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Keith and Lance, as a rule, didn't play games on the same team.
At first, it was a self-imposed rule.
It was just a part of them. A part of Keith.
Keith was half-galra. He had black hair. And he competed against Lance.
He knew Lance felt the same way, too, because one of the walls in Lance's room was covered floor to ceiling in sticky notes from their competitions.
They were even color coded. Red sticky notes marked Keith's wins, and blue ones marked Lance's. Yellow meant it was still ongoing.
There were so many sticky notes that, nowadays, Lance had to overlap them.
Every time Keith looked at the wall, he felt a little gooey inside. He might have been kind of fucked.
But that was beside the point. The point was, when given the choice, they always chose opposite teams.
The problem arose when they weren't given that choice.
"Lance, buddy," Hunk said. "I love you so much. You know that?"
Lance rolled his eyes.
Hunk continued, "It's just—I really want to try being on a team with Pidge. Please? Pretty please? Can you make nice with Keith for, like, five minutes? I really wanna do the engineering deck."
They were all sitting on the floor of the lounge — Lance and Hunk were on one side, and Keith and Pidge faced them on the other. Allura was sprawled out on the couch, still recovering from a minor illness she'd contracted on the last planet.
Apparently, she was too ill to play, but not too ill to tease whichever team was losing. Keith didn't buy it for a second.
Pidge said, "You guys have to be the weirdest couple I've ever met."
Lance had a blue sticky note stuck to his thigh (optimistic motherfucker) and was marking down Keith and Pidge's recent win. Offhandedly, he boasted, "Whatever. It's just one round. We're gonna crush you guys, and then you're gonna wish you never put us on the same team!"
Pidge snorted. "I don't think I've ever seen you guys play on the same side. You know this game literally requires teamwork, right?"
When no response was forthcoming, she stood up to trade positions with Lance. Dramatically, Lance plopped down beside Keith and threw an arm around his shoulders. He said, "We're gonna crush them, babe."
Keith just raised his eyebrows. "I'm pretty sure you've never called me babe."
Which wasn't exactly true. He'd tried it once — way back in their early days — and Keith had laughed so hard that the goo he was eating came straight back up his nose.
Lance had conceded that, perhaps, they just weren't going to be a pet name couple.
"Ugh." Lance leaned further into Keith's space. "We need to be a united front. Full couple mush."
"And that requires pet names?"
"Well, no." Lance laughed. "But man, their faces are priceless." He gestured to Hunk and Pidge, who were openly gaping at the two of them. Keith smirked.
Hunk said, voice mystified, "They're touching Pidge."
"I know. I'm so confused. It's almost like they're a normal couple? Should I get out a camera?"
Lance huffed indignantly. "We touch." As if to demonstrate, he slung his legs sideways so that he was almost completely in Keith's lap. On instinct, Keith's hand drifted down to his hip to steady him.
"Not like that!" Pidge made a complicated gesture that encompassed the whole of Keith and Lance.
And, okay. It wasn't so much that they didn't touch. It was just — they didn't really cuddle in front of the team? The idea of it didn't bother Keith. They were simply more keen to race each other, or spar, or play a video game than they were to sit still and cuddle.
Especially not in the middle of the day. There were better things to do! Why cuddle when you could be swimming, or flying, or fighting hundreds of robots in the training room?
Still, they weren't not touchy-feely. They just tended to be touchy in the tackling each other during Mario Kart kind of way.
"First one to make Pidge spray us with a water bottle wins?" Lance challenged in a mock-whisper.
Pidge squawked, and Hunk said, "Aaaand they're back."
Pidge began shuffling the cards, prompting Lance to remove himself from Keith's lap. Unfortunately, Taboo was impossible to play if you could see your teammate's cards.
"Okay," Hunk said. "We're doing engineering, obviously. Which deck do you guys want?"
Without looking at each other, they said in tandem, "Conspiracy theories."
Pidge squinted her eyes at Lance. "Everyone knows why Keith chose that. Why the fuck did you choose it?"
Keith turned to watch Lance's face.
"Uh, because he talks about it so much that I'm basically an expert now?"
With one last skeptical look, Pidge shrugged.
She rifled around in the box to find the deck, and then peeled off the plastic wrap that it was encased in. This would be the first time that particular deck was put into use, so none of them knew what to expect.
Keith flashed Lance a taunting grin, and then he — stopped. Because. He was on Lance's team? What was he taunting?
Catching onto his predicament, Lance gave him an amused smile. Keith's face bled from taunting to daring. They were going to crush this.
Hunk interrupted their silent discussion. "Arms or legs, guys?"
The only coin-like thing that they'd managed to scrounge up was some weird, kinky tile from an alien sex store. Instead of heads or tails, they had to call an arm or a leg.
"Legs," they both said. Not quite in tandem, but eerily close.
Hunk flipped the not-coin. He clapped his palm down on the back of his hand and said, "Ha. Arms. Pidge and I are starting."
Lance grabbed his tablet. The game did, actually, come with a sand-timer. But on their first round last year, they all agreed they wanted a little more time than the allotted minute, so Lance's tablet became the designated timer.
Pidge grabbed the card-holder and set a handful of cards in it. She angled her body so that Keith and Lance could read them, but Hunk couldn't.
Dramatically, Lance said, "Three…two…one…" He paused. Pidge rolled her eyes at him. Another couple ticks passed in tense silence. Then:
"Go!"
She began speaking immediately. "Oh! Okay, you have to com—" She cut herself off, obviously realizing that 'Complete' was a taboo word. "Fuck. It's like…electrons go through it?
"A conductor?" Hunk asked frantically.
Pidge shook her head. "No. Uh. It won't work if you can't…get them all the way through. And— Oh! We diagram them wrong!"
Hunk, who'd been scrunching his face in confusion, lit up. "Oh my god, a circuit?"
"Yes, yes!" Pidge pumped her fist in the air. Then, she flipped over her card.
"Oh, you've gotta be kidding me." She groaned. Keith could see the word: Centripetal Acceleration. Yikes.
Their round went on. Pidge didn't say any taboo words, but she had to skip a couple cards. You lost a point every time you skipped, so they ended their round with only three points, even though Hunk had gotten five right.
"Okay, okay! You guys ready to be demolished?" Lance gloated. Pidge passed him the card holder.
Keith chuckled under his breath, even as his eyes lit up with the promise of competition. Lance may have been the show-y one, but Keith was no less competitive. He wanted to win.
Privately, he knew that they were going to.
Pidge smirked at them. "If you guys get more than one I'll be impressed."
"Pidge!" Hunk whined beside her. "Play nice, please?"
"What? It's true! They've never been on a team together. And Lance sucks at explaining. This is gonna be hilarious."
At that, Lance piped up, "I do not suck!"
"Sure you don't, buddy," Hunk said kindly. Keith let out a snort. The only games Lance and Hunk had won were in spite of Lance's explaining.
The man just could not shut up. It was like he didn't even read the taboo words!
It had worked in Keith's favor when they were on opposite teams. Now, Keith had to hope Lance could avoid saying every motherfucking taboo word on the card.
Still, they had an edge: Hunk and Pidge had never seen them on the same side before.
Hunk grabbed the tablet. "Ready, guys?"
They nodded. Keith watched Lance out of the corner of his eye. Their smirks were matching.
"Go!"
Lance's face lit up at the first card. "Oh! You were literally telling me about this one yesterday."
"Dead internet theory?"
"Yeah!" Lance smiled brightly, flipping the card over.
Keith heard Pidge mumble, "Damn, that was lucky."
Lance continued, "This is the one about the, uh—music making people?"
"Oh, Paul McCartney is dead? Which—" he looked at Pidge and Hunk, "—totally true. The evidence is overwhelming. He—"
Lance cut him off. "Tell me later. Next card!"
Since Keith was still facing Pidge and Hunk, he saw the look of open shock on their faces. He didn't have time to think about it, though, because Lance was continuing, "Oh, god. You stopped me in the middle of sex one time to tell me about this one."
Through a sharp peal of laughter, he answered: "Chemtrails. I'm not sorry."
Lance rolled his eyes, but flipped over the card. "Crap." He stopped dead.
"What?" Keith asked.
"I, uh. Don't recognize this one? Do you want me to skip?"
Keith really didn't want to lose one of their points. They had no way of knowing what was coming for them. "No. Try it."
"Uh, okay. I…recognize this guy's name from Star Trek?"
Lance, the nerd, had made Keith watch almost the entire discography of Star Trek last year. So, he asked, "Which one?"
"The reboot with Khan."
Keith hummed, eyes squinting in thought. Lance kept talking, but he was too busy sifting through names in his head to catch much of it. Okay. Khan…Pike…Kirk…who was the villain? Oh, yeah, it was— Oh!
"Death of Nero!" he shouted, getting up on his knees in excitement. He explained, "He was a Roman emperor."
"Yeah! Okay, next one's easy. You have a poster of it in the shack."
"Birds aren't real."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Pidge mouth to Hunk, "What the fuck."
Lance laughed at the next card, clearly growing more comfortable with his role. "It's the…non…not-ethereal person?"
Keith smiled. "Anti-christ?"
"Yup."
This time, it was Hunk who exclaimed: "How the hell—?"
"This one turned out to be real."
"UFO's," Keith answered quickly.
They went on like that for the rest of their time. Keith got every card right, and Lance never said a taboo word.
When all was said and done, they had eleven points. Eleven.
It was unheard of.
The current record was nine, and it was set by Allura and Keith almost a year ago. Nobody had even come close to that number in the past year. They'd all been convinced it was some insane fluke.
"Holy fuck," Pidge said, right after Hunk called time.
They'd both gotten up on their knees for the last stretch, leaving them so close that Keith could see the faint freckles dotting Lance's face. Warm breath fanned across his cheek.
For a moment, they all sat in silence.
Lance looked — well. He looked kind of enamored. The fire that had been there a moment ago drained from his eyes, and he was looking at Keith with a soft smile.
Keith was pretty sure that he was making the same expression.
Eventually, Keith tore his eyes away to look at their captive audience.
He heard Allura, unsurprisingly, snoring behind him. Pidge and Hunk, though…
"Holy shit, Hunk. Holy shit," Pidge exclaimed. "We can't ever let them be on the same team again. We'll never win anything!" Her eyes were bugged out of her head.
Hunk looked like he was torn between cooing at them and agreeing with Pidge.
Both of them had their jaws glued to the floor.
Keith sat back on his haunches, and Lance gave him a questioning look: both of his eyebrows raised, a slight quirk to his lip. Keith nodded.
"Welp!" Lance turned to Pidge and Hunk with a clap. "That was fun. You guys ready to switch back?"
Pidge gawked even further. "What? No bragging?"
Lance just shrugged.
"Why the fuck do you want to switch back?" she asked incredulously. "You guys could crush us!"
Keith ignored her. "I'm down to switch back."
"No," Pidge said. "No, no, no. You guys have to have some other motive here. There's no way you want to switch back after that!" She threw her arms up wildly.
"No ulterior motive, Pidgey," Lance assured.
Lance dropped the cards still in his hands, eyes flicking up to Keith. The hum of an inside joke passed between them.
Pidge squinted.
"Pidge." Keith sighed. "We knew we were gonna win."
"Well, if you guys knew then why haven't you been playing on the same team this whole time? It doesn't make any sense!"
Lance reached for Keith's hand, letting Keith lace their fingers together.
After a beat, Lance said, "We compete, Pidge. It's what we do."
When she still looked confused, Keith tacked on: "Some couples cuddle. We do, uh—" he made a nebulous gesture with his free hand, "—this."
Lance peeled the blue sticky note off of his thigh, holding it up to show Pidge with a sheepish look on his face.
It wasn't just tally marks; it rarely was. There were teasing stick figures scrawled around the edges — taunting words written on nearly every available space. He had drawn what looked to be Keith with big teeth and evil eyes in the corner.
Lance squeezed his hand.
"Oh my god," Hunk cooed.
"Oh my god," Pidge repeated.
Nobody said anything else.
Then:
"In that case, I forbid you guys from being on the same team. You're way too overpowered."
Lance laughed. "Yeah, that's fair enough."
Keith dropped Lance's hand, standing up to switch spots with Hunk. With a sort of confused look, Hunk obliged.
When they all settled down, Pidge said quietly, "I, uh, don't think I've ever said it. But…you guys are—good. Uh, together. You know that?"
"Yeah." Lance smiled, looking across the room at Keith. And, Keith felt that gooey, mushy feeling again. The one he got whenever he looked at Lance's sticky note wall.
"We know."
fin.