Archive of Our Own ^beta

1. a river in egypt

It’s a clear day on planet Earth but things for Keith, who sits beside Lance just outside the castle after a full day of training, couldn’t be murkier. Lance, who has been carrying on about something hilarious that happened to him the other day, is simultaneously digging into takeout leftovers as enthusiastically as someone in a commercial might. Except there's definitely no camera here; it's just Lance being Lance. And Keith—being Keith—should find this supremely obnoxious, and should interrupt Lance’s mouth-full commentary with some classic insult-hurling banter. But instead he finds himself, as he has been finding himself as of late, curiously enough, wholly preoccupied and unable to divide his attention.

“How do you know if you have a crush on someone?” he asks, apropos of nothing but the building tightness that has set up shop in his chest and throat. But, he knows Lance takes non sequiturs in stride. Lance turns to him, chewing and swallowing so fast his Adam’s apple protests.

“You have a crush on someone?” he asks, through a napkin pressed to his mouth, eyebrows ever-animated: raised and accusing. The words are barely formed, because he says them through another full mouth. This should be enough to annoy it all right out of Keith. Unfortunately, it's not.

It’s something that's been marinating in the trivection oven of his head. Something usually bolt-locked in a brain chamber, never to see the light of day, until he acknowledges it, every once in awhile in the middle of the night, with coldsweat-inducing clarity that he instantly locks up once more without a second thought. There are certain things that he is above, and having feelings—romantic feelings, distracting fuzzy feelings, feelings that have nothing to do with survivorship in a war-torn universe—about anyone, is one of those things. So, he's not afraid to air it out, to get it off his chest, to recognize it as ridiculous and improbable and trivial and be done with it so his conscious can be as cloudless as this midday horizon—a niggling wisp of white here or there, but nothing that can't be ignored.

“Do you listen when words come out of my mouth,” Keith says, trying to wipe his sweaty palms on his pants until he realizes they're trapped in his gloves. “I asked you a question.”

He can tell Lance is looking at him funny from the corner of his eye, but before long Lance simply shrugs and scoops up another bite.

“Well,” he starts, sounding smug even as food puffs out his cheek. Keith starts to regret asking, and he starts to wonder what he thought he'd even accomplish, asking the object of his—whatever, about his—whatever. “You feel jittery around them. Like when you drink a can of diet coke at ten p.m. and your heart tries to kill you for it.”

Keith nods slowly, considering it. He brings two fingers up to the rightmost crook of his neck to press against his carotid and its steady bump-bump. He thinks about how whenever Lance does something stupid on the field, in or outside of his lion, his heart pounds like crazy. But that's something else .

He looks over at Lance now, who’s doing the inane thing that made Keith’s mind start to wander: just eating, now less like he's on camera and more like he hasn’t seen a meal in months, as is normal for anyone after a day of training. And when he thinks about what he just asked Lance, he half expects his pulse to fizzle to a stop beneath his fingertips, game over. Or maybe, another scenario: Lance’ll say who do you have a crush on and Keith’ll say guess and they’ll have another one of their back-and-forths until they both guess right—and there it is, picking up speed against the tips of two fingers, traitorous and alarming. He curses under his breath.

“What are the other symptoms,” he grits, removing his hand from his neck, opting to pretend he doesn’t have a pulse at all. Lance dips forward where he sits criss-cross to try and catch his gaze.

“Symptoms—uh, alright,” Lance sighs, and then pauses to think for a moment, humming to himself. Keith, watching him, checks his heart rate one last time for good measure. “Well, if they say something nice to you, your whole face heats up. The top of your ears, too. And your neck.”

“What if they never say anything nice ever?” Keith asks. Lance gives him a look, eyebrows scrunched together, that seems to say, then you should find a better person to have a crush on. Keith could laugh, if this weren't so utterly solemn and heavier than Lance’s fried chicken in the pit of his stomach.

“Uh, then I guess you really really want them to?” Lance replies. He scratches the back of his head. “More than anything.”

“Okay,” Keith says, nodding. “What else.”

“Hmm,” is the noise Lance makes. He looks up at the sky as if it has answers. Keith tries to follow his logic. “If you really like someone, they can do no wrong.”

“Great!” Keith says. Lance can only ever do wrong, even if he's technically right about a battle strategy or a skincare routine or how spicy any given dish should be, even if it's not quite his fault that Keith feels like a balloon is verging on popping inside his ribcage. “It has to be something else, then.”

But Lance continues anyway: “Like, they're cute no matter what. Whether they're dressed to go out or they just woke up with bedhead and toothpaste all over their face, you get butterflies.” He has a thoughtfully serene expression on his face. Keith wonders if he's thinking of anyone in particular, and the car-sick feeling comes back. “You think they're the cutest person in the world.”

When Keith swallows, it feels like a longer, limper one of Lance’s french fries is stuck in the back of his throat. He’s not normally one for dramatics, but when his head starts to spin he really thinks he’s about to die. It's the backfire of all backfires, the worst plan Keith has ever executed—and therein might lie his fatal error: he was never one for plans in the first place.

“You're not that cute,” he says, hoarse like Lance socked the words out of him. He brings both knees up to rest his elbows on them. His mind’s a chorus of no, no, no, which happens a lot whenever he's with Lance, but now it's to the tune of a funeral march. Clarity, Keith decides, is not worth this chaos.

“What the heck does—Keith, buddy, you okay?” Lance rests a hand on his shoulder, which makes everything exponentially worse. “You look like you're gonna pass out.”

“This can’t be right,” he says, wiping a hand down his face, press his palm against his lips.

“Dude, you're being a little dramatic,” Lance says, and, especially coming from him for a multitude of reasons, it does nothing to reassure Keith or cut short this downward spiral. “It's okay to have a crush on someone.”

“It's not,” Keith says, letting his head fall between his knees. Lance’s hand squeezes his shoulder, and every nerve across Keith’s body seems to rear itself monstrously toward that touch.

“It is! It totally is,” Lance insists, jostling him gently, and it makes Keith’s head start to hurt. He leans in to hook his arm around Keith’s shoulders in full. It’s right in Keith ear, when he speaks. “I have a crush on someone new, like, every week.”

“No—it's not someone.” Keith brings his head up, and it feels as heavy on his neck as if it were his center of gravity, and he meets Lance’s eyes with his own. Keith doesn’t mean to communicate something through their silence, he just kind of gets caught up in staring at Lance’s face, which tends to happen lately. Sharp features, cheekbones and chin. Impossible eyes and a loud mouth as expressive as his eyebrows. But Lance seems to come to some understanding on his own. He sits back in a rare, rare moment of speechlessness, that mouth of his slightly pursed and twitching in its search for words in what can only be, though Keith doesn’t know much about body language, immense confusion on the brink of realization.

“You,” he starts, but it comes out in a squeak, so he clears his throat into his fist and starts again, “You gotta spell it out for me, man. You look like a kicked Arusian right now.”

“I’m not even going to spell it out for myself,” Keith says, and flops onto his back, looking up at the tauntingly clear sky as if it has his answers, too.

2. red in the face

Between training sessions and meals the recreation room—which had been something else until Hunk brought in some board games and dubbed it as such—gets a workout. The ping pong table in the center of the room, which had also served some other purpose until Lance pinned a makeshift net across the center of it, is where Lance and Keith currently find themselves, paddle in hand, at either of its ends. Keith’s game plan consists of pretending the ball is his feelings for Lance and the paddle is—well, a paddle, and he’s using it to smash them. But the ball never breaks, it just bounces. And, it always bounces back to him. And Lance is always the one sending it over the net and onto Keith’s side of the table, each and every turn.

At first, Keith had expected the open recognition of his feelings to effectively kill them in their tracks, for his brain to catch up with his heart and say something like hey, this is actually really annoying, let’s stop. But when, a day later, he continues to recklessly seek out Lance’s company despite himself—or maybe, to spite himself—that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. He then had sort of counted on Lance teasing him enough to make him shed all warm affection that might be hiding away somewhere deep between where his ribs start and his belly button ends. But, as should have been predicted, Lance makes nothing easier.

“Pretty gutsy of you to up and say it to me, like, minutes after realizing it,” Lance says, apropos of nothing, as though they had been talking about it all along. Keith hates how he refers to it as it. Lance sends the ball over, Keith sends it back. “I’m still surprised.”

“Shut,” Keith says, and slams the ball as it bounces to him, “it.”

“Like, you and me? It makes no sense!” Lance, ignoring him altogether, laughs. “What a plot twist in the Misadventures of Paladin Lance McClain, colon, Blue in the Face .”

“I’m the protagonist in this story and the title’s much shorter,” Keith says, “And you need to stop talking.”

“It’s a movie, first of all, and second—I don’t mean to make fun of you, Keith,” he says, and his reassuring voice sounds a lot like his smack talk voice. The ball bounces from Keith’s paddle to Lance’s side of the table to over Lance’s shoulder; a point. “You wouldn't be the first to fall.”

“Second, then?” Slam! Keith sends the ball back after Lance serves it. From his shoulder to his pinky aches with restrained energy. Keith has at least five hundred punches in him, and ping pong isn’t really doing the trick. They should try boxing next, or cinder block breaking. “Less talk, Lance.”

“Hey, you know what?” Lance says, and of course, Keith doesn’t. “We should try it out.” 

“Boxing?” He’s really not working up enough of a sweat, though his heart’s pounding as if he is. The hand-to-hand training that had preceded this game hadn’t even been enough for him to sweat it all out, especially considering he had been hand-to-hand with Lance.

“Dating?” Lance hits the net on his next turn, stilting the rhythm, setting everything off-kilter, as he does best. Keith gets the urge to unleash some sort of primal scream; he wonders how it would echo through the castle. “I’m curious enough to give it a shot.”

“Since when are you even into guys,” Keith says, voice low and quavering just barely out of his control, but at least he didn't scream it.

“You have to give a type of food ten tries before you can tell whether or not you like it. That principle,” Lance says, hitting the ball back, “I transfer to anything in life!”

Keith digests what Lance is trying to say to him, and it makes something in his core buzz like an old motor that developed just enough sentience to be really, really angry. Those five hundred punches pile up to a rough one thousand, and they pound inside his chest. Keith, for the first time since he was a toddler, probably, feels one wrong move away from a temper tantrum. It’s astounding, how many pent-up emotions Lance can inspire without much effort at all.

“How do we try each other ten times,” Keith snaps, “I feel like you’ve been trying me for years, and I hate it.”

Lance splutters for a moment, missing the ball as it curves past him, and Keith can't help but relish his loss and subsequent outrage.

“You could be a little happier about this!” Lance says, foregoing the ball to scold Keith, who crosses his own arms over his chest, from across the table. “Your wildest dreams are coming true right now.”

Keith would send his paddle over the net too if his grip weren’t white hot around it. He doesn’t know what he truly expected, coming clean to Lance or himself, but it wasn’t exactly—whatever the hell Lance thinks he’s doing right now.

“I can't stand you, and your—your face, and your stupid mouth,” Keith says, as Lance finally stoops to collect the ball so they can continue their stupid game. “The only thing I want to hear is the slam of the ball and whatever noise your paddle makes when you swing and miss.”

“The paddle would be more of a whooshhh, Keith, and slam isn’t the noise the ball makes.” Lance says, “And, uh, that is not what you said last night.”

“This isn’t a joke. It’s the biggest tragedy that I’ve ever faced. And you know I’ve been through some things,” he says through ground teeth. He watches the little white ball bounce once, and with precision knocks it over the net. “Lance, you know how I feel about sound effects.”

“It's called ping pong for a reason,” Lance says. This time, the ball whirls past Keith’s shoulder, and Lance, who hasn’t seemed to work up much of a sweat either, leans his hands on the table and catches Keith’s eye. He’s pouting, and looking like he wants to start another round of arguments. “I still don’t get why you’re mad at me!”

Keith grunts, a swell of frustration in his throat brought down by a sinking guilt. He’s going to get whiplash with all this emotion, and it’s all Lance’s fault—except, not really.

“It’s not—it’s not you I’m mad at, Lance.” He supposes he can’t quite blame Lance for existing, though if he weren't here Keith wouldn't be suffering. Though it's still not a pleasant train of thought to have about someone he has a crush on. He presses his palm to his forehead and groans. “It’s—”

“‘It’s not you, it’s me?’” Lance says, and then scoffs over at Keith like he’s tasted something sour. “How many times do I gotta tell you, Keith, it’s a crush, it ain’t that deep—”

Keith slams—slams—the ball over the net, it hits the table and whizzes right past Lance’s left ear. And that makes eleven.

“I win,” he says, and tosses the paddle onto the table. He doesn’t feel like he’s won, but he does feel like he needs to jog a mile in the opposite direction of Lance. He lifts the hair on his neck up in a fist, finally feeling sufficiently warmed-up, and with a swallow he looks down at his emotion-smashing paddle on the table. “It feels—that deep.”

“I thought we were volleying,” Lance says. He braces his hands on the table again, and somehow finds the nerve to smile. “So then? What say you? To dating me?”

“I say,” Keith says, and though he should march away and train himself into the ground until he can’t think of anything but a hot shower and bed, he’s got Lance to himself, and maybe he’s a little masochistic. “Rematch.”

3. more than you bargained for

The reception for recent garrison grads constitutes a whole lot of mediocre Italian food, unwanted social interaction, and time wasted; but ever the optimist, Keith finds his silver linings in Lance, who somehow, despite all the logic of alphabetical order, managed to get a seat beside him. The table’s a circle so Keith can see him perfectly without having to sneak glances out of the corner of his eye, and for once, Lance isn’t talking; he’s listening. The girl on the other side of him is telling some story that Keith can only hear bits and pieces of, but he's not paying attention to that, anyway. Not when he’s busy trying to make sense of the back of Lance’s head and the v of hair above the nape of his neck, his shoulders in a pressed white button down, his sleeves rolled up and his forearms resting on the table, the bone of his wrist when he picks up a utensil.

There’s gotta be a way to beat this, Keith thinks, resting his face against his fist. Lance laughs at the girl’s story and makes commentary every so often, gesticulating animatedly with his fork when he does so. Keith hasn't spoken to him, or instigated any arguments, in about twenty-four hours, which might be an excruciating new record. Excruciating, because Lance makes himself so easy to argue with. And because, for whatever traitorous reason, Keith’s mind has been supplying the memory of Lance’s voice like a glitch in a remix: I have a crush on someone new, like, every week. The food in his mouth goes bitter as he forces it down.

Sitting this near to Lance, the legs of their chairs bumping, is messing with his already sufficiently messed-up head. He doesn't know if he wants to put distance between them or—he looks at Lance beside him; he could press his arm up against the length of Lance’s, and it would seem casual to anyone other than him. Or he could lean in closer and say something really funny that would wheel Lance’s bright attention around to him. Or he could rest his chin on Lance’s shoulder and tell him in his ear how bored he is.

When Lance finally turns to Keith, after the girl he had been talking to got up from the table as if the universe decided to throw him a bone for once, he rests his hand on the back of Keith’s chair. His tie is blue and loosened around his neck. His hair is styled. He smells like walking past the cologne kiosque in the mall.

“You clean up well, I must say.” Lance sweeps his eyes from Keith's collar to his hair, and Keith swears he feels it as if it were Lance’s hands touching him there. “It's kind of annoying. But then I remember who you're trying to impress.”

“Who was that girl?” Keith asks instead of taking the bait, though he wonders who Lance is trying to impress with his slicked hair.

“Danielle? She was your classmate, too, you know,” he says, and then he grins. “You jealous?”

“Lance,” he warns. “No, it’s better if you’re interested in her.”

“Why would I be?” Lance chuckles and nudges their shoulders together easily, like Keith is in on some joke. Under the table, he curls his foot behind and around Keith’s to press the inside of their ankles together. Keith holds himself very still. “Didn't know you were into sharing.”

“I mean, interested in her instead of—me.” Under Keith’s collar suddenly goes feverish; he didn't mean to insinuate that Lance is into him—because, despite his recent misguided attempts to get Keith to agree to a date, he isn't; he's just stupid. Lance looks at him like he sprouted a tail, but opens his own mouth before Keith can start to back peddle.

“Is this your roundabout way of breaking up with me?” Lance asks. Keith resists the urge to stab his fork into something.

“Lance, we weren't even something that could be broken up,” he says.

“Oh contraire!” Perking up in his seat, Lance leans onto the table and in toward Keith. Keith can’t help but relish this change in mood, and thinks: I guess this is one way to get his attention. “I thought we agreed to test the waters.”

“No one agreed to anything outside of your imagination,” he says. “Why don’t we just move on from this.”

“Do you really like me?” Lance asks, and he says it incredulously and in a whisper, which Keith can’t decide if he appreciates or if it just annoys him even more.

“Of course I do,” Keith replies, throwing his hands up, facing Lance in his seat and just barely refraining from grabbing him by the collar and shaking. It's the stem of all his current problems. He wouldn’t feel as if he were in the ninth circle of hell if he didn’t really, really like Lance. His candor seems to shock Lance’s smile right off his face. But Keith is just as surprised as anyone about all of this.

“Do you even like me?” Keith asks, taking advantage of Lance’s silence. “Why are you acting like you do?”

“I-I don't know,” Lance brings a hand to the back of his neck; it’s an endearing tick he has, though Keith feels an irrational swell of exasperation when Lance unwittingly uses it on him . “You got me thinking, and I thought it could be—”

He falters for words, so instead then turns his hand to let his knuckles brush against the side of Keith’s on the table. Keith snatches it away before he can even register that the touch felt like a spark.

“Another one of your bright ideas?” Keith finishes, absently cradling his hand to his chest.

“Exactly! Bright idea!” Lance says. “Sans sarcasm.”

“A badder than bad idea, full sarcasm,” Keith counters, then backtracks with a hushed curse. “You know what I mean.”

“That just made it sound really cool, anyway.” Keith starts to feel dizzy when Lance presses their ankles together again. “Besides, there's no such thing as bad ideas, just good ideas gone horribly wrong.”

“Lance?” Keith says, and then tilts himself in closer and enunciates, hoping it will penetrate past Lance’s gelled and combed hair and into his thick, thick skull, “We have already gone horribly wrong.”

“Haven't you ever had a crush before?” Lance asks. His voice gets higher when he’s annoyed. “Do you do this every time?”

“I don't—it's never felt like this!” Nothing has. And Keith has had his fair share of ailments. Lance looks at him like he’s a math problem on the homework he always would copy from Pidge. 

“Like this,” he scoffs. He prompts, “Like what? ”

“Like,” Keith tries, “Like I have tunnel vision, twenty-four-seven. And there's no light at the end of it, just your—dumb—face. Like I could take hours deciding whether I want to kick you or kiss you and still not come up with an answer.”

“You want to—” Lance cuts himself off, blinking his eyes hard a few times, as if a bug flew into them. He gives a couple curt shakes of his head and narrows his eyes. “Maybe you don't have a crush on me.”

“I think I would know,” Keith snaps.

“Would you?” Lance’s eyebrows seem to mirror his frown. He leans in like he does whenever they get caught up in one of their fights, like personal space means nothing. “You didn't even know what a crush felt like just a few days ago.”

“But you explained the symptoms, so now I know for sure,” Keith says, leaning in too, and that’s his mistake. Being close enough to Lance to smell his cologne and to see where he shaves is enough to make him forget what they’re even talking about.

“Y-you,” Lance squeaks, and then coughs, and then manages: “You felt—all those ways?”

Keith nods so exasperatedly his neck twinges.

“About me?”

“Yes!” But the gravity of their back-and-forth is so familiar, he almost feels relieved when it starts to draw him in.

“You’re absolutely positive—”

“Lance.” He says it in a helpless exhale. He doesn't know how else to make it clear short of—kicking or kissing him.

“It’s just, it’s kind of flattering,” Lance explains, drumming his fork against the tablecloth. “I never imagined—you, feeling that way, about me. Like, of all people.”

Lance glances over at him and then smiles, and if Keith didn’t know him any better, he’d say it were shy. He can’t help but, after sighing, smile back wearily. It is kind of funny, like a practical joke, like the universe is mailboxing him—which actually isn’t funny at all and pisses him off a lot. He gets some twisted, backwards consolation in knowing that at the very least, it's making Lance grin at him and only him, and maybe not even at his expense. Keith leans into Lance’s arm in a moment of temporary truce.

“How could I not?” he replies. When he says this, Lance startles and goes still beside him, and when Keith looks over, his face goes totally pink, pinker than the flush he had already been sporting, pink down to the collar of his button down. Keith wonders if he does this shit on purpose, and then he draws in a steadying breath and counts backwards from ten. When he exhales, his bangs float up. “I mean, seriously. How do I stop it?”

“Oh,” Lance says, and tugs on the edge of one of his rolled-up sleeves, shrugging against Keith’s arm. “I know you're all emo about this, but I feel like I can take on the Galra Empire and win.”

Lance smiles down at the tablecloth. Well, Keith thinks, at least one of us does.

“Maybe if I just ignore it it'll go away,” Keith reasons, nudging him. His eyes trace Lance’s profile in the dim light—already off to a bad start. But it’s hard to believe anything is happening in this reception hall apart from their conversation. “You’ll just—pass through my system.”

“And that’s a little less flattering,” Lance says, nudging him back, but he seems to appreciate the comparison somewhat because he starts laughing, and Keith can’t help but to laugh with him.

4. i guess that's why they call it the blues

Keith, after a few dozen rounds with the fighter simulation, has taken to lying face down on the training deck floor and, for the first time in a long time, just wallowing in his multitude of sorrows. His mind’s on Lance, even more than it usually is, and it’s getting him absolutely nowhere. The sick pleasure he gets out of thinking about Lance’s profile in dim light, and his hand touching his own, and his voice saying stupid things like it’s kind of flattering or we should try it out, only serves to kickstart his cycle of misery over and over again. To make it worse, something small and sharp has been stuck in his shoe for the entirety of his training, but he hasn’t attempted to remove it, because what’s even the point. And then, the sky-breaking thundercloud over his already pitiful state: he hears someone coming, and it makes him want to sink into the floor when he realizes he recognizes who it is by footstep alone.

“Looks like you've got the blues,” says Lance, gaining closer to where Keith has sprawled himself. Keith doesn’t have to lift his head to frown at him; Lance gets down on his level, lowering himself to his stomach to lie down perpendicular to Keith on the floor, head to head. “Get it—blue? Because you're sad, and it's about me.”

“I wasn't even thinking about you, Lance,” Keith lies, lifting his forehead only to stick Lance with a glare. He toes the rock-hard floor with a grimace. “There's something stuck in my—”

But before he can finish telling Lance about the most mundane of his woes, before he even meets Lance’s eyes again—he senses it: Lance, closer to him than he had been, closer than is ever necessary. He comes up nose to nose with Keith, too close for Keith to look him in the eye, and then brushes just past him. He presses his lips to Keith’s cheek in a kiss, fingers brushing back fringe; it feels like it happens in slow motion, maybe because Lance lets it linger and draws in a deep breath before pulling back just enough. Just enough, and before Keith can register it happening: like an afterthought, a proper kiss against his mouth. It’s not a clash but instead more of a graze, soft and hesitant, just barely parting his lips—which is not how Keith imagined it might have been with Lance, of all people.

That’s right—he’s no longer above imagining it, especially these past couple of nights. He had always figured it might happen in the heat of the moment, a now-or-never type of deal. And he figured he’d be the one to initiate it, hands fisting the collar of Lance’s jacket, or grappling against his armor, maybe the second-to-last bold move he ever makes. He never pictured it as gentle and surprising and safe as on the floor of the castle. The one consistency between reality and imagination, he supposes as he chases forward when Lance breaks away with that small smacking kissing noise, is how much longer he wants it to last.

“Well?” It comes from Lance’s mouth sort of huskily and out-of-breath, and still just a crane of the neck away from Keith. It’s then that Keith realizes his eyes are squeezed shut; he opens them, and licks his lips.

“What,” he says, then is cut off by a swallow as he touches his fingertips to his mouth. “What did you do that for?”

Lance’s shoulders hug his ears, his eyes roam the room somewhere to the side of where they lay. He chews on his bottom lip as if he’s trying so hard to play it cool, as if he weren’t the one who started it. “I figured if you kissed me once, it would be out of your system for good.”

“On what planet,” Keith says slowly, resisting the urge to pinch himself, or Lance, “would that have worked.”

“I always see it on TV!” Lance argues, pink staining the tops of his cheeks as if to undercut his bold move. “Though it never works on TV, either. And it also didn't work for me. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” It comes out quieter than he expected or intended it to, like Lance kissed the voice right out of him. And he must have kissed the sense out of him, too, because it definitely isn't okay— Keith would do nothing short of anything for him to do it again; it’s dangerous.

“So?” Lance prompts. So? So close to Keith, so close to kissing him again, so obnoxious and so catastrophic. Keith’s brain feels so much like the green goo they live off of during missions that he starts to wonder if that’s exactly what the food is—the melted brains of a lovesick fool.

“What was the question?” he asks, licking his lips again, to rid them of any ghost of Lance’s touch, or maybe to try to taste it. Lance’s eyebrows seem to be mocking him. And Lance himself, too; he laughs.

“Wow, Earth to Keith. I haven’t asked it yet,” he says, studying Keith with a curious gleam to his eyes and silly smile that takes up his whole face. “Why do you even like me?”

“Why?” Keith repeats. He shakes his head, which is starting to be permanently on the verge of a migraine. “Believe it or not, you have a few redeeming qualities.”

The compliment is completely disproportionate to how much Lance perks up, his cheshire grin appearing like a magic trick right before Keith’s eyes. It'll never cease to amaze Keith, how easy it is to butter him up. It’ll be his downfall, one day. Or Keith’s.

“I know that, but I didn’t know you knew that,” Lance says, and then elbows Keith’s arm a couple of times. “Come on, I’m fishing. Gush about your crush. Start with: besides the obvious.”

“I don't know!” Keith replies, louder than he intended. “I don’t know why, it’s just—what’s happening. You're annoying and we don't get along well. You don’t think before you talk, and you’re all talk. Your eyebrows have, like, a mind of their own, and so does your mouth. You flirt with anything that walks on two legs and looks only vaguely humanoid. And you pilot like—like you’re perpetually under the influence.”

Lance’s face falls so comically flat, it almost spurs Keith on; after all, he’s got a list that goes on for miles. “Jeez—anything positive? At all?”

“Well, yeah,” Keith says, and he hadn’t realized he was being particularly negative. He tries again: “I like when we argue.”

“Keith.”

“I’m being serious!” he says. “I—I like spending time with you and talking with you. When we argue, it’s—annoying. But fun. You’re—a lot of fun. I like teaming up with you, and—getting riled up with you, even about stupid things. So, you’re a good rival. For me.” He clears his throat, finding his mouth suddenly dry under Lance's gaze. He looks down to where his hands splay flat against the floor. “I like when you pay attention to only me, when—you’re talking to me, or trying to get my attention, or even trying to one-up me. When I have your attention, it’s—it’s. I’m not good with words, but I don’t think even you could explain—that. I don’t know how you’re so full of yourself and so selfless at the same time it just—it just! What I mean is, I barely trust you in the cockpit but—I do trust you with my life. Despite my better judgment. Or maybe because of it. I like being with you, I like thinking about you, and I like look—” Keith freezes, his brain catching up to his mouth, and ultimately deciding: just finish what you started: “I like looking at you.”

Keith abruptly realizes, once Lance is stunned into a wide-eyed silence, how much worse it is when he isn’t talking. Lance starts to tap frantic patterns on the floor with his fingertips.

“Uh—okay, okay, run with that,” he says, and with bravado he claps his hands together and summons an airy laugh. “What about my looks? My bod?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Keith huffs, pillowing his chin on his arms. Lance peers down at him from where he rests his cheek against his hand, his eyes a little starry and his smile almost curling at its edges. “I don't really care about looks.”

It's Lance’s turn to huff, into the palm of his hand.

“The irony,” he says, and then narrows his eyes down at Keith. Eye contact in such close quarters, and after what had just transpired between them, is kind of hypnotic.

“What's that supposed to mean,” Keith asks. He finds his own reflection in Lance’s irises. He wonders when Lance will try to kiss him again, if he should purse his lips when it happens, or tilt his head, or put his hands somewhere on Lance, wherever's in reach, maybe his shoulders or his face.

“You're like, easily the most attractive guy in any room at any time,” Lance says, and after saying so he glances down to inspect his nails. And that makes Keith feel, pathetically, good, and he feels it in his stomach. He just made it clear that he doesn’t care about appearance, and now he has the urge to search out the nearest mirror. Lance can’t just go around kissing and then—and then flirting with him. Keith’s chest, and his head, and actually every limb of his body seems to want to reach out and grab something.

“I think you are, too,” he replies. He lifts onto his elbows so he and Lance are eye-to-eye. “That’s just not—why I like you. And it's like what you said. I realized how I felt for you while you were stuffing your face with leftovers. It should have been disgusting—it was disgusting, but—”

Lance snaps his fingers, cutting Keith short, probably for the better.

“But you think I'm cute no matter what!” he finishes, and it sounds even more pathetic coming from Lance’s mouth than from Keith’s head. Keith lets his head drop between his shoulders as Lance lets out a giddy laugh. His hands find Keith’s on the floor and, unlike the night before, Keith doesn’t pull away when he clasps them together between his own. When Keith glances up, he sees the top of Lance’s bowed head.

“Keith, no one’s ever—I don’t know how—you just, like—”

“Speechless?” Keith says. If he presses forward a couple of inches his face would be buried in Lance’s hair; it’s the dumbest, most pointless and useless thought he’s ever had. “That’s refreshing.”

“You really do like me, huh?” Lance says, lifting his face, expression serious, eyes wide and trained only on Keith. His hands squeeze around Keith’s. His lips, even without any words coming from them, still manage to cause Keith endless, eternal distress.

“Why would I lie about it?” he asks the ceiling. “I don't even know why I'm telling the truth about it!”

“Well, at first I thought you were pulling a fast one on me, but then I realized: you don't know how to pull fast ones,” Lance says with a slow, smug, and aggravatingly contagious smile spreading across his lips. “You don't even know how to pull slow ones.”

“Your knock-knock jokes don't even make sense to me,” Keith agrees, though naturally he recognizes that as a shortcoming of Lance’s, before anything else.

“It's okay if you don't get my jokes. That just means I'll have to explain them to you,” he says, releasing Keith’s hand to pat at the side of his face in a way that makes Keith want to pin his wrist down to the floor. He feels the touch up and down his entire right side. “And everyone knows that elaborating on a joke, only makes it funnier.”

“I won't laugh, anyway,” Keith promises, biting the inside of his cheek. To think, Lance is simultaneously the one to make him miserable and to cheer him up. Though there are certain things that Keith is above, and swallowing his pride to blame his slump on himself, he realizes, is not one of them.

“And I'll get mad at you for not laughing!” Lance gets a firm hold on both of Keith’s hands again, almost pleadingly; his fingers curling around Keith’s own, his thumb sweeping once over his knuckles. Keith looks down to memorize it as it happens so he can play it back when he wakes up the next morning and tries to convince himself it was all a dream. “See? We could be...”

Keith’s brain, had Lance not muddled it, would have supplied a slew of adjectives to complete the sentence, but he can’t help but think that maybe they aren’t exactly on the same page, in a way they’ve never been before. He holds in a breath as Lance tries to find the right words, idly comparing Lance’s hands to his own, marveling at the proximity that allows this comparison.

“We could be something. Really good,” is what he says, so earnestly and so simply that it’s hard not to put stock in him. “Disney good.”

“Disney?” Keith surprises himself with a laugh. “Like, Cinderella?”

“Not my best,” Lance admits, letting his head drop for a second. “Still romantic, though.”

Keith wants to protest the word romantic coming from Lance’s mouth, but more than arguing, both with Lance and his own self, he wants to put Lance’s mouth to use in that other, new way. The mere inch or two between them seems to give him courage, or at least makes him forget absolutely everything else; he places a hand, like Lance had to him, against Lance’s cheek. His hand frames the angle of it, softens his expressions like a breeze. The justification for it comes to Keith indignantly and probably unnecessarily, given the welcoming way Lance tilts into it: if Lance can touch me like that I can touch him like this, no harm, no foul. He closes his eyes only when Lance becomes blurry before him, nose to nose once again. He nudges their foreheads together, Lance tilts his head into Keith’s hand so their mouths line up like instincts.

“Lance,” Keith sighs when Lance doesn’t close the distance between them like he had before. Lance lets out a breath of a laugh, Keith feels it against his lips, and then makes a whiny frustrated noise in the back of his throat.

“I don't like seeing you moping around like this.” Lance decides, his nose nudging into Keith’s cheek before a deep grounding inhale has him pulling away, leaving Keith blinking fast and reeling. “Let’s get outta here.”

“And go where?” Keith asks, disgruntled, considering he had finally found a comfortable position prostrate on the floor, considering Lance just left him utterly kissless. But he takes Lance’s hand when he offers it down to him, and lets Lance pull him up.

“We'll get some fresh air,” Lance says, which does nothing to answer Keith's question. He looks over his shoulder at Keith in a strange but familiar way, his eyes bright and his voice soft, both his hands tugging on one of Keith’s to lead him off to somewhere. He looks at him like Keith is—something really interesting and fun, like a white-sand shore with an empty lifeguard stand and ten-foot waves, or like a shiny new cutting-edge spacecraft with cupholders and laser guns that make all the right sounds, or like a plain old human being that he has immense affection for. In an out-of-body moment, Keith starts to feel sorry for and jealous of himself, thinking about how he reached the point of no return, the point where he would follow Lance if he were leading him by hand to a one-way wormhole, that foreboding and prophesied point where Lance might just be able to get away with anything.

5. despite everything

Keith, after Lance had dragged him out of the castle, had expected a ride in the blue lion rife with corkscrews and lost appetites to somewhere maybe two galaxies away and for some purpose that Lance probably had as much of an idea about as Keith did. But on earth they stayed, suitably, because it had probably been the most earthly night Keith had ever had; Lance had taken him to the plaza, which housed a grocery store, three restaurants of varying fanciness, a movie theater, and a locksmith. They did dinner and an action movie—it had been comfortable and easy-going and so quintessentially Lance that Keith almost feels guilty for expecting anything else. They mostly talked—nothing about whatever the heck was happening between them, but instead about the weather, about good memories, about Lance’s self-proclaimed status as a film buff, about Keith's widespread knowledge of conspiracy theories.

And now they’re walking home, or walking somewhere, at least—Keith is just content enough, and warm enough in his jacket despite the chill, to follow along. Meandering along the empty midnight sidewalk under the streetlights, their arms brush past each other every fourth step or so. A lull in conversation lasts no more than a minute and is usually filled with Lance’s whistling or their shoes scuffing against the concrete. The moon sits full circle in the sky, and it’s hard to look up at it without thinking about how far beyond it they’ve been.

“I was thinking something more sophisticated, or a romantic walk along the shore, but,” Lance says, shoving his hands into his pockets, “It’s kind of cold, and museums are so lame.”

“Who cares about art!” Keith agrees, ignoring that r-word coming from Lance’s mouth again, though he kind of wants to stick out his foot and trip him for it. He matches Lance’s ambling pace as they follow the sidewalk. They’re getting nowhere, strolling this slow, but Keith might be okay with reaching a destination in an hour or two, if at all. “I don’t want to look at art unless it’s—”

“—unless it’s comics! Exactly.” Lance grins over at him, a sly quirk to his eyebrows, but then the excited smile fades to something a little more shy. He nudges their shoulders together. “See—we’re on the same page, for a few things.”

“Oh yeah?” Keith laughs, nudging him back. He knows he’s humoring Lance, and he knows he’s indulging himself. There must be something in the air tonight. “What else?”

“Well, we’re both handsome,” Lance says, holding his chin in thought, “and we’re both integral parts of Voltron.”

“Which definitely comes second to being handsome,” says Keith.

“And we both,” continues Lance, with a brief pause to draw in a dramatic inhale, “have a crush on someone.”

Lance, somehow, manages to slow their pace then; Keith stutters a step to match him, rolling his eyes toward the moon, wondering why it always seems to come back to this.

"You have a crush on someone," says Keith, flatly.

"I do,” says Lance, naturally.

“On who.” “Guess.”

It’s reminiscent of some sort of kindergarten playground experience that Keith never had and frankly never felt he had missed out on. But maybe, if he had conversations like this at recess, and had gotten this humiliating pointlessness out of the way in childhood, it would have felt far less weight-of-the-world now, with Lance making eyes at him and leveling revelations as effortless as he’d whistle some obscure Air Supply song Keith hates that he recognizes.

“You’ll have a new one next week,” Keith replies, picking up his pace, “I'll guess then.”

And so Lance cuts short their walk altogether: he wheels around to face Keith, hands gripping either of Keith’s arms and blocking his path. Lance, Keith realizes not for the first time, has a real knack for throwing everything off balance, for stilting rhythms and building obstacles and creating a whole lot of something out of nothing. Lance lowers himself to catch Keith’s gaze by looking up, still hanging onto Keith’s arms, and it kind of makes Keith want to—kick or kiss him, he can never decide.

“I’m trying to tell you,” Lance says, with a kind of imploring, desperate edge to his voice, “I wanna be your boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend,” Keith repeats. The word tastes funny and foreign in his mouth. It sounds juvenile and a hundred years out of his league all at once. Maybe I should try it ten times, he thinks, in a last-ditch effort to distract himself from the enormity of what Lance is trying to say right to his face.

“More than a crush,” Lance clarifies. “I want to commit.”

“Commit?” Keith says.

“Sh, stop yelling. Residential neighborhood.” Lance loosens his grip on Keith’s forearms until his hands just rest there, as if they’re holding Keith together, as if that’s the most comfortable place for them to rest. He straightens himself up. His thumbs press into Keith’s jacket. “It could be fun.”

“Fun?!” Keith says, and he’s this close to biting Lance’s hand when he flattens it over his mouth. He pulls him away by the wrist, and whispers, “It's been the worst week of my life and it's only Wednesday.”

“Because you're going about this totally the wrong way! As usual,” Lance says. He looks down at his shoes as if to collect his thoughts. His hands find their way back into his pockets, and Keith feels aggravatingly bereft when they leave his arms. “We had fun tonight, right? We can do this, like, every night.”

“This wasn’t a date,” Keith says, but it comes out sounding more like a question than anything. His pulse starts to work double-time, he feels like they’re teetering on the verge of something and he’s the one hanging by his pinky onto the cliff’s edge.

“Sure felt like one!” Lance replies, of course.

“We didn’t kiss,” Keith can’t help but say, and the k-word, as he kind of intended it to, acts like an on button. Lance’s gaze flit from Keith’s eyes to his lips, where they seem to zone out, and he licks his own lips, and Keith doesn’t know how he knows it, but when he tilts his chin, Lance will tilt his as well, and when he leans in so will Lance, and their mouths will part and definitely, definitely meet—

“No, no, no,” Lance whines, low, and his lips brush against Keith’s with his protests. It makes Keith suck in a shuddering breath and rear back on every instinct pushing him forward. Two hands land on Keith’s shoulders, halting whatever magnetic force that suddenly materialized between their lips just short of touchdown. Lance lets his head hang, almost dropped onto Keith’s shoulder. “There'll be no more kissing until I know where this relationship is going. I’m not that kind of boy!”

“‘This relationship’ makes no sense!” Keith argues, suddenly remembering himself beyond a pulsating mass of hormones, beyond this conversation, and beyond Lance’s mouth. “It’s your worst plan yet, and you’ve done some next-level scheming before.”

“We make perfect sense!” Lance argues back, voice edging on hysterical. He throws his hands up. “We’re fire and ice! Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

“Exactly, it makes more sense to just—diverge,” Keith insists. It feels strange to say, when all he truly wants to do is fall against him and make up for all their almosts. “And those are two different poems, Lance.”

“Same guy, Keith,” Lance whines, letting his shoulders give a tremendous slump. “If you like someone, and they like you back, you date! I fail to see the logic in you not seeing the logic!”

“You only think you like me because I liked you first,” Keith says, once again transported to some hypothetical playground. The nonsense Lance drives him to spew—he's not sure if he really thinks it's true, and in a backwards way he hopes it isn’t, but he knows, because he knows Lance, exactly the way he’ll take those fighting words.

“That’s not—Keith, you’re—” Lance swallows in a gulp. His hands drift down to Keith’s arms again, this time as if to hold himself together, and he sighs. “You’re so cool and you don’t even know it. And you don’t even try! Mullets have been out of style since, like, the moment they were conceived, but you somehow pull it off. You’re the best pilot and the best fighter I’ve ever seen, it makes me want to be better and it seriously pisses me off but—we make such a good team, and I’ve never been more confident than when it’s you by my side.”

He finds either of Keith’s wrists, and he maneuvers their hands to entwine their fingers, each of Lance’s between each of Keith’s own. Keith has never held someone’s hand in this way. “We’re, like, the definition of opposites attract, and I like our arguments, too—but I don't like this argument, and I like when we’re on the same side even better. I like that I’m an inch taller than you and that—and I’ll only say this once—you could definitely wipe the floor with me in combat. Close range. You’re a reckless lunatic and I’m jealous of you and—I never ever imagined us together in this way but once you got me thinking about it—I can’t think about anything else! And if I had to choose between kicking and kissing you—” He leans in and kisses Keith’s cheek again, and it sends ripples of goosebumps down Keith’s left side, from his temple to his kneecap. “That’s how I feel about that.”

They’ve drifted closer together than they had been before, sharing a square on the sidewalk. Keith feels his patience wearing thin—not towards Lance, though.

“You’re also very attractive—did I,” Lance clears his throat, wrinkling his nose, and laughs down at their clasped hands. “Did I say that already?”

Keith gives one singular nod. He doesn’t know how to respond to all of that, now that he’s on the other side of it, and he doesn’t think a gee, thanks, or any other combination of words in the English language, would sum up what he’d like to convey. That whole taking on the Galra Empire single-handedly bit—he has that feeling on a good day, but now he feels like laughing until his cheeks and ribs hurt. Or like, digging into a mile-long buffet lined with all of his favorite meals and then getting the best night’s sleep of his life. Or like, walking along the sidewalk with Lance until the sun comes up and makes the moon disappear, getting too noisy in a residential neighborhood and not caring either way.

Lance sighs, loosening the tension between their joined hands. “Listen. If you don’t want to I’ll back off, but—”

“I want to, but—” Keith starts. But, he doesn't even know what he wants, what any of this entails, what it means for Lance to say such crazy things, to want to kiss him and refrain. He finds himself tightening his grip on Lance, willing him to not step away just yet. “It’ll be an inconvenience. We—we do argue. A lot. We have bigger responsibilities. Universe-sized responsibilities. I’ve never been—” he cuts off in a frustrated groan; even in delicate moments Lance drives him up the wall. “I’ve never been a boyfriend before.”

Keith supposes he has had Lance’s attention for the better part of the last few days, and perhaps even beyond that. But right now, with Lance’s focus trained on him, chasing after him, with Lance hanging onto his every word, his every movement, his hands—it's huge, how much he wants to freeze this moment and save it, to neither retreat nor push onward for fear of some great loss. But it’s huge how much more he wants to do what he does best; cease all overthinking, take the wheel and hurtle headfirst. Lance presses the backs of Keith’s hands to the tops of his thighs.

“You know the universe is screwed when you’re the voice of reason between the two of us,” Lance says, lightly, as if he could hear Keith's whirring mind from inches away.

“That’s not getting you any points,” Keith says. But Lance must realize he's on the winning side, because he starts smiling the way he does whenever he's deluded enough to think he has the upper hand. The overhead light casts all kinds of shadows on Lance's face and Keith gets the strange urge to find out what they taste like.

“We might have to work to make it work,” Lance reasons, “But we already know that we’re our best when we work together!”

“So you’re comparing dating,” Keith says, dipping his head to hide his smile, but this close Lance can see everything, “to a Voltron mission? That’s not so great, Lance.”

“I get to be the melodramatic one, every once in awhile,” Lance says, jostling their hands. “Give and take.”

Keith looks down at their hands, hidden from the ray of the streetlight. Lance then, with a cheeky grin, lifts them to press the back of Keith's hands to his chest, just under his chin.

“That’s really distracting,” he says, with a huff of defeated laughter. He can't stop smiling, which makes being the rational one that much more impossible. Which also makes him wonder, and despite everything it pains him to think this: who, out of he and Lance, is being the voice of reason here.

“I know,” Lance says, and then lowers their hands and untangles their fingers. Keith’s hands drop to his sides, useless and tingling. “And I know it’s not your style, but—you can have time to think about it."

“No,” Keith sighs. He figures it makes less sense than anything for him to get into the habit of slowing down and making sense of things. He figures, if he stops treating this like a supernatural extraterrestrial conspiracy case to crack or an all-or-nothing mission millions of light years away and instead trusts Lance to take the lead just this once—if he stops treating this as a death sentence and sees it for what it is—then maybe everything will fall into some sort of chaotic clarity.

“No?”

“I mean, yes,” Keith says, extending a hand. It's not really necessary, but he'll do what it takes to hold Lance's hand again. “A test drive.”

Lance stares down at his hand for a moment. Then, he clasps it.

“New frontier, huh,” he says, squeezing Keith’s hand. “You scared, or something?"

“Of you?” Keith says. He squeezes back. “Or something."

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe,” Lance says, squaring himself up as he uses their handshake to clumsily reel Keith into him once more. They trap their hands between their stomachs.

“You’re the one who’ll need saving,” Keith counters, jutting his chin out to close that pesky distance.

“Yeah,” Lance sighs, absently. Then does what he did before, what had propelled gravity into motion: looks at Keith’s eyes, then his mouth, then his eyes again, and then his mouth, and zeroes in. “This means I can finally do—” He lets go of Keith’s hand to cup his jaw, and he tilts Keith’s chin up to him, “one of these—”

Every instinct that tells him to keep his eyes open gets hushed, embarrassingly enough, even before their mouths meet; during that prolonged tantalizing second where the millimeter between them becomes a mile, where the potential energy could generate a wormhole, where it's definitely physically, astronomically, literally, impossibly impossible for their lips to meet—but then, miraculously, impossibly, they do. Kissing Lance is maddening; Keith forgets everything else but he remembers how impatient he is, how badly he's wanted this, how hard he's fought it. He's prepared for this kiss, now, unlike their very first one, but he can only be so prepared for—Lance's fingers threading back through his hair and catching on a couple of strands, his belt buckle pressing into Lance's, soft suction against his bottom lip. His breath comes so fast he thinks it might be enough to float him away. And it's a conscious effort, to make no noise. Keith wraps his arms around Lance's waist, because that's what feels right, and then walks him until his back is against the streetlight, because the need to press Lance bodily against something comes to him as readily as the need to blink or breathe. Lance’s arms curl around Keith's shoulders until there's no space between them, and for whatever reason, that makes Keith feel more like a boyfriend than anything he's ever been.

Keith crowds into Lance until they're chest to chest and stomach to stomach, knees slotted between each other; he wants to push close against him and meld until a law of physics surrenders itself at their feet and becomes myth. Keith's hands slide under Lance's jacket, from his waist up his sides to his chest and back down again, he just doesn't know what to do with them. Lance guides their mouths together over and over, interspersed with small breaking points of mingled panting breath and eye contact that makes the air around them go hot. Lance parts Keith’s lips with a slide of his tongue and it makes Keith’s fingers scratch into his back, makes Keith want to sink his teeth into something that'll give.

“You’re a little rough,” Lance laughs breathless into the crook of Keith’s neck. He scratches his teeth there, and covers it up with a kiss.

“Sorry,” Keith says, but he doesn’t pull back for air, tries to nose his way to Lance’s lips again. “Unfamiliar territory.”

Lance's tongue slipping into his mouth is the type of thing that'll make Keith's subconscious start remembering dreams.

“Oh, I am gonna woo you so hard,” Lance says, between an gratingly loud mwah kiss, and then one more to Keith's jaw, “I’ll woo you until you forget your name."

“Idiot,” Keith sighs through a laugh. He drops his forehead onto Lance’s shoulder. Lance makes a soft surprised noise that Keith can only hear because his ear rests by his throat. “I already like you. How many times are you gonna make me say it.”

Fingers tangle in the hair at the nape of Keith’s neck. When Lance hums in thought Keith feels the vibration of it.

“I'm thinking twice a day for the next thirty days,” Lance decides, pressing his face into Keith’s hair. “I'll say it back, though.”

Then Keith lifts his head and eases Lance into a kiss of his own, thinking distantly of heart rates and diet cokes and humiliating confessions, thinking that he might already be developing a knack for this sort of recklessness, and then he puts all thoughts aside. "Starting tomorrow," he adds, and Lance hums his agreement, so they can find much better use for their mouths.