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Lance and Keith were sitting in one of the communal lounge areas on the other side of the castle. The team had just been given medical clearance to move Keith back home, and they did so immediately, but Keith was still shaken up. Being around others was too raw, but he seemed to be comfortable around Lance, so the rest of them had decided he was on Keith-duty for the foreseeable future. Which was fine, Lance was totally fine with staying with Keith alone in empty, unused rooms, far away from everyone else. He definitely didn’t have to work extra hard to focus, to remind himself that this was serious, that he couldn’t be feeling any specific way about it.
God, Lance felt like scum.
The silence was eating him. Keith was usually a pretty silent guy, but this silence was different. Worse. Pidge had told Lance to either keep Keith talking or just keep talking, period. Anything to ground the other man in reality to prevent him from slipping back into his dreamstate.
‘Anything,’ the devil inside his head whispered, promising and evil. Lance mentally sent an explosion its way to get it to shut up. It only worked about half the time.
Curiosity killed the cat, true, but Lance was never one to shy away from danger, even if maybe he should be, this time. “So,” he started, glancing over at Keith, who still had yet to retreat back into his mind, “What’s it like, you know… now that you’re awake. How’s the, uh, dreams treating you?” he asked, internally cringing at himself. Real smooth, McClain, real smooth.
“They’re like sirens,” Keith replied to Lance’s surprise, shutting his eyes as his face scrunched up like he was fighting them away as he spoke. Maybe he was. “He- he calls to me, Lance.”
“What does he say?” Lance asked, heart heavy with hurt and an emotion that could absolutely not be jealousy, not at a time like this-
“Anything,” Keith interrupted Lance’s thoughts, his eyes opening again. He looked distressed. Fuck, Pidge said Keith wasn’t supposed to get too emotional to avoid triggering an episode. “He calls me back to bed, he calls me in from our porch, he’s heading out the door, asking if I’m coming.” Keith’s eyes looked like they were about to glaze over again.
Lance inhaled sharply and steeled himself. “You’re not, though, right?”
Keith blinked a couple times, confused. The glassy look started to retreat. “What?” he questioned.
“Going with him. You’re not,” Lance started, “You’re staying here, right? With me.” He winced internally and felt guilty at selfishly hoping Keith was too confused to pick up on anything from that statement.
“Yeah,” Keith started, nodding his head slightly, tilting his head to the side, “Yeah, I’m staying with you,” he looked at Lance, and he felt sick to his stomach because even though that glazed-over look was gone from his eyes, Keith still didn’t seem like he saw Lance when he looked at him.
However, this had to be good enough for now, so Lance would grin and bear it and hope Keith got better soon.
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, Lance would gain the opportunity to sate his curiosity once again, several quintants later: Pidge had a new experiment they wanted to run the next time Keith had an episode.
“There will be a next time,” they stated firmly at Lance’s grimace, “It’s unavoidable this early in his recovery. I want to analyze brain activity, first and foremost. If we can figure out where the toxin attacked and where it activates, we might be able to figure out a treatment.”
That almost sounded too easy, in Lance’s opinion, but it wasn’t like he was a neuroscientist. Hell, neither was Pidge, but this was the closest any of them had gotten to a potential answer, potential cure. Lance didn’t know how to feel about that, and he didn’t know how to feel about the fact that he didn’t know how to feel.
“I want you to hook up with him,” Pidge was saying, having been talking the whole time Lance’s mind wandered, and Lance couldn’t help the interruption.
“What?” he coughed out, clearing his throat and face a little flushed, “You want me to what?”
Pidge gave him a flat look, one that he got pretty frequently, but still never failed to make him feel like he had disappointed the younger teammate, somehow. “The dream-sharing machine, Lance. I want you in there with him. It’ll help having someone actually coherent and able to describe the experience. Think of it like an intelligence mission.”
Lance did not want to think of it as a mission. He didn’t want to think about it at all, to be frank. He’d, what, be inside Keith?
“In his mind, yeah,” Pidge replied dryly, and Lance flushed further at the realization that he had said that out loud. Fuck, he needed to get his shit together. For Keith. For himself, too, at this point, if he couldn’t tell when he was saying things out loud versus in his own head.
“I think it’s a good idea, Pidge,” Shiro said, and where did Shiro come from, in the first place? The man needed a bell, like a cat or something. “I know if there’s anyone Keith would trust inside his head right now, it’d be Lance,” the older man continued, and wow, that certainly made a tornado of butterflies ravage his stomach. He felt a little queasy and tried to imagine slowing them to a stop so they could just flutter instead of violently rampage. Lance couldn’t allow distractions like this, not if they threw him off his game, not if Keith was still out-of-commission and still needed Lance to be the strong one.
Pushing past the internal turbulence, Lance nodded at Shiro and agreed to have his brain hooked up to Keith’s so he could experience the memories- dreams, he reminded himself- firsthand.
That same day, he found himself in one of the lab cots hooked up to a machine that was hooked up to Keith. Too late to back out. Keith himself was already in the episode, as they’ve all taken to calling it. Lance didn’t like that term, but he didn’t know what else they realistically could call it. He hoped how nervous he was wasn’t too obvious, but if it was, his team was too kind to say anything about it. He took a deep breath and steeled himself, allowing Pidge to place the strange headset with wires like spaghetti trailing from it and cold metal plates that rested at his temples and on his forehead. The brunet shut his eyes, focusing on thinking about nothing so his mind didn’t wander.
“I’m gonna count you down, okay?” Pidge said, clearly trying to remain calm themselves, “Three, two, o-”
Everything went dark.
His eyes blinked open. He didn’t immediately recognize his surroundings, but he instinctively knew they were familiar. There was a body at his side, in front of him, familiar and unfamiliar all at once. He felt emotions that weren’t his, felt knowledge that wasn’t his flooding in. It was confusing, disorienting. His body moved against his will.
Keith’s husband looked at him with a challenge in his warm eyes, sliding closer seductively.
“You’d find me, right?” He asked, seriously.
“What do you mean?” Keith let out a slight chuckle, bringing his book down and looking his husband in the eyes. Was he Keith? Was Keith him? The book didn’t have any words that made sense, just little squiggles on the pages like one would see in a cartoon, or maybe a kid’s drawing. It wasn’t real.
His husband hummed, sliding a hand up Keith’s leg. He started at the ankle, massaging the joint there and crept up slowly. “You remember our conversation earlier, about my philosophy class? Dreams?”
Keith grinned, stretching his leg out further, teasingly poking the other man in the thigh with a toe. “Of course, how could I forget my insanely smart boyfriend explaining to me the complexities of perception and reality?” he giggled. Keith didn’t giggle. Lance giggled, sometimes, when he was warm and safe and with family. Was Keith the same way? Did he giggle when he felt warm and safe and he’d just never felt that way with Lance?
“Did you know,” his husband - boyfriend? - said slowly, “that anyone who appears to us in a dream is someone we’ve already seen in real life?”
Keith raised a brow, interested. “Really?”
Dread immediately pooled. That emotion was all Lance’s, and it helped him separate himself from Keith, even if everything in the memory was still from Keith’s perspective. This must have been what Pidge mentioned earlier, about the toxin trying to convince him his dream was real, that it was the only reality that mattered. Lance had a feeling he knew where this was going, and he didn’t like it one bit. Selfishly, Lance had hoped to gather some sort of insight as to how Keith’s dream man looked - purely educational, no other reason - but he was disappointed. He could see brown hair that was not quite short, not quite long, and while he couldn’t actually see the man’s eyes, he could tell they held a warmth that was reserved for romance movies and old married couples. He couldn’t tell their relative heights from this position, but boy, could he feel how Keith felt about this guy. Couldn’t remember a name but regardless felt so full of love that Lance distantly thought he was having a heart attack. Lance thought he loved deeply, but this? This was at a level even he didn’t think was possible. He didn’t know how much of that was the toxin and how much of that was just… Keith. He hated that he thought it was the latter.
‘You’re a brunet,’ the devil in his head whispered, ‘The color, the length… it could be you.’ Apparently mind-devils could survive mental explosions. He sent a tornado at it this time and tried to imagine a forcefield around his brain to block it off. There was no way that Keith was dreaming about him, even if what his dream-boyfriend was saying turned out to be true.
His husband-boyfriend nodded, trailing his hand from Keith’s shin to his knee, massaging that joint, as well, “Yep. Anyone you’ve ever seen in your life could make it into a dream.”
“Wow,” Keith murmured, eyes sliding shut at his boyfriend’s gentle ministrations, “That’s pretty wild. Our brains are so… weird.”
“Yeah,” his boyfriend murmured back, sliding up Keith’s body as his hand finally reached Keith’s waist, hovering over the other man, “So, if this is all an elaborate dream, if you woke up, one day, would you find me?”
‘No!’ Lance wanted to shout, but his body was Keith’s, and Keith moved where he wanted to. He felt like he was going to be sick. He couldn’t watch this, couldn’t bear to see Keith like this with someone else, and he didn’t care if he was being selfish. He needed to-
“Of course,” Keith breathed out, “You’re my soulmate. I’d know you anywhere, dream or reality,” he brought his hands up to the other man’s hips, pulling their bodies flush, “I wouldn’t rest until I found you, and I’d figure out how the hell I got you to fall in love with me so I could do it again.”
“I’d find you, too,” his boyfriend whispered against his lips, then-
Lance was violently yanked from the memory, shooting up from the lab bed with a gasp. His mind felt tingly, like he had received a small shock, and he blinked to regain his bearings. Dream, he reminded himself, not a memory. A dream. Keith’s dream.
He looked over to where the other boy was sitting, chest heaving with each breath Keith took. Lance’s heart broke a little more each day, but after that scene? He was fairly sure it shattered. For the first time since Keith woke up, Lance had doubts about whether Keith would actually recover, or if the toxin would take him first.
Haunted, he let Pidge lead him into a side room to recount what happened in an almost dissociated state. Pidge didn’t mention anything about it, so neither did Lance.
—
“Fuck Voltron!”
Lance felt like he’d been doused with a bucket of ice cold water. His sister used to wake him up like that, sometimes, in the hot Cuban summers when all he wanted to do was lay in bed and melt away into a puddle. Mama would always chide Veronica for it, but she never did anything to stop it. Truthfully, Lance didn’t either, bar complaining. The cold water always felt good in the sticky summer heat. It didn’t feel so good now. Distantly, he wished he would wake up in his bed in his family home, and this would all be a bad dream. Then he felt guilty, given Keith’s circumstances.
Keith had put his hand on Lance’s shoulder at some point during his shock-induced daydream. He was saying something about how Lance was just a kid, and- wow, that triggered something he thought he left back at the Garrison, or maybe early on in their venture to space. He could feel himself respond before he really thought about it, before he even heard himself. It was like his mouth was operating on autopilot and the rest of him was just along for the ride.
“Well, we’re here now, Keith. You’re just a kid too, and up until a couple nights ago, you were probably the most dedicated to the Voltron cause out of all of us,” he heard himself say, knocking Keith’s hand off of his shoulder in the process. Why, why, why did he do that? Lance cursed himself internally and regretted the outburst instantly, but he was still too young and prideful to back down, to admit he was wrong. That stung, too, after being told he was still too young to be doing what he did up here in space. So, instead of doing the mature thing, he doubled down. “Or do you not remember all those nights I had to drag you off the training deck so you could get more than three hours of sleep? Do you not remember-”
“Of course I remember!” Keith shouted, cutting Lance off. ‘Shit, shit, shit, not good,’ Lance thought to himself immediately. Keith was beginning to ramble about his dream life. This was not good at all. He opened his mouth to interrupt, to apologize, to say anything to break Keith out of the spiral Lance had spun him into, but Keith didn’t even give him a chance. He barreled through like he does everything, and usually it’s a point of admiration for Lance, but right now, he just wanted it all to stop. Wanted Keith to stop.
Naturally, as soon as Keith did stop, he regretted thinking that, because a silent Keith these days was a Keith in danger of getting lost in his own head. Lance didn’t know how to break the silence, though, not after everything the other man had just said, because Lance knew he was right. He knew it was unfair and it shouldn’t be their fight in the first place, and a secret part of Lance that he would never tell anyone on the team, not even Hunk, wished that he had never been essentially kidnapped into space and forced into this war because he wanted to go on dates and just have regular teenage problems. Lance also knew that if he had kids, he’d feel the same way. He kind of already did. It was obvious in his interactions with Pidge since they were so much younger than he was, regardless of how insanely smart they were, in the way the older brother instincts kicked in and he was thrown back to a time where he was wrangling his baby cousins and his niece and nephew. He missed it. He can’t blame Keith for how he’s reacting, not really. Lord knows how fucked up he was when they first got up here.
Keith let out a sigh and the noise snapped Lance out of his thoughts. Shit, Keith hadn’t said a word this whole time. This was bad. He didn’t know if he could pull Keith out of this one, this time.
Lance knew Keith couldn’t get too excited or it would trigger another episode, but he just had to go and fuck things up like he usually does. But- fuck, Keith’s already got that glassy look in his eyes.
“Keith?” Lance asked, acceptance already settling into his bones at the fact that he was about to lose him again.
“Yeah?” Keith answered as he went still, and Lance choked back a sob at watching him shut down once more.
“Keith,” Lance called out again, louder this time even though the other man was right next to him, but he had already gone unresponsive. Sighing and cursing himself out loud, he got ready to time the episode. It’s not like Keith would care if Lance was a little hard on himself; the man was already under whatever spell had bewitched him this time. Pidge had said to get them if it was anything longer than ten doboshes, and that they’d skin him alive if he let it go for longer than fifteen, but Lance hadn’t seen anything butting up on that ten-dobosh mark since Keith first woke up. He also hadn’t had a major argument with Keith since the man first woke up, though. The guilt would eat him alive if he was responsible for any backsliding.
Lance stared at the other man, guilt mingling with selfish frustration. Keith was supposed to be the strong one of the two of them; if anyone would fall prey to daydreaming about a romantic life, it would have been Lance. Should have been Lance. Deeper still, Lance was jealous. Just what was so great about this mystery guy (and hadn’t that been a shock, discovering that in Keith’s ideal life, he married a man) that he could steal Keith away from him. Them. The team, Voltron, not just him, Lance.
The brunet sighed yet again, gaze flicking between the stopwatch and Keith, searching for any sign of the boy coming back to them, back to him. Lance thought he’d wait forever if it meant Keith would be normal again, and he felt that was selfish, too.
—
“How’s your head?”
Keith hummed in response from his place on top of Lance, his head tucked nicely under the brunet’s chin. His hair was so soft, Lance couldn’t stop running his fingers through it. If they were interrupted right now, Lance might throw whoever interrupted them and then himself overboard.
“Not too bad,” Keith responded, guiding Lance back to the present moment, “The fog’s cleared up, mostly. I feel like I can distinguish what’s real and what’s dream.” He turned his violet eyes on Lance and damn, could he get lost in them if given the chance. Hopefully he will be given that chance.
“Although,” Keith continued, shifting slightly so that he could look up at Lance and meet his eyes, a small smirk on his lips, “It helps having you here, like this.” The man leaned up and pressed a kiss to the bottom of Lance’s chin and he short-circuited, sputtering like an old car. Keith laughed, settling back down into his previous position. Lance tightened his arms around the other’s waist, just enough to steady him and hold him close.
Lance swallowed, his throat and mouth dry, still not really knowing how to react to the fact that Keith was here, Keith kissed him, Keith loved him-
“Happy to help,” Lance choked out, interrupting his own spiraling thoughts. He would not let anything ruin their moment, not even his own stupid brain. Keith simply tilted his head up and smiled again, and all Lance could do was stare. The man currently in his bed was breathtakingly beautiful, an absolute smokeshow, as Marco would put it. He was worth potentially risking the wrath of his papa, knowing the man was a little old-fashioned and not knowing how he’d react to his son bringing home another man, kissing and potentially-
“Lance,” Keith called softly, and wow, when did he get so close? They were facing each other, now, Keith having moved to essentially straddle him as they gazed into each other’s eyes.
“Yeah?” Lance replied breathily, mouth drying once again as he focused back on the beautiful man in his arms, in his lap.
The other man reached up and brushed Lance’s bangs from his eyes, offering the brunet a soft smile. “I haven’t said it yet, but…” he blushed lightly, and Lance tracked the way it spread from the centers of his cheeks across the bridge of his nose like a man bewitched, “I’m really glad you’re not weirded out by the whole… dream situation.”
Lance blinked, taken aback. “Why would that weird me out?” he asked, a little bewildered, “This is, like, the perfect setup for me. The guy I’ve been crushing on since the Garrison built the life of his dreams with me? How could I-”
“You’ve been crushing on me since the Garrison?” Keith interrupted, eyes wide and a little vulnerable. Ah, shit, Lance hadn’t meant to reveal that just yet. Maybe ever.
Grimacing, Lance nodded. “Yeah,” he said, now sporting his own flush as he looked to the side, “I mean, dude, all that rivalry stuff? Come on, I was just coping over my big, fat, gay feelings for you,” he said with a shaky chuckle, trying to joke himself out of the proverbial hole he thought he dug himself into.
“Rivalry stuff that I wasn’t aware of,” Keith mumbled, though he still had a smile on his face, and wasn’t that something? He wasn’t pushing Lance away. “You… why couldn’t you have just talked to me like a normal person?” he said with a laugh, knocking their foreheads together softly, affectionately, like a cat would.
Shaking the imagery of Keith as part-cat from his brain, he mustered up a reply. “Uh, hello, is there anything normal about me?” Lance said, breathless and smiling because the boy in his lap was still in his lap, and he was beautiful and smiling too and Lance could ride the high of having a safe and happy Keith in his arms for the next century if he could live that long.
“I guess not,” Keith admitted, but before Lance could even think about getting offended or retaliating, Keith closed the distance between them and brought Lance in for a soft, almost exploratory kiss. Lance melted like putty left out in the Sun and held Keith tighter, wishing against all odds that they could just stay like this forever.
—
Almost a full phoeb after the initial dream-share, they were still running tests to track Keith’s progress. His episodes were becoming fewer and farther between, but they still happened too frequently for anyone’s liking. The strangest thing, for Lance, anyway, was how almost docile Keith had become. Lance hoped that it was just part of the healing process and wouldn’t last forever.
After the two had kissed that night in his room, when Keith revealed the truth about his dreams and they’d slowly built up a relationship from the foundation of their friendship, Lance didn’t ever want to leave Keith’s side. He knew he needed to tell Pidge, considering this might qualify as a conflict of interest, now that he was a little invested in Keith’s dream life. The last few sessions had been memories of the kids. Their kids. Lance didn’t know if it was him being wishful, but he could see himself in the girl. If only he could remember her name.
‘If only Keith could remember her name,’ he corrected himself. God, he really should talk to Pidge. What if the neurotoxin was contagious somehow and now Lance was getting sucked in? He shook off the thought, brushing it off as yet another case of overthinking. Pidge wouldn’t allow anyone to risk themselves like that, and Allura would be pissed to all hell if not one but two Paladins were taken out by the neurotoxin. Sure, the rebels had said that it was only supposed to affect Galra, but what if they were wrong? They had to have experimented on some of their own in order to figure out how to get the desired effect, right?
He mentally slapped himself again, settling back into the lab bed next to the machine that was next to Keith. It had almost become routine, and a fucked up part of Lance started to look forward to it now that he knew the dream-husband was him, that he had nothing to be jealous over. Absent-mindedly, he wondered what he would be shown today. Maybe he’d finally get to see the memory Keith had mentioned before, in the early days of having him back, where Keith was helping their son do something with his car. An air tube? Take-in air… something? Lance shrugged, figuring that he’d know whenever the memory played.
“Hey, Lance?” Hunk said by his side, a bit of worry presenting in his voice, “Pidge wanted me to remind you to try and keep your- uh, your conscious separate from Keith’s. The last few times we’ve done this…” Hunk wrung his hands nervously, a habit he had mostly shaken off since leaving the Garrison, “Well, your brain activity has been overlapping with Keith’s more and more, each time we do this. If it gets any worse, we’ll have to stop-”
“Stop?” Lance interrupted, looking up at his friend, trying not to look or sound as frantic as he felt, “Why would we stop? Aren’t I doing important stuff?”
Hunk took a deep breath and observed Lance with a healthy dose of worry. It was clear he was being careful about how he spoke and what words he chose. “We don’t want to scramble your brains, man,” he started cautiously, “It’s bad enough that Keith is down for the count, we can’t handle losing you, too.”
“We haven’t lost Keith,” Lance replied, adamant, pointedly not responding to anything else Hunk had said. If he fought back now, they might pull him out completely, and then he’d never get to see his kids again, see the life that Keith had built with him.
Whatever Hunk was about to say was cut off by Pidge yelling at them to hurry it up and get Lance under. The other man let out a heavy sigh and counted Lance down. Lance shut his eyes, holding back a soft smile as he prepared to see his family again.
Everything went black.
This memory… this memory was strange. It didn’t feel like the past ones. Lance didn’t know where he was, he didn’t know anything. He felt like he was underwater, like his head was full of cotton, like how he felt when he had a double ear infection when he was a kid and he woke up at two in the morning screaming in pain and his mama put cotton balls soaked with olive oil in his ears because they couldn’t afford a trip to the emergency room and the family doctor didn’t open for another five hours.
He saw the man first, and Lance didn’t recognize him. Everything was… wrong. It was like looking at a mannequin with a wig in a dark room.
Lance could hear Keith’s voice, but he couldn’t see him. He couldn’t see himself. They usually shared a body for these things, but where was Keith? Where was Lance? It was like his brain was rejecting the entire premise of the dream, twisting it into something that made Lance want to wake up as soon as possible to escape the wrongness. Why wasn’t this going like normal?
Eventually, Lance managed to focus hard enough that his conscious fell into Keith’s body like click-lock hardwood floors, rough and with a snap that made you nervous at first, thinking maybe you broke something by accident. The details of everything were still fuzzy, but he was close enough to normal that he’d take it.
Lance couldn’t make out the words, but he knew their voices were coming out wrong. They were echoey and deeper than usual. The kids were nowhere to be found. Lance sat through the memory, even more detached than usual, and a feeling of wrongness flooded his system the longer he sat in it. Something was tugging at him, trying to get him to wake up, but he couldn’t. Not yet. Not until he figured out what the hell was going on, and why the man who was supposed to be him didn’t look like him anymore-
It wasn’t him.
Keith’s dream husband wasn’t him.
Instantly, Lance was violently pulled out of the dream. He gasped as he sat up, mind reeling from everything. He could hear something beeping, maybe an alarm going off? Pidge was cussing up a storm and Shiro barely bothered to even try to chide them for their language.
“That’s not me,” Lance breathed out, too many emotions entangled with each other to be able to pick one out, hurt and confusion and wonder and-
“What do you mean, buddy?” Hunk, ever the angel, interrupted the beginning of Lance’s spiral.
Lance whipped the headset off and spun around to look at Hunk, eyes wild in a way the other man had never seen Lance before. Lance didn’t care that he looked like a lunatic in that moment, all he cared about was-
“That’s not me,” Lance repeated, voice louder but shakier than before, “He said it was me, it had always been me. That’s not me.” Dread filled his gut as he played back the memory in his mind. Sure, some of the features were close enough that it could pass for him, if someone hadn’t seen him in years and also forgot what he looked like, much less acted like, but not Keith. Keith, who lived with Lance every day, who was frequently in close quarters with him, who knew Lance better than anyone, these days.
“I’m not catching your meaning, man,” Hunk said cautiously, but Lance was already up and out the door. He didn’t know where he was going, he just needed to go away. He needed room to think, space to breathe.
Pidge chased after him, gripping him firmly and dragging him into what had become their debriefing room.
“What the hell was that about, Lance? The readings were off the charts!” Pidge shouted, obviously concerned and scared. Lance tried to gather himself together, even just to make them not worry as much.
“Pidge,” he started, still trying to calm his breathing, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Sensing the severity of the situation, Pidge locked the door, pushed Lance back into a chair, and stood in front of him. “Talk,” they demanded, and talk he did.
Lance told Pidge about everything, and he meant everything. How he and Keith had talked in Keith’s room that one night half a phoeb ago, how Keith told him that Lance was the dream-husband, that Lance was the one who he had built the life of his dreams with, had children with, grown old with. He told them about the kiss they shared and how he started looking forward to the dream-sharing, how he started thinking of the dreams more as memories. Lance told them about how wrong everything was from the start today and how he couldn’t navigate the dream-sharing like usual, how everything was unfocused and fuzzy and unfamiliar. How he was unfamiliar. How the man who Keith had married didn’t really look like him at all.
Pidge was fuming, but trying to contain it. Lance appreciated that. He was still too raw from the discovery that Keith didn’t actually love him that any further external input would see him break down and probably never talk again. He felt like he was going to be sick, or maybe have a heart attack, or maybe both.
“Okay,” Pidge said softly, grabbing Lance’s attention, “This… this is bad. Of course he’d latch onto you, we shouldn’t have kept you two in such close quarters for so long,” they said, and Lance was about to speak up to defend himself, offended, but Pidge held up a hand and stopped him. “Just- hold on. Let me think.”
The younger teammate began pacing the room slowly, and strangely enough, watching the rhythmic motion helped calm Lance down, too.
“Okay,” they said again, “This is… new information,” the young scientist decided on, “and new information is always good, even if the situation isn’t ideal.” They took a deep breath and faced Lance, this time directing their speech toward him, “Your brain was rejecting the dream. You probably felt like it was a nightmare, right? Like your body was trying to get you to wake up because something was wrong?”
Lance just nodded, too overwhelmed to really say anything. Pidge had gotten it right on the money, per usual.
Pidge nodded in return. “Okay,” they repeated yet again, taking a deep breath before continuing, “So it’s safe to say that what we’ve been seeing has been your brain trying to assimilate into the dream, but because you don’t have Galra DNA, your nervous system rejected it,” Pidge theorized, beginning to pace again, “So, somehow, just observing made you vulnerable. We’ll have to press Keith a little harder than usual for details to see what the dream was supposed to be like,” they murmured, letting out a small huff in what Lance could only assume was annoyance. They turned again to face Lance, fixing him in place with a stern look. “We can’t do this again,” they stated firmly.
Lance opened his mouth to fight back but held his tongue at the beginnings of fury that built up on Pidge’s face as he attempted to do so. He sighed and deflated, nodding dejectedly. Objectively, he knew whatever was happening to him was bad and he definitely needed to stop, and even if he continued, there was no guarantee that Lance would ever see the actual dream again if his mind was already rejecting the dream-share.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Pidge started tentatively, face screwing up in an expression that told Lance that they couldn’t believe what they were about to say, “Whatever you saw… it wasn’t what Keith saw. It wasn’t the actual dream.”
“You mean…” Lance trailed, unable to even vocalize the rest of the question.
Pidge grimaced, though more at themselves than at Lance, “That whatever- whoever- you saw wasn’t actually real? Well, less real than Keith’s dream-memories? Yeah.”
Suddenly, Lance felt a little silly. Maybe more than a little. God, that explanation made so much sense, actually, now that Lance had taken a second to think, had stepped back from the emotional overwhelm. Of course it wouldn’t work on him, he’s not Galra, so obviously whatever was affecting Keith would be rejected by his own body. They only shared half of the same DNA. Kind of. Lance didn’t really know how that stuff worked, he’d always just treated it like being mixed race back on Earth. That’s all Keith was, even if the second race was technically a whole different species. He was just mixed.
Shaking his head to get back on track, he stood from the chair and gave Pidge a wide smile. “Thanks, Pigeon,” he said, clapping them on the back happily before getting ready to walk out of the door and find Keith, who was still in love with him, who still thought Lance was the man of his dreams, “Man, what would I do without a smart friend like you, huh? I’ll see you at dinner!” he called, waving back at them as he walked out the door. He was focused on going to find Keith so they could spend some time together. The other man should be done with his own debrief by now. Lance practically skipped down the hall as he went to find his lover.
If he ignored the way Pidge looked pained as he spoke, the way they immediately turned to their notebook to furiously scribble as soon as they thought Lance couldn’t see them, well. That was no one’s business but his own.