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When they get the news that Keith received a full ride scholarship to the local university, everyone had been relieved. Dorm and a food plan were included, and the fact that he didn’t have to rely on that shithole of a house for anything after high school relieved everyone.
Pidge’s dad teaches at the same university, so their tuition ends up being free if they choose to go there. Pidge grilled their dad on the computer science section and whether or not they would know everything the teachers are teaching or not.
Hunk is the one that actually looks at out of state colleges before in state. While scholarships cover most of the cost, he still looks at price for a deciding factor. He wants a good engineering program that isn’t overly expensive.
Lance is actively doing his best not to think about college. He brushes off everyone’s questions with a laugh, casually says he’s still deciding. He’s really not. He avoids the topic as much as possible, diverts the conversation back to someone or something else.
It doesn’t work so well when graduation creeps up behind him and he hastily types up the application form for the university the rest of them have all been accepted to. It’s last minute, but his grades are fine and he gets accepted.
Scholarship time has long since passed, and he wants to hit himself for not thinking.
“Hey,” Keith says one night in June. He’s got his legs propped over Lance’s, leaning back against the pillows on the bed. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything is grrrrreat.” He rolls out his r dramatically and raises his eyebrows. “Why do you ask?”
“You seem really dodgy about the whole college thing. I know you only applied because it was last minute pressure and you knew you could get in.”
Lance taps at his phone, avoidant. Keith pushes himself up so his face is right next to Lance’s and narrows his eyes.
“That’s a pretty obvious no.”
He sighs and locks the screen, pushing his head back against the cool wall. “I’m kind of scared, honestly.”
Keith looks confused. “Why?”
“I don’t know why. It’s completely different. Everything’s... bigger I guess. I have to know what I want to do with the entire rest of my life.”
“I don’t know what I want to do either.”
“Yeah, but you’re so sure that you’ll figure it out and I’m not.”
“Lance—”
“It’s fine. Really, it is. I’ll figure something out eventually. Got to try it out before I totally give up, right?”
“Is this because of Anna?”
He purses his lips at his sister’s name. She hasn’t come home in a while, still well out of state, thriving off of the whole “College Experience.” She’s not exactly not a factor in his college anxiety, but he doesn’t consider her the deciding factor.
“Nah. I’ve just gotta figure out what I want to do forever as an adult. No biggie, right?”
He knocks foreheads with Keith gently, smiling. “It’ll be fine.”
It is definitely not fine.
He, again, waits until the last minute to sign up for classes, sign up for student aid, sign up for anything. He takes what gen-eds are still open, biology, psychology, this weird movie class that for some reason isn’t held on campus but at a high school later in the day, and the math class his ACT placed him in.
Lance is bitter about the math course. It’s the same one he took in seventh grade, pre algebra. In his senior year, he took pre-calc, but no one cares about what you actually succeeded in, just what your test scores say. And he’s so bad at math on tests. Formulas get so hard to remember. He looks in the workbook for the class and he wants to yell that he’s known how to divide decimals for years but it won’t do anything.
He’s living at home, and so is Pidge, while Hunk and Keith are living on campus. He doesn’t have the money for a dorm, his family certainly doesn’t have the money for a dorm, and he has zero scholarships to fall back on.
The first day is weird. It’s the first time he hasn’t driven Keith to school in pretty much two years. The quiet that accompanies him in the car is unsettling to say the least.
He parks in the park down a little from the campus. He would have gotten a parking pass, but there’s exactly no way in hell he’s shelling out three hundred dollars to park in some stupid garage. Sure, he’ll probably regret it when it gets bitterly cold out in December, but right now, it’s not too bad. Just warm.
Pidge meets him first in the common building. Keith and Hunk have classes right now. They grab sodas and sit in the cushy chairs adorning the walls.
“You finally got your classes settled, I see.”
“Um, I’ve had my classes settled for weeks, thanks.”
“Pretty last minute, though.”
He sips his drink and doesn’t say anything.
“What’s your first class?”
Lance makes a face. “Biology. I just have to get through it. It’s not like I’ve never taken a Biology class before.”
“I’ve got Physics. I’m pretty sure I could sleep through that class and ace it.”
“I think you should, just to prove a point.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, just in case my teacher’s an asshat.”
Lance snorts. “Asshat?”
“Matt came home for the summer.”
Well that explain it. “And he brought his terrible word morphs with him.”
“Matt’s word morphs are a treasure.”
He hums, taking another drink. “We’re still all hanging out tonight, right?”
“I’m pretty sure we are. You might want to double check with Hunk and Keith, but pizza night’s still a go for me.”
He has to go to class shortly after that, and his professor says the word “here” at the end of every thought.
The day moves quickly with syllabus and going over rules and stuff like that. He doesn’t really pay attention to most of it, fills out the questionnaires that are handed to him, but other than that, he lets his mind wander. He wonders if everyone else’s day is going as boring as this, if Pidge really will sleep through their class. He hopes so, just to hear what that teacher does when they pass the class with all As.
He meets Keith a little later at that same, squishy chair building. He leans his head on Keith’s shoulder and listens to him mumble about what his day was like. This feels nice.
It steadily declines after that.
---
He loses morale for his classes really quickly. For the first month and a half, he shows up, actively does his work, turns things in on Blackboard, talks to people regularly.
A Mood slaps him across the face mid October. He loses the motivation to go to school, to turn in his work, to unlock his phone to send a reply to anybody. He skips class, doesn’t finish his homework.
It goes really, really downhill when he starts missing test days in his math class.
He hasn’t been to the campus in a solid three weeks. It’s November and he knows just as well as everybody else that there’s no way he can pass the classes he’s missed so much of. Hunk corners him before Keith can.
“Lance, I don’t know what happened, but you need to go to class. You’re missing tests, do you get how big that is?”
“Yes Hunk, I get how big that is. I’ll… I’ll figure it out, okay?”
“You’ve gotta figure it out by going to class, buddy.”
He continues to not go to class, only really ever shows up for his film class, and even then, there’s not much he needs to do. They watch a movie every night, and the notes are minimal.
When he does show up for his Biology class, he mostly just doodles in the margins of his notes.
The problem is, he knows what he’s doing is wrong. He knows he’s screwing up his grades, and he knows it’s definitely not a thing he should be doing in his first semester of college. Regularly skipping classes, not turning in any of his work, ignoring his friends, avoiding all source of conflict until he’s dug himself a hole far too deep to crawl back out of.
There’s no reason for him to even stop everything like this, just that constant pressure on the back of his mind, the way his limbs feel like lead when he tries to get up for school, how he hesitates to even leave his car once he gets it parked.
Lance knows he’s hurting Keith with the way he barely sees him, barely texts back. He doesn’t want to, but he can’t will himself the hit the call, send, video button.
Hunk and Pidge don’t know what to do about any of it, and if he was in their shoes, he wouldn’t either.
Ironically, he’s figured out that what he wants to do with the rest of his life is lie under his blanket and never come back out.
Guess college really throws your wants into perspective.
---
He’s decided that he at least needs to try and shoot for a C in math, he can’t fail this fucking seventh grade math class.
He has a test today, and while he hasn’t been in class in weeks, hasn’t done any of the homework for even longer, he has to show up and at least try the test. It’s the second to last week of school, he needs to try for something.
Lance sings along embarrassingly loud to the radio, but stops when he hears a noise that is definitely not the song that’s on. Turning down the volume, a weirdly hollow grating noise is coming from his car. It’s a new noise, and he hopes he can just make it to the park without his car blowing up on him.
He turns the radio back up and makes it a little further down the road before the noise gets louder and it feels like something snaps in his car. The steering wheel locks up in his hands and the gas pedal does exactly nothing. He slaps the radio off and does his best to turn the wheel. It gives, slowly, and he realizes that it might be a good idea to put his hazards on.
Finally pulling it off to a side road and stopping against a curb, he turns the car off. He checks his oil first, and it’s shockingly low. He puts some more in and tries turning it on.
No such luck.
Panic sets in, a little late, he thinks to himself. He stuck on an unnamed side road with no working car in five degree weather smack in the middle of the path to his house and the school.
Fumbling for his phone with shaky hands, he calls Pidge. It’s their day off, a Wednesday, and he knows they usually spend it cramped in Keith’s dorm watching reruns of cryptid documentaries.
“Lance?” The confusion in their voice at him actually initiating a conversation stings, but he doesn’t have time to focus on that.
“Um,” he tries not to let his voice shake. “Pidge, um, is there any way you can pick me up?”
“Pick you up?” They repeat his question back at him. He hears Keith in the background ask if everything’s okay. “Why do you need me to pick you?”
“My car just broke in the middle of the street. It’s- it’s not still there, I’m on a side road but—”
“Where are you?”
“You know that weird turn off of seventy-fifth that’s between the two used car lots?”
“Got it,” Pidge says, and he can hear them moving around. “I’m bringing Keith with me, so, y’know, you might want to pull your relationship skills out of the dingy basement you’ve thrown them into.”
“Okay,” he says quietly. It’s shakier than he wanted it to be. They hang up.
He sends a text to him mom, telling her the situation, where the car is, everything she needs to know. He knows she won’t see it until late that afternoon, but he needs her to have the information or he’s going to go crazy worrying about it.
There’s a blanket in the backseat from when he stocked his car with everything anyone could possibly need. He curls himself up in it, watches the glass around him fog up as he breathes too fast.
The cold seeps in regardless. Lance draws his knees in and waits, resting his head against the ice cold window.
Pidge shows up some twenty minutes later, and they get out of the car with Keith. Lance’s nerves reside in his jaw and he tries not to let it shake as he pulls himself and his backpack out of his extremely dead car.
“How dead is it?”
“Dead dead,” he says, getting back in to turn the key in the ignition. It makes that hollow scraping sound and Pidge winces.
“That sounds very dead.”
“Are you okay?” Keith asks. Lance can tell he’s still upset, but he comes over to fret regardless.
“Y—,” he bites his tongue to stop his stupid shaking. “Yeah I’m okay.”
“Don’t lie to me.” He sounds so tired of his bullshit, and honestly, Lance is tired of it too.
“We can talk about this in my car, it is too cold for the weird break up reunion thing we’re doing here.”
“What?” he guesses it only makes sense if Keith would want to break up with him for how trash of a boyfriend he’s been.
Keith groans. “Pidge, please.”
“Alright, if y’all want to freeze your asses off, that’s fine with me, but I will be in my car, with the heat on.”
They get in their car and shut the door. It turns on quietly, and he can see them situating themself to get warm.
“I’m not breaking up with you,” Keith says quietly. “Unless that’s what you want. I really can’t tell. But I don’t want to break up.”
“Me neither.”
“Lance,” he says roughly. “Lance, why are you avoiding me?”
“What? I’m not ignoring you. I’m ignoring everybody. There’s a difference.”
“That doesn’t make it feel better.”
“I know. I know it doesn’t and that I’ve been a terrible boyfriend and a terrible person all around to all of you, hut especially you. I know you need me to tell you what I’m feeling because feelings get weird for you, and I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry Keith.”
“Hey, whoa, um, wow.” Keith gets up close to him, takes his hands in his own. “Calm down for a second. That was a lot.”
He thinks his eyes are tearing up, and he drops his gaze to the cracked asphalt.
“You shouldn’t be comforting me. I’m the one who fucked up our relationship.”
“Yeah,” Keith puffs out a laugh that turns into fogged air. “Well, you might be right, but you don’t look like you’re in the best shape right now. I’m terrible at staying mad at sad Lance.”
“I’m not sad.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’m kind of feeling a little empty right now, actually.”
Keith nods, and it’s solemn and focused, and he pulls them both into the car. Pidge looks back at them.
“You figure stuff out?”
“Kind of,” Keith says.
“Are we dropping you off at your house, or do you want to come to Keith’s dorm and finish watching Lost Tapes with us?”
“I, um, have a test later today, but Lost Tapes sounds like a better option even without that.”
“Oh man, are you actually going to class for once?”
He’s quiet for a second. “…Yes.”
“Well good.” He’s being given their special brand of affection, where they make snarky, mean sounding comments because they’re not sure how to show concern otherwise.
Keith rests his head on Lance’s shoulder, and it’s a nice kind of normal he hasn’t felt in a while.
“Any particular reason you decided to skip almost two months of classes?”
His car breaking down has thrown the anxiety into his head and his filter is pretty much gone. “Kind of felt like nothing mattered and it’s not gonna help me figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life, so why bother? Also I got hit with that Big Mood I get sometimes. Didn’t want to leave the bed. I still don’t want to leave the bed, but Sammi’s home sick and she’d tell mom if I skipped.”
“Well,” Pidge says, kind of awkwardly, glancing at him from the rearview. “That is more than you’ve told anyone in months.”
He nods, twining his fingers with Keith’s. Pidge texts Hunk when they get to the dorm, and he joins them for the weird cryptid show Pidge puts on their laptop.
“Are you feeling any better?” He asks Lance when he sees him.
“Not really. Still feel really bad. It’ll figure itself out though. It always does. Never been this bad before, but hey! There’s gotta be a first for everything, am I right?”
Hunk pulls him into a hug, and it feels safe and warm, and he loses himself in the feeling of it.
---
He does not pass that math test, nor does he pass his Biology and Psych tests. He’s done it to himself. He has no one to blame but himself. It doesn’t make the disappointment in himself better.
Academic probation is not something he’s surprised about, and neither are the others, but it’s embarrassing. He’s better than this. He knows he’s better than having to be watched by administration to make sure he gets his grades up to something they consider good. He’s better than this terribly, terribly low GPA.
But he’s not better than it, because he’s here, drowning in it all, failed classes and trying as hard as he can to avoid telling his mom.
He signs up for new classes, deals with it for now. He just needs to get his GPA back up, and he’ll be fine.
It’s so hard.
Even with this new semester approaching, he just wants to curl up and ignore it all.
Hunk forces him out of his house, because isolating himself does nothing. Keith and Lance have talked about how terrible of a time that had just been and that neither of them wanted to deal or got through that again.
Pidge scolds him a little more, but they understand, he thinks. That he can’t manage to pull himself into classes most days, but he has to.
There’s nothing easy about this.
College is not easy and the only self discovery it gives you is how unmotivated you actually end up being.
Lance shoves himself out of bed and borrows the family car to go see Keith most days because he can’t bear to be around his mom with the lies he’s told her on his shoulder.
Things level out and it stops getting worse.