Chapter Text
The thing is, Lance has liked Keith from pretty much the word go.
It’s - Lance is only human, okay? Keith is attractive and smart and yeah, kind of a dick, and that had been a little off putting at first but had gradually become endearing somewhere along the way. Keith is the kind of person that people write entire stories about, placing extra careful emphasis on his thoughtlessly attractive cheekbones and the length of his eyelashes.
Back before Keith had dropped out, half the school had been crushing on him. Lance knows this as fact because he has very distinct memories of staring longingly at Keith across the classroom only to realize every girl sitting in his row was doing the same thing.
Lance honestly thinks it’d take a stronger kind of person not to crush on Keith. And he’s not - strong, that is. Not really. Not once you look past his combat scores and space training.
So yeah, Keith. Lance has been crazy over him since the first time their eyes met. The thing is though - the real fucking kicker of the thing - is that crushing on a vaguely unattainable someone from a distance and crushing on a close friend and teammate?
Are really fucking different things.
It’s tolerable at first. Embarrassing as fuck, but Lance has a long extensive history of embarrassing himself, so you know, he can work with that.
Like, when they’re on a planet with functioning water and Keith is coming out of the shower as Lance is heading in, towel around his waist, another at his neck as he scrubs his hair dry, unconcerned with the way Lance starts stuttering and backing up like Keith is dripping something particularly radioactive and dangerous.
“Oh,” Keith says, all casual like, not quite smiling but lighting up a little at the eyes. He stills the towel, his hair curling up at the nape of his damp neck, skin flushed from heat. “Lance. Hi.”
He looks warm, cozy and terrifyingly naked.
“Yes,” Lance says thickly, eyes stuck at the small crinkle between Keith’s brows because it seems like the only safe space to be looking right now. “Yes, I mean, hi, I - shower?”
( - and oh god, the water rolling down Keith’s collarbone, his chest, down, down, down, and -)
“Lance?” Keith says, again, and the upwards tick at the end tells Lance it’s not the first time he’s said it. Lance’s eyes snap up and he hadn’t even realized they’d left their safe spot on Keith’s forehead. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” Lance repeats blankly, finally catching sight of Keith’s slightly concerned gaze. “Oh. No, I’m - you get out, will you? Stop hogging the bathroom.”
He pushes past Keith, shoulders brushing together, and makes sure to lock the door behind himself.
His shower after that is long, cold and guiltily miserable.
But, you know, whatever.
Tolerable.
It’s less tolerable the first time Keith gets injured, really injured, blood on his face and finger, shoulders that shake and shudder beneath the weight of every breath he forces down, the whole nine yards.
They’re on the ship, Lance dragging Keith to a healing pod even as Keith staggers and nearly pulls them both down to the floor. While he’s usually pale he’s now sheet-white and the blood is an angry, vicious red; white and red, white and red, white and red.
And still, when Keith realizes where Lance is taking him he says, “what about the others?”
It’s then, with Keith all but dying in his arms and still worrying about the team, that Lance has the kick-to-the-gut realization that things might be worse than he thought, that he might have left ‘tolerable’ behind at least three battles ago now.
Keith goes into the healing pod, and when the team come back from battle, a little bruised but nowhere near as worse for wear as Keith had been, Lance goes to his room, gingerly climbs into his bunk, and screams soundlessly into his pillow for what feels like an age.
It’s a shitty realization to have a million lightyears from home with the fate of the universe riding solidly on his shoulders, but Lance may be a little bit gone on Keith.
A little - a little more.
More than sneaky classroom side glances and poking and prodding at Keith to get his attention. More than sitting side by side for team dinners and always having one another’s back out on the field.
More than having that tiny blip of a crush every functioning being with a brain has.
And Lance isn’t - he doesn’t - tolerable had barely been tolerable. How the flying fuck is he meant to handle more?
The answer to that, as it turns out, is badly.
When it comes to Voltron and the lions, there’s a … thing that the whole team doesn’t talk about but all sort of silently acknowledge; because occasionally being psychically connected to four other people and an assorted collection of semi-sentient machines is awkward enough for everybody involved without trying to verbalize it.
Most of the time it’s not really a problem. When they’re connected they’re usually in the middle of battle, and it’s not really the time to get side-tracked on the careless thoughts that fly from one person to the next through whatever thin cosmic thread is hooking their brains all together.
Sometimes Lance might get a flicker of annoyance from Pidge as the battle drags on, a small burst of a grumbling stomach that echoes down into his own gut from Hunk. A spark of impatient irritation from Keith, a patient fondness from Shiro when the team manage to coordinate Voltron just right.
But rarely much, and never more than the unquashable subconscious urges.
Even for Lance, who is an excellent multitasker, there’s not really much time for aimless angsting about Keith when there are Galra soldiers trying to sink him in the sky.
After Lance’s realization though, the thought seems to always be there. Just - lurking. Waiting until Lance has his guard down, thinking he’s quietly content doing one thing or another - annoying Pidge over their electronics, sharing a respectful silence with Shiro - and then it’ll ram him upside the brain.
An unending chorus of; you’re in love with Keith and he’ll probably never feel anything more than grudging tolerance for you.
On the worse days it’s gets the added cherry on top of; if he ever finds out how you feel you’ll tear this whole fucking team apart because you didn’t know how to keep your damn mouth shut.
Yeah. It’s not a particularly cheerful time inside Lance’s head lately.
For the most part though, it’s not something he worries about getting out to the others. Through the mystic bond anyway. The thoughts are too complex, patterned and worded in a way the lions and Voltron aren’t really equipped to translate.
And life-and-death fighting is a really great distraction.
The thing is though, that life-and-death fighting, while a great distraction, isn’t what you’d call constantly reliable.
In the end, it’s the damn fighting that ruins it all.
They’re mid-battle on the edge of some godforsaken galaxy system that is eighty per cent rocks and exactly zero percent breathing room. Galra soldiers are everywhere. Lance can’t so much as spin Blue around without finding a whole new fleet at his tail.
They can’t even form Voltron because any time they try to get close to one another a burst of fire forces them back.
Somewhere out there is Allura and the ship, but they’re slow coming, and Lance doesn’t really think they can hold out long enough for it.
It’s an all-around miserable time. The bond between them is fraught with anxious worry, terror, and resignation. The sheer intensity of the moment, the lot of them exhausted and frightened all at once, has pushed their psychic bond up several notches and Lance can almost swear he feels five hearts beating in his chest instead of one.
“Stay calm, team,” Shiro says, for what seems like the fifth time in as many minutes. His voice is thin in a way Lance wishes he wasn’t so familiar with.
“We are calm,” Hunk shoots back. “There’s only so much scary shooting you can take before you have to resign yourself to your inevitable demise.”
“Nobody is dying,” Keith says, and his voice is as sharp as his blade.
Lance wants to agree with him, but he looks out at the pulsing pink that seems to fill up most of the sky and he can’t. “Keith,” he says tiredly.
“Nobody is dying,” Keith insists again, and a burst of protective fury almost knocks Lance from his seat, hot and angry.
“Nobody is trying to,” Shiro says, but it’s more to sooth Keith than it is to be genuine and they can all feel it. The kindle Keith had left blazing in Lance’s chest flares higher so it almost chokes him with the smoke of desperate, possessive, fear.
For Keith who had no family, who had lived alone in a shack at the edge of a desert, their little team had become his whole world. For Keith, who was more instinct than he was reason, could not possibly bring himself to do a single thing halfway, the idea of losing a single one of them was positively debilitating.
Keith had never had to learn temperance and so he hadn’t.
“We might not be trying to,” Pidge says, “but I don’t see another way out of here.”
Neither does Lance. Never has a sky full of pink ever been so frightening. His mother will never know what happened to him. He’d always hoped to get back to her one day, tell her of the amazing places he’d seen, the people he’d met, the things he’d done.
But, he thinks, there are worse ways to go then among a family closer to him than blood has ever wrought; he’d die for these people in a heartbeat if he thought for a second it’d get them free.
He doesn’t realize how much of that sad longing has flickered out across the bond, broadcasting to the other lions, until he hears Keith’s sharp intake of breath. It’s a distinctive sound that Lance has committed to memory long ago.
“Lance,” Shiro says, too quiet, their fearless leader, but whatever else he says is lost because all of a sudden there’s a roar so loud that the electronics in Blue frizz out for a second.
When they come back Lance’s heart doesn’t so much as sink as it does freeze in place.
Across the crowded stars Keith is dashing forward, Red jumping from ship to ship; destroying Galra soldiers easily with each dash, but taking enough fire that the sparks crackling along his lion are visible.
“What’s he doing?” Pidge shouts, tinny over the speakers, or maybe under the too loud rush of Lance’s blood. “What is he doing!”
Pidge doesn’t say “that crazy suicidal fool” but Lance feels it.
Shiro swears, something vicious and low, but even as he starts to give chase Lance can see exactly what Keith is doing.
Where before there had been nothing but solid pink sky there is now a cut of clear blackness and stars; an escape route that the lot of them could take if they left behind Keith to hold the way, distract the forces with destruction.
“Oh you fucking bastard,” Lance hisses, and the anger that crashes through him is only dwarfed by the paralysing fear.
Different from before; where it had been a natural culminating understanding of the situation, it is now the overwhelming ice cold realization that the guy that Lance is maybe a little in love with is throwing himself to the wolves because he’d rather die than lose his friends.
And Lance has never once thought of telling Keith that, just what his existence means to Lance, and so he doesn’t think anything so stupid as don’t die before I get to tell you how I feel - instead he thinks don’t you dare die and leave me alone to be crushed under the weight of all the stupid things I’m never going to be able to tell you.
He doesn’t even realize he’s moving until he hears Shiro yelling at him through the coms, Pidge and Hunk just beyond him, but it’s not a conscious choice, nothing Lance told his hands to do, just Blue moving on pure instinct and even if Lance wanted to he doesn’t think he could stop.
In his head there’s a voice saying you’re in love with Keith and he’ll probably never feel anything more than grudging tolerance for you.
There’s another voice, louder though, saying Keith will live if I have to die for it.
And everything else Lance has thought has been too big for words maybe, but the emotion in that last one trembles right down into his very bones, resounds out, echoes off into a very specific direction and connects.
Lance can feel it in a way he never has before; Keith’s surprise total and consuming, something else indistinct at the edges, but too caught off guard and shaken for Lance to pull into focus.
He sees, though, the way Red has frozen beneath Keith’s shock, and he sees a Galra ship in position to completely take him out, an ion laser powering up and everything.
Keith’s still frozen, it’s barely been a second since Lance had hit him out of the blue with everything, but on the battlefield a second is all it takes to lose the breath in your lungs.
“Lance don’t you even -.” Shiro shouts.
Lance doesn’t think, pulls Blue forward and slams into Keith with the full weight of his lion, sending Keith spiralling away.
The laser whirs - something bright, endless and terrifying barrels at him.
Keith’s voice, in his head more than it is in the coms, shrieking, “Lance -.”
As far as the last words Lance will ever hear goes, he thinks he can be content with that.
The laser hits.
Dying is a little more painful than Lance had thought.