Lance – Moami

They’re washing blood off their space suits when Keith rips off his helmet, thrashes it against the wall and puts his forehead to the mirror.

“I’m not okay,” he says.

Lance rubs at a spot that’s so stained it looks black. The species has red blood like them. Had. He shifts from one foot to the other. Keith twitches. His fists clench, loosen. The bathroom carries all their quiet motions into terrible sound with its echo. Keith’s face reflects from the mirror, and Lance watches his wide eyes for a moment. Black pupils, iris drowned out. Keith is waiting. Something, anything.

“I know,” Lance replies then. He wipes off the last stain from his wrist.

“Sorry.”

“Why?”

Keith turns his head away. There’s only black hair in the mirror now. “I’m supposed to be fine.”

It’s stupid, but Lance still laughs. “Not really, no. Look, just.” He reaches, taps Keith’s shoulder as gently as he can, barely a touch, but Keith yields and swirls around to him, stands chest to chest and his fingers cup around Lance’s jaw.

“None of us is. Sometimes we may be okay, but not in general. Don’t think anybody could be with how things are. We’re alive though, right?” Lance closes his eyes, humming when Keith’s breath falls over his cheeks, warm fingers so nervous against his collarbone. They’re both still new to this and Lance has been a bit better at faking confidence until now when his heart is really thundering a thousand miles a minute.

Keith’s kiss is a tiny, whole thing, and his voice isn’t shivering anymore when he grabs Lances’s hand to pull him out of the after-mission bathroom.
“Yes, we are. Good enough for me.”

It’s not the lions.

Zarkon learns it after seeing them together, the brilliant formation of colour, when he watches their ferocious battle flight through the universe that belongs to him. It has never been the lions, at no point. Oh, he’d been a blind fool, but now he knows. He’d been one of them once, after all.

And then it’s so brutally easy to turn red into violet and violent.

All it takes is bleeding the crimson out of blue.

“Shut up.”

“You keep telling me that – “

“No, shut the fuck up.”

“ – but I don’t think you actually mean that.”

“I can’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”

“On the other hand,” Keith says, pulling off his helmet so he can pump some naturally oxygenated air into his lungs, “you probably do. Not that I care. Because I don’t.” He clears his throat and watches Lance scamper into the corridor behind the airlock. The door hums shut behind them. “Anyways, I’m starving, how long were we even up there? Allura can fix the tower next time, take Shiro with her and spend all day poking alien roof tiles that ooze all over you.”

Lance kicks his boots off. The frown on his face is a bit dirty because he’d insisted to take off his helmet and lick the tile slime. Keith hadn’t dared him. He didn’t have to, which is sad enough on its own but not surprising at all. Lance would lick anything that – he’s experimental with his body is what Keith means, but he doesn’t think about Lance that much anyways. Except he does.

“We’re eating in my room,” Lance says. He’s by Keith’s side, bare toes wiggling on the floor. Has to be cold. Maybe his spare pair of fluffy socks could help.

“Can’t, gotta change clothes. Scratched myself, it’s bleeding.”

“Then your room. You’re not getting out of this.” Lance is up in his face, pressing one long finger against Keith’s nose. “I’ll introduce you to the masterful work of The Princess Diaries, and you won’t be an uneducated heathen anymore. Well, less of one. Can’t believe it, honestly.” He pulls back, running a hand through his hair until it sticks up a bit because it’s gotten longer and Keith wants to know if it’s as soft as it looks now.

But this is a chance if he’s ever seen one. “Fine. You’re getting the food though. And this won’t become a – “

“It’s a date.”

Fuck. Keith stares, mouth dry and warmth in his chest, watches Lance flash him the fraction of a grin before he shoots off in a whirl of limbs and blue.

Maybe he should go clean his room. Or patch up the scratch on his leg that’s still bleeding, damn it. No day without trouble here. Keith picks up his helmet, and tries to remember whether he did use fabric softener on the socks when he last washed them.

Keith tries to believe that they don’t care. His team tells him every day how the purple glint in his hair doesn’t make him an enemy, that the golden ring flaring around his iris when he’s in battle couldn’t ever make them fear him.

And still, it’s only when Lance takes him aside by slamming him against the wall of his own room, pressing a finger on Keith’s mouth to shut him up, and staring at him like he could shatter with just too rough of a touch that Keith let’s go, and allows his mind a whispered ‘okay’.

“Nobody cares,” Lance says, voice so raw and soft that it cracks at the edge, “what you were born as. I don’t give a fuck if you’re human or Galra or something in between, and I don’t need to know. Voltron is all of us. Red chose you. She let you in, that ancient powerful thing let you into her everything because you have the mind of a paladin. Voltron found all of us and chose every inch of you, every goddamn string of dna. It wants you here.”

He takes a deep breath. “And so do I.”

Keith closes his eyes when Lance presses his first kiss to the corner of his mouth. He’s pretty sure that his eyes are golden right now, and his skin has to be a radiant violet all over his cheeks.

But Lance still wraps both arms around him when Keith slides their lips together once more, and Keith forgets the meaning of colour, time, or fear.

Nobody tells him that he needs to eat or sleep. It’d be hypocritical, none of them gets enough of anything these days, they’re all circling the castle like shadows of a broken behemoth. The magic is a vibrant hum in the castle’s veins, all of it flowing around its tragically temporary heart. Silence sits in corners and waits.

Keith has found a position for himself. He’s got a blanket around his shoulder, another underneath his knees so they don’t fall asleep, because no part of him can. The capsule that cocoons Lance thrums against his forehead. It feels impossible to move. He could grow into the sterilised polymer surface, just melt into its insides and curl himself into the empty shell that looks like shatters of what Lance was. Allura had said that there was hope.

They don’t believe it. They know it, want it so badly with all they have left, because without him the last piece that ties them after this is gone.

The young, freshly founded federation has named their new timeline p.b., post bellum, and Keith wants to scream and vomit and tear their stupid horrible politics apart because there hadn’t been a war, just a massacre and they had managed to get out alive. They had lost Red. Keith had cried until his lips were red from blood he’d bitten out of them and his throat hurt so much he felt like dying all over again.

Then Lance hadn’t opened his eyes.

Fifteen days p.b., the radio station squawks somewhere in the castle.

“Get back here soon,” Keith hears his own mouth say. It’s dry again, his throat too. He talks for hours every day and if only so the silence doesn’t fill Lance’s healing trance and steals more pieces of him, because he’s lost an eye and his arm and Keith can’t bear to let anything else of him get away.

“Wake up. Wake up. You said – you said that we,” his lungs ache, he breathes, talks and talks and talks some more until it ends in sobs and the sixteenth day begins on the horizon. “We’d watch the stars from Earth, you told me that, do you hear me? You said you’d kill me if I die out there. With your own damn hands, you said, and now you’re making me threaten you with your own words, when I just want to tell you… come home. The – the stars are waiting, you hear? Your stars, Lance. They’re all waiting.”

It’s twenty p.b. and Keith sleeps with his cheek against the cocoon. The body inside twitches. A bruised eyelid opens, the blue iris below blinking into focus.

Stars, Lance thinks through a nebula of pain that’s swirling fucking everywhere. Guess I can’t leave them hanging.

Access code: Zarkon Alpha-Thanatos-Centauri-Four-Seven
Filename: K –

υπνος – deactivated
Project: Leo Omnium Leonum

Stardate 3398.4-01. Review of candidates completed. Sleeper agent has been chosen. Four months, male, half-human heritage expected to offer obedience and enough weakness to blend in with possible paladins. Family: now deceased. Preparations begin. Estimated time until completion: seventeen years.

Stardate 3412.8-17. Preparations successful. Artificial memories fully implanted. Transport of agent to planet Earth without detection of inhabitants. Search for information in garrison: no results. Retreat to deserted area. Waiting for signal of Leo-B.

Stardate 3415.10-20. K fully activated and in contact with inhabitants. Leo-B located. No attack until locations of all Leo parts known.

Stardate 3415.10-21. Contact to K lost: location impossible to detect, brainwaves still incoming. Excitement, fear, confusion have been recorded.

Stardate 3415.10-22. Heavy influx of emotions into brainwaves. Joy (?), heavy activation of amygdala and a human-only brain area that seems to encode bonds to other humans. Attempt to influence brainwaves without success.

Stardate 3415.11-03. Connection dead. No input. Unable to reconstruct.
[ edit: 11-03, 12:56 Galran time: Identity and configuration of all paladins known. Project K has failed. Attempts to re-establish connection are still made. ]

Access code: p-5392790078-gund-hol
Filename: hear me roar motherfucker
Project: K is short for kick your ass

Stardate PurpleIsSoLastSeason.
I’ll make this quick because Pidge will bite my head off if we spend any more time hacking into you cute little security system. Bet you didn’t think that we’d find this outpost of your empire, huh? Another free planet and a way to get into your computer net. Really weak firewall, btw, Pidge laughed for five minutes. Anyways, listen up, eggplant.

You’re not getting him back. Project K isn’t yours. He’s a person, he’s a paladin and he’s our friend now. And I swear, if you bastard so much as look at him again except through the window of his lion when he gives your pathetic empire a load of whiplash, I’m gonna come for you. And I’m bringing my pet.

His name is Keith, by the way, and I’m Lance. Remember that.

Stardate Red.

I’ll never stop hunting you. I’ll find you at the edge of the universe. And I won’t be alone.

See you soon, uncle.

– K eith

Keith finds him in the middle of the virtual star map. He’s sitting on the ground, legs crossed, fingers resting on his knees and it’s the first time Keith has seen Lance that quiet since he was unconscious five hours ago.

“So,” Keith starts carefully.

“Did you know that there used to be glaciers?”

“…what?”

“They were Earth’s largest reservoirs of fresh water. I think they were somewhere around the polar caps.” Lance doesn’t move. He’s usually throwing his hands into all directions when he talks. Keith misses it so much, doesn’t know what he’ll do if it never comes back. If Lance stays still and rigid.

Keith lets out the air in his lungs. He breathes, gathers courage. “I see. Can I sit? I brought food.”

“Not hungry,” Lance says sharply. His voice softens then. “Okay. Whatever.”

Keith doesn’t ask twice. They’re side by side, two bowls of some oatmeal-mash and a bottle of water that Keith puts down in front of them. None of them touches it. Lance is looking up at the virtual image of the earth, and Keith looks at him and tries not to choke on the sob that’s stuck in his throat.

The electric blue of the projection shimmers when Lance waves his hand around. The earth turns around itself, a steady and slow path through the surrounding stars and their darkness.

“You have to eat.”

“They didn’t take their of their glaciers,” Lance says. “Past generations, I mean. Maybe we could have seen them one day then. That would’ve been cool, don’t you think? Glaciers. Huge blocks of ice that you could drink. They didn’t, Keith.”

Keith closes his eyes, and fuck this, he takes Lance’s hand and presses his face into Lance’s shoulder where he’s still healing and pink flesh starts to grow over the wound that he’d taken when all of them had almost died. “We saved some,” he says and it sounds pathetic, because it is. He looks at him again.

“Nine billion.” Lance whispers every syllable to the stars over their heads. “Nine billion lives.”

He’s crying now. His voice cracks, and Keith can’t bring himself to care. “We evacuated five million. And Zarkon isn’t – not anymore.”

“Neither is Earth.” Lance trembles, his shoulders a furious shiver under Keith’s touch. “But what’s a single planet to the life of an entire galaxy? What are we to them, except endangered and homeless and alone? We’re all alone out here, and they don’t care.” And Keith looks up at him, grabs Lance’s hands to wrap them in his own that are cold as ice too, and finds a wounded animal where Lance should be staring back at him. There are dark rings carved under his eyes, a scratch across his cheek, tears that look like they dried hours ago.

Lance stares at him, a second, two more. He watches how Keith cries. His eyes wander over Keith, seem to drink him in with the bandages around every damn inch and the bruise on his cheekbone, and Keith doesn’t pretend not to be broken because he is. Everything fucking is.

Then a whimper rises out of Lance, and he falls, collapses into Keith’s arms with painfully digging nails. Keith lets him, catches whatever he gives, closing his eyes and hearing Lance scream.

“A planet to save a galaxy, a planet to lure him in and one attack to kill all he has, and all that we ever were!”

Keith is ruining everything he touches, which is just typical, Lance shouldn’t even be surprised, but here he is and not any wiser than before. Fine then. Everyone else can have fun without him. He doesn’t care about enjoying his free time, no sir. Why would Lance care to relax, that’s ridiculous, it’s not like he puts himself in mortal danger every day by trying to save the galaxy’s ungrateful –

Shiro says it’s an attitude problem. Lance had considered telling him to kindly fuck off, but he values his health and also, Keith had given him grin number sixteen that conveyed ‘coward, I knew you’d chicken out’ without actual facial expression. So now Lance sits here, alone, with an implied attitude and nobody understanding why he won’t join the fun.

It’s their first free day in months, and of all things to do on a sunny day on their recent planet of residence, Pidge had decided to take all of them for a ride. Horseback riding, to be precise. Lance had immediately vetoed – they’re not even horses, anything equine has four legs and not six and doesn’t come elephant-sized with fur ranging from sky-blue to suspicious translucent – but nobody cared for his opinion.

Keith holds one of the animal’s reins while Pidge climbs on its back. Pidge is cooing soft words all while trailing upwards on the complicated framework of tasseled wool on the horse’s flank, but Lance knows that the whispers aren’t what keeps the animal calm. It’s Keith.

Watching him has become a habit, Lance won’t deny that. It’s too mesmerising to see how all the horses had crowded around him as soon as the natives had led the paladins onto the far-stretched meadow where the herd resided. Shiro had talked the natives into giving them five of the animals for the day after hearing that some of them were tame, and Hunk had been so excited that even Lance had stopped his protest. He did refuse to ride along, though. He’s just gonna sit here and wait for them. Alone.

A lot of people are afraid of horses, okay. That’s fine.

Or it would be, if Keith wasn’t totally ruining his plan right now. As soon as Pidge’s up on the horse, Keith takes another one by the reins and shouts something at Shiro. Pidge’s eyebrows fly up, Hunk tilts his head, and Lance can’t see what emotion goes over Shiro’s face but he turns his horse, and the three of them ride off. Without Keith.

Who now strides over to Lance, a baby-elephant sized horse in the colour of seaweed following by his side. Lance freezes. Oh god, no. This can’t be.

“Listen up,” Keith says. He’s stopped before Lance, one hand resting by the horse’s neck, fingertips barely just touching and he’s not even holding the reins, fuck, Lance is going to die. He’s afraid and fascinated and so in love that it hurts in his chest like a salvo of bullets. Keith then does something that keeps Lance from runnning away – he smiles.

“No idea why you’re scared, but I could see it from all the way over there and I’m not gonna let you ruin my free day with that sad face of yours. This is Sal’njeh, which is a nickname I made up because the actual names they give those poor things are ridiculous and should never be spoken out loud. Now make some space with your damn thighs, I wanna sit.”

Lance can’t move a single muscle. He lets himself be pushed aside by Keith who squeezes onto the same bench, the seaweed monster happily nosing into Lance’s hair and holy space he is going to die. He’s going to get eaten and his mother will cry and Keith will never know how cute he is when he smiles at animals like they’re the only good in this world –

“She likes you,” Keith says casually.

“I’m.” Lance closed his eyes sometime around when the horse’s nostrils flared with warm breath over his face. “She won’t. Kill – kill me?”

“Nah. Vegetarians, peaceful, love humans cause they think we’re foals that can’t walk and gotta sit on their backs. Look…” Keith nudges him gently, and Lance takes a deep breath before cracking an eye at him, taking in Keith’s smile. It’s almost shy, like he’s nervous about something. “It’s our free day. You don’t have to sit around all alone. We can just stay like this, if you’re not too afraid.”

Lance doesn’t know what to say for a moment. The horse seems to find his face boring now and has moved to nibbling at Keith’s pants. “If… if you keep its teeth away from me. And hold the reins. Then that’d be, uh, fine I guess. To sit here.”

“Okay.” That’s all Keith says. He takes the reins again and starts talking about horses on different planets and riding and somewhere along the way, Lance touches the seaweed horse’s fur. He only does it with his index finger, strokes it along the animal’s back, but Keith’s smile goes a bit wider at that. Lance allows himself to feel warm and kind of okay for a little while. They’re free, for now.

“I never thought I’d say this one day,” Pidge mentions to Hunk when he appears with another broken piece of communication technology to fix, “but I’m glad they’re finally getting along.”

Hunk blinks for a few moments, frozen into place. Pidge uses the time to rid him of the electronics and point across the room where Keith is in the process of wrestling Lance onto his back. He’s grinning and looks a bit mad in the process, and there’s more skin touching and sweat involved than Hunk personally prefers in training.

“How long have they been at it?” Hunk finally sits down, setting down a big box he’d been carrying among the electronics and digging into it. He produces two quite frankly enormous sandwiches, forcing Pidge to accept them with his feared even-a-genius-has-to-eat-so-take-it-or-I’ll-make-you look.

“Thanks. Two hours, I think. What’s on these?”

“Pickles and cream cheese. But – ”

“I love you, oh my god, this is my favourite.”

“Duh. You’re welcome, but anyways – how are they not tired yet? And look, you know I value your scientific opinion and all, but this,” Hunk gestures to the chaos of limbs that looks suspiciously like Lance trying to pull Keith’s leg while Keith attempts to sit on his thighs and hold him down, “isn’t teamwork. They’re beating each other up for fun.”

Pidge lifts a brow at him before finishing a huge bite and then speaking. “They don’t actually hurt each other, you know. It’s more like – ugh, how should I say this. I don’t feel drunk enough for this conversation.”

“You’ve never touched a drop of liquor,” Hunk says, sceptical.

“Whatever. What I mean is – ”

Their conversation is rudely interrupted when Keith bolts past them. His hair is a fluffy mess, he’s lost his black training shirt somewhere one hour ago and Hunk is surprised to see a hint of actual joy glittering in his eyes. “Cardio unit, potato face! Bet you can’t catch me before I hit the roof!”

Pidge gives Hunk a silent stare.

“Huh,” Hunk says, “that’s. Well.”

Then Lance swishes past them with a yowling battle cry, and Hunk barely manages to snatch him by the sleeve. “Hey, what about lunch break? At least have a few sandwiches, and don’t kill each other.”

Lance’s grin is bright enough to power a solar system. “Dude, thanks! I’m so gonna make him fight me for these.” He stuffs three of them into his pockets, loads another portion into his hands and sprints off, calling over his shoulder at Hunk. “And if anyone goes down, it’s fucking Keith! He doesn’t have the skills to take me – where the fuck are you?”

The electronic door glides shut behind Lance. Hunk stares at the smooth metal surface, lost in thought and his ham sandwich. Pidge has started typing rapidly on two laptops at once.

Hunk sighs, drawing a long breath, and drapes himself around Pidge’s back. “They’d do anything for each other, wouldn’t they.”

Pidge’s mouth is the tiniest curve. “If there’s anything I know, then it’s that those two would raise hell and the entire galaxy for each other. They just don’t know it yet.”

“Mine,” Lance says, and his mother tells him no. It feels like his entire world is breaking apart, all good forgotten and all bad streaming down his cheeks in tears, because he can’t have it. Lance is three years old and he wants that toy, he’s ten and yells that he wants a pet and not another brother, he’s eighteen and says “I want to be a pilot, and this time he ignores his mother’s no.

"Be careful what you wish for, treasure,” his mother says sometimes. Her mouth smiles, but her eyes are dark with worry. “You may get it one day.”

Voltron is his life now, and the paladins are his family. All but one. Lance tries everything. He hides and lies to them and himself, learns to grin wider and laugh louder and builds his walls from bolts and ice. And still, he thinks and begs to the stars: I want him to stop hating me.

After one mission, Keith almost crushes him in a hug. Lance stands there, listening to his own treacherous heart beat, fingers gripping tight into Keith’s back.

“Don’t you dare die on me.”

Lance can’t stop through words from coming put. “Look who doesn’t hate me anymore. They all fall for my charm in the end. Lost your heart to me, huh?”

There’s a ridiculous, tiny flare of hope in his chest when Keith suddenly pulls back. “I don’t hate you, idiot. I haven’t for a long time.” He’s laughs, lets go of Lance to pat his back.

“So to you, I’m- ”

“God, you’re a friend, alright? Just like all of them. You’re my friend now.”

“Yeah. I – yeah. I am.”

Lance closes his eyes and listens to Keith’s steps growing quiet. When they’d first become Voltron, Keith had looked at him with a blaze of heat, and a blood-curdling storm of emotion had swept Lances’s mind into chaos of what, how can he, he’s infuriating, don’t get hurt, mine.

Careful, he thinks.

Too late. His mama had been right.