Work Text:
Laughing All the Way to the Hospital
Lance is quite possibly the single most accident-prone person Keith has ever met. It’s not so much that he does risky things – although if he feels he’s been challenged he will do pretty much anything up to and including eating an entire box of cold Hot Pockets, drinking a shot of ketchup, and doing a cartwheel on a trampoline. The last one resulted in Lance not falling off the trampoline, but actually managing to flip the trampoline over so it fell on him. The first two just resulted in a stomach-ache and a newfound hatred of ketchup. (The ketchup-hate lasted about a week – Lance hated dry French fries more than memories of a self-inflicted ketchup overdose.)
Keith honestly isn’t sure how his boyfriend survived to adulthood if his life as a quasi-functional, responsible adult is in any way indicative of what he was like as a kid.
The true genius of Lance’s propensity for personal injury is that he doesn’t even do particularly dangerous things – he just manages to make ordinary things deadly. (He says ‘exciting’ Keith says ‘horrible and life-threatening’. Keith should know; he spent several years doing potentially dangerous stuff on purpose. Sometimes he still does.)
Keith is pretty sure he’s on his way to a heart attack in his twenties if Lance keeps this up.
…
1.
“Heeeeey, babe…”
“Lance, what the fuck. I just saw you ten minutes ago. What did you do?”
“Do? I didn’t do anything! Why would you think I did something?”
Keith pauses in the cereal aisle, parking his grocery cart next to the Captain Crunch and glaring at a soccer mom when she looks ready to tell him off for blocking the high-sugar cereals. Her kids don’t need that much frosted crap anyway. “Lance.”
“It’s no big deal, really,” Lance laughs nervously and Keith has a sudden burst of sympathy for Shiro every time his brother fielded another call from teenage rebel Keith. (‘Hey Shiro, I need a ride and maybe a doctor, I think my nose is broken…’)
“Lance, do I need to come home?”
“Uh, maybe?” Lance sounds very shifty and Keith’s blood pressure is through the roof right now.
“Maybe yes or maybe no?” Another woman pauses in front of the cereal and tentatively points at the Coco Puffs. Keith hands her the cereal and she mouths ‘thank you’ and goes on her way.
“Uh…probably yes. Unless, do you think I could drive one-handed? I bet I could drive one-handed…”
“No!” Keith shouts and a man with his young daughter glares at him. Keith glares right back. He’s allowed to yell in the grocery store if he wants to, dammit, “You can barely drive with both hands! Please, please don’t – just – ugh, I’m coming home. Don’t…do anything. And call an ambulance if you think it’s life-threatening.”
Lance laughs nervously, “Who said anything about – ?”
“Just do it,” Keith growls and half-stalks, half-runs out of the grocery store, abandoning his cart behind him.
…
Lance is sitting on the kitchen floor, a now-ruined towel wrapped around his hand, which is held above his head and stained a troubling shade of red. He’s surrounded by broken glass.
Keith comes skidding to a halt in front of him and is very glad he forgot to take of his boots before running into the kitchen. He folds his arms. “We have a bottle opener.”
Lance smiles at him sheepishly, “I couldn’t find it.”
“So you decided to smash it?” Keith says sarcastically, walking across the broken glass, listening to it crunch under his combat boots.
“I tried to do that thing where you pop the top off with the edge of the counter,” Lance says defensively. Keith crouches down in front of him. “Hey,” Lance says, “What are you doing – ?” the rest of his question is cut off with a yelp as Keith pulls him onto his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” Keith explains, “There’s no way you could get around all that glass without cutting your feet.”
“Well this is demeaning,” Lance mutters. He’s obviously not that upset about it because he reaches down with his good hand and pinches Keith’s butt.
“Quit it,” Keith growls at him and Lance giggles like a child.
“Sexy Keith.”
“Idiot Lance.”
“Hey!”
“You sliced up your hand trying to open a bottle,” Keith says flatly, “You are an idiot.”
“But a very cute idiot,” Lance tries.
“An idiot who needs stitches,” Keith says darkly, “Stop squirming.”
“We’re out of the kitchen, put me down!”
“No, if I do you’ll just run off and hurt yourself again.”
Lance sighs dramatically, “This would be a lot hotter if I was in less pain and you were less grumpy.”
“Just shut up and let me take you to the hospital.”
…
He needs several stitches. Allura straight up laughs when Lance whines, “I finally got Keith to carry me around and he wouldn’t even let me make it sexy.”
Keith throws cotton balls at him until Allura tells him to stop.
...
2.
“What happened to your face?” Keith demands when he gets out of the car and sees Lance standing on the curb, a bandaid across the bridge of his nose and a faint blue stain around his eyes that was not there this morning when he left for work and looks suspiciously bruise-colored.
“Funny story,” Lance begins and Keith folds his arms, “So I was playing Frisbee with the kids…”
“And one of them hit you in the face with it.”
“No, actually, my boss did.”
“It was totally accidental!” Coran, who is technically the director of the Community Center, although he has the organizational skills of a toddler hopped up on two liters of soda and a pound of raw sugar, calls as he walks past carrying a stack of files that will presumably disappear into the quantum wormhole that is his office, never to be seen again. “Although it was an otherwise brilliant catch!”
Lance laughs uneasily. “Coran was tossing the Frisbee to someone else and I turned around at the wrong time.”
“It was really a terrible bit of bad luck,” Cora says sympathetically, “But we got it all sorted, Lance has some ice and a bandaid and no concussion!”
“And you know this how?” Keith asks skeptically.
“I used to be a medic on wilderness adventure tours back home in Australia,” Coran explains cheerily, “See, pretty much everything in Australia can kill you so all our company tour guides were certified EMTs. First response handled right saves lives!”
Keith sighs, “Thank you for taking care of it, Coran.”
“Least I could do.” He disappears into his office, presumably to dispose of the files.
Keith turns his attention back to Lance. “A Frisbee? Really?”
“Hey, if I’m lucky it’ll scar and I’ll finally have a scar story that’s only, like, halfway lame.”
Keith rolls his eyes, “Just get in the car.”
“What, you’re not going to kiss it better?” Lance wiggles his eyebrows suggestively and winces when the motion yanks on the bruising around his eyes.
Keith sighs presses a brief kiss to Lance’s forehead. Then he ruins the moment because Keith is a compulsive moment-ruiner by grinning when he pulls away and saying “I figured I’d go for the forehead. Since your brain’s apparently broken.”
“Hey!”
“You stepped in front of a flying Frisbee. Your decision-making skills need work.”
“It was an accident!” Lance protests and looks so distraught Keith can’t help but lean forward again and press a soft kiss to the bridge of his wounded nose.
“There? Happy?”
“Yes,” Lance grumbles.
…
3.
Keith is fucking exhausted. And cold. Ugh. It’s o-dark-o-clock and too-fucking-late-thirty and all he wants is to crawl in bed with his boyfriend and warm up. He forgot his hat or gloves and is actually shaking snow out of his hair as he climbs up the stairs. He feels like someone replaced his blood with liquid nitrogen. He will never be warm again.
He wouldn’t normally bother to do much more than maybe take off his coat and think about taking off his boots when it’s this late, but melting snow seems to have snuck into every crevice of his clothing so he actually changes into a soft t-shirt and sleep pants, cursing under his breath every time cold air touches his bare skin. He gets most of the snow out of his hair and decides that’s good enough, dammit. Lance is already asleep, curled on his side, wrapped around Keith’s pillow like a little kid with a teddy bear. It’s incredibly cute…and incredibly inconvenient. Keith wants his pillow.
He slides under the covers, inching over to Lance, trying not to wake him as he inches closer, gently tugging the pillow away and replacing it at the head of the bed. Lance, still asleep, deprived of his cuddle-buddy, grabs onto Keith, who chuckles deep in his throat and reciprocates, tangling their legs and rubbing his frozen toes against Lance’s warm feet and tucking his freezing fingers against Lance’s sides.
The minute his cold digits come in contact with Lance’s warm skin, Lance snaps awake like someone flicked a switch in his brain. He yelps and jumps away, still half-asleep, getting tangled in the blankets as he goes. One second he’s there, the next he’s tumbled straight off the edge of the bed, hitting the floor with a hard thump and a pained groan.
“What the hell just happened?” he moans as Keith’s sluggish, exhausted brain tries to decide if he thinks this is funny or something to actually be concerned about.
“You fell off the bed.”
“I got that, genius.”
“My cold hands and feet startled you and you launched yourself off the bed to get away from me.”
“Oh god.”
“It was very hurtful,” Keith says, a grin tugging up the corners of his mouth as he bites down on a laugh.
“Oh trust me, I’m hurt,” Lance groans as he pushes himself upright and crawls back onto the bed, “That’s gonna bruise.” He makes it back onto the bed and sprawls there spread-eagled. He flops his head over to stare at Keith. “Babe, tomorrow I am buying you mittens and I’m sewing them to the sleeves of your coat so you can never, ever lose them.”
That’s it; Keith is laughing now, the hysterical laughter of the majorly sleep-deprived.
“And fuzzy socks. Big fluffy fuzzy socks. And maybe some wool everything. That too. You are an ice cube. How are you alive?”
Keith snickers and reaches out. Lance scoots away, “Oh no, oh no, no, no. No cold hands. Bad Keith, bad Keith!”
Keith presses his fingers to Lance’s face and Lances shrieks and actually failboat-ninja-rolls himself off the bed again.
“That’s it, I’m just gonna become one with the floor,” Lance groans and Keith loses it again. “Oh yeah, laugh at my pain. Asshole.”
…
The next morning Keith wakes up to Lance dropping ice cubes down the back of his shirt. With a shout, he’s jumping to his feet and chasing Lance down the hallway as his boyfriend cackles, unrepentant.
…
4.
“You, Hunk and Pidge tried to build a what?”
“A flamethrower – you know what, babe, it doesn’t matter.”
“You tried to make a – why?”
“It was Pidge’s idea. To be fair, Hunk tried to reason with us.”
“And you thought you wouldn’t get burned?”
“I’m a very optimistic person.”
Keith just stares at him flatly and slaps more burn ointment on Lance’s arms with a little more force than strictly necessary.
…
5.
“You are the only person I know who could possibly get tangled in Christmas lights and have a giant plastic snowman fall on him. That’s like sit-com-level unlikely.” Keith says as he gently de-tangles Lance from the festive knot he’s gotten himself into, “Also, let me say this now, the plastic snowman is creepy as hell.”
“Aww, don’t be mean to Melty!” Lance says; then yelps in protest when Keith accidentally jostles the ankle that’s probably sprained. His wrist too, most likely. He tried to catch himself when the snowman toppled. That didn’t work out. “Hunk and I got Melty at a yard sale when we were in college. Him and the twinkle lights we’d been stringing up in our dorm rooms were basically all the Christmas decorations we had when we first moved in.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s staring at me.”
“Him. Come on, Keith, respect the snowman’s pronouns.”
“The plastic snowman is giving me the evil eye after attacking my boyfriend.”
Lance sighs, “Pidge took a while to come around to Melty too.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s going to murder us all in our sleep,” Keith eyes the snowman suspiciously. Its plastic features (a factory error, the paint was applied wrong and half the snowman’s grinning face is smudged, the color just sort of smeared on) grin dementedly at him, and Keith shudders.
“He grows on you,” Lance staunchly defends his possibly demonic lawn ornament.
“Why were trying to attach him to the roof?” Keith asks patiently as he continues to unwind the Christmas lights. The roof they’re still standing on, actually, as Lance was too enmeshed in the light strings to retreat.
Lance shrugs. “Variety is the spice of life.”
Keith stares at him flatly.
Lance deflates, “Pidge said I couldn’t do it and I wanted to prove I could.”
“That sounds more like it.”
Keith works in silence for the next couple of minutes, only pausing every now and then when he accidentally pulls on the sprained ankle or wrist and Lance whimpers. Finally, Lance is free to drape his good arm over Keith’s neck and hobble toward the ladder.
“Keith…”
“Yeah.”
“I think the ladder fell over.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re stuck up here, aren’t we?”
“Yeah.”
Melty grins sinisterly at them from where he leans against the chimney. Keith pulls out his phone. “Should I call Hunk or Pidge or just give up and call 911?”
“I’m not sure I’m prepared to have firemen see me like this,” Lance confesses.
“Hmm.” Keith has an idea. A wonderful, awful idea.
“Oh shit,” Lance muttered.
…
+1
“I bet I could get down there without a ladder.”
“Keith, no.”
“It wouldn’t be that hard. I’ve gotten onto the roof without a ladder before.”
“That’s the second story roof,” Lance tries to reason with him, “or the roof over the porch. This is the top of the house. The one roof to rule them all. You can’t get to this roof from the other roofs. There’s a reason I used a ladder.”
But Keith has the Danger Look on and he’s not listening. “No, I bet I could do it.”
“Maybe in the summer…when there isn’t any snow…”
“I’m gonna try it.”
“Babe, no. Babe. Babe, I will call Shiro on your ass!”
“He’s not the boss of me,” Keith calls over his shoulder and Lance face-palms then moans in pain when he jostles his probably-sprained wrist.
“I’m in love with an idiot,” Lance tells his palms.
“I heard that.”
“Good!”
It goes pretty well, actually. At first. Keith gets a decent handhold on the gutter and, hanging by his hands, manages to inch himself along until he’s close enough to the lower level roof – the gutter, which was not designed to hold the weight of a human body, squealing in protest the whole time. Lance feels like his heart is trying to crawl up his throat and escape out of his mouth. It’s horrible. Keith manages to get close enough to swing himself onto the lower roof, but it’s icy and his foothold is tenuous at best and the gutter gives up about the time he’s almost on the roof and pops free just as he’s landing. The unexpected loss of his handhold plus the ice on the roof has Keith sliding down to the edge of the roof horribly quickly. Scrabbling for a something to grab onto, he manages to grab that gutter as he goes over the edge and kind of catapult himself into the pile of snow by the driveway from the last time they shoveled.
Lance is pretty sure he was screaming at Keith towards the end of that adventure. He’s definitely screaming now, “KEITH. Fucking hell, you’d better be okay, you asshole. KEITH! ANSWER ME, YOU DAREDEVIL PARKOURING JERK!”
“I’m fine,” Keith’s shaky, beautiful, goddamn stupid voice drifts up to him and Lance is this close to flat-out sobbing at that gorgeous jerk.
“No, you’re not, you’re fucking insane.”
Keith hauls himself upright, but his arm is at a funny angle. He’s sitting waist-deep in the snow, peering up at Lance, his fluffy hair an absolute disaster. “You should probably call 911, though. I’m pretty sure my arm’s dislocated and something’s probably broken.”
Lance, crying and making sure to keep Keith within view at all times – his heart almost stopped there, okay? He and Keith are having words about this later – dials emergency services.
Allura is going to love this.