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The first bruise occurs during a lackluster training session when Lance is personally nonethewiser. It’s a hit to the side, just below the ribs, a slight moment of failure to dodge a particularly nasty downward swipe. For the duration, there’s only the sensation of blood-pumping adrenaline, a high that never falters until time is called, and it’s all over.
It’s only after Lance feels the slight tug while slipping off his body suit that his eyes trail over the forming mark. At that time, he simply shrugs it off; he’s sure that Shiro just wasn’t aware of how hard he can hit, how brute his strength is when confronted with a cause. The unfortunate purpose of training was to prepare the Paladins for anything, and Shiro takes everything seriously to the point it’s almost sinful; Lance won’t worry about it. It’s just another day in the life of a Paladin. He tucks the thought away in the recesses of his mind, the parts that contain his longing for his mother’s hugs and garlic knots.
As the week passes, it still doesn’t really bother him, the swollen part on his side that seems to tug at the nerves whenever he stretches or turns in his sleep. Another week passes, but the bruise doesn’t really eat at him like how the sight of Keith putting his hand on Shiro’s shoulder does. He wants to scoff; Lance’s life has been nothing but a series of bruises, both physical and mental. He’s tough, tougher than tough, so he can handle a few black and blues on his caramel skin. After all, Lance’s life has been nothing but physical pains, from falling off a body board into the rushing waves and from being pushed to the ground from the older kids that deemed him nothing better than a cargo pilot. He’s gotten used to it; it’s freeing even to admit it.
The second bruise, however, is the beginning of an ache that never fades, of a throb that dully reverberates in his ears and his heart. It’s merely a moment Lance wasn’t meant to stumble upon, his presence unwanted in such a private occurrence. All the same, the sting is still as real as his own skin, the puncture deep enough for him to admit, yes, this hurts.
It’s the sight of Shiro’s war-worn eyes softening at Keith’s smile and the gaze, the sight, those eyes are oh, so adoring, so loving, that for the first time, Lance truly feels his heart break.
Yet, there was a time his heart felt so light, floating like the dust towards the cosmos above in the form of galaxy clouds and meteor showers. There was a time his fingers would carefully caress the name Takashi Shirogane with such reverence, his heart would nearly burst. This pilot, this man so honored and so talented, was his hero. Through the budding years of puberty when Lance would sit on the beach, greeted so kindly by midnight waves, his little flashlight would reveal to his eyes a handsome grin, and a proud frame. Takashi Shirogane was a man that he thought he could sought to be, and, maybe even, sought to be with. Lance would flirt with anything that garnered his fancy, but oh, the thought of maybe gathering the affections of his pilot hero—that was a fantasy only the waves and the stars could know.
But, the second bruise is far from the worst, Lance wants to tell that young man sitting cross-legged in the sand. This bruise is only one of many; there is never a last.
Once that crack forms along the ridges of his heart, the blue Paladin comes to understand that his defenses, however unfortunate, are fading. He’s vulnerable in a sense that he has before with the numerous rejections and the overlooking of others, but never has it hit so hard. The hand that shook Shiro’s prosthetic tends to tingle more each passing day, seems to remember the form and the curves when their hands met. The metal was cold, and the sinews nothing like Lance’s own, but it didn’t matter; it was Shiro, everything that dumb kid on the beach dreamed of and more.
But the stars, they’re not the same as the textbooks and the maps, they’re not the comfort that Lance finds salt-bitter waters of home. Galaxies are not the ocean’s push and pull around him after sinks down too deep, so deep that the world engulfs him and makes him feel safe. Space is cold, so frigid, that ice fills in the cracks of his heart with every new bruise, every new hurt.
The bruises that follow dig deeper, linger longer. They form in the little stolen moments when the universe comprises of nothing more than red and black; when eyes meet each other and understanding and, dare he say, love blooms in such fragility, the thought smashes its heel into the blue Paladin’s heart. It’s smothering him, all these memories that aren’t his own, when fingers touch along the other’s knuckles, when fingers intertwine, and the worst comes, the damn worst. It steals Lance’s breath, blue eyes so transfixed but it burns, something finally burns and aches, and all it took was a secret kiss.
Weeks pass, and truly, his own breath is stolen, replaced with something more bitter and stale. He finds fewer things to think about, fewer things to even say. Thoughts of consciousness all revolve around the bruises that just don’t seem to fade, that throb and that pulse with his own timid heartbeat. His jokes and his banter even fall deaf on his own ears because, really… no one is paying attention any way.
It was a long time ago now, the teen realizes, that he thought maybe Shiro found some good humor in him. Maybe, he once thought, that those war-worn eyes that watched him, crinkled with that handsome grin as words of praise warmed through the room for something grand that Lance did were something just for him. Good job today, Lance, or you’re really becoming something, aren’t you? Every word all looks a little less like praise and more like forced thoughts the closer that Shiro and Keith get before his eyes—and everyone else’s honestly, Hunk and Pidge are anyone to go by.
Age has a way of changing a soul, his mother would say. Lance gets that now as his looks over his new bruises, accumulated from time in the training room and venturing out from Blue to face a fight straightforward. His hair is a little longer, his skin a little paler, and it all makes the bruises look so stark and black.
Here in this confinement, black does not meld with blue to make anything else but a bruise, but black and red, they make the twilight of a sunrise, they make the heat of a nighttime fire, and they make darkness of space juxtapose the fire of suns and stars and it is beautiful.
And it’s alone in his bedroom, with nothing more than the humming silence of the ship that he likens to something out of one of those silly sci-fi books his father would read, that he lets the pains hit bone deep, that he allows the loneliness to creep in and sink him. It’s here in the dark space that confines him to his thoughts and his woes that sweet kisses and lacing fingers haunt him, and he wonders where the smile in his own dreams went, the whiskey-rough chuckle that he imagined playing against his own ear.