Lance reaches back into the waistband of his too-tight jeans, and he pulls out the uncanny, glowing dagger. Keith launches himself over the console in his effort to grab it from Lance. But, just like Lance knew it would, his hand phases right through sheath and metal and flesh.

Lance shivers at the slice of cold through his thigh.

Shaking his head, he manages, “This is a portaje.”

Keith still hasn’t taken his eyes off where Lance is gripping the dagger. “I don’t know what that means.”

Stomach roiling, all Lance can think of is how irresponsible it is to be so tied so intricately to something that you don’t understand. After all, this dagger is the thing that’s keeping Keith tethered to the physical world. The only thing. Lance boils internally about it.

Until Keith speaks.

“I’ve had it my whole life. That dagger. It’s the only thing I have of my mom’s.”

“Your dead mom’s, I’m assuming?”

Lance winces internally—and maybe even a little externally—at his own lack of tact. But Keith doesn’t seem particularly bothered.

“Dad is. Dead, I mean. I’m not so sure she is, though. Even though that’s what everyone always said.”

Frowning at him, Lance asks, “What makes you think that?”

“I’ve always had a feeling that’s why she left it. So I could find her.”

Lance nods, partly just to give himself a moment to confirm the decision he’s already made.

“Well. I’m gonna take us to someone who may be able to help us figure out what kind of weird shit your mom was into.”

Not even blaming Keith for the dirty look he gives Lance at this, Lance flicks off the flashers and flips a bitch to point the car in the right direction. 

“Aw, hell no,” is the first thing Veronica says when she opens the door.

“Hey, sis,” Lance says, feeling the pathetic stretch of a grimace over his face. “I have… kind of a situation I’m hoping you can help me with…”

Chapter Text

“You know this isn’t the first time I’ve had to bail you out of a situation since you enrolled here at the Garrison?” 

“I know, Veronica.”

“Nor is this the first time you’ve brought home a stray spirit!”

“I get it, sis.”

“You brujos—can’t figure out what to do with your shit? Just bring it to the brujas! Surely we’ll clean up your mess…”

Lance’s sister (and, technically, superior officer) keeps muttering to herself as she vacates the foyer and heads further into her modest quarters. Lance glances that half-step behind him to where Keith is staring after Veronica, eyes wide. He gazes between the two siblings for a moment, bewildered, then suspicious—but the question he asks isn’t the one Lance was prepared for.

“So what did she have to bail you out of the first time?”

Lance feels his face burn very, preposterously red. “Uhhh… Let’s just say, ‘be careful about dating legacy kids,’ because nepotism is”—shit, almost said “alive and well”—“a bitch.”

Keith snorts out a laugh. Lance thinks that’s the end of it until he asks quietly, “And what’s a bruja? Isn’t that a witch, something like that?”

The way Keith doesn’t quite manage to roll the “r” in “bruja” is frankly charming, but Lance doesn’t have the time to be charmed.

“Sort of. It’s why I can see you. I-”

“Are you coming in??”

At Veronica’s sharp shout, both boys jump, and then Lance reaches around Keith (not through—because, rude?) to shut the door.

“Lance, I hope you didn’t pull that knife back out on my doorstep where anyone could see it.”

“Hey, I just showed you the hilt! And only because you were about to slam the door in my face!” Lance says, turning the corner to take in the sight of Veronica opening up a notebook on her coffee table. There’s a half-empty glass of red wine on that table, too. “How dumb do you think I am?”

Veronica smirks—and the family resemblance spikes. “Do you actually want the answer to that, little brother?”

Lance shoves one thumb into his pocket. “Do you want me to let you finish that wine or am I going to accidentally knock it onto your basic beige rug?”

Her eyes flash and she looks like she’s about to keep playing. But then she looks over at Keith. After a moment, she says, “Show me the portaje again.”

“Fine.”

Lance reaches into his waistband for Keith’s tether and pulls the knife out of its leather sheath. She studies it, narrowing her eyes and thinning the line of her mouth as she takes in the glowing symbols. Onto the white blank page before her, she draws the largest of the blade’s symbols, the one on the bolster. Next to it, she writes something that Lance can’t decipher—some Latin spell, probably; she’d always been the best of any of his siblings at the verbal components of magic. Then, she tears off that corner of the paper.

While she’s rolling the torn scrap into a neat little scroll, Keith steps forward. He’s looking intensely down at the drawing she’s made.

“You didn’t just take a picture,” he ventures. “You’re not going right to the internet with this.”

Veronica gives him a level look. Carefully, she says, “You’re clever. And you’re right. I don’t want anything we do here to be tracked.” She turns her look to Lance. “You know each other, don’t you? From before?”

Keith says, “A little,” before Lance can say, “Not really.”

The way Lance starts and blinks at Keith does nothing to banish the over-critical look on Veronica’s face. She holds out the tiny scroll to Lance. “Put this in your pocket. I don’t like the fact that you have that portaje with you.”

Lance re-sheathes the dagger and holds the whole affair out as if to hand it to her hilt-first. She jerks back and breathes out harsh, through her nose—like a cat’s hiss, or else a dragon’s.

“Don’t want that thing any closer to me than it is right now, thanks,” she spits. Then she wiggles the little rolled paper between two fingers. “You’re in it now, and I don’t think you can safely leave that knife anywhere else. Anyway, this might help counter-balance some of the energetic bleed.”

Lance frowns and takes the little scroll. “Care to tell me why you don’t even want to touch it?”

She rolls her eyes and, utterly ignoring Lance’s question, looks at Keith again.

“Did it ever glow like the, before?” she asks.

Keith hesitates before he says, “Only, uh… only when someone I knew had died. It… it glowed brightest when my dad died.”

He’s so quiet by the end of that sentence that Lance barely hears him. Veronica, however, seems to catch all the words and all the nuance that Lance must be missing. She nods gravely and turns the page of the notebook, where she writes a single word down on the next blank sheet. She shifts the notebook toward Keith and taps on the word she just scratched out. Keith squints, and Lance can’t exactly blame him. Her handwriting is even worse than Lance’s…

“Have you ever encountered this word before?”

Keith ducks down over the table, turning his head so that his bangs fall even further over his eyes. He quirks an eyebrow. “Gala? Like a party?”

Veronica shakes her head. Very quietly, like a curse, she says, “Galra. Like a plague.”

Lance narrows his eyes, feeling like he should know the significance of that word. Veronica notices Lance’s struggle and asks him, “Do you remember how, in your Ceremony, you promised to only use your portaje for its true and proper purpose?”

“Of course,” Lance says, feeling his spine straighten just at the reminder.

Veronica breathes deep and pulls out her phone. “Not every brujo makes the same promise, unfortunately.”

Lance shifts uncomfortably as Veronica flicks through the contacts on her phone, selects one, and holds the phone up to her ear. Lance hears several dull rings and thinks it’s about to go to voicemail.

Then Veronica says, “Abuelo?"

Lance gasps. It’s like 11:30pm in Cuba right now…

In Spanish, Veronica continues, “I’m sorry about the time, but we have a situation. I think there may be active Galra here in Las Vegas.”

She stares right at Keith as she says this. A chill goes through Lance that has nothing to do with the fact that Keith draws close, bringing the cold with him.

Their abuelo hops with surprisingly alacrity onto a video call. He greets all three of them—Veronica, Lance, and Keith—and Lance’s head spins for a moment over the fact that his family patriarch can apparently see spirits even over a digital connection. Then, he asks Lance to show him Keith’s dagger. When Lance does, the old man lets out a soft curse in Spanish.

In heavily accented English, he asks, “Were you using this blade for necromancy, boy?”

Keith takes an actual step backward, away from Veronica’s phone propped up on the coffee table.

“N-necromancy?”

Lance’s abuelo shakes his head. “I didn’t think so. The Galra tied to this portaje is still alive. The glowing, you know. It may be your tether, but it does not truly belong to you.”

Keith doesn’t respond. He freezes, and for a moment, Lance wonders if he’s gone somewhere else. Spirits do that, occasionally…

“He said it was his mom’s,” Lance hears himself say. “Apparently people told him she was dead. But he didn’t believe them.”

“I’m afraid,” Lance’s abuelo says, slowly, deliberately, “that this young man’s mother is likely an active necromancer. Working not to release souls into the afterlife but keep them here, using them for improper purposes.”

Lance and Veronica—who know exactly how bad that is—look at each other warily. Then Lance turns to Keith, whose fists are clenched and whose brow is furrowed.

“Do we know anything about where she might be found?” Abuelo continues.

“If anyone knows where she could be,” Keith starts, voice shaking. Lance can’t tell whether it’s with anguish or with rage. “It’d be my brother.”

“Brother?” Lance asks.

“Foster brother,” Keith amends. His eyes slide away from Veronica, who is copying the rest of the symbols on Keith’s knife onto a fresh sheet of notebook paper, and finally rise up to meet Lance’s. “His parents took me in. I never asked him for the records the agency had on my family. But his parents passed a couple years ago and I know he’ll still have them.”

Lance nods. “He live in town?”

“Yeah,” Keith sighs. “Actually, he-”

“If those records reveal anything about your mother’s potential location,” Abuelo says, with just a touch of impatience that brooks no space for family drama. “I must ask you not to go in search of her.”

Turning back to Veronica’s phone, Lance promises, “We won’t.”

“I want his word, as well,” Abuelo adds, pointing with his chin in Keith’s direction.

Looking caught out, Keith asks, “Me?”

Patiently, Abuelo continues, “I understand she is your mother. But a necromancer can use a spirit just as easily as they can use a body. There is no knowing to what end you might be used.”

Slowly, Keith says, “I won’t let that happen.”

Lance’s eyes cut to Keith—feeling the absence of his promise not to go in search of his mother.

Still, Abuelo nods. “Right. Although… if the pull of that dagger is as strong as I suspect, she may already be coming.”

After an uncomfortable night crashed on Veronica’s couch alongside a ghost not-sleeping on the floor beside him, Lance drives them across the Garrison grounds to student housing. It’s so early in the morning that the sun hasn’t even risen, the sky a weak, filmy gray. Far to the south, the high rise casinos of the Strip still give a faint glow, florescent tombstones to the night gone by. 

Keith is silent. Lance can’t help but fill such silences.

“I’m uh…” Lance’s hand goes to the back of his head. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Keith asks, dully.

Lance sniffs. “I said I’d help find out what weird shit your mom was into. I’m sorry it was apparently necromancy. That… can’t be easy to hear.”

Lance can’t hear Keith breathe—because he doesn’t, not anymore—but the rough sigh is palpable. Then Keith grinds his teeth and his nostrils flare. 
“Figures,” he finally says.

“I’m absolutely going to regret asking this,” Lance says, pulling into his accustomed spot in the student parking structure. “But um. What figures?”

Keith leans back into the passenger seat and runs his hand through his hair as Lance puts the Camry in park. Before he says anything else, he turns as if to open the door. Instead, he phases right through—the shocks of which results in a helpless, furious gesture that ends in a growl and then a shout that echoes through the parking garage. An echo that Lance hears, anyway; anyone else will only feel vaguely unsettled, hairs standing on end.

Lance gives him the moment he clearly needs. Then he steps out of the driver’s side door and circles the car, stopping a few paces away from the angry ghost.

Quietly, he asks, “Anything else left in there?”

Keith doesn’t even turn to look at him. He just shakes his head furiously.

Sliding his hands into his pockets, Lance says, “I won’t judge you. I’ve seen spirits do worse. A lot worse. A little screaming fit is nothing.”

Keith scoffs. Lance doesn’t press him.

“So… what figures?” Lance finally ventures. “That you didn’t know about any of this until it was too late to do something about it?”

“It figures,” Keith spits, venom dripping from every syllable. “That she’s just one more person who left me behind for something more important.”

Now. Lance has personally seen a spirit go maligno only once. Lucky for him, it was a contained situation; his father had had it covered, and Lance had been in no danger of being hurt, killed, or worse, pulled out of his body by the sucking, ferocious rage of a spirit intent on destruction. 

And Keith is mad, that’s for sure. Righteously pissed. But there’s nothing of that evil sort of wrath in him. In its place is a sorrow so deep, so human, that it hurts to observe. Lance wants to embrace him so badly he has to pull his hands out of his pockets to wrap his own arms around himself.

Instead he says, “I’m sorry, man.”

“Yeah,” Keith says roughly. He still won’t look at Lance.

“What… what can I do?”

Keith is quiet, the sound of someone’s car alarm on another floor of the garage the only sound for a long moment.

“If there’s necromancers involved… God what a fucking weird concept…”

This shocks a laugh out of Lance. “Extremely weird,” he agrees.

Keith actually smiles at the sound. Then, finally, he turns to look at Lance.

Lance doesn’t know Keith well enough to read his expression all that adeptly. But Keith holds eye contact with him for a long time, long enough that Lance sees the shift happen behind his eyes. Sees some kind of wall come down. Or at least a door open. Seeming to come to a decision, Keith nods.

“I have to make sure the people who killed me aren’t…” He grimaces. “…aren’t using my body for anything.”

Lance agrees even as he stifles his shudder. He doesn’t want to dwell on that. Doesn’t want to think about the fact that the man who appears to be standing before him, so determined, so full of fire, is, in fact, not alive at all. That his body, wherever it is, is an empty shell.

“So,” Keith is trailing off. “After we see if we can find anything out about where my mom might be… Will you help me find it?”

Shoving his hands back in his pockets, Lance says, “Of course.”

Chapter Text

“Aww yisss, bacon…”

The foil wrappers gleam, promising freshly-assembled breakfast burritos. Lance reaches into the pile and pulls out four. Then he thinks better of it—one of their number doesn’t eat—and returns the fourth one.

Then he thinks best and grabs that fourth burrito right back.

He’d rushed in for breakfast from the commissary right after Keith’s cathartic outburst in the parking garage. Now his accustomed shadow, Keith and Lance will venture from here to his and Hunk’s dorm, so Lance can explain… Well. At least explain that he’s not dead or hospitalized, because who knows what worst case scenario Hunk has cooked up in Lance’s absence. It’s early enough that there’s barely anyone else here. Lucky, because it means he’s gotten the good burritos for Hunk as a peace offering. They’re always out of them by the time he and Hunk drag their sorry asses to breakfast.

The unfortunate thing about this well-intended gesture is that it puts him and Keith in a position to know that, by that point, it’s all over campus:

One of the Garrison’s own students is missing. Or maybe worse.

“-s what happens when you break all the rules. Someone’s going to get hurt, eventually. Can’t really complain when it’s you…”

Lance side-eyes the speaker: James Griffin, with whom Lance has, unfortunately, had several classes and assignments.

One of the other kids on the opposite side of the breakfast spread also makes a face at James says, “Being a rebel doesn’t mean you’re asking to get killed.”

“Not usually, anyway,” someone else adds.

“No one actually knows if he’s dead, ya know…”

“But Kogane always made himself a target,” says the young man standing next to James.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” James says, clapping that kid on the shoulder.

“And I heard he was always taking odd jobs around town for cash. Working under the table, you know? People in those situations, I mean, probably shouldn’t trust them…”

Lance hates them—every single one of them—and he seriously considers intervening in their conversation to make them look exactly as stupid as they should feel. Bunch of legacy kids who’ve never had to worry about money a day in their lives—whose fathers never had to do manual labor and whose mothers never had to work two part-time jobs just so all her kids could eat.

Then he grimaces and turns to the object of the gossip.

“Sorry, man…”

Keith shrugs. “It’s not like they had anything nice to say about me while I was alive. Wouldn’t expect it now.”

But Keith gives himself away. He looks aside. He even looks a little more translucent around the edges than he did a moment ago.

“So,” he says, clearly having checked out of the previous conversations. “You were saying your double-major medic friend could help with the whole ‘finding my body’ thing…?”

Pidge and Hunk are both there when Lance opens the door to his dorm room.

Sitting on the edge of Hunk’s bed, one leg dangling over the side, Pidge is tapping away at her laptop. She looks up, glaring at Lance as he crosses the room. What sucks isn’t that she’s mad; it’s that she looks hurt.

It’s Hunk who starts, though.

“So, you saw Keith last night at Area 15?” he asks, still sitting in the chair at his desk. Lance has never understood how he keeps it so neat, with his class load… “Or I mean. You called out his name.”

“Aah,” Lance hesitates, shutting the door only after ensuring that Keith is inside. “Sorta, but…”

“But he’s missing. Do you know where he is? How do you ‘sorta’ see someone??”

“Especially when, as of an hour ago, there’s an autopsy report,” Pidge cuts in.

Hunk’s mouth drops open. So that’s news to him, too… Meanwhile Lance sucks in a breath. He can’t help but glance over his shoulder back at Keith, who’s hovering by the entrance.

Not actually hovering—for the most part, recently deceased spirits still act like they’re bound by the laws of physics—but like. Metaphorical hovering. Hovering the way Lance had observed him over the last year here at the Garrison, always along the fringes of social circles, never really a part of any of them.

Gaaah… Why is there so much extra tragedy in this already tragic scenario?

“See, that,” Hunk says, insistent. “Why are you doing that? Looking over your shoulder and like… making faces…”

Lance curses his face for its over-expressiveness—he must have quirked an eyebrow at Keith in sympathy or something. To avoid that part of conversation for at least another forty-five seconds, however, he turns to Pidge and asks, “How do you know there’s a report…?”

She spares a sympathetic glance for Hunk, who’s thrown his hands up in the air like, What the heck?—fair—and she shakes her head. “When there’s gossip on campus, I meddle. Which you should know, Lance. I’ve gotten your ass out of enough online drama.”

Lance makes a face. Then he remembers Hunk’s earlier comment and he does not look backward at Keith again. “I think this qualifies as slightly more than drama, Pidge…”

“But the internet is the internet. Easy enough to program a bot to find any mention of someone’s name in a government database. And anyway,” Pidge murmurs, closing her laptop and pushing it across the cheap comforter. “The fact that Keith Kogane is missing is all over campus now, but you said you ‘sorta’ saw him last night. So either you work at the morgue now or you saw him alive last night, somehow. So. Spill.”

Hunk hefts himself up out of his desk chair and crosses the room to stand before Lance. Thinking he’s about to be guilt-tripped further, Lance recoils a little. But Hunk just puts his hand on Lance’s shoulder. It’s a gesture Hunk has offered dozens of times before, after failed tests and failed dates, and right now, this comfort combined with the comfort Lance can’t give to the dead boy, the shadow at his shoulder that he can’t touch and that his friends can’t see, is making him sick.

“How could you have seen Keith if he was already dead? I don’t know anything about- murders, I dunno, but I don’t think autopsies happen that quickly.”

“They don’t,” Pidge, the medical student with an actual internship at the morgue, mutters.

“Is that what your ‘errand’ was about?” Hunk continues.

Lance is absolutely not going to cry. So he grips Hunk’s wrist for a second before he removes it. With a long, slow breath, Lance turns his back to them. It’s too hard to look at them, at least while he tries to piece together the speech he had practiced in his head in the car on the way over.

“I saw him. I don’t know exactly when he died, but I saw him last night,” he confirms.

“…What?”

Lance adds, “His spirit, specifically.”

“Lance, whoa-”

“So,” Lance says, looking right at Keith while he addresses his friends. “You know my family’s uh… pretty close, right?”

Humming, Hunk says, “Not that I know what your family has to do with any of this, but. Closer than mine, and we have a scheduled weekly FaceTime.”

Lance nods. “We’re close because we have to be. We’re part of a tradition of brujeria. We deal in life force energy. We help take care of spirts in trouble. We heal them, if we can, or help them cross over, if we need to.”

At the long silence, Lance turns back to Hunk. His face is doing something Lance doesn’t recognize, going pale and distant.

“Buddy,” he gasps. “Are you telling me you’re… magic?”

Lance shrugs, wincing. “That’s… pretty much it. Yeah. Anyway, I saw Keith at Area 15. Sorry to leave you guys without a ride, but I took him to my sister. I know there are things the brujas know that they keep from us brujos. And turns out I was right; there’s something bad going on here. Worse than just a murder.”

Hunk is shaking his head, eyes haunted.

Lance swallows. He’s not sure what he expected; but this silence isn’t it. “Hunk, say something.”

“I- I can’t…”

Pidge clears her throat. Both Lance and Hunk turn to her as if they’d forgotten she was there. With alarming calm and unexpected empathy, she says, “Hunk, maybe sit down?”

“Yeah…”

Hunk goes back to his desk and opens up his laptop.

It’s then Lance remembers the breakfast burritos, getting cold in the bag he’s clutching in his left hand. As unobtrusively as he can, he steps towards the desk and sets the bag by Hunk’s elbow. Hunk doesn’t even move. So Lance reaches into the bag to grab one for Pidge and one for himself.

“I’m gonna be frank,” Pidge says, when Lance turns back to her to hand her her breakfast. She takes the foil-wrapped parcel and places it, unopened, next to her on the bed. “That’s a lot. I don’t know if I believe you. But obviously something weird is going on here. Gimme a minute to pull up that autopsy report. I haven’t tried to access any of the records other than what my County login gives me permissions for which is why I’m having trouble pulling it up… but since it’s the Wild West out here, I doubt their system is impenetrable.”

“There’s nothing in the news,” Hunk mutters, glaring at his own computer screen.

“I’m not surprised,” Pidge says, opening her laptop back up. “It’s all locked down. And there’s a law enforcement flag on the records. I’ll see if I can hack Metro’s database and pull up the police report…”

Lance turns around because at the re-mention of the word “autopsy,” he felt Keith’s presence withdraw. He is still in the room, but now he’s leaning back against the wall. Lance goes to him.

“I didn’t want you to hear anything like that,” he says, hopefully quietly enough to prevent Pidge and Hunk from hearing him. “So, I’m sorry. This is a lot. But I wasn’t about to tell you to wait outside because this is more your business than mine.”

Keith looks up at him, then, shock and something softer on his face. “You’re telling your friends your biggest secret because of me. And now they’re-” Keith makes some kind of helpless gesture and cuts himself off. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Lance shakes his head. “Yeah, I did. And don’t worry. I’ve been keeping this secret my whole life, but I live with Hunk now. This would have come out, eventually.” 

***

Lance leaves Pidge to her hacking and leaves Hunk to his early class. (“Because if I don’t take my mind off this for just a little while, I’m probably gonna throw up…”) He walks back to the parking garage, Keith in tow and silent again. He doesn’t say anything at all—and he doesn’t make any other sound, because… well, ghosts don’t, not unless something is really wrong.

Lance is gripping the steering wheel, staring at his hands, by the time Keith speaks up.

“He lives out in Henderson,” Keith says. “My brother. That’s where we’re going next, right?”

Lance nods. “If you’re ready.”

Keith works his jaw before his eyes flick up to Lance’s.

Now, Lance isn’t sure what color they were in life. He’d never really gotten close enough to Keith to know. But just now, they’re a sort of otherworldly indigo.

“I really don’t want him to hear through the rumor mill that I’m dead.”

“But Keith, I can’t really tell him. And uh, you certainly can’t…”

“No,” Keith agrees. “I’ve been thinking about it. You can tell him you’ve heard that I’m missing. He’ll call Adam. If Adam hasn’t told him already…”

“Who’s Adam?”

“That’s his fiancé. He works at the Garrison,” Keith says. “So did Shiro, until the accident.”

Lance glances at Keith as he puts the Camry in reverse and backs out of his parking spot. “There’s a story there.”

“I bet you’ve already heard it.”

“Try me.”

“A few years ago,” Keith says, shifting in his seat, “there was an incident with one of the planes during what should have been routine maintenance. Not his fault. But yeah… He was the one who got hurt.”

“Oh… oh. Your brother is Takashi Shirogane??”

Keith snorts. “How do you think a kid who barely made it out of the foster system got accepted into the Garrison?”

“I mean… You’re not exactly a nepo baby,” Lance mutters—very under his breath.

“No, but a letter of recommendation from Shiro is pretty hard to ignore…”

“Henderson” is putting a polite label on where Keith’s brother lives. “Hendertucky”—that weird little holdout occupied mostly by bitter old people who begrudge the fact that urban sprawl now connects Las Vegas and the other settlements in the valley—would be more accurate. It’s almost rural out here, wide swaths of undeveloped desert stretching at random intervals.

“So you grew up out here?” Lance asks.

“From twelve or thirteen.”

“What about before that?”

Lance wants to shove his fist in his mouth because he knows he probably shouldn’t be asking Keith anything about his prematurely cut-off life—but Lance is who he is, and he’s a talker.

Luckily, Keith indulges him.

“Dad and I lived out in Tonopah when I was real little. I moved around a lot, in between,” Keith answers. And the clipped tone lets Lance know that that’s as much of an answer as he’s going to get.

“Take a right, here,” Keith says, suddenly. Lance pulls onto a side-street, roughly paved and with houses spread out on large, rock-landscaped lots. “Third house on the left.”

Lance pulls up to the house but parks across the street so as not to seem like a complete psychopath. Rubbing at the back of his neck for a moment, he says, “It’ll be weird if I open your door. Just in case anyone’s watching.”

Keith nods. “I’ll just climb over and use yours.”

Nodding, Lance opens the driver's side door and steps out onto the hot pavement. It’s eleven a.m., and Vegas’s unseasonable heat is clinging on with everything it’s got. Lance considers leaving his jacket in the car, but he’s always felt more comfortable when he can hide in something, and he still hasn’t fully grown into this old, beat-up coat. Lucky it’s too big, really, since now he’s got not only his own portaje in its customary place in a front pocket but also Keith’s, tucked into his waistband. Wouldn’t exactly be a good idea to show up on Takashi Shirogane’s doorstep with a weapon so obviously concealed…

“Can you-”

Keith cuts himself off. Lance stops on the curb in front of the two-story house and turns his back to it so no one can see that he’s talking to thin air.

“Can I what, Keith?”

Crossing his arms, Keith continues, “Can you try to be gentle about it? Shiro… He’s been through a lot.”

“Sounds like you both have,” Lance mutters.

“Still, I-”

They both turn to the house at the sound of the front door opening. Lance watches a guy as big as a linebacker—a guy he recognizes from recruitment posters—step out onto the front porch.

“If you’re here to tell me my little brother is dead, save it,” Shiro says, crossing his arms—very much like Keith just did a moment ago, except for the slightly awkward movement caused by one of those arms being a prosthetic. “Because I know he isn’t.”

Lance flicks his eyes towards Keith and, out of the side of his mouth, murmurs, “Well this is gonna go great.”