Chapter Text
Varsity soccer is a pretty uncommon choice for a college sport, but Keith is good at it, the fucker. Their school is nowhere near breaking into televised matches or first-division college leagues, but Lance thinks that if Keith really wanted to, he could go pro. The guy runs like he’s being chased.
The regional league is on its semifinals, and Lance is on the stands with Hunk and Pidge, watching as the overtime break is called. Both teams have scored two goals, and as it is, they might go into penalties; most players look exhausted, and not many can run as fast as they did in the first half-time.
“Oh man, I’m so nervous,” Hunk says beside him. His face is painted, two little stripes on each cheek in white and red to match with the team’s white and maroon ensemble. He’s fidgeting in his place, playing with a hangnail absently, watching over the field as the players walk back to the benches to hydrate and regroup. “Keith looks so tired.”
He does, Lance realizes as he sets his eyes on him: he imagines that he’d have his hair plastered to his forehead and neck if it weren’t for the thin headband and hair tie tying it back. A sheer film of sweat shines on the high points of his face as he throws back his head to gulp down water. He seems to be trying to calm down his erratic breathing from the last play, where he ran almost the entire length of the field three times.
“Matt needs to get a grip. That last shot was a near miss,” Pidge comments.
Lance snorts. “If he doesn’t, Keith might just shove his gloves up his ass.”
“And then we’d be out of our only non-injured keeper, so he better think that through.”
Lance watches as the team huddles around their Coach, and feels the anticipation rising as the minutes pass and the second half of the overtime comes closer to its start. The team eventually disperses and starts heading to their places on the field. Matt goes back to the goal post, and Keith resumes his place as a right wing attack.
Somewhere in the stands someone begins a song, cheering for the Altea Lions, and Hunk, Pidge and Lance follow along with glee. The whistle blows and the clock starts ticking again.
The match goes nowhere. Lance sees their team run after the ball time, after time, after time, but every time they get to the Garrison Cosmonauts’ goalpost, they either miss or get blocked. One of their defense steals the ball several times from Keith, and the frustration is running high both on the field and on the stands.
Lance is biting his nails. Pidge has taken to sitting up and down anytime it looks like anything might happen. Hunk covers his eyes when the other team aims for Matt.
And then someone commits a foul. With 3 minutes left on the clock and no goals scored.
He recognizes the player; after all, Garrison Tech and Altea University are pretty much sister colleges, and their teams have played friendly matches plenty of times before.
James Griffin raises his hands as if he didn’t just kick their 5’s shin. Rax is on the ground, writhing in pain and grabbing his leg, while the referee approaches the scene. Lance is on his feet trying to get a better view of the scene, as the crowd around him starts booing.
“That’s a yellow card, right? It has to be, oh my God,” Hunk says, also rising to his feet.
“He already has a yellow, from the first half-time,” Lance reminds him. “Another one and he’s out.”
“Well, how much does that change right now, anyways?” Pidge says, standing on their seat. “The match is almost over anyways. They’re definitely going into penalties.”
“Well, it’d mean he can’t shoot in penalties, at least.”
Pidge hums. “That’d be an advantage.”
On the field, things are quickly getting out of control. Griffin is pleading his case to the referee, and some teammates have approached Rax to help him. Keith strides into the scene with fury, and heads directly over the first pair.
“Uh-oh,” Hunk sings, worriedly. “Keep it cool, buddy, keep it cool.”
Keith is decidedly not keeping it cool. It’d be impossible to make out what’s being said over the roaring crowd, but you wouldn’t need a keen intuition to see that the referee is not hearing whatever Keith has to say, and Keith is not liking it one bit. Griffin, on the other hand, is having a hard time biting down a smirk.
Another teammate approaches. The referee’s attention is diverted, and Griffin says something under his breath. Whatever it is, it finally breaks Keith’s composure. Lance grimaces as Keith shoves James hard, almost pushing him to the ground. The crowd gets louder, and Griffin retaliates by shoving Keith back. Their teammates separate them before it can escalate, and the referee intervenes. He reaches for his side, takes out the yellow card…
And gives it to Keith.
“WHAT?” Lance screams.
“Oh, why the fuck did you have to push him?!” Pidge groans.
Several similar expletives can be heard around the crowd, the stands in an uproar, but Lance doesn’t stay in their midst to hear them. He leaves his seat, and runs down the stairs until he’s leaning over the railing.
“What the fuck, ref?! The foul was for Griffin, he almost broke Rax’s shin! Give him the yellow! GIVE HIM THE YELLOW!”
Keith is protesting his card, Lance is yelling, Griffin is grinning like the Cheshire cat. Keith turns away from the referee in exasperation.
And then, something unexpected happens.
Lance feels the call.
He stops mid-sentence, and it is as if the world slows as well. It burns inside his chest, like it always does. It tingles on his fingertips, as if his bow is a second away from materializing in his hands. It resonates in his ears, as everything goes quiet but for a heartbeat, and he strains his ear to recognize whose it is.
There’s so many people here. He looks back at the stands, time-frozen. The heartbeat doesn’t belong to someone standing on the bleachers, so he casts his eyes to the field, and scans its length from one end to the other.
It’s there, somewhere in front of him, a rapid beating, frenetic. They’ve been running.
One figure after the other, Lance discards them. Instinctually he knows how to match a heartbeat to a person, as if they don’t only have a pattern, but a scent; a color, a personality.
The moment his eyes land on Keith, he knows it’s his.
The world comes back into focus. Everything seems to come back to its normal speed, to a normal volume, though the burning sensation in his chest doesn’t leave.
As if in hyperfocus, Lance's immediate thought is how he needs to find a way out of the stands and into a secluded space as soon as possible. The field is massive and he needs to figure out several things.
First of all, how in the hell he’s going to make this shot.
Second, if the arrow is aimed at Keith, who is it for?
Third– and this is a new one in his repertoire–, how does he feel about shooting a friend? He’s never had this dilemma before.
But there’s barely time for thinking about the third point if he doesn’t figure out the first.
Barely anyone pays attention as he starts moving towards the left, headed for the exit stairs. The closer he gets to them, the closer he gets to the other side of the bleachers, where most of the opposing team’s flags wave in orange, and he can faintly hear Hunk calling his name, asking him where he’s going, but Lance ignores him. He’ll deal with that later.
He runs down the stairs and ducks into the desolated men’s bathrooms. An empty stall is not his happiest place on Earth, but it’s his best choice as far as it goes for a cover.
Regrouping. Yeah, he should be regrouping.
Taking a deep breath, he calls onto the burning in his chest, until it extends past his shoulders, into his back, taking over his arms; until the tingling in his fingertips becomes nearly painful, almost like blood flowing back through your veins after your limbs have gone numb.
He pulls his hands together in front of him, and as he pulls them apart, a bow materializes in them. It’s old, ornate; carved in wood and horn, and painted in soft blue hues, and gold details. The string’s thread is woven with gold.
From the centre of his chest, he pulls a single arrow; it’s thin and long, and the same gold as the string that will pull it.
He feels a sensation course through him, as he holds both arrow and bow in his hands: like a full body shiver that tells him, to the curious eye, right now, in that stall, there’d be nothing but air. Lance McClain is hidden from everyone else but himself. People could look right through him and be none the wiser.
He opens the door and approaches the sink. Overhead, he hears a whistle and the roaring crowd. The match must have come to an end, and no team has scored, meaning they’ll have to go into penalties.
Keith will surely be kicking, meaning at least, for some time, he won’t be moving. An easy shot… if not for the distance.
There’s enough foliage at each end of the field that no matter which goalpost gets chosen, Lance will have some cover. It’s still a long distance for his arrow to travel, but Lance hasn’t been going to archery lessons since he was five for no reason. He’ll make it. He has to make it.
The tricky thing will be the timing.
He has to make sure Keith is looking at the object of his future affections when the arrow lands. Lance thinks back to the moment when the call swelled inside of him…
It’d been a whirlwind moment: the card, the screaming. But if something stands out to Lance’s trained eye is James Griffin's cocky smile as Keith turned away from the referee, the movement taking his eyes over the crowd and directly into James’ expression.
Oh, really, Keith? Really? Lance really has to question Keith’s taste, but if this is what love calls for, then who’s he to challenge destiny?
So it’s settled. He stops his pacing of the bathroom floor, and heads for the door, unsure if he’ll be able to find the perfect window of time in which Keith’s eyes will be trained on James for long enough to make his shot.
He leaves through the back, and runs up through the trees until he’s close to the edge of the field once again. The captains of each team are tossing a coin to choose who shoots first, and Lance notices James is in the lineup for the Cosmonauts kickers; apparently, he never got that yellow card, and Lance has half a mind to feel irritated by it. The other half is relieved he’s not benched; this way, there’s no way Keith won’t look at him when he makes his shot. Well… if James gets to kick, that is. With Lance's luck, they'll get to enough of a difference in points before he does.
The Lions get to choose the goalpost, the Cosmonauts get to kick first, and Lance thanks his stars he chose to run in his team’s goalpost’s direction when he left the bathroom, because that is the one they choose. He only has to duck between the foliage, ready his bow, and wait.
Matt is nervous, he can tell. From this short distance, he can see how he shuffles his feet and shakes out his gloved hands as the first kicker readies the ball. For a second, he wishes he could concentrate on the game, but his eyes search for Keith instead. He’s standing with the rest of the kickers, over the midfield line, and Lance feels like he underestimated how big a soccer field really is. He’s never shot someone from so far away before.
He realises that, realistically, he won’t be able to make it. He needs to be closer to his target or get some higher ground, but he’s almost lying in between the leaves, and he’s got a goalkeeper in the way. The only time he’ll be able to make this shot is when Keith approaches the goal to kick.
He’s distracted from his musings as Keith’s face erupts in a joyous scream; Lance belatedly realises Matt has saved a goal, and everyone is celebrating.
The bleachers don’t quiet down much as the next kicker approaches. Matt switches places with the Cosmonaut’s keeper, and the Lion’s team captain spins the ball in his hands before putting it down on the grass.
If Lance knows anything about soccer, it is that you don’t leave your best kickers for the last penalties. Keith is good; he’s bound to be the second or third kicker in line.
The ball flies up into the air in an arch, and misses the keeper’s hands by a hair. It goes into the net, and Lance breathes out, beginning to rise from between the bushes carefully, trusting his bow to keep him hidden. He places his arrow into the rest mount, and tightens his hand on the grip. With his left hand, he pulls on the arrow and the string, and aims.
He stays like that through the next penalty, which Matt doesn’t save; his gaze goes right through the sight window and is locked on Keith, who remains just beyond his reach.
He’s the fourth kicker. They’re tied two for two, so there’s a lot of pressure on Keith not to miss.
As he gets closer and closer, Lance sees him close his eyes for a few seconds, taking deep breaths, muttering under his breath. He'd be tempted to chuckle if he wasn’t sweating from nervousness.
Keith will kick. In the grand scheme of things, it won’t matter much. It won’t matter to the Universe, it won’t matter when they’re dead; it won’t even matter in a couple of months. But right now it matters.
It matters to Keith, who wants the team to go into finals.
It matters to Lance, because the second Keith turns away from that ball, he has to make a shot. And he has to hope it’s the right one.
Keith sets down the ball, and takes a few steps away from it. Lance tenses his bow.
Lance barely sees it happen, but at the last minute, before touching the ball, Keith changes directions. The keeper is already in the air, falling to the right, and the ball simply flies to his left, shot right into the top corner.
Keith’s face morphs, from pure concentration to relief, as he turns to his teammates.
But it’s not right. Fuck, it’s not right.
He doesn’t look in the other team's direction at all. Why would he? He doesn’t have a sure victory to rub in their faces yet.
Matt tackles Keith from the back, in celebration. If he saves the next kick, and the Lions score, they win. Keith laughs as he pries Matt off him, and Lance belatedly realises the next kicker is already walking their way. And it’s Griffin.
Matt gives Keith one last pat on the back as he turns to the goalpost, and Lance has millisecond to realise this is his window. This is the time.
Keith turns to walk away, back to the midfield line, while Griffin is walking towards him.
Lance shoots.
The arrow lands square on the middle of his back. Keith wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, and crosses paths with Griffin. They lock eyes for a second, though it doesn’t last much. Lance holds his breath waiting for the stumble, waiting for the stuttered breath, waiting for the confused take back glance as Griffin passes him.
It never happens.
The arrow remains stuck as Keith continues on his way, never dissolving into his heart.
Lance feels his bow dematerialize, a tingling throughout his limbs that tells him he should be ducking for cover, turning tail and running back to his seat at the bleachers. He does so in a daze, shocked. The whole way over, walking briskly, he tries to keep his eyes on the field. When he reaches the stands, James Griffin has made his shot, the Garrison Cosmonaut’s side of the bleachers screams almost deafeningly, and the arrow remains stuck on Keith’s chest.
He sits besides Hunk while his friend's eyes are still on the field. It takes a few seconds for him to notice Lance is even there.
“Dude, where were you?! We totally lost sight of you!”
“Felt a little sick,” Lance says, and it might not be a complete lie. He feels a little dizzy.
Hunk makes a worried face. “Okay, did you drink some water? If we score, we win, and we can go home…”
Lance smiles at Hunk. “It’s okay, bud. I’m already feeling a little better.”
Pidge hasn’t noticed him yet, if the way they have their eyes trained on the last kicker, and the way in which she screams encouragement are anything to go by.
Lance trains his eyes on the ball. Holds his breath as it’s kicked, as it flies in the air, directly into the net. The stands erupt in cheers.
Lance hugs Hunk, who picks him up and shakes him, apparently forgetting his earlier worries. Chuckling, Lance sees the Lions run to their last kicker to tackle him, piling on top of him in celebration. Matt is the first to get to him, and ends up crushed under the weight.
Keith is one of the last to jump into the pile, but the arrow doesn’t move. It goes through everyone else like it’s not even there, but it refuses to budge off of Keith.
And Lance questions everything.
He’s missed shots before. Not many, luckily, but it was bound to happen when you’re still thirteen and learning. He got horribly sick afterwards, running fevers and colds, like the Universe was punishing him for not doing its bidding, but the illness always passed. He always got a second chance to shoot, and he always made those.
But those were misses; that was his arrow not making it to the target, vanishing into thin air as it hit the ground or a park bench.
He’s never made such a perfect shot for an arrow not to take.
This is new. This is unexpected.
This is frustrating, because he doesn’t know what’s wrong. He doesn’t know how to fix it.
He’s startled back into the present, as Hunk puts him down, and Pidge hugs both of them. “We need to go down! I want to congratulate Matt!”
They start tugging them both down the stairs, towards the railings Lance clung to earlier to protest Keith’s foul. When they reach them Pidge lets go of their sleeves, and climbs onto the bannister, calling their brother’s name.
A few players look over. Matt smiles at their group of three as he’s taking off his gloves, and shoots them a pair of thumbs up.
Keith looks over as well. Lance’s eyes slip to him as Pidge and Matt keep screaming at each other about his saves, and he notices more than a few strands of hairs have escaped his ponytail in the scuffle of the celebration pile. Keith’s mouth seems to be perpetually fixed in a small, pleased smile, and as his eyes meet Lance’s, he actually lets his lips pull onto a full grin. Lance smiles back.
“Good game, Red!” Lance calls, and watches Keith chuckles. For a second, he barely notices the arrow that pokes out of Keith’s chest, completely impaling him. The floodlights that illuminate the field cast sort of a weird shine on it. But even when it becomes invisible to the eye, Lance knows it’s there. Feels it there, as if it were his own heart.
It’s there as Keith jogs to the edge of the field, closer to the bleachers. It’s there as he looks up, and smirks, and opens his mouth to tell Lance, “You sound surprised!”
But Lance has been shooting arrows into strangers’ chests for close to eight years now, disappearing into the shadows and pulling the weirdest of excuses out of his ass to explain his sudden absences. So no matter how bothered he is by this, just smiling and pretending everything is normal almost comes as a second nature to him.
“Well, you did pull your weight Kogane,” he teases. “Managed to be a team-player and everything. Color me impressed!”
It’s funny to see how Keith’s nose scrunches up when his eyebrows furrow. Lance thinks that expression might be one of the reasons he enjoys annoying the guy so much.
“You’re never letting that go, are you?”
“Nope! And I don’t think your team is either, man, you literally stole the ball from Rolo.”
Keith grumbles something about Rolo being bad at soccer and leaving the team mid-season anyways, but Lance just chuckles. More of the Altea Lions are gathering closer to the stands, either saying hi to friends or to chat with other teammates before hitting the showers.
Lance actually sees Allura leaving, and waves goodbye at her when their eyes meet. If he’d known she was at the game, he would have invited her to sit with him, Hunk and Pidge.
A firm pat on his shoulder distracts him from that thread of thought. He turns around to find Shiro smiling at him; also someone he didn’t see when he first came in, but he’s less surprised about Shiro’s presence: he never misses Keith’s games.
“Hey man!”
Shiro always has such a warm and calm aura about him. He asks Lance if he’s enjoyed the game, and quickly catches his brother’s attention to congratulate him. He distracts him for long enough with conversation that Keith doesn’t realise Matt has sneaked right behind him, with the intention of dumping his water bottle over his head. Soaked and giving chase, Keith abandons the conversation mid-sentence, but Shiro hardly seems to care, as he laughs heartily along with the rest of them.
They watch them run the length of the field. Keith dumps a water bottle on Matt, and then steals Rax’s and dumps that one on him as well, for good measure. Pidge and Hunk go back and forth on their cheers, Lance is unsure if they want Matt to win or lose.
When they both come back, they announce they’ll be hitting the showers with the rest of the team.
“We’re actually gonna go celebrate our win,” Matt says. “You’re all invited if you wanna come.”
Pidge grimaces. “If it’s at a frat house, no thank you.”
“Nah, we’re going to a bar actually.”
“They’ll probably want to throw an actual party if we win the final, though.” Keith adds.
“I have work tomorrow,” Shiro says, sighing. “But you guys have fun. Be responsible.”
“I’ll pass. Couldn’t get into a bar even if I wanted to, anyways,” Pidge chuckles.
“I’m game!” Hunk slaps him on the shoulder. “How about you, bud? Feeling okay to party a little?”
Well, it’s not like keeping a close eye on that arrow would be a bad idea at the moment. And Lance really needs a drink. “Yup, I’m good. We’ll wait for you guys.”
“I win.”
Lance almost drops his drink. Someone needs to put a bell on Keith; the motherfucker is too quiet, Jesus Christ.
But maybe he’s not too quiet. Maybe the bar is just too packed, with an entire soccer team that already had a few drinks too many, and all the friends and fans that decided to come along.
“Fuck, man, warn a guy! I just bought this thing!”
Keith ignores him. He might have had a few drinks too many as well. Lance can’t help but notice the arrow seems more solid in close quarters.
“I win,” he repeats, smirking, and Lance’s brain whirrs to a stop as he realises belatedly what Keith is implying.
He frowns. “You do not!”
“I do! I scored two goals!” He almost huffs, and yeah, this is definitely drunk-Keith, and Lance is ill-prepared to deal with dunk-Keith right now.
Firstly, because Keith is stubborn on a normal day, but giving him a margarita and trying to convince him of anything is a sure recipe for disaster.
Secondly, because Lance has spent the better part of the last hour trying to pull himself out of spiralling anxiety.
And third: because their fucking bet was a stupid idea in the first place.
“Okay, the shoot-outs don’t count. You technically only scored one. Which means, I win.”
Keith scrunches up his eyebrows. His nose gets all wrinkly. Lance catches sight of the arrow again, but it doesn’t budge. “The shoot-out penalties are part of the game!”
And God, Lance might not have the mental capacity to deal with drunk-Keith right now, but at least he’s a good distraction for his building, oncoming crisis. Well, kind of. Since he’s the source and all that—
He probably should go home. Write a message to his mom. Call her, perhaps? She wouldn’t appreciate the late night call, but maybe she’d understand the urgency.
He grabs the first one of Keith’s teammates he sees close by, and pulls them into their conversation.
“Hello, sorry to bother you, you’re Daniel, right?”
Daniel is perhaps the most sober person in that bar. He looks at Lance curiously. “Uh, yeah?”
“Cool. So, Daniel, you see, my buddy Keith and I made a little bet before your guys’ game and now we need to figure out who won. He says he scored two goals. I say it’s only one because the shoot-outs don’t count. What do you think?”
Daniel looks at him like he’s asked him the secret of the cosmos. Scratch that about him being the most sober, that guy definitely had something–
“Man, I don’t know… I mean. Shoot-outs don’t really get counted as goals, but they do define who wins,” he scratched his neck, thinking it through like it was a complicated math problem. Then his eyes landed on another teammate. “Tommy! Dude listen to this–!”
That’s how it went, until all teammates, in all their stages of drunkenness, had chimed in. As the very last resort, the team had resorted to calling their coach for a final word, who had very sleepily told them they were all idiots and to let him sleep, not before voting in Lance’s favor.
Coach’s word won Lance a bet and a chance to call it quits and go back to his dorm to panic in peace.
He’d think about collecting his debt when there weren’t other, more concerning issues at the forefront of his mind.