Lance had gone over this in his head many, many times. In none of the scenarios had he imagined it would be so calm, though.
He was sitting on his bed, lights dimmed and door unlocked in anticipation of his soon-to-come visitor. Hands under his thighs, heels gently rocking against the bed, he waited in uncharacteristic silence.
The door slid open.
The almost comfortable atmosphere that had settled between his walls immediately dissipated, tension thick and taut between Lance and the room's newest occupant.
"Oh," he said, rather dumbly, considering that he'd all but sent Keith an invitation on a silver platter to come over and have a Conversation, capital-C and all. "You came."
Still standing in the doorway, Keith did an awkward little shuffle on his feet, hands clenching and unclenching where they hung loosely at his sides. "You asked me to, idiot."
"Oh. I mean, uh. Yeah. I did."
They then proceeded to just — look at each other, for a long enough amount of time that Lance began wondering if he'd missed the memo on a staring contest. Finally, Keith blinked and seemed to come back to himself, in all his floundering glory.
Very slowly, as if having to actively push the words out of his esophagus, he said, "Can I... come in?"
"Oh! Yeah, sure, here." With that incredibly eloquent statement, Lance shifted over to one side of the bed, legs instinctively crossing in front of him.
The door slid shut with a barely audible woosh. Keith made his way over, socked feet quiet on the floor, and gingerly sat on the very edge of the mattress.
A beat of dumbfounded silence.
Keith sure was… something else.
"Dude, you can, like, scoot up a little, y'know?" Lance patted the space in front of him, poorly stifled amusement in his voice. "The bed isn't gonna bite you."
Glaring, Keith shimmied up the tiniest bit, more out of spite than to get comfortable. At the unimpressed deadpan Lance levelled at him, he sighed, and sat up properly at last, legs criss-crossed. Eyebrow quirked, he asked, "Satisfied?"
"Very," Lance agreed, smiling just the tiniest bit, hoping it looked calm, cool and collected enough that Keith couldn't tell he was freaking out a bit.
Because Keith! Kogane! Was! In! His! Bed!
Somewhere, the universe was having a grand ol' time laughing at him — the first (and possibly the last) time he got Keith McFreaking Kogane in bed and it's literally only because they need to talk.
Nevertheless, despite all his internal… emotional turmoil, externally, he was mostly only gripping his blankets really tight in an effort to not go and lock himself in Blue. Surely, considering the direness of the situation, she'd make an exception and let him in, right? The niggling feeling in his head—that he knew was Red being a snoopy nuisance!—confidently told him that Blue would do no such thing.
They stared at each other some more.
"So."
Lance would've mocked him for that—"And there's another great conversation starter from the Black Paladin!"—but knowing exactly where this was going, he merely hummed, the sound as innocent as he could make it, eyes skirting around the duvet he was sitting on. Oh, wow, that wrinkle sure looked interesting—
"You died."
That sentence should have been a question. The way Keith said it made it an accusation.
Lance sucked in a breath. Let it fill his lungs and pushed it out. He still couldn't look up. "Mmhm."
He heard Keith exhale, barely, but nothing else followed: no sudden getting up and leaving, no outbursts, no livid insults. Lance finally raised his eyes, just in time to see the last piece of stoicism slot itself over Keith's face, all vestiges of emotion gone. Lance decided, then and there, that he despised that stone-faced mask. Keith wasn't Keith if his thoughts didn't flit over his features, however small those changes may be to someone else.
But at the same time, a small, infinitesimal part of him felt a rush of fondness at the sight; it was damningly endearing to see the obvious proof that this was something so incredibly important to Keith.
(Perhaps, though he was hard-pressed to admit it to even himself, there was also some relief mixed in there. It was validating to have confirmation that he wasn't weird for still being affected by—by his death. And for that confirmation to have come from Keith? The person who historically said, "I need to take a shower" after a group hug and proceeded to actually do it? Halle-fucking-lujah.)
"When?" Keith's voice was hard but also startlingly soft, an impossible dichotomy: it was firm and sturdy and solid but without sharp edges. And it made Lance's heart do a kickflip in his chest, except the kickflip went horribly wrong and his heart was lying face down in his chest cavity, curled up and sniffling miserably.
His mouth was still functioning, though, completely on autopilot, while the rest of him bluescreen-d. "A couple months from now, I think. Maybe a little over half a year?"
"'Maybe'?" Keith asked, his face twitching, expression confused but also, like, murderously concerned, or something.
Lance shrugged plainly in response. It wasn't a lie, really. With all the alien planets and wormholes and time warps they'd survived, time was only a vague idea.
Keith took that in stride; Lance imagined a lot of compartmentalizing and shoving-things-inside-mental-cabinets was happening inside the other's brain.
Keith leaned forward, the space between them reducing the paltriest bit, face unnervingly serious. "And…?"
"And… what?" Lance asked, inching back.
His question prompted an eye roll from Keith, who muttered under his breath something that sounded suspiciously like a lot of cursing Lance out and calling him an idiot. Then, louder, in a severely exhausted and annoyed tone that sounded like it'd been copy-pasted from Shiro's mouth, "And how, exactly, did this happen, Lance?"
At Keith's expectant gaze, Lance squirmed a little. In a totally manly way, not in a I-do-not-want-to-talk-about-things-that-actually-do-matter-to-me way. Because somehow, while lying (sitting) in wait for Keith, Lance had managed to completely overlook the implication of talking and him being the one doing it. Which he had to do now. Talk. About him dying and possibly even about how he's not fully okay with it yet. Oh, hey, why not crawl under a microscope lens while he's at it?
Deep breath in, deep breath out. In for three, hold for five, out for seven.
Right.
He could do this. They're just — words. He could definitely use them like he's been doing for the last however-long-he's-been-alive.
And, wow, that was a whole other mindfuck — he didn't even know exactly how old he was! And, yeah, he wasn't lying before—he'd mostly come to terms with not having a fixed clock—but nonetheless, it still irked him sometimes. He was good enough at guessing to know he should be going out at nights on the weekends and getting blackout drunk and meaninglessly flirting with people at shitty bars. But instead he was stuck risking his life, losing his life, out on the battlefield of an intergalactic war he had no business being part of. Yes, he loved saving people and doing work that was inherently good and, yeah, it was also kind of comforting to know that he wasn't quite as meaningless as he felt sometimes, but there are considerably large parts of him that viciously, guiltily wish he hadn't gone out that fateful night at the Garrison.
Of course, there wouldn't be anything for him to feel guilty over if Zarkon hadn't been such a grudge-holding, power-hungry, possessive maniac. Oh, how he hated that asswipe of a dead furry purple raisin—
Warmth settled over his hand, heavy and sure. Sometime while he was spiraling, his fingers had curled into the covers, wrinkles spiderwebbing out from his grip. Now, Keith's pale ones rested on them, not quite long enough to hide his hand entirely but enough to ground him. For a moment, he allowed himself to marvel at the striking contrast their skin made—light brown against warm porcelain—and then he shook himself out of it, an easy action in light of the number of times he's had to do it before.
Lance shifted again, this time purposefully, until he was sitting with his back against the wall, legs still crossed. Keith's hand didn't let go and he himself settled next to Lance, bodies a hair's breadth apart, just close enough to feel each other's presence. And that barely-there brush of shoulders and thighs gave him the courage to unstick the words from his throat.
Lance opened his mouth.
—
Sometime later, Lance and Keith sat slumped against each other, if their gaggle of limbs and clothes could even be called that.
Turns out, talking through a traumatic event takes a lot of time and energy.
"I still think you should tell everyone else, though."
Lance sighed, again. It was nearing the sixth time Keith had brought up that suggestion since Lance had revealed that only he and Allura knew about that particular incident; the knowledge was exclusive enough that they could very well form a club. The "'Lance Died And We're The Only Ones That Know About It' Club" had a nice ring to it.
He said as much to Keith, earning him a smack to the head.
Things quieted down after that, though, the atmosphere dim, energy reserves all but spent. Then, following the trail end of a sigh, "But," Keith began, "I get why you don't want to tell the others."
And it would've been fine. Should have been fine, really, except for the sheer knowing in his voice.
Lance sat up properly, dislodging Keith in the places his body rested on top of Lance. Keith was quick to follow, features instantly on high alert for danger.
Lance's gaze swept over the entirety of the other's face from his unyielding eyes, to his slightly crooked nose, to his—to his scar.
Then, as his brain worked to fully process what his eyes were seeing, "Hey, hold on a second, when did you die?"
Because all the evidence pointed to it. The remarkable ease with which he'd accepted Lance's story. The underlying understanding as he awkwardly tried to comfort him. The way he'd come back that day with a comatose Shiro, an unexplained scar and nothing but smooth evasions and outright refusals to answer.
Except his astute observation merely got him an even more alarmed, thoroughly bewildered look. "What?"
That got Lance to backtrack a little, organize his thoughts in a less Mentos-in-Coca-Cola way.
"You—you died, didn't you?" A quick once-over of Keith's still quite confused face quickly proved that theory wrong, much to Lance's confusion (and relief.) "Oh, never mind, your face is calling me an idiot."
Features slowly beginning to smooth out again, Keith retorted—unthinkingly, judging from the way his eyes never once wavered from Lance's, "Yeah, because you are an idiot."
"Hey, there's no need to be rude," Lance said, indignant, but he let the feeling wash over him and slip away. He could recognize deflection tactics. (How, exactly, he learned to recognize them so well was something he refused to dwell on, much to the dismay of the enemy residing in his brain he liked to call Self-Aware Lance. He hated that guy.) "But also you were acting very suspicious just now and you are going to tell me why."
Immediately, Keith's hackles raised. "I wasn't acting very anything! You're just being stupid—"
"Ab-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap!" Lance waved his hand in front of Keith's face, as if to dispel the sheer liar lying-ness of his defense. "You," he brought up a finger and poked Keith once in the chest (oh-ho-ho, interesting. How firm and muscle-y — SHUT UP BRAIN), "are hiding something, and you will tell me," now pointing at himself, "what exactly it is."
Satisfied that he'd effectively gotten his point across, Lance sat back, arms crossed, while Keith rubbed the spot he'd been poked in, lips downcurved in what could really only be called a pout.
"Seriously, Lance, I've got nothing to—" He cuts himself off, eyes narrowing suddenly. "Did Matt tell you about Naxzela?"
Lance, taken aback at the non sequitur, very intelligently stated, "Huh?"
Now squinting, Keith leaned forward, and Lance leaned back, heartrate kicking up a notch. He laughed nervously. "What are you doing?"
"Trying to see if you're lying."
"…Lying about what?"
Apparently satisfied, Keith sat back once again and Lance sent a quick "thank you" along with a "what the fuck" to any omnipotent beings that deigned to listen.
"Matt really didn't tell you what happened at Naxzela, then?"
He shook his head while mentally trying to figure out how this conversation had derailed so badly, but Keith's fixation with Naxzela was raising alarm bells in Lance's head. At the other's immediate relieved sigh, the alarms blared louder.
What did Keith's not-dying have to do with Naxzela anyway? The battle was a big fat disaster—an understatement, honestly—but as far as they knew, everyone had come out of it with only a few bumps and bruises. Did it almost give Lance a couple of gray hairs and plague his sleep for weeks to come? Yes. Did they all almost die? Yes, but that was an everyday thing now. Did they have any major injuries? No.
And what did Matt have to do with it? He'd mostly been with the Rebels while they'd tried to break through the Galra cruiser's shield. They hadn't even heard much from him, except for at the end, when he'd been weirdly panicked and calling for Keith—
Oh.
"What happened at Naxzela, Keith?" Lips pulled into a smile and voice deceptively pleasant—a complete 180 from the discomfiture before—Lance figured he looked like a whole new flavor of demented. Keith agreed, judging from the way his eyes had flit once all over his face and then immediately begun straying to the door.
Though that also could be because he'd realized his slip-up.
Lance was always smarter than anyone ever gave him credit for and Keith had all but dropped the puzzle pieces straight into his lap.
Abruptly, the fight drained out of Keith's body, except for the glare he fixed on Lance. He groaned, a sound that somehow captured the truly unique feeling of "I see no way out of this but I want you to know that that won't stop me from being stubborn and mad about it." (Lance would know.) He threw his hands up. "Fine, jeez, okay! Something might have happened at Naxzela that I should have told you guys about but didn't."
Arms crossed, Lance let the Do you seriously think I'm that dumb? written all over his face do the talking for him. "Yeah, well, I'd kind of already figured that out." He made a little flappy, get-on-with-it motion with his hands. "And now, if you could quit delaying—" a raise of his eyebrows "—it's the rest of the details I want."
"Right, well, there aren't many. But," he quickly interjected, shooting a pointed look at Lance's open mouth, "whatever there is to tell, I'll tell you." His voice implied that he would rather suffocate either Lance or himself with the nearest pillow than talk about it.
Regardless, in short, stilted sentences that slowly gained momentum, he began retelling the story of what, exactly, had gone down in the Battle of Naxzela.
By the end, Lance was firmly stuck feeling a dizzying array of emotions, including but not limited to:
muted anger at having been kept in the dark for so long
heavy, sinking relief that he at least got the chance to find out
an unfortunate, reluctant gratitude for Lotor (blegh)
a hysterical urge to either laugh or cry or drown himself in a bowl of food goo
All in all, he figured he was handling this—"this" being finding out his friend/leader/crush-but-also-probably-the-love-of-your-life had been ready to sacrifice himself to save him and their team/space-family in a last-ditch effort that he hadn't even known would work—as well as one could be expected to.
They sat in silence for a while — Lance because he was still sort of processing the revelation and Keith because, knowing him, he was waiting for Lance to start yelling at him. And all at once, he couldn't stand the few inches of distance between them, and the next thing he knew, they were once again an undistinguishable tangle of LanceandKeith.
"When I meet Zarkon, I'm gonna tell him how thankful I am that he makes his Galra jets so slow," he murmured in the warm skin of Keith's neck, more thankful still that he could feel his little exhales ruffle his hair.
Above him, Keith snorted, and Lance was pretty sure he wasn't hallucinating the slight wetness in the sound. "Zarkon's dead, you idiot. Don't you think reviving him just to tell him that is a little too dramatic?"
To that, he replied, "Fuck you, I said when, Mullet." And then, immediately afterwards, registering the latter half of his statement, with even more vehemence, "Out of all the people in the universe, you are the least qualified to tell me how to feel my feelings, you quiznak."
"You're still not using that word correctly."
They both quieted down after that, something Lance imagined anyone else would consider weird. One would think that life-changing revelations would require a lot of talking. One would, apparently, be wrong. Even with all their previous plans of "talking things out" after Lance had accidentally deployed one of his admittedly poor coping mechanisms (read: made a death joke), there hadn't been much talking involved, when he thought about it. They were content to simply sit there entangled in each other, basking in each other's miraculously continued state of aliveness.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Self-Aware Lance noted how big of a display of trust and comfort this was from Keith, for him to be allowing himself to touch and be touched like this: completely entwined with one another that they probably looked like some kind of abomination of a spider robeast (which sounded like an amazing Halloween costume he'd have to try sometime) from the outside. But the position was comfortable, Lance was completely drained, and his and Keith's bodies warmed the bed in a way that he made him ache somewhere deep inside him, and so he let that thought be buried under static.
"I'm glad you're still here."
Lance had been on the verge of dozing off, the world distorted at the fringes and the lines of his own body blurred, but the words—soft, barely audible, and pressed into the crown of Lance's head—dragged him back to almost-consciousness.
Lips curved into a barely-there smile, he whispered back, "Me too." Then, because his cheeks felt a little too hot and he was now awake enough to feel embarrassment, louder, he said, "Maybe we should form a club instead."
He heard a disembodied, similarly sleepy chuckle from above. "What, the 'Self-Sacrifice Buddies' Club?" Keith paused, as if actively contemplating it, then continued, slyly. "I imagine we'd get at least a Level 5 Allura Intervention if we told them that."
Oh, that was evil. (And also quite masochistic.)
"I like the way you think, Mullet." He painstakingly detangled himself, ignoring the routine Not a mullet from Keith. Once they were face-to-face again—bodies forming twin apostrophes, mirrored, on his bed that definitely was not meant for more than 1-and-a-half people—he continued. "Then it's settled. We'll tell them. Tomorrow morning."
Keith raised an eyebrow. "What happened to 'I'd rather chug Nunvil than tell the team'?"
"I have no idea what you mean." He turned his metaphorical nose up, voice haughty. "And anyway, now I'll have you there with me."
Evidently, Keith had somehow overlooked that particular insinuation of Lance's statement. His eyes widened and jaw dropped in near-perfect synchrony. "What— me?"
"Who else, idiot?"
After a few seconds of undignified stuttering—and wasn't that such a dream-come-true for the jealous teenage Garrison cadet that still occasionally made itself known inside Lance?—Keith seemed to come to terms with his fate. Very unhappily. He pointed an accusing finger at Lance with great difficulty, grumbled various things under his breath, then threw his hands up in a very Lance-esque manner—with even more difficulty and only semi-succeeded—which seemed to satisfy his fleeting urge for dramatics. Mostly calmed down, he rolled his eyes (affectionately, if you ask Lance) and made his way off the bed (slowly, sluggishly). "Fine. But you better not sleep in."
As he got up, Lance realized that, at some point in the last however-long, the Castleship's interior lights had automatically switched to the soft blue of the night cycle, meaning it was sometime around midnight. It was a good look on Keith. The angles of his body softened, hair spilling over his unburdened shoulders, the shadow of a smirk playing at the corners of his lips, stance open and, dare he say, vulnerable—
Keith looked tangible, for lack of a better word. Real. But after the knowledge he'd gained today, Lance didn't know if that was necessarily good. He looked like he'd be warm to the touch if Lance reached out, but the thought—the reminder, really—that it wouldn't take seconds for him to grow cold stopped him. He wanted to, still. He wanted to touch him, hold him, run a finger over his spine just to feel him shudder. He wanted to hug him, hold his hand, dot kisses over the scar he didn't know the cause of. These weren't new feelings, but by god, did they seem more urgent now then ever.
And underneath it all, underneath the cyclone of leader-friend-teammate-rival-lover, he mostly just wanted him to—
"Don't go." The words fell from his lips before he could make much sense of them. Keith, who'd already whispered a soft "Goodnight" and turned away towards the door, froze, the planes of his back tense once more. His shoulders dropped as quickly as they'd risen, however, and he faced Lance again. For a second that irrationally felt like an eon, Keith held his gaze, calculating, as their eyes met, and he swore he could hear a thousand different unsaid sentences strung in the air between them. But then time snapped back into place and they darted away, their echoes undecipherable to his ears.
Head tilted slightly to the side, hair brushing over his eyes, there was a question in Keith's eyes. Did you mean to say that?
Lance did. And he was too far gone to hide it, at least not tonight. "Stay."
Keith replied simply, quietly, "Okay."
"Wait, just like that?" He wasn't expecting it to be so easy, but Keith wasn't paying his crisis any mind. He was already climbing back into Lance's bed, pushing at his limbs whenever they were in his way while Lance merely lay there, stunned. It took less than a minute for Keith to get settled under the blanket, his face the sole part of him visible.
He raised an eyebrow, in a manner far too judgmental for someone who'd hijacked another person's bed. "I really hope you're not planning to stare at me all night."
Currently void of the ability to piece together actual human sentences, Lance sat up a little, gesturing with the minimal access to movement he had at the moment and hoping it got his point across. "I— you— my bed! You! Sleeping!"
"It's almost two in the morning. Of course, I'm sleeping!" He raked his eyes over Lance's form, and, to his immense offense, continued, "And you should be too."
Lance huffed and threw himself backwards onto his pillow (that Keith had stolen half of, as well) with a ferocity that, yeah, was objectively uncalled for, but how dare Keith imply that he looked anything other than ravishing at all times, when Lance knew personally that Keith himself looked more Mothman than human in the mornings. No wonder he was so obsessed with the cryptid.
Lance struggled with the blanket for a bit—Keith, it seemed, was an atrocious blanket hog—but settled down for bed in record time. He fumbled for the switch on the wall behind him somewhere. A click! and then it was just him, Keith and the gentle in-and-out of their breaths.
In the darkness, although the questions (namely, What the fuck was happening?) and unintelligible trains of thought whirred along at top speed, he could feel himself beginning to grow foggy: being horizontal had knocked the wind from his sails.
His body was hyperaware, all the same. Of the minute shifts of the mattress. Of him holding his muscles so rigid he felt like he was cosplaying a piece of wood. Of every involuntary movement his body made regardless. Of the iota of emptiness between his and Keith's bodies, of the heat he could practically taste radiating off of him. Of every single sound he heard from beside him that he didn't know the origin of because he was too scared to look.
Then again, he wouldn't have survived his years out in space if he'd let fear stop him.
Lance gingerly turned over to find Keith already on his side, facing him. That close, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness, he could see every individual curve of his eyelashes, the subtle zigzag of his nose, his own reflection in his eyes. It was all very intimate, he was coming to realize, but he was too fully, completely, absolutely tired to dwell on it. Instead, propelled by the… everything that had happened today, he allowed his lips to curl up rather dopily and the words he'd been safeguarding—for too many months to be healthy—escape from his lips.
"Love you."
And Lance would probably question it later when he got a moment alone with a less sluggish brain, but at the moment, he was positive he hadn't made up the "I love you, too" that had similarly fallen from Keith's.
It wasn't a big declaration or earth-shattering revelation. Those four words didn't even seem real in the moment, the world too fuzzy around the corners for them to hold weight. They etched themselves into his mind anyway, a memory that he couldn't make sense of right now but would surely revisit (and overthink) later. Because they had time, now. Threads of minutes, hours and days woven into the prospect of a future that held surety and a million, billion, trillion tomorrows.
Tomorrows where they to talk about it, and the dozens of things they'd let go unsaid. Tomorrows where they tell the team everything, where they get the chance to. Tomorrows where they probably shed a few tears and get the mother lode of lectures. Tomorrows where all the fragments slot together and tomorrows where they get ground down into dust, ceasing to exist between one heartbeat and the next. Tomorrows where they emerge alive together from the war and tomorrows where they die too early. But all of those tomorrows were yet to happen
And so, bound by the calm and quiet of his now, Lance let the world fall away.
ty for reading :333
and I cross-posted this on ao3 as well, which you can find here
