Chapter Text
Plink!
It was a single note, clear as a bell, falling sweet as a lemon drop.
A piano.
Perfectly tuned.
Waiting for the next deft touch on its ivory keys.
Lance stirred and turned over in his bed.
If this was a dream, he was going to let it play on. A bit of piano made a welcome change from screaming lasers and visions of soundless spherical explosions, and either he was dreaming or he was going stir crazy at last. There was no piano on the Castle Ship, let alone an Earth piano, not some Altean knock-off and that was definitely an Earth piano playing.
Lance frowned into his pillow. He couldn’t explain how he knew that.
Three tentative chords, as if the pianist (and if this wasn’t a dream, who would be playing? It had better not be Keith) was a little shy to start.
Then unknown fingers walked up the notes with the cheeky, sly kind of saunter Lance wouldn’t have minded being his own personal theme tune, ending on a fine, wheedling little trill.
The notes faded.
Morning in the Castle Ship held its breath.
And then the band kicked in.
As if catapaulted out of bed by the very beat of the drums, Lance was on his feet and whirling through his morning routine.
“Another crazy morning out in space.” Whoa, what was this? In the bathroom mirror, Lance watched as his own mouth stretched around the shapes of words that he was singing - and, wow, was he singing! He sounded amazing! And the words, they were coming from him! Dragged up from somewhere deep inside his own mind from what was clearly a previously untapped wellspring of musical genius and spontaneity, but what was this? “Another crazy morning – why, hello there, my radiant face.”
Radiant? Well, if his own mind was going to be nice to him today, he wasn’t going to stop it. He patted his face dry and the band continued its jaunty, upbeat tune. A trumpet came in, the beat picked up and Lance found himself spinning on the spot, to throw his dressing gown onto the bed with a dramatic flourish. It landed perfectly, practically folding itself, but before Lance had the chance to gawk at his handiwork or collect his thoughts beyond, ‘Smooth, McClain!’, his mouth was moving again.
“We’ve got world’s to liberate, Zarkon’s army to obliterate.”
His hand and feet moved deftly to put on his shoes and jacket in time to the music.
“Who knows what today will bring!”
The room door swept open, and Lance danced out, opening his arms wide in a gesture he vaguely remembered as better suited for nuns on hillsides.
“What is this? What’s going on? There’s music in my head, I’m bursting out into song.”
He tripped dancing down the stairs, thankfully on the last step. The strange music filling his ears and somehow seeping right down to his bones punctuated his fall with a trumpet warble. As if to rub it in.
“There’s something crazy happening every quintent, brand new dangers of mysterious intent,
So if I wake up singing and dancing, I can deal with it just fine!”
He couldn’t control his arms, his legs, his hands or feet. They moved to the bouncing band music and the honky-tonk piano as if to strings.
Lance let out a shaky laugh.
“I can deal with it just fine!”
Could he? Could Lance deal with this?
“I can deal with it just fine…”
The music trailed off. Lance’s feet slowed. It gave him a chance to scowl up at the ceiling. Of course, he could deal with this! There was no need for the music to fade away as if had had a crisis in confidence!
The corridor plunged into darkness. A spotlight snapped on, dazzling Lance with white light.
The piano dropped another prompting note.
“Unless, it’s some sort of alien mould in the ventilation,” Lance sang, quiet and uncertain. “Making me sing and dance and have this spotlight hallucination…”
Well, when the words from Lance’s own mouth were putting it that way, that sounded…
…that sounded…
He smiled.
…that actually sounded pretty damn cool!
What if this wasn’t just Lance? What if this was happening to everybody? The possibilities, oh, the possibilities, they were a beautiful thing.
The music allowed him a moment to cackle to himself, before throwing him out of the spotlight with a balletic leap and into the last part of the song.
“It’s another crazy morning out in space,” Lance swung from a decorative pillar and dropped to the floor – he had never noticed the pillar there before, he had to swing from it more often, “I’m doing the opening exposition number to set the tone and pace.”
His sides felt a little sore after that pillar-swing but he didn’t care. “Well, whatever’s going on down here, I hope I’m not alone here.”
If Lance had woken up that day with broadway level ability in singing and dancing, he wasn’t going to waste it. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t so strange at all. People had woken up from comas fluent in foreign languages, so who’s to say Lance couldn’t become fluent in musical theatre from a good night’s sleep?
Hell, he had background music. He had a theme. He had music that punctuated all of his, completely intentional, moments of physical comedy!
He turned back to face the empty corridor and spread his arms wide again. This time, it felt as if he was inviting an audience.
“In this crazy sudden musical out in space!”
Lance clicked his heels together and exited stage right - onto the bridge.
At the sound of the doors opening, Hunk, Pidge, Shiro, Coran and Allura turned as one for Lance’s grand, smooth, piano-backed entrance.
Their expressions told him everything he needed to know.
He threw his arms in the air, relieved beyond speech, but apparently not beyond lyrics. “It’s not just me!”
“It’s not just you!” agreed Hunk, moving forward to slap hands in a high five, before gesturing at the others gathered. “It’s not just us, it’s them too!”
Shiro sighed and turned to Allura. “We have a problem.”
It came out sung. Followed by a pluck on a – was that a cello? Pidge snickered.
Shiro closed his eyes then opened his mouth, very slowly and deliberately, as though he could sneak up and ambush his words into ordinary speech patterns. “A musical problem.”
Hunk’s shoulders shook with barely suppressed laughter. Shiro sighed, ran a hand over his face and went on, “Is there anything that could have been broken on the ship to cause this problem?”
Allura frowned, pursing her lips. “Why do you assume it is the ship?”
“Because it’s usually the problem,” piped up Pidge, settled in her chair and making busy with the Castle Ship schematics on a holographic panel. Shiro groaned as Pidge’s tune echoed his own. “If it’s not purple space cats – “
“Space-cat-chinchilla-bats – “
Pidge ignored Lance. “- a ship ten thousand years overdue for servicing is the most likely problem.”
There was a delicate sweep of harp-strings and Coran stepped forward, the back of his hand pressed to his chin and waggling his fingers in what would later be recognised as a traditional narrative gesture from Altean water operas, one which meant both ‘despair’ and ‘blasphemy’ but also ‘respect the ship my forefathers built, ye graceless child’.
“While I take some offence at the implications, this ship has seen some serious altercations. I shall commence full-system diagnostics – until then, you may use these to play Prokrostrics,” over the sound of Lance’s sniggering, Coran pulled out a box of what appeared to be blackboards hung on cords, silver styluses clipped to their frames, from behind Pidge’s chair, “and to solve our conversational problem.”
Shiro took the board Coran offered him and experimentally traced the stylus across it. A purple line seeped up from the black surface like a hair attached hooked to the stylus tip. Hanging the board around his neck, Shiro wrote, Good job, Coran, and held it up for Coran to see.
Beaming, Coran held up his own board, where orange letters read, Tap twice with the stylus to clear it and it’ll be fresh and clean as a platwort again.
“I was wondering what would rhyme with diagnostics,” Lance span the board between his fingers. “Thought I was about to get called out for the time I bought a nosepick.”
What are Prokrostrics? asked Pidge, tapping at the green words on her board to get Coran’s attention, and it was in the midst of Coran and Allura’s demonstration of what looked like an Altean variant of Noughts and Crosses - where the grid was overlaid with a spiral and players could add and remove lines to the grid on their turns - that the doors to the bridge hissed open and Keith appeared.
In a desperate attempt to apparently gag himself, Keith had twisted a towel into a rope and crammed it between his teeth.
He took in the blackboards around their necks and, at the realisation that he wasn’t alone in his torment, sweet relief flashed through his eyes. When Shiro held up a spare blackboard for him, he eagerly crossed the room, unknotting the towel from the back of his neck.
Opening his mouth to work his jaw, however, turned out to be a mistake.
From nowhere, fell a spotlight. Music dragged Keith’s hand upwards into a clenched fist.
“I REFUSE TO SING,” he sung, and at the mortifying vibrato clinging to his voice, drawing each word out long and full, in the spirit of rebels singing their unbending principles at a barricade, Keith’s face went a bright, glowing red.
Shiro, Lance and Pidge burst out laughing.
If they were going to be singing and dancing during a fight, they had to be prepared.
We’re going to have to consider building stamina, Shiro wrote, tapping the board with the stylus to continue. We don’t want to be tired out because we were line-dancing down the corridors of a Galra space-ship before engaging in a fight.
Hunk let out a nervous laugh. Shiro, you’re kind of making this sound like a long-term thing.
Until we know what’s caused this and what THIS is so that we can stop it, Shiro underlined THIS with a squeak of his stylus, we’re going to have to treat it like it very well could be.
Great! Lance jumped up and down with his blackboard over his head. Because I want to hear Keith sing his feelings. I’ve got my bets it’ll be twentieth century eighties pop. Any takers?
All but growling around the towel stuffed into his mouth again, Keith unclipped his stylus with a flick, poised it on the board like a sprinter on a starting line and looked ready to pour out an essay on the subject of his feelings when Hunk waved to get everybody’s attention.
Hey, if we’re (temporarily, for some mysterious undefinable reason) living a musical, do you reckon one of us might get a power ballad? Hunk’s eyes were shining. Or a duet? Or, you know, Hunk drew a heart around the last word on his board, harmonising?
After a mixed bag of expressions, ranging from blank looks, blushes, horror to quiet contemplation, crossed every face in the room Shiro cleared his throat and very emphatically slapped his blackboard with a clack of metal.
TRAINING NOW.
They ignored Lance’s insistence to call it ‘rehearsing’.
“Paladins, gather, we have results to be seen,” Allura’s voice sung out over the intercom. “It’s not good, it’s not bad, but something between. Come one, come all!”
Deftly twirling string music swept them up from their rooms and buoyed them to the bridge, where Allura and Coran were waiting. A yellow canister, about a foot long, capped with steel, blinked at the paladins with a small green light. A glass panel in its side showed its contents. Inside was something red and gelatinous, pulsating with black and white twisting threads.
And something about those twisting, pulsing threads reminded Lance of piano keys.
Allura held up the canister in one hand whilst Coran showed them his blackboard: We have identified the cause of this singing and dancing water-opera problem!
Pidge pointed at the thing in the canister, What the quiznak is that?
The sporangial mass of an, as yet to be identified, fungus! I found it growing on the crystals you gathered from the Gallubean moon for the air filtration system. Coran flipped the board over. This, my young paladins, is the origin of our problems. It’s been releasing its spores into our ventilation system for something in around three quintents.
Allura set down the canister and, gravely, held up her sign, where her pink looping script read: Unfortunately, it seems that we have all been infected by its spores.
Which are releasing neurotoxins into our bodies that cause audiosomatic semi-telepathised hallucinations, finished Coran.
Lance raised his hand. In non-advanced biology terms?
We’ve got freak space mould in our bodies making us hallucinate this whole musical. I’m guessing that the ‘semi-telepathised’ part means we’re hallucinating this whole musical as a group, replied Pidge, stroking her chin and squinting at the red jelly fungal mass in the canister, which would explain how we’re all hearing the same music and somehow coordinating the singing and dancing when we’re in a room together.
Broadway space mould. Wicked.
But, guys, shouldn’t we be worried? Hunk underlined ‘worried’ several times. Nothing that ends in ‘toxins’ is ever good news, right?
Which is why we will be setting our course for the Gallubean system immediately. We have no records of anything like this in our archives. Perhaps the people of the system that the fungus is endemic to will be able to help us.
Shiro nodded. That sounds like a good idea, Princess.
In the meantime, Coran will study the sample we have obtained and examine each of us individually, so that we can confirm its effects. She gave them a faintly rueful smile. I’m afraid it will take us a day or so to return there. I cannot, on good conscience, attempt opening a wormhole in the knowledge that I may break out into a varga-long water-opera aria during the process. It would be much too dangerous. The highest notes of an Altean soprano would shred your delicate human ear drums.
The red jelly pulsed in the canister like a demon blood blister.
Keith had not been having a good day.
He had woken to finger snapping. Specifically his own fingers snapping. Not actually snapping, like celery (something about broken fingers had always reminded Keith of celery when they happened), but dropping smart, beat-defining clicks between agitated taps on a snare drum. And after that it had only got worse when he was struck by a strange, insistent, most profound and horrifying urge to open his mouth and sing.
He hadn’t been sure what he had been about to sing about, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t want to know. Something was obviously messing with his head, so he had done the most sensible thing he could think of and stuffed the corner of his blanket into his mouth, whilst he hunted his room for any item that would make a better, more portable, gag.
It wasn’t the singing that was the problem. Keith had nothing against singing. If he had to be honest, those opening snaps and snare had been kind of catchy. If only they hadn’t raised all the hairs on the back of his neck and made every instinct whisper-scream with, ‘Something is wrong and this is not okay’, he might have been tempted to go along with it.
But he wouldn’t have, because this was Keith’s body and Keith’s voice, and he would rather chew on his own towel than surrender to whatever it was that had tried to possess him. He sang on his own terms, damn it - and not, as it turned out, because some space mould was hijacking his body. He was master of himself. Nothing and nobody else.
He hated not being in control, not being able to trust his own feet, to have that unthinking certainty that when called to do so, his body would and could do exactly what he needed of it.
So much of his speed, agility and the snap-decisions that he could make in battle depended on a simple knowing. Shiro had once in training called it ‘an innate awareness of everything Keith’. It was all subconscious. He never had to consciously think about his position in relation his surroundings,or his stance, or his skin, the spring in his joints and where he had centred his weight. He relied on the instincts rooted in his body to cover those things whilst Keith focused his mind on solving the problem presented to him in the fastest, most absolute, most certain way.
Certainty. This space mould had stripped all that away from him. If he couldn’t trust his body, half the certainty in his actions was gone. He was second-guessing himself with every movement and every time he opened his mouth.
He felt betrayed in his own skin, or perhaps he had been feeling that way ever since his knife had stretched out into the dark sword of a Blade of Marmora in his hands.
Keith sighed and tried to re-focus on the tablet. He had been scrolling through the records of their trip to the Gallubean moon where this weird fungus had supposedly come from, in a vain attempt to remember if they had seen anything like it (they hadn’t, he was sure of it) on the surface, when there was movement in the corner of his eyes.
Lance had slid onto the sofa next to him, arms folded and one eyebrow raised.
Keith pretended that he wasn’t there.
Then Lance breathed.
And there was an expectant piano ‘plink!’
“So I was thinking…”
Keith lowered the tablet and very emphatically held up his blackboard: NO.
“…about why you don’t want to sing, and it’s fine, I get that this is all a bit freaky,
I saw the space mice, and even they were getting…squeaky.”
Keith groaned into the towel. Dimly, he wondered what he was going to do when it came to dinner. Maybe if he ate fast enough with big enough mouthfuls, he’d be able to stuff the singing out of him. The other part of him wondered where all these lyrics were coming from. If they were from neurotoxins acting on Lance’s brain, should he blame the space mould or Lance?
Unfortunately for Keith, Lance had taken his silence as permission to carry on, and the music – goddammit, the music! – had picked up pace.
“I thought it might be the whole feelings thing, because you don’t even talk that, let alone sing.”
As far as Keith had it, he didn’t talk about his feelings because he didn’t need to. What would it achieve? And, quite frankly, why would anybody want to know? Why would they be interested? On a side note, an electric guitar had joined in. Apparently this song was going full pop.
He could walk away right now.
He clenched his hands into fists and gritted his teeth. Willed his feet to move.
He couldn’t.
That same force that put his fingers snapping in the morning was holding him in place on the sofa. Keith’s body wasn’t obeying him.
Keith wanted to scream. Thank god for the towel that he didn’t, but maybe it showed on his face because Lance gave him an oddly concerned look before carrying on:
“And I talked to Hunk and he said talk to you,
Because,” Lance put his hand around his mouth, “I have this theory, you see, a real humdinger – “
Must be the semi-telepathic thing. That was a Coran word. The space mould was even hijacking their vocabularies. This was a nightmare. Why couldn’t Lance see that?
“ - You don’t want to sing…” Lance whispered, the music ebbing with all the intention, Keith could feel it, of rising again. And then he caught up with what Lance had sung and was filled with a nonsensical surge of dread, which was ridiculous because he wasn’t hiding anything that he could ever dread Lance working out, “ – because you’re a closeted singer.”
Keith stared at him.
Lance grinned and, before Keith could even confirm or deny it, he had leapt up from the sofa with his hands on his hips. “It’s okay, Keith, we’ll all understand, I just want you to know that if you ever need to talk, I’m right here at hand.”
Keith snatched up his blackboard. I AM NOT A CLOSETED SINGER. He flipped it over. THERE’S NO SUCH THING.
Lance’s eyes glittered. “Sure there’s such a thing, all you need is a closet. And people have closets of all shapes and sizes.”
The door hissed open and Hunk and Pidge arrived. Keith could only watch in dismayed disbelief as, arms over their heads and poised on their toes, they pirouetted across the common room more with more grace than he had ever seen either of them possess to assemble behind Lance.
Hunk managed to lower one arm from his pose to point at his blackboard: Lance, what did you do?
Lance only smirked and shimmied with the music, which was building, to something. Keith dreaded what.
Pidge shot Keith a dirty look as if this was all, somehow, his fault, arms held above her head like she had been taken prisoner.
And then the three of them broke into a ridiculously vigorous dance routine in the middle of the common room, Lance singing at the top of his voice – passionately, surprisingly tunefully, and then, knocking Keith’s expectations completely off-kilter, with an honest, sincere conviction in his own words.
“If you’re hiding something deep because you think we’ll all despise it,
Or call it sick and dirty, and to put it back where we won’t find it,
Then you’ve made yourself a closet, a lie fit for you,
Just don’t fit yourself in your closet, because it’s not meant to be true.”
Keith didn’t know what to make of that. Or rather, he did, he just didn’t know what to make of this onslaught of warm sincerity radiating from the three dancing in front of him, who despite Pidge’s reluctant and Hunk’s baffled expressions, seemed, well, they definitely sounded as if they were…
…singing something they truly felt from the bottom of their hearts.
Something hurt, a twinge in his chest, like the touch of a glowing match.
He didn’t want to hear this, the space mould, digging up the others’ feelings and turning it into tacky rhymes and song and dance routines, the music they were hallucinating together laying bare all the layers of emotions that even words could usually hide.
He sighed and held up his blackboard: LOOK. I CAME OUT AS GALRA. I’M DONE WITH CLOSETS.
He hadn’t meant to write that. He had meant to write for them to stop. Lance, however, simply shrugged and clapped his hands in Keith’s face.
“So you’re partially purple and your mum’s a space ninja. Pidge – “
“ - is a girl – “ That was Hunk.
“- and she came out as ginger.”
“What the quiznak, Lance?”
“You can have any number of closets, of all types and roles,
Maybe you stack them, small to big, like Russian dolls.”
Keith was laughing. Not out loud, but inside, yes, he was laughing. He couldn’t help it. If the towel wasn’t in his mouth he probably would have started belly-laughing at how awful this whole business was the moment Hunk and Pidge twirled their way into the room, but if he did that, he’d probably end up singing with the rest of them, giving in, and he was not going to do it.
“So if you’re a closeted singer and you think we’ll make fun of you,
At how your voice wobbles and you can’t for scheisse hold a tune,
To break it to you, mullet, we’ll make fun of you anyway - ”
Thanks, Lance.
“- But not because of what you hide. That’s just not done, okay?”
No, Keith was not okay. Lance was patronising him and he was simultaneously feeling both heartwarmingly endeared and infuriated, with a burning urge to either smile in second hand embarrassment or kick him in knees.
“So whenever you feel ready,” onto said knees, Lance dropped and skidded across the floor, coming to a stop at the foot of Keith’s sofa and spreading his arms with a flourish, and Keith decided that the bruises Lance was going to get from that particular move were entirely deserved, “ - because we’re ready for you today.”
Music ended on a final little swirl, appealing for Keith to listen.
Silence descended like a curtain.
As Lance, Pidge and Hunk finally came to a stop, breathing heavily and dripping sweat down their faces and necks, damp patches blossoming in their armpits, the strange tension pinning Keith to the sofa finally vanished.
Not wasting a second more, Keith moved. He leapt up from the sofa. Slowly, deliberately, looking Lance dead in the eyes, he etched his furious parting message, then turned around the blackboard and thrust it into Lance’s face, capital letters stamped in blazing red: BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TO ZARKON WHEN HE SHOWS UP – AGGRESSIVELY DANCE AT HIM UNTIL HE GIVES IN.
Then he fled the common room. He didn’t care that he was fleeing with a timing as if it was a planned part of the song and dance routine, or running because the neurotoxins finally said he could.
Behind him, after wheezing complaints at Keith’s ungrateful soul for running away when they were all being so supportive of him and his obvious singing insecurities, Lance flopped onto the sofa, alongside Hunk and Pidge, utterly exhausted, and closed his eyes. Singing and dancing all your major conversations of the day had really taken it out of him. It wouldn’t hurt to get a little lion-nap in before dinner.
There was a faint smell of smoke hanging in the air.