Chapter Text
Keith heard Lance disappear mid-complaint about the stairs.
There had been several flights of them, in Lance's defence, though Keith suspected he would have found something to complain about regardless. The facility had been built down into the side of a mountain rather than across it, all narrow metal walkways and steep drops between levels, and somewhere around the fourth descent Lance had apparently decided this was a personal slight against him.
“I'm just saying, any species advanced enough to build an entire base inside a mountain should also be advanced enough to invent an elev-”
Static swallowed the rest.
Keith barely registered it as he ducked beneath a burst of fire and drove his shoulder into the Galra soldier coming around the corner, using the momentum to slam them back against the wall. His bayard flashed in his hand as he twisted, blade catching the next strike before it could reach him, and there was enough noise in the corridor that he didn't notice Lance hadn't come back immediately.
The whole mission had sounded like that from the moment they'd entered the facility.
Pidge had warned them before they split up that the rock surrounding the base was interfering with their signal, something about mineral deposits Keith had only half listened to while checking the edge on his blade. Their comms had been dropping in and out ever since. Hunk had vanished halfway through a sentence earlier and returned three minutes later still talking as though nobody had missed anything. So, Lance going quiet wasn't unusual.
Keith put the thought aside and kept moving. But by the time he reached the next junction, he stopped long enough to listen. Blaster fire echoed somewhere below him. “East corridor clear,” he said, stepping over a fallen weapon. “Moving down.”
“Copy,” Shiro answered through a crackle of interference. “Hunk?”
“Working on it.” Something exploded loudly enough through Hunk's comm to make Keith wince. “Still working on it.”
Pidge laughed somewhere in the background before her voice cut sharply through. “Lance, you've got three moving toward you from the west stairwell.”
There was no answer, and Keith glanced toward the open shaft beside him as he started down another flight of stairs.
“Lance?”
Only static came back, and Pidge tried again, waited, then made an irritated noise. “Signal's gone again. He was on level six last time I had him.”
Keith was heading for seven. Close enough that he found himself looking through the gaps between walkways as he descended, searching for a flash of blue armour among the dull grey metal below. He saw movement two levels down, but it was Hunk driving someone bodily through a door, yellow armour unmistakable even at a distance.
Nothing blue.
Keith landed at the bottom of the stairs and kept going.
They had spent too long in space, on too many planets and ships and stations built from materials that apparently hated Coalition technology, for a dead comm to mean much on its own. Lance knew what he was doing. More importantly, Lance knew what to do when his comm failed. Keep moving toward the objective unless circumstances made it impossible, regroup as soon as he could, don't waste time trying to fix equipment in the middle of hostile territory.
Keith knew all of that because they'd done this before, and he also knew Lance was probably still talking to himself, and the thought almost made him smile.
Another soldier rounded the corner ahead of him. Keith moved before they could raise their weapon, caught their wrist and twisted until the blaster clattered against the floor. The fight was over quickly. He left them unconscious beside the wall and checked the time projected faintly across the inside of his visor as he moved on.
Three minutes.
Pidge was still talking, directing Shiro toward a security hub on the western side while Hunk worked his way up from below. Keith listened for Lance underneath it without meaning to, waiting for the familiar voice to break through with some unnecessary commentary.
By five minutes, Keith had stopped pretending he wasn't keeping track. “Pidge.”
“I know.” Her answer came quickly enough that she'd clearly been doing the same thing.
Keith reached another junction and looked toward the west corridor. “Where was he?”
“Last clean signal was level six, western access route. He should've been heading toward the central shaft.”
“Should've?”
“He was heading toward the central shaft,” Pidge corrected, irritation sharpening her voice. “I lost his tracker with his comm.”
Keith looked down through the nearest opening and checked the floor number. Six was one level below him, and without thinking he turned toward the stairs.
“Keith.” Shiro didn't raise his voice. “You've got movement ahead of you.”
“I can reach six in less than two minutes.”
“And Lance knows the regroup point.”
Keith's jaw tightened, and there was another burst of blaster fire somewhere close, followed by Pidge swearing as something struck metal. Shiro continued before Keith could argue. “We finish clearing the route. If Lance isn't back online by the time we reach control, we retrace from his last position.”
Keith hated that it made sense.
He turned away from the stairs. “Fine.”
The next few minutes were busy enough that he didn't have room to think about much beyond what was directly in front of him. The resistance thickened closer to the centre of the facility, forcing Keith back twice before he managed to push through, and Shiro's voice remained steady in his ear as he directed them around one another. Hunk came back onto the main channel; Pidge lost hers briefly and returned almost immediately. Somewhere along the way the emergency lights kicked in, washing everything in a dull red that made the corridors look narrower than they were.
Lance stayed gone for eight minutes.
At nine, Hunk said his name. “Lance?” Hunk tried again, louder this time, as though volume had anything to do with whether the signal reached him. “Lance, buddy, you there?”
Nothing answered except the faint hiss of an open channel.
Keith hit the next corner harder than he needed to and nearly ran straight into Shiro. They had reached the same corridor from opposite sides, and Shiro caught Keith's shoulder automatically, steadying him before immediately releasing him, and Keith looked past him toward the stairs. “Ten minutes.”
“I know.”
“We should go back.”
“We're almost at control.”
“Shiro.”
“I know, Keith.” There was something in his voice now that hadn't been there five minutes ago.
They weren't worried, yet it seemed. None of them had said they were worried, at least, and Keith wasn't interested in being the first one to put the word into the air. Ten minutes wasn't long; Lance could have run into another group. His comm could have been damaged, not just blocked. There were dozens of perfectly ordinary reasons for him to be quiet.
Keith could think of them all, but that didn’t stop him from listening for him anyway.
They reached the central control room at eleven minutes. Pidge arrived less than a minute later, sliding through the door before it had opened fully and immediately heading for the main console. Hunk appeared behind her, breathing hard, armour scorched across one shoulder but otherwise intact.
No Lance.
Pidge plugged into the terminal and started working as Shiro moved to the opposite entrance to cover her while Hunk took the first, leaving Keith near the centre of the room with nothing useful to do except watch the timer climb.
Twelve minutes.
“Can you get his tracker back?”
“Trying.” Pidge's fingers moved quickly over the controls. A map of the facility flickered to life above the console, sections blinking in and out as she fought with the system. Four Coalition signals appeared eventually, clustered around the control room.
Pidge stared at it for half a second before returning to the console. “His suit isn't transmitting.”
Keith's stomach tightened. “Why?”
“I don't know.”
“Can you find him another way?”
“I said I don't know, Keith.”
He closed his mouth, and Pidge's shoulders were tense. Shiro ordered them to start pulling the data anyway. There was no point standing still while they waited, and Pidge obeyed without arguing, though she kept one side of her display dedicated to the dead signal.
Keith moved toward the door, and this time Shiro didn't stop him. “I'll take six,” Keith said.
“I'll go with you,” Hunk replied immediately.
“Pidge stays here. Hunk, take the eastern route. Keith, west. I'll meet you at the central stairwell.”
They were already moving when Pidge spoke. “Keep your channels open.”
Fourteen minutes.
The corridor outside felt different on the way back. Nothing had been here five minutes ago. Still, every doorway seemed worth checking now; every branching corridor became somewhere Lance might have gone.
Keith reached the stairs and took them two at a time. “Lance.” No answer on the main channel, so Keith changed to their private frequency. “Lance, answer me.”
Keith jumped the last four steps and landed hard enough that pain travelled briefly up his knees. He knew Lance's last route. Pidge had said western access toward the central shaft, which meant Lance should have passed somewhere close to where Keith stood now.
There were signs of fighting, but that didn't mean anything. There were signs of fighting everywhere around here. A scorch mark across the wall, two discarded Galra rifles. A damaged panel sparking beside an open door, but nothing that told him who had been here or when.
Keith swallowed and kept moving, but then static cracked through his helmet. Keith stopped so abruptly his boot scraped against the floor.
For half a second there was nothing else. “Uh- guys?”
Lance.
Keith's eyes closed immediately; the rush of relief that pooled in his body was frankly mortifying. Somewhere over the comm, Hunk made a sound that was almost a shout. “Lance!”
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? Where the hell have you been?”
There was a short pause before Lance answered, sounding baffled by the intensity of the question. “Wow. Okay. Didn't realise fifteen minutes without me would send everybody into a group crisis.”
Pidge's breath left her loudly enough to carry over the channel. “Your comm and tracker disappeared, you idiot.”
“Yeah, I noticed the comm part around the time I spent five minutes talking to myself.”
“You do that anyway,” Hunk said.
“First of all, rude. Second of all, I would really appreciate a little more enthusiasm about my triumphant return.”
Keith leaned his shoulder against the wall, and the tension went out of him slowly, leaving something almost embarrassing behind. His hands had been clenched tightly enough around his bayard that his fingers ached when he loosened them. Lance answered whatever he was being asked by Shiro right now. Level five, somehow, on the opposite side of the facility. He sounded fine, though- irritated, but fine. Keith let his head tip briefly against the metal behind him.
He opened his eyes. “Glad you're alive, McClain.”
Lance laughed softly into his ear. “Aww. Were you worried about me, Mullet?”
Keith pushed himself away from the wall and started back toward the stairs. “Not anymore.”
“That's cold.”
“You've survived worse.”
“And yet not one person has asked about the emotional toll of being deprived of my friends for a whole quarter of a varga.”
Hunk groaned, and Pidge told him to shut up; Lance immediately started arguing with both of them, and Keith smiled despite himself as their voices filled the channel again.
They found Lance two levels down and exactly where he'd said he would be, leaning against the wall outside one of the auxiliary access corridors while he waited for the rest of them to catch up, and he looked about as bad as everyone else did.
There was a dark scorch across the left side of his armour and a shallow scrape running along the edge of his jaw, already dried where it had bled earlier. His helmet was tucked beneath one arm, his hair flattened strangely around his forehead from wearing it too long, and he looked tired more than anything else.
Hunk reached him first. “Dude.”
Lance barely had time to straighten before Hunk caught him by both shoulders, looking him over with enough intensity that Lance's eyebrows climbed. “I'm fine.”
“You disappeared.”
“My comm disappeared.”
“Your tracker disappeared.”
“Okay, technically my entire presence within the Coalition communications network disappeared.”
Hunk stared at him, and Lance gave him a tired smile. “But physically, still here.”
Pidge arrived next and immediately reached for the damaged transmitter fixed along Lance's armour. Lance complained when she started pulling at it without warning, and it turned into an argument about whether she was making the damage worse, until Shiro finally interrupted them and asked the question Keith had been waiting for. “What happened?”
Lance's attention shifted easily toward him. “Part of the corridor came down right after we split.” He gestured vaguely behind him. “Not on me, before anybody starts freaking out again. I tried going around it, ran into a couple of sentries, and somewhere in there one of them got a lucky shot at my comm.”
Pidge turned the damaged unit over between her fingers. “That'd do it.”
“Thank you, resident genius.”
“It's completely fried.”
“I gathered that when nobody appreciated my excellent commentary for fifteen minutes.”
Keith looked back toward the corridor Lance had indicated. There was dust caught in some of the seams of his armour, pale against the blue, and the scorch along his side lined up well enough with the story. “You ended up on five?”
Lance glanced at him. “Eventually. The western route doubled back on itself, and apparently whoever designed this place had a personal vendetta against logical floor plans.”
That made sense too; Keith had seen enough of the facility by then to believe it. “You hurt?”
“Only emotionally.” Lance joked with a hand on his chest, and Keith rolled his eyes.
Shiro called the mission complete once Pidge confirmed the data transfer, and they made their way back toward the surface together, Hunk and Lance filling most of the walk with an argument about whether Lance's disappearance technically counted as getting lost. By the time they reached the Lions, the fifteen minutes had already begun shrinking into the sort of thing that would probably become a joke by dinner.
The flight back was uneventful, and the Castle came into view some time later, familiar and bright against the dark surrounding it. Keith guided Red into her hangar and settled her in place, exhaustion beginning to catch up with him now that nothing was left trying to shoot at them.
By the time he climbed down, the others were already filtering in from their own hangars.
Lance appeared from Blue's direction just as Keith pulled off his helmet. Keith shifted it beneath one arm and reached out with the other, but Lance walked straight past him.
Keith's hand stayed there for a second, and he looked down at it. For some reason, he'd been expecting Lance's helmet.
Keith couldn't have said when that had become something he expected.
It wasn't as though they'd ever discussed it. Lance simply had a habit of finishing missions and immediately deciding he needed both hands for something else. Usually undoing the clasps at his throat before he'd even properly stopped walking, or inspecting some new mark on his armour while loudly announcing that it had definitely not been there before, or gesturing through an increasingly exaggerated retelling of something they'd all been present to witness.
At some point, apparently, his solution had become handing his helmet to Keith. And, apparently, Keith had been taking it.
Lance was several steps ahead now, helmet still tucked securely beneath his arm while he listened to something Hunk was saying. Keith lowered his hand with a strange feeling in his gut and adjusted his grip on his own helmet before following them out of the hangar.
They had barely had time to change out of their armour before Shiro called them into the briefing room, which meant Pidge was still trying to clean something dark and greasy from her fingers with the corner of a cloth, and Hunk had claimed the chair closest to the door. It slumped so far down in it that his head rested against the back, and Lance had spent the first few minutes complaining that nobody had even given him time to fix his hair.
Keith sat opposite him. There were no assigned seats, and they rarely sat in the same places twice, but somehow he had ended up with Lance directly across the table from him, which was probably why he kept looking at him.
Shiro worked through the mission from the beginning, mostly for Coran's benefit. The data Pidge had pulled was already being transferred into the Castle's systems, and whatever the Coalition eventually decided to do with it would be somebody else's problem. Their part had gone well enough. No major injuries, no significant damage to the Lions, facility secured.
Lance's disappearance came up eventually, and Pidge had already pulled the logs from his armour, confirming that his transmitter had suffered a complete failure sometime during the mission. She was halfway through explaining exactly what had happened to it when Lance interrupted.
“So, in normal-person terms, somebody shot it.”
Pidge stopped. “Yes, Lance.”
“Great. Just checking.”
“I was getting there.”
“You'd been getting there for three minutes.”
Pidge threw the cloth at him, and Lance caught it against his chest and looked delighted with himself. Keith smiled before looking back toward Shiro.
Everything was normal. The team was all back together, and that should have been the end of it. Instead, a few minutes later, Keith found himself looking across the table again.
Lance was listening to Hunk now, or at least pretending to. His cheek rested against one fist, elbow planted on the table, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion while Hunk explained something about the structural damage on the lower levels. There was nothing unusual about him. The scrape along his jaw had been cleaned, though the skin around it was still faintly red, and without the armour covering him, there was no sign he'd taken anything worse than the rest of them.
Keith looked away when Shiro asked him about the eastern corridor. Keith answered, and Pidge corrected one detail about the security system. This then led to a petty argument about whether semantics were always relevant. Lance leaned forward to inform both of them that, personally, he thought Keith should simply admit Pidge was smarter than him and save everybody some time.
Keith told him to mind his own business, and Lance grinned. Nothing about Lance should be feeling off. Still, Keith's attention returned to him again when Shiro started speaking.
He couldn't figure out why.
Maybe it was because Lance had gone missing. Not missing, Keith corrected himself. He'd lost communications for fifteen minutes. There was a difference, and Keith knew there was a difference because he'd spent most of the walk back telling himself exactly that. Still, maybe some part of him hadn't caught up yet.
Keith watched Lance reach for the cup of water in front of him, take a drink, then put it back down. He frowned faintly when Lance looked up, and their eyes met.
There was just… something.
By the time Shiro finally started wrapping up, everyone had visibly lost whatever remained of their patience. Hunk was barely upright; Pidge had abandoned the cloth. It was picking at something beneath one fingernail, and Lance had shifted positions four times in as many minutes and was now sitting sideways in his chair with one leg stretched beneath the table.
Keith looked at him again, and there was a strange heaviness behind his eyes that Keith hadn't noticed earlier. “You need a pod?”
The question interrupted Shiro halfway through a sentence, and everyone looked at Keith. Lance blinked in surprise. “What?”
Keith nodded toward the scrape on his face. “Do you need a healing pod?”
Lance stared at him for another second, genuinely confused. “No?”
Keith frowned. “Okay.”
Shiro waited, and Keith realised nobody had stopped looking at him. “What?”
Lance's mouth twitched. “I don't know, man. You tell me. You're the one suddenly monitoring my health.”
“You're acting weird.”
That earned him an immediate snort from Pidge, and Lance sat up a little straighter. “OH, I'm acting weird?”
Keith huffed and nodded. “Yeah.”
“How?”
Keith opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Because he didn't actually know. Lance had been complaining like usual; he'd interrupted Pidge like usual. He'd made fun of Keith, and he'd spent most of the debrief looking like he'd rather be anywhere else.
There was nothing Keith could point to.
Lance spread his hands when the silence stretched. “Well?”
Keith leaned back in his chair. “Never mind.”
“No, no, I'm interested now.” Lance turned slightly toward Hunk. “Did I miss something? Did Keith become my mother while I was gone?”
Hunk laughed, and Pidge immediately added, “He'd be terrifying.”
“Right? I'd never be allowed outside.”
“You'd finally be on time for things,” Keith said back with a bit of sass.
Lance pressed a hand to his chest. “Cold.”
The tension Keith hadn't realised had formed around the table disappeared. Hunk was still laughing, Pidge had started telling Lance that Keith would probably enforce a bedtime, and even Shiro was smiling faintly as he attempted to drag everyone back toward the last few points of the debrief. Keith laughed too.
Because Lance was fine. Because there was absolutely nothing wrong with him beyond being tired after a mission and apparently carrying his own helmet for once in his life. Keith looked across the table one last time, and Lance had already turned back toward Shiro.
Keith forced his attention to follow, swallowing whatever strange feeling had been bothering him since they landed; he let it go.
Keith managed to forget about it for most of the afternoon.
There were reports to finish, armour to clean and a shower that lasted long enough for the water to start cooling before he finally dragged himself out. By the time he'd changed and made his way back toward the common areas, the mission had settled into the dull ache behind his shoulders that usually followed a long day; everything else pushed somewhere comfortably out of reach.
He heard Hunk before the doors opened. Whatever story he was telling had apparently reached its best part, because Pidge was laughing hard enough to interrupt him while Hunk insisted she let him finish. Lance's voice rose over both of them, already objecting to something Keith hadn't heard.
The doors slid apart, and Lance looked at him immediately.
Keith stopped immediately; it lasted no more than a second.
Lance had been sprawled across one end of the couch, head tipped back in laughter, one arm stretched along the cushions behind Hunk. The moment the doors opened, his head turned, and his eyes landed directly on Keith.
There was something sharp about it in the way Keith never normally received from Lance. Attention, eyes moving over the doorway, Keith, then to where Keith normally kept his blade. But then Lance saw him properly, and it disappeared as quickly as it came. His shoulders loosened again, expression slipping easily back into amusement. “Oh, perfect. Keith, tell Hunk he's full of shit.”
Keith remained near the doorway for half a beat too long. Hunk twisted around. “Don't bring him into this. He wasn't even there!”
“Exactly. Neutral third party.”
“That isn't what neutral means.”
Keith crossed the room while they argued, though the strange feeling followed him several steps farther than it should have. He sat down in the empty chair beside the couch, and Lance had already turned away.
Hunk restarted his story; Pidge immediately interrupted again. Lance complained that nobody in this room respected narrative structure, and within seconds the conversation had swallowed the moment completely.
Keith tried to let it. He'd walked into rooms with Lance in them hundreds of times, and usually Lance barely noticed.
Keith could sit down halfway through one of his stories, and Lance would simply keep talking, shifting his legs out of the way without looking or passing Keith whatever food he'd been eating as though Keith had been there from the beginning. Sometimes Keith could come and go twice before Lance actually acknowledged him. But the point was, Lance never had any reason to check.
Keith looked at him, and Lance was listening to Hunk again, smiling faintly as Pidge argued over some detail. Nothing was wrong again. But still, Keith couldn't quite shake the memory of the way Lance's eyes had found him the instant the door opened. He shifted in his chair, irritation prickling beneath his skin without anywhere sensible to go.
Maybe Lance caught the movement, because he glanced over again. “You good?”
Keith stared at him again, and this time there was nothing strange in Lance's expression now, just mild curiosity. “Yeah.”
Lance nodded once and turned back to Hunk, and Keith looked away too. For some reason, he didn't feel any better.
Dinner should have settled the suspicion easily. By the time they were all crowded around the table, Lance had returned so completely to being Lance that Keith had started feeling vaguely embarrassed about the entire afternoon.
He stole something from Hunk's plate less than a minute after sitting down and denied it while he was still chewing and complaining about the food despite taking a second helping. He spent several doboshes arguing with Pidge over whether she had deliberately sent him through the worst section of the facility earlier, which Pidge insisted she had not, though the smile she kept hiding behind her cup suggested otherwise.
Keith ate and listened, gradually relaxing.
Because this was stupid, Lance had been tired; they were all tired. He'd lost his comm in hostile territory, been shot at, taken a hit hard enough to destroy part of his armour and then come back to find Keith staring at him like he'd grown another head.
Maybe Keith was the one acting weird.
“So then this guy comes around the corner,” Lance was saying, one hand moving animatedly as he spoke, “and I'm thinking, okay, easy, one guy, I've got this.”
“You never think anything is easy,” Pidge said.
“That is completely untrue.”
“You screamed at a spider on Olkarion.”
“It had WAY too many legs, Pidgeon.”
“It was a spider.”
“Exactly? Your point?!” Lance gasped, shocked and grimacing. Hunk laughed around a mouthful of food, and Keith shook his head and reached for his drink.
The conversation wandered naturally from today's mission into older ones, as it often did when they'd spent the day fighting. Pidge brought up an old Coalition outpost with security doors that had locked them inside for nearly an hour; Hunk reminded her that she'd been the one who accidentally triggered them, and Pidge immediately blamed the outdated software.
Somewhere along the way, Lance mentioned Karthos. Keith couldn't remember what brought it up, but he wished he could in hindsight. The name alone was enough to pull an unpleasant memory from somewhere he'd been happy to leave it. A mining colony, a collapsing processing plant and far too many civilians still trapped inside when they'd arrived; they had gotten everyone out eventually.
Barely.
Hunk had been the last one inside, and the structure had come down before he cleared it. Keith still remembered Lance shouting Hunk's name over the comm, once, so loudly that it had distorted through Keith's helmet. They'd found Hunk beneath part of the collapsed support structure several minutes later, alive but unconscious.
Lance hadn't left his side until he woke up. “Honestly,” Lance said now, reaching across Hunk to steal another piece of food, “we should've just left you under there. Would've saved us listening to you complain about your back for the next three quintants.”
The table went quiet.
Keith looked up immediately, and Hunk was already staring at Lance. It wasn't anger exactly; Hunk didn’t have much of that. If anything, it was just surprise. Lance seemed to notice at the same moment Keith did, and his smile faltered slightly before he moved to bump his shoulder against Hunk’s
“I'm kidding, big guy. Obviously. You know I would've dug you out myself if I had to.”
Hunk's expression softened. “Yeah, well, you would've thrown your back out in about five ticks.”
“There is nothing wrong with my back.”
“Yet.”
Pidge snorted and just like that, the moment passed for everyone else. Lance immediately launched into a complaint about everybody acting like he was physically incapable of lifting anything heavier than his own bayard, and Hunk started laughing again before he'd even finished.
Nobody seemed bothered anymore.
But Keith stared at Lance, because there had been plenty of jokes about Karthos over the years. Mostly about Pidge screaming when one of the mining carts started moving unexpectedly, and being convinced alien spirits haunted it. Keith had liked that one.
Then about Shiro getting covered head to toe in some kind of blue industrial powder, about Lance somehow losing one of his boots during the evacuation and refusing to explain how.
Never that.
Lance joked about his own close calls constantly. He'd turned being shot, thrown, dropped, and nearly blown out of airlocks into stories before the bruises had even faded. But he absolutely didn't joke about Hunk under that rubble.
Keith knew that; he knew that with the certainty of the fact that he sat with Lance while he was inconsolable when Hunk was unconscious.
Across the table, Lance laughed at something Pidge said, and Keith watched the laugh end. He watched Lance glance briefly toward Hunk before reaching for his drink, checking.
Keith's appetite disappeared immediately, and a huge pang of dread dropped so suddenly into his gut. He lowered his fork slowly to his plate as the discomfort shifted into something else, not quite suspicion yet. But this time, when Lance looked over and caught Keith staring, Keith didn't look away.
Keith waited until after dinner to approach Lance. He helped clear the table, listened to Lance and Hunk argue over who had stolen more food from whom, then disappeared back to his room long enough to change. He tried reading for a while, but only managed less than a page before he put it down.
The joke kept coming back to him. Not even the joke itself really; what was really bothering him was the pause afterwards. Lance looked at Hunk, checking his reaction. Sure, Lance and Hunk were best friends; it wasn’t strange exactly. Keith couldn’t explain why it was bothering him so much.
Keith pushed himself off the bed and out into the hallway. He found Lance in the corridor outside his room twenty minutes later.
“Hey.” Lance stopped and turned, and Keith felt the immediate attention again. Keith tried to ignore the feeling in his stomach and spoke. “You busy?”
Lance looked down at himself as though checking. “Currently? Devastatingly not.”
“Want to spar?”
Lance’s eyebrows lifted as Keith shoved his hands into his pockets. It wasn't exactly an unusual request; they trained together often enough that it shouldn't have felt like one. They had gotten closer over the last few months. Whatever petty rivalry they had had had turned into background noise, not how they saw each other. Keith actually enjoyed Lance as a sparring partner, and he’d done it enough now to know exactly how Lance moves.
“Sure,” Lance said, as he turned immediately toward the training deck. “But if this is revenge because I said you'd make a terrifying mother earlier, I want it formally noted that I'm participating under duress.”
Keith rolled his eyes and followed. “Keep talking.”
“Oh, I plan to.”
By the time they reached the training room, Keith was already wondering what exactly he'd expected to accomplish. Lance activated his bayard and rolled one shoulder while Keith did the same. There was nothing strange in the movement. He took his usual position a few paces away, weight balanced lightly through his feet, weapon held ready without being rigid.
Then he bounced once on the balls of his feet, and Keith stared.
Lance caught him and sighed. “What now? You’ve been staring me down all day, man.”
“Nothing.”
“That's becoming your favourite word today.”
“Are we doing this or not?”
Lance grinned. “Of course we are, mullet.”
Keith moved first, and Lance blocked. The impact travelled cleanly up Keith's arm, familiar enough that his body already knew how much resistance to expect. Lance stepped back, shifted his weight and fired. Keith twisted aside before the shot passed him, closing the distance again before Lance could reset.
Lance laughed. “Oh, we're doing angry Keith tonight.”
“I'm not angry.”
“You've got the eyebrows.”
“I always have eyebrows.”
“Not like those.”
Keith swung for him, and Lance ducked. For several minutes, everything felt exactly right, annoyingly right. Lance fought like Lance.
He favoured distance whenever Keith let him create it and got irritated whenever Keith closed it again. His left shoulder dipped slightly before he fired from an awkward angle. He still had the same habit of taking one unnecessary step backwards when Keith pushed aggressively enough, something Shiro had been trying to train out of him for months.
Keith knew all of it, and apparently so did whoever had been sitting somewhere in the back of his head insisting something was wrong.
Keith drove him toward the edge of the mat, and Lance slipped sideways at the last moment; Keith's momentum carried him past. “Getting slow, Kogane.”
Keith turned. “You wish.”
“I don't need to wish. I'm witnessing it.”
Lance fired, and Keith blocked again. Another shot followed almost immediately, then another, forcing Keith back until he found an opening and rushed him again.
Lance swore and retreated, and Keith almost smiled. He was starting to feel so stupid, genuinely stupid. He had dragged Lance down here because he'd made a bad joke at dinner and looked at Keith too quickly when he walked into a room.
Maybe the fifteen minutes had gotten under Keith's skin more than he'd realised. Maybe he'd spent long enough believing something had happened to Lance that his brain was still searching for evidence that it had. He could already imagine what Shiro would say if Keith tried explaining any of this to him.
Keith exhaled through his nose and attacked again, and Lance blocked high. Keith shifted again and let his right shoulder turn, dropping his weight toward his back foot. Lance moved immediately to compensate.
Keith stopped.
It happened so quickly that Lance nearly stumbled. “What?”
Keith didn't answer, but his bayard remained raised between them. Lance frowned immediately in response. “You good?”
Lance had shifted left, exactly where Keith had wanted him. The only problem was that Keith hadn't attacked.
It had been a feint.
One Lance knew.
Keith had used it on him dozens of times when they'd first started training together, mostly because Lance had fallen for it so reliably that Keith had enjoyed annoying him with it. Eventually Lance had stopped reacting altogether. Keith could drop his shoulder as dramatically as he wanted and Lance wouldn't move until Keith actually committed.
Keith straightened. “Again.”
Lance's frown deepened. “Okay.”
They reset, and Keith moved more slowly this time. He didn't use the same feint; that would be too obvious, though he wasn't sure what exactly he thought he was hiding.
They exchanged several blows, Keith changing direction here and there. Lance followed, then let Keith retreat, as usual. It was almost enough for Keith to write off the feint, but then he left his left side open. It wasn’t a huge obvious opening, but it was something.
Keith watched the moment Lance’s eyes flicked towards it and closed the opening before Lance could take it. His heartbeat had started climbing now, and Lance didn't seem to notice. He fired twice, forcing Keith sideways, and Keith moved around him instead of away.
He pulled back, and Lance's eyes moved over his shoulders, his hips, his feet. Keith saw it now, and the problem was he couldn’t stop. Every single movement Keith made was being processed right now. Lance was good enough that it barely showed. A fraction of a second here, a tiny adjustment there, but once Keith knew what he was looking for, it became impossible to ignore.
Lance was waiting, waiting for Keith to commit before deciding what came next. Keith's mouth went dry as he felt that uncanny ease settle back into his stomach. Keith tried another feint, and Lance reacted again. Nothing huge, just some weight shifted by a few inches, but Keith had to step back.
Lance lowered his weapon slightly. “What are you doing, man?”
Keith looked at him, and Lance looked the same. Same face, same hair falling across his forehead now that they'd been moving long enough to make him sweat. Same blue eyes narrowed with mild irritation.
Keith knew the tiny scar near his chin; he knew the crease that appeared between his eyebrows when he was concentrating. Knew Lance would complain in a few minutes that Keith was taking this too seriously despite being the one who had agreed to spar in the first place.
Everything was there, so why was this so bizarre?
Keith tightened his grip around his bayard. “Come at me.”
Lance stared at him. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
Something uncertain passed across his face, but then Lance moved. Keith defended this time. Winning wasn’t even something we cared about right now; he just needed to watch. Find something that proved Keith was overthinking this, that he was making it up because some part of him was more affected by the idea of Lance being lost than he initially thought.
Lance's footwork was perfect, his timing was almost perfect.
His technique was without a doubt Lance's. But his attention never left Keith; even when he attacked, he was waiting for Keith’s response.
Keith stopped halfway through another movement, and Lance stopped too.
There.
That was it; the discomfort that had been sitting beneath Keith's skin all day suddenly snapped into place. Lance didn't watch him like this; he hadn't for a long time. Maybe once or twice back when they'd first started training together. Back when neither of them understood the other's rhythm and every spar had been a competition rather than something they simply did, Lance had watched him then. Keith remembered it now: Lance's eyes constantly searching for tells, waiting for Keith to reveal where he was going before choosing how to counter him.
Then somewhere along the way he'd stopped; they'd flown together too long and fought together too often. Covered each other's backs in too many corridors, exactly like the one they'd been in earlier that day.
Real Lance didn't wait for Keith to move, because he already knew where Keith was going, and in return Keith knew where Lance would be. Because begrudgingly, Keith was always aware of Lance, as clearly evident right now.
Keith lowered his bayard, and Lance stayed ready, like this was a fight too.
“We're done,” Keith said sharply; the words came out flatter than he'd intended.
Lance blinked. “What?”
“I'm done.” Keith deactivated his bayard.
Lance slowly lowered his own. “Okay.” He gave a small laugh. “Did I win?”
Keith didn't answer; he just turned toward the door and tried to calm down his absolutely raging heartbeat.
“Keith?”
His hand paused beside the control panel, and Lance was still standing in the middle of the mat. There was confusion on his face now, maybe a little concern. Keith found himself looking at him for several seconds; the wrongness was so obvious now that he couldn't understand how he hadn't seen it before.
Lance shifted beneath his stare. “Seriously, man, what is going on with you today?”
Keith opened the door. “Nothing.”
He stepped through before Lance could answer, and the doors closed behind him. Keith stood in the corridor for half a second, pulse pounding hard beneath his ribs, then he started walking.
Shiro was in his room. Keith knew because he'd passed him there earlier, sitting at the small desk with one of the mission reports open in front of him and a cup of something steaming beside his elbow, and seemingly nothing had changed when Keith reached him.
Shiro was still at the desk, though he'd changed into a loose shirt and the cup was mostly empty now. He looked up when the door opened, mild surprise crossing his face. “Hey. Everything okay?”
Keith stepped inside and checked the hall before shutting the door behind him. Keith didn't sit down; he didn't quite know how to explain what had happened in the training room yet, and right now he didn't care whether any of it sounded convincing.
He knew Lance, and that was enough. Shiro's expression sharpened when he looked Keith up and down, and he put down his pen and turned to look at Keith.
“Shiro.”
Something in his voice made Shiro straighten. The report was forgotten immediately; his expression changed, exhaustion disappearing beneath the quiet alertness Keith knew almost as well as anything. “What's wrong?”
Keith looked him straight in the eye.
“That's not Lance.”