Jun 10
Lance who's jealous of Keith for all the regular reasons but doesn't let himself think about how much it hurts him and Keith who feels like he's being hollowed out with a rusty spoon everytime he sees lance hold a conversation with someone
seen from Brazil
seen from Yemen
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Ecuador
seen from Sweden
seen from United States
seen from Croatia
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Spain
seen from Malaysia
seen from Dominican Republic
seen from United States
seen from Poland
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
Lance who's jealous of Keith for all the regular reasons but doesn't let himself think about how much it hurts him and Keith who feels like he's being hollowed out with a rusty spoon everytime he sees lance hold a conversation with someone
i love shy keith but not in the easily flustered way but in the stares-at-you-unnervingly-because-he-doesn't-know-how-to-fill-the-silence way
I feel like Keith would be the kind of person to collect bones, fossils, dead bugs, preserved dead animals, shark teeth that kind of thing. Lance, on the other hand, would collect seashells, dried coral, dried flowers, and sea glass. They both enjoy hunting for crystals/shiny rocks. They end up living California near the beach, so most of their collections are of sea life and alien stuff from their travels. In their home, they’ve got a shelf dedicated to their collections, but it’s a combo. There’s a bird skull with dried flowers in its eyes, that butterfly over their is resting on a amethyst cluster, that prehistoric sea animal Keith found is sitting next to a conch shell from Lance’s childhood. They use Altean magic to keep the flowers alive.
However, in true ADHD fashion, Lance also has a million separate little collections that don’t go on the main collection shelf. Lance has only ever been able to stick with collecting shells, coral, sea glass and rocks. Everything else is a hit or miss
I feel like keith would be scared of being perceived. Like, everyone thinks he's antisocial but he's just autistic and slightly awkward and he's been made fun of enough for being weird that he's absoloutely terrified of people perceiving him. So he doesn't really go out in public by himself.
need a klance fic where it turns out their rivalry was just. them both misinterpreting each other because they both have autism and couldnt pick up on eachother’s social cues. they finally found someone they couldnt read and it genuinely freaked them out and their brains immediately went to hate. like “why the fuck is this guy so hard to read?? i hate his guts.”
Communication Difficulties (Klance fic for Autistic character month 2026)
Words: 2115
Rating: T
Ship: Klance
Vld re-make is worth my soul to the devil
The air in his apartment is getting staler, and his scalp is starting to ache.
Everything is going to fail, he thinks to himself, unhelpfully. He doesn’t have time to correct himself because he has time for nothing. He barely has time to breathe. People will be coming in less that two hours, and he’s only just begun decorating; at this rate people will arrive and everything will look barren and horrible and boring and of course no one will say it to his face but he can hear how muttered conversations will go on the way home, how everyone will think he’s —
The front doorknob rattles. Lance gasps, a great, heaving breath forcing its way in and out of his lungs, realizing for the first time his hands are trembling too much to hang the tinsel correctly.
“Lance?” calls a voice, familiar and soft and raspy from years of cigarette smoke. “You in the kitchen?”
Lance finds himself frozen in place. His mind has gone completely blank, and he’s become a statue; thoughtless, still, unblinking, unable to process. As if someone has hooked him up to a remote and pressed pause.
Quiet sounds of boots unlacing echo the empty apartment, followed by socked footsteps. Keith appears round the bend of the front hallway, eyebrows knit together in concern, lips pursed.
“…Lance.”
“Everything is falling apart,” Lance blurts. He twitches suddenly, stiff muscles spasming, and the sudden movement rocks the rickety footstool under him. Quick hands flit out to grip his arms before he falls, steadying him on the ground with a soft, “Woah, dude.”
For several moments the only sound is the synched billowing of their breathing. Keith’s hands slide down his biceps to rest on his elbows, squeezing gently. Slowly, dragging through molasses, Lance’s heart begins to slow.
“You’re freaking out,” Keith says. “There is no need to freak out. Take a breather.”
“I don’t have time for any of this,” Lance says, heartbeat picking up again. “I barely finished the last of the food fifteen minutes ago, decorations aren’t out yet, there’s flour all over my clothes and my face is a mess and I haven’t washed my hair —”
Darting out faster than Lance can track, Keith’s hands come to rest on Lance’s cheeks, thumbs brushing under his eyes — rough, warm, startling. Lance stares at him with wide eyes. Keith smiles back, quickly, widely, crookedly; breathtaking. His hair is twisted back neatly, thick and gorgeous, and festive red sparkles line his eyes. Pretty red stones glitter in his ears to match. The gold bands of his thumb rings are cool against Lance’s cheeks, and the chain he got from his mother rests delicately over black knit fabric. The high-cut neckline of his sweater compliments his frame nicely. His jeans are the only pair he has without rips — a pair Lance forced him to get last time they were shopping together.
The air punches right out of Lance’s lungs, and the last of his worries with it. Keith tucks a curl behind his ear, lingering.
“Go shower and get dressed,” he urges, indigo eyes dark and imploring. “Let me help.”
“Okay,” Lance breathes. He doesn’t move.
Keith smiles. He pulls Lance’s face down at the same time that he stands up on his tiptoes, eyes fluttering shut. Their lips press together softly, one, two, three, and then he pulls away.
Lance makes a noise in the back of his throat. His fingers come up to brush the swell of his lip. “What was that for?”
Keith’s eyes flick up at the doorway. Amusement dances across his expression.
Mistletoe, green and white and fragrant, hangs delicately from the door frame.
“Oh,” says Lance, flushing. He remembers, abruptly, the stepladder and falling into Keith’s arms. He becomes hyperaware of the bareness of the rest of the apartment, hardly lived in one month.
“Lance,” Keith says again, noticing the shift in his expression. He slides a hand down and pats his hip. “Go, you walking mess of anxiety. I got this. Get fixed up. Everything will be fine.”
Lance closes his eyes, exhaling shakily, and nods. It’s too late, now. Whether or not things get finished is irrelevant — he can’t very well host a Christmas party in sweatpants and his grossest, most threadbare hoodie. Whatever Keith can manage while he showers will have to be enough.
He rushes off to his room, tearing off his clothes the second the door locks behind him, practically throwing himself under the stream without bothering to wait for it to heat. He rushes through his routine faster than he maybe ever has in his life, toweling off so roughly the first two layers of his skin go with it, and buzzing around his closet like a horde of wasps on a field of decaying grapes.
There is Nothing to wear. Because of course there isn’t. The outfit he’d picked last night suddenly seems inadequate, and most of his other stuff is still boxed up, so he doesn’t even have the time to go digging. Eventually he just throws on what he’d planned and tells himself to get over it.
Forty-five minutes have passed, by the time he steps out of his bedroom, and the state of his apartment makes him gasp.
String lights are hung delicately along the walls and wrapped around his small tree. Ornaments and decorations sit artistically on every surface, as if each placement was deliberated and perfected. Paper snowflakes, even, that Lance had made in a fit of procrastination to avoid work weeks ago, are hung from the ceiling. Keith stands on the same footstool Lance tumbled from earlier, hanging a few more.
“Keith,” Lance chokes out. “Oh my God.”
His friend shoots him a grin. “What, surprised? I told you I’d handle it. Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I do.” Lance swallows as the words come out on reflex, heavier than he’d ever usually let them. “I just.” He looks pointedly away from where Keith stretches his arms above him, thin paper held delicately between his thick fingers, sweater raising to show a strip of pale skin. “I appreciate it, is all. Turns out you do have some taste, Mullet.”
“Asshole,” Keith huffs.
But he’s smiling.
They spend the next twenty minutes in comfortable silence, putting up the last of the decorations and plating up the last of the food. Lance doesn’t need to say, I should have asked for help from the beginning. Doesn’t need to say, I’ve missed being close to everyone, being a real adult is hard, finally finishing school and growing into a new phase of adulthood, away from all the people I’ve grown up with, is hard. I had to prove I’m handling it. Doesn’t bother admitting, I couldn’t have done it on my own. Thank you for knowing me enough to come even if I couldn’t ask.
Keith brushes his hand on the small of his back as he walks by. Lance smiles, shy and pleased, and sinks into the comfort of Keith knowing, of Keith knowing him; of the proof of their familiarity despite all the new changes. He sighs, long and silent and heavy, something settling in his bones.
When the doorbell rings, and the rest of his friends start pouring in, he’s ready for them.
———
Hours later his giggly and red-cheeked and a little bit tipsy. Pidge brought bottles of liquor and Allura brought novelty shot glasses, and the rest of that story wrote itself. Lance lost count somewhere between Hunk slicing up the honeyed ham he brought and Shiro busting out the Twister. Cheesy Christmas songs have been looping for hours on Veronica’s CD player, and the air smells of plátanos a sweet-smelling incense Adam pulled out, and Lance is drunk on more than just the booze.
“The place looks great!” shouts Shiro, not particularly because it’s loud in here. He looks pretty red-cheeked, too, glass of wine tucked protectively to his chest. Adam watched him in amusement, arms half-raised in preparation for his clumsiness.
“Keith helped,” Lance admits, just as loud. Their shouted conversation draws teasing glances from the rest of their friends, but for once Lance isn’t self-conscious of the stares on him.
They’re drunk. It’s Christmas. Who cares?
“Speaking of, where is Keith?”
Lance frowns. He blinks some of the dizziness out of his eyes — he truly needs to stop walking around, there was way more rum in that daiquiri than he thought, typical Matt — and scans the crowd of people shoved into his tiny apartment. He would recognize that mullet anywhere and from any angle, and it is not currently among the masses.
“Hm,” he says out loud, and wobbles off.
The first place he checks is his bedroom. It’s locked, but he knows Keith can pick a lock and also has no qualms about picking the lock for Lance’s bedroom, because he was raised by wolves. He’s not in there, though, so Lance pivots to checking the bathroom — occupied by Kinkade and Rizavi who are busy sucking face — and the weird little linen closet tucked in a random alcove, which is empty. Keith is, strangely, nowhere to be found, but he couldn’t’ve just — left, right? He would have said goodbye.
Lance pouts. He hopes he would have, because Lance’s emotions are Compromised right now, okay, and if he gets sad he’s going to get sad for real. And Keith leaving just like that will, indeed, make him sad as shit.
“I need t’clear my head,” he mumbles to himself. He pushes through the tight circle Allura, Pidge, and Veronica have formed — he does not want to know, it might be actual witchcraft knowing them — to make his way to Hunk, tugging on his sleeve to pull his attention away from Shay.
“‘M gonna go get air.”
“Don’t die,” Hunks says. Lance nods, moving to stumble away, but Hunk grabs his sleeve and tugs him back. “No, wait, drink this, buddy. Else you’re going to walk into a wall and we’re going to end up in the ER on Christmas again.”
Lance dutifully chugs the three separate glasses of water Hunk hands him, realizing suddenly that he’s parched. By the end of them and also a banana Hunk has him eat, his head has miraculously stopped spinning.
“Hunk,” he says in total seriousness, “I love you. Deeply. From the bottom of my soul.”
Hunk rolls his eyes fondly and presses a kiss to the top of Lance’s head. “I know, you doofus. Begone.”
Lance snickers and heeds his command. As he closes the apartment door behind him, shutting out the noise with it, he breathes a huge sigh of relief. He hadn’t realized how overwhelmed he’d been getting, as much as he’d been having fun.
He understands, immediately, where Keith has gone. He huffs a smile.
“Goober,” he says around a smile, and jogs to the stairwell.
———
A sobering seven flights later, he pushes open the door to the roof, panting breaths turning to steam in the frosty air.
“You are elusive, you fucker.”
Keith looks over his shoulder, smiling in that quick way he does. “And you’re tipsy.”
“Nuh uh! Hunk made me drink water!”
“Right, and that undoes the six shots you took when Pidge dared you.”
“Obviously.”
Keith laughs, a little, and Lance preens like he’s won the whole lottery. Keith most definitely notices. Lance can’t bring himself to care.
“C’mon, let’s sit somewhere not so close to the edge. Knowing your shit luck you’ll go careening over the edge and I’ll have to jump after your dumb ass.”
Ignoring how that makes his heart pound, Lance shoots back, “That wouldn’t solve anything, stupid, we’d just both be dead.”
“A very Merry Christmas to us both, then.”
Keith finally finds a spot on the ground that’s mostly clear of snow and only a little wet. He plops himself down. Lance grimaces, looking down at his expensive and shimmery black slacks before sitting down beside him.
“You good?” Lance asks after a moment.
Keith lets out a breath. “Yeah, it was just getting to be a lot in there.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re basically a cat in human form. Surprised you didn’t bite anyone on your way out.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Make me.”
Keith looks over, eyebrows raised. A smile twitches at the corner of his mouth.
“That was very transparent, you know.”
Lance shrugs, not bothering to hide his own smile.
“Hey, you’re the one who kissed me. Not my fault I’m thinking about it.”
“You think I kissed you to shut you up?”
“A little.”
Keith holds his gaze, challenging. Lance crosses his eyes. Keith snorts, punching him in the shoulder.
Heh. Success.
“I didn’t kiss you to shut you up, you goober. I kissed you because I wanted to.”
“…Did you maybe want to again?”
Now it’s Keith’s turn for his smile to turn shy, for a slight flush to rise on his cheeks. Lance’s own cheeks hurt from grinning.
“No mistletoe up here. Not sure I have an excuse this time.”
“Aha, but that’s where you’re wrong.” Lance digs in his pockets until he finds the little sprig, plucked from when he and Hunk were caught under the doorway sometime after shot number five. He holds it up between them.
Keith’s smile grows. “You really are a genuine actual goober.”
“You seem to like it,” Lance says cheekily.
“It’s fine, I guess. If I had to live with it.”
“Mhm.” Keith’s hand has snaked its way around Lance’s neck. Lance’s own hands are planted firmly on the ground between them, keeping him balanced as he leans closer, closer, closer. “Is that the case.”
“Yeah,” Keith breathes, and then he doesn’t bother with anything else, closing the distance between them. “Merry Christmas.”
Lance sighs into his mouth, tilting his head as their mouths move, as Keith’s long eyelashes tickle his cheek. Merry Christmas, indeed.
———
based on this art by @mothmanavenue