Chapter Text
The first time Lance lays his sore eyes on the brooding guy with a mullet in his creative writing course, he thinks that he is quite a sight for his… aforementioned sore eyes. This is probably why his gradebook in the class isn’t looking so good, but great writing comes with time and Shakespeare definitely had loads of it.
Now, Lance has had a few exes. He dated Nyma in high school, and she haunted him through the entirety of the rest of it when they broke up. According to Pidge, who swears she had to find cotton swabs for her ears because they wouldn’t stop bleeding when he bemoaned his eternal bachelor status, they should’ve stayed friends. They are, now, anyways, although it’s still a bit awkward ever since they managed to reconcile over the summer and realized they were going to be attending the same college. He had a brief fling with that Kinkade dude on the basketball team, but he didn’t really have much going on for him other than his proficiency with balls (all innuendo intended), and this time it was Hunk who said that Lance could do better.
On that same wavelength, Lance has liked a few people too, although he was shut down almost immediately by all four of them. There was Allura, ethereal, beautiful Allura, who’s his best friend now and keeps saying she ‘let him down slowly’ when to Lance it felt like she pummeled him into the ground with a wrecking ball and left him there to die. There was Shiro, one of the TAs for their dorm floors, who laughed for five minutes straight with his fiancé Adam when Lance begrudgingly admitted his schoolboy love and made Adam and Lance exchange numbers. There was Lotor, and he was put under direct fire during the entire time by Pidge until it ebbed away, but damn he should ask for his haircare routine. He has to say that he always thought Matt was good looking, but the idea that he’s Pidge’s brother makes it a little nauseating for him to imagine it becoming anything more than a crush.
Lance is, more or less, a loverboy. He loves people. He likes them. He doesn’t fight them, not often, anyways. He’ll fight them if it calls for it, but that’s besides the point. Lance falls for people easily.
And when he sees that guy sitting in his freshman year creative writing course, sipping from a black coffee with a mullet and the most gorgeous eyes he’s ever seen, Lance falls hard.
Lance: i’m dead fuck ass right now just fuck me in the ass there’s this guy
Pidge: Bye
Lance: ??????/
Lance: pidge i didn’t even say nothing come BACK
Lance: please wait he’s so fine I don’t think i’ve ever seen him before but he’s in my creative writing course and i think he’s genuinely like hung the stars in the sky he has these pretty purple eyes and for some reason he has a MULLET but it’s ok i can overlook that fact who is this man the gods must’ve gifted him to the world
Pidge: boy why can’t you write like this in your assignments maybe if you did you wouldn’t have gotten a grade that genuinely knocked you out for like an hour
Lance: that was stockpiled hours of overdue sleep hitting me and overdose on pop tarts can u lay off it for one day pidge
Pidge: what do pop tarts have to do with this Lance!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!
Lance: LISTEN TO ME I’M SERIOUS
Hunk: lance it’s too early for this man
Lance: IT’S ALWAYS TOO EARLY FOR YOU
Lance: wait I’m sorry Hunk I love you bro
Hunk: [heart]
Lance: but listen ok. he has a mullet. i think he has a piercing??? they look so good on him i think i might explode right NOW and he was wearing… a varsity jacket??
Lance: …wait pause why was he wearing a varsity jacket
Pidge: LMAOAOAOSHSHAHSASHALSLALSLALALALAL Wait let me
Lance: wait wait wait i need to find him wait whose jacket was that?? piercings?? mullet?? he is not a jock at least i don’t think he is/?? is he just defying stereotypes???
Hunk: Lance
Pidge: black hair? I might’ve found him on the school database hehe
Lance: oh god pidge you angel
Pidge: does keith kogane ring a bell to you guys
Pidge: [image attached]
Pidge: he DOES have a mullet….. I’ve seen him around for sure, but he seems to keep to himself most of the time tbh
Hunk: isn’t that Griffin’s boyfriend
Lance: ARE WE FUCKING SERIOUS
Here’s another thing to know about Lance.
He’s not lucky, not at all. Not in academics, or anything else— he’ll take his chances on a MCQ once in a while and get most of it right by entirely guessing— but in Cupid’s field, he’s basically always scrambling to get out of a tornado, or a hurricane, or a tsunami, or whatever metaphorical reference there is to make out of his terrible chances with the Aphrodite and Lady Luck collab. And Lance always gets the short end of the stick.
Shiro having a fiancé was really a terrible crossing of the cosmos. If Allura somehow ended up getting together with Lotor, or Romelle or whatever, given how much they’ve been talking, that’s all because of the inherent fabric of the universe. Ezor was gay, for fuck’s sake!
Lance, by now, is convinced that this is all at the hand of a higher fate, and really isn’t his fault. Or maybe his taste is just terrible (which he’s sure is not the case). Keith having a boyfriend— captain of the rugby team all-star James Griffin, is seemingly also because of this same curse, and he’s had enough of it.
“You can’t be serious,” he’s wailing in the shared dorm he has with Hunk. Pidge raises a small fist up to her glasses, pushes them higher up the bridge of her nose, and rolls her eyes. She’s basically the third member of their dorm, even though she’s a girl. She doesn’t act like one, anyway. “How is this happening to me?”
“I dunno, Lance, maybe it’s just that all hot people are always taken,” Hunk offers unhelpfully, but his intentions are kind. It doesn’t stop Lance from wanting to throw the nearest packet of cheetos there is at him (there’s actually a lot of options, because the two of them both love cheetos).
“Allura wasn’t taken,” Lance retorts.
“She may as well be now,” Pidge grins. Lance hurls a pillow at her and she yells at him about how one day he’s going to break her computer.
Lance looks at her incredulously. “It’s a pillow!”
“With the force you’re throwing it at, it’s not,” Pidge glares, like he’s a kid throwing a temper tantrum.
A knock on the door nearly scares the computer out of Pidge’s hands and Lance right off his bed. They peer at the doorframe, which reveals Shiro, looking stern (and still as good-looking as before, Lance notes). “You guys are the loudest on this floor,” he says matter-of-factly, crossing his arms. The metal of his prosthetic hand glints in the light.
“Hi, Shiro,” Pidge offers. He raises an eyebrow at her presence, but doesn’t say anything. He’s always sort of liked her, in that older-brother manner, and despite swearing that his bias will get him in a bad place one day he doesn't bother to do anything about it.
“Cause we’re the only ones on this floor,” Lance complains. “People have breaks and stuff, man. We’ve all got free periods.”
“Lance is crushing on a dude with a boyfriend,” Hunk blurts immediately. Lance gapes at him, betrayed.
The look on Shiro’s face twists away from imminent scolding and into glee. “Oh, pray tell. Who’s the lucky man?”
“Tell the lucky man to give his luck to me,” Lance says, laying supine on his bed and burying his face in his hands.
Pidge looks downright devilish as she opens her mouth and Lance knows that this is a horrible idea and that he has horrible friends and a horrible heart. “Keith Kogane.”
Shiro’s jaw drops. “Keith?”
Hunk frowns. Pidge nearly leaps in the air with joy. Lance feels his bones lose all sensation. “You know Keith?”
“Lance, Keith’s like my brother! He used to live at my house!” Shiro shrills. He pauses and then rakes his fingers through his hair. “You’ve been there! You’ve seen the photos!”
Well. “I didn’t know that scrawny kid in those photos was supposed to grow into a hulking heartthrob!”
“Don’t call him a heartthrob,” Shiro groans and it dawns on Lance on how weird this is. He’s got the hots for Shiro’s basically-brother that has a boyfriend, which Shiro definitely knows of, and he’s just declared his undying affection. Brilliant.
“Fuck, I’m sorry, man. I know it’s weird,” Lance justifies, putting his hands up, and Shiro looks rather surprised. “I’ll get over it eventually, you know. If I don’t pursue him, I’ll just grow out of my feelings. It’s all good. Just a small thing.”
“Oh, no, Lance, I’m okay with it, don’t get me wrong,” Shiro begins—
Hunk looks like he’s come down with a particularly bad case of indigestion, with the way this conversation is going. “But he has a boyfriend!”
“Let me continue,” Shiro warns, waggling a finger, and Hunk shrinks back into his pillows. Pidge looks at the interaction unfold with the air one would watch a telenovela with. “Keith— and James— I have always thought that their relationship was never more than physical attraction.”
Lance winces, imagining Keith and James going at it. It’s not a bad sight to picture— they’re both horrifyingly attractive, but it fills him with the melancholy of that one Justin Bieber song that goes that should be me, accompanied by the obligatory twinge of jealousy. Damn right, that should be me.
“When Keith told me that James asked him out and he said yes, I was absolutely shocked. A little less than Adam was, actually. Adam was so out of it that he chewed him out for like an hour about protection and looking to date for more than just appearance, and a wide pool of compatible people— nicely, of course. As their relationship continued I never felt more justification for my shock. They didn’t seem to know each other at all, and James still has Keith hanging off his arm everywhere. I have to admit I’ve been waiting for something to happen that finally splits them up, because I know my brother, and I know he’s not happy.”
Shiro turns to Lance, rubbing at his temples. “I know you too, Lance, and I think you and Keith would work out quite well. So if… if you wanted to give it a go, maybe it would… make him come to his senses. A boyfriend’s not supposed to have you crying every week because of a fight. A boyfriend’s supposed to remember your anniversary.”
“Oh, shit,” Pidge murmurs.
“It’s not the most ideal course of action but Keith is stubborn as hell and I think he needs someone in his life like you, Lance, to make him realize that there are men out there better than James Griffin,” he concludes. Hunk looks like he’s on the verge of crying, actually. “Who knows? You’ll still make a friend.”
“Yeah, Lance,” Pidge pipes up. The look on her face has lost its mischief, superseded now by something softer.
“Yeah, Lance,” Hunk says, tearily.
“Yeah, Lance,” Shiro smiles.
Lance finds himself grinning too. He can take that back. Maybe once, once out of fifteen hundred, fate is on his side. Even if it has begrudgingly offered up its favor.
Lance: allura, i've got an idea
Allura: Hmm, that's never good