Keith presses the heels of his palms to his eyes and exhales deeply. He lets all the air trickle out of his lungs until his chest feels concave, until spots dance behind his closed eyelids, until his lips start to go numb. Then he lets go and lets the air get sucked back into him like a vacuum.
“One more try,” he whispers to himself, conscious of Lance sleeping — finally — beside him. “One, and then we move on.”
He swipes the touchpad on his computer to wake it back up, dragging the blinking curser over the rarely-used blue ‘10’ under the Google logo. The page loads, and loads, and loads, and finally spits out the next few results.
Most of them he’s already seen before. Dozens of times. BARGAIN BALLET TICKET SUBSCRIPTION, reads one link, CLICK HERE FOR 20% OFF YOUR FIRST MONTH. Another reads, Rush Ticket Prices — Buy Now!
He’s been there. Clicked that. Priced it out. Looked at the worst possible, next-to-the-washrooms, garbage seats. Nothing. Not a single ticket within their limited budget — or even close to it.
Completely out of the realm of possibility even if they hadn’t agreed on a price limit for their Christmas gifts.
He keeps scrolling down a few pages that all advertise the same thing — a disgustingly costly subscription here, bargain-but-not-really tickets there, more scammy resell ads than one would believe possible. Even, notably, a still-active link from 1997 that Keith peruses for clicks and does not actually count towards his one-more-try limit. (It even tries to accept his Paypal, which is crazy and means that someone updated the site to accept modern payment for a show that is no longer running. Keith is so amused by the pure audacity that he has to fight the urge to buy one. Wild thing, ADHD.)
Just as he’s about to give up and buy his boyfriend yet another plant this year, a link catches his attention. It’s the very last result on page 13, with no description, no punctuation, hell, hardly even a sentence of text. Nutcracker ticket sales, it reads, for a website called ‘FeuillesBrillantAcademie.org’.
Keith shrugs. Might as well. Not like anything else has been promising.
He clicks the link and immediately wishes he hadn’t. The ugliest website he’s ever seen literally assaults his eyes — a bright blue and a neon purple, clashing in the worst possible way. It takes at least four solid seconds for his eyes to unblur enough to recognise the screen in front of him as having words rather than a solid wall of Bright And Bad. Even then, he has to squint, glasses practically touching his eyeballs.
Feuilles Brillant Academy is pleased to present the final performance of the hard-working dancers this season, is what he can finally make out. The show begins at 7 p.m. on December 23rd, tickets for $20 per person. In-person payment not accepted. Please pay via e-transfer using the link below. Call out administrative office if there are any difficulties.
Keith stares at the page for as long as his eyes can handle, then he looks up at the ceiling. (Where, he may add, he can still see the screen perfectly, because the damn thing has been burnt onto his retinae. He will never mock Matt for his web design degree again. Well, probably.)
This seems…too good to be true.
It’s outrageously cheap, for one. Keith has been looking for literal days and the cheapest he’s managed to find is $50 per person, for bad rush tickets. $20 is bonkers. For two, this is a perfect time, and nearby, as well. And there are still tickets left. Somehow.
Something is amiss.
Keith’s first thought is that it’s a prank page. But the page is buried so deeply — page thirteen of Google. The hidden archives, basically. If this is someone’s prank, it’s garbage. His second thought is that the link is a virus, which, while possible, is still kind of unlikely for the same reasons. Why on Earth would someone post something nefarious so obscurely? It doesn’t make sense. This might be one of those rare times when something isn’t too good to be true, it’s just good.
Then again. Keith just got his laptop back from the last time he fucked around and well and truly Found Out.
Time to get a second opinion.
Despite the disgustingly late hour, the phone picks up on the second ring.
“Hey, stinky,” says Pidge. Keith can hear the smile in her voice as clearly as the explosions and gunfire of Call of Duty in the background.
“Asshole.”
“Turd for brains.”
“Skidmark.”
“Rotting splatter of parking lot vomit at three in the afternoon in Arizona during high summer.”
“…Pidge, that’s disgusting.”
She snickers. “I win.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Keith freezes as Lance stirs next to him, curling his arm around Keith’s bent leg and muttering something in Spanish too fast for him to understand. Keith smiles, tucking a stray curl back under his fluffy frog-eye hairband, lingering over the scar on his temple from a skateboarding accident when they were fifteen. “I need your help.”
“Well, obviously. You’re calling me at three thirty four in the morning. Usually you’re in bed by nine because secretly you look up to Adam and emulate his habits.”
Keith flushes. “I don’t remember ordering a psych analysis, fucker.”
“Consider it a bonus! Tell Auntie Pidge about your troubles.” He can practically see the face she makes immediately after, and snorts. “Ignore that. My mouth is not attached to my brain. Carry on.”
“I need you to check out a link,” Keith says, choosing to be merciful. “It’s pretty buried and obscure, but honestly I think it’s fine —”
“Yeah, last time you thought a link was fine you fucked your shit up so bad I had to download another virus to cancel it out. I’ve never had to do that before. You fucked your laptop up so bad I’d actually never seen that kind of damage before, Kogane. And I do this for a living.”
Keith pouts. “No, you commit cyber crimes for a living.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m an angel and have never gotten so much as a speeding ticket. I am a law abiding citizen. Send over the link.”
Switching his phone to rest between his ear and shoulder, Keith does. “I need to know if the link does what it says it does.”
Pidge hums. He can hear the ding of her laptop as his e-mail goes through, and then the sounds of her clicking as she inspects the website, running it through her various programs that Keith cannot fathom for the life of him.
“What did you say you were looking for, again?”
Keith closes his eyes and tips his head back, letting it thunk gently on the thin wall under the big window, in the corner of the apartment where they’ve shoved their bed. He lets his eyes go blurry, lets the stars they stuck on the ceiling before they did anything else turn into bright green dots. They’re real constellations. The two of them spent hours on them; Lance on Keith’s shoulders, tripping and shouting and laughing.
“I need tickets,” Keith says quietly. He turns his gaze slowly to Lance, who is sleeping soundly again, who has bags under his eyes, whose hands twitch every few seconds, who frowns deeply. “And we can’t — these are the only ones I could find. That I can even pretend to afford. I need it to be —” He swallows. “I need you to tell me they’re real.”
Pidge is quiet for a moment. The only sound is her breathing, her nail tapping slowly on the edge of her screen.
“The link is exactly what it says it is.”
Keith sits up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, man.”
Keith bites back a cheer so he doesn’t wake Lance up. Hell yeah! This is perfect! Exactly what they needed! Just — a little bit of luck. A little bit.
“Thank you, Pidge,” he gushes, hurrying to punch in his information. “Seriously.”
Pidge huffs fondly. “Okay, dweebus. Gross. Go be all affectionate somewhere else.” She pauses. “Take a picture when you tell him.”
Keith smiles. “I will.”
———
It takes every inch of Keith’s willpower to keep his mouth shut for a whole three weeks.
“I Know you are hiding something, Kogane,” Lance says while walking home from classes, while curling up into him as they watch TV, while cooking, while showering. “I see it in your face.”
“It’s nearly Christmas, you dweebus,” Keith says every time, and every time he softens it with an exaggerated kiss to Lance’s cheek, one to make him laugh despite himself and shove Keith’s face away. “Of course I’m hiding something.”
But it’s eating at them both. Lance’s blatant curiously makes it that much harder for Keith to keep things hidden, to stash the tickets between the pages of his corniest romance novel that Lance won’t touch with a ten foot pole. To wait, and wait, and wait, as they set up the three-foot high discounted Christmas tree and Lance changes their sheets to the flannel ones his mother gave them.
But the days pass. Finals come and go and so does the time. And finally, finally, it comes time to crawl onto the creaky mattress, knees on either side of Lance, nose kisses down his neck, and murmur, “We’ve got plans today.”
Lance groans. “No we do not.”
Keith smiles widely. He knows Lance can feel it, because he scowls harder, trying to hide his own fondness even as he melts into Keith’s affections.
“Yes, we do. I know. I planned them.”
“Well, then, un-plan them,” Lance grouches. He turns over so he’s facing Keith, now, trying hard to glare up at him, but late afternoon sunlight bleeds into his dark brown eyes and makes them shine golden, and they are as warm and bright as the rest of him, and his hands slide up Keith’s chest, over his shoulders, brushing through his hair, to rest on his cheeks. “Come nap with me.”
Keith turns his head to press a kiss to Lance’s palm, keeping his mouth there. Lance rolls his eyes, and can no longer hide his smile. “Later. I made plans. Dress up, I’m gonna pick us up some food for the way. We’ll leave in forty minutes.”
“Ugh.”
“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, baby. I can see you eyeing the closet.”
“Shut up and get me a burrito.” He soothes the bite of his words by pulling Keith’s face closer to his, pressing their lips together softly. “Please.”
“Whatever you want.”
God, he’s whipped, and Lance knows it, because he grins, pleased, and pulls Keith even closer, kisses him stronger. It takes Keith a good five minutes to muster up the willpower to pull away, and Lance knows it, smirking.
He finally manages to yank himself away, stumbling backwards towards the kitchenette of their studio. Lance pouts at him.
“Menace,” Keith says sternly, deliberately turning away as he pulls on his boots and coat. He ignores his boyfriend’s grumbling and finally makes it out the door, hustling to their favourite bodega and hoping it isn’t too crowded.
Thirty-seven minutes later, burritos secured, Keith is shoving his frozen fingers around the door handle to jimmy it open. The bodega was indeed crowded and they are indeed late. The show starts in an hour. From what Keith remembers from Lance’s recitals — and he has been to many — people who are late are people who miss the show. The ballet does not fuck around with tardiness and disruptions; if you’re late, that’s tough shit for you. Plan better.
“You’re going to eat shit,” Lance says, amused, the fourth time Keith power walks right over black ice and nearly actually dies. “Slow down, babe.”
Keith does not.
“Can’t,” he huffs, keeping a half-eye on the pavement. A tourist walks into him, shoving him into Lance, who takes the opportunity to slide his hand into Keith’s back pocket and wink at him when his cheeks colour.
“Why can’t we slow down? Where are we going?”
“It’s like you don’t know what surprise means.”
“I do know. I also know that if I annoy anyone long enough they’ll snap so I’ll shut up.”
“Nah. I like it when you talk.”
He’d meant it as somewhat of a comeback, as a jab back to Lance’s teasing. But suddenly Lance stops, spine going rigid, something like shock flirting across his face for half a millisecond before he blinks it away and moves again. It happens so fast that Keith would almost be convinced he’d imagined it, except Lance’s cheeks are crimson.
Keith smiles. “Lance.”
“Shut up.”
“Babydoll.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m barely sayin’ anything, baby.”
“You are so fuckin — gay, you know that? God. Who fuckin — who says shit like that? Who on this Earth?”
Keith laughs, bending down to kiss right below Lance’s ear, to feel his flushed skin warm to frozen tip of his nose.
“You are so easily flattered.”
“Easily flatter this dick. How about that. Fuckin. Jerk.”
He lets Lance grouch at him, pleased and embarrassed about it, as he pulls them along the overcrowded streets. He checks his watch. Fifteen minutes ‘til the show starts, thirteen minutes ‘til they get there. Hopefully.
“Are we almost there? It’s cold and these shoes are pinchy.”
“I told you to wear comfortable shoes!”
“You told me to dress up! I can do one of those things, Akira!”
At the seven minute mark Keith starts running. Lance, surprisingly, doesn’t complain — a grin pulls at his sharp features, actually, and he wraps their hands together and runs faster, despite not knowing where they’re going. Every time they bump into someone in a suit he laughs. He laughs harder when they curse at him. Keith has to fight to keep his head in the game, to keep running, to not stop where he’s standing and watch Lance laugh for hours and hours and hours. It’s been too long.
He nearly pulls Lance’s arm out of his socket when he stops then abruptly, shouting “Here! Here! We’re here!” and pulling him inside a well-kept brownstone.
“Where’s…here?” Lance wonders, taking in the well-salted walkway and pretty red-and-green decorations all over the aged brick.
Keith doesn’t answer. “Close your eyes.”
Lance narrows his eyes. Keith makes his expression as wide and pleading as possible, and in seconds Lance caves, much to Keith’s satisfaction.
“You’re a pain in my neck.”
Keith kisses him quickly and chastely. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t let me walk into anything.”
Satisfied that Lance won’t peek, Keith shuffles them over to the box office, holding out their tickets. The stewardess smiles at him, scanning them, eyes twinkling at Keith wordless plea for her to keep the secret, and gestures towards a grand set of doors.
“Up the stairs, to your left, seat and row on your ticket,” she murmurs. “Enjoy the show.”
Keith nods his thanks and rushes them off.
“This sounds very fancy,” Lance observes as their shoes click on the — literally marble, how the hell were these tickets $20 — floors. “Dangerously so.”
Keith shrugs. “Perhaps.”
“…Not to be. A bummer. But please tell me you remembered our budget, Keith.”
“I did, Lance. I swear.”
Lance relaxes into him, and Keith realises for the first time how tense he was. He winces to himself. He probably could have made things a tad less stressful and still kept the surprise. He’ll remember that for next year.
“Okay, good. I trust you.”
They barely make it to their seats in time. Keith’s butt barely makes contact with the cushioned chair before the lights dim and the orchestra starts tuning, the rest of the audience lapsing into almost immediate silence.
Lance inhales sharply. “Keith…?”
“Open your eyes, sweetheart.”
Lance does, and they’re wide, and his mouth drops open, slightly, and for a moment he just stares, frozen, at the stage and the lights and the set, the familiar set, as the dim light casts shadows onto his face. The orchestra’s tuning note reaches its satisfying peak, harmonizing as one sound, and Keith’s full attention is on the lines of Lance’s face, the set of his jaw, the curves of his cheekbones.
“Merry Christmas,” he says quietly.
Before he can say anything else, before Lance can say anything else, the familiar sound of pointe shoes tapping delicately across the stage steals Keith’s attention. He turns his eyes to the stage, watching the dancers strut on the stage, and — stops.
He leans forward, squinting.
What?
Keith is…very familiar with the Nutcracker. He’s grown up alongside Lance’s family since he was eight years old. He’s been to more recitals than he can count. He’s been dragged to more performances than he can ever remember. Lance has lived and breathed and loved ballet his whole damn life, for the entire time Keith has known him, and that love bled well outside of the studio, has lasted even after he aged out of the program last year. Keith knows how the Nutcracker begins, and nothing about the program said this one was supposed to be any different.
Half of the dancers walking onstage are significantly shorter than they should be.
Now he knows damn well that there are kids in the Nutcracker. The main character is a kid. That’s the whole deal.
But there is not one adult on that stage right now. Hell, not even a teenager.
Keith looks down at the ticket — Feuilles Brillant Academy. He looks back at the stage. He looks at the other audience members — lots and lots of people with camcorders. And other small children.
Keith sinks into his chair, head in his hands.
His dumb ass bough a ticket to a children’s ballet recital.
Lord above.
“Lance, I am so sorry,” he whispers, “I was so caught up in the ticket being in budget I didn’t bother actually, like, looking deeper into things, this is totally — Lance?”
Keith leans forward in alarm, hands immediately falling on Lance’s knee, on his back. His shoulders shake and his hands are pressed to his eyes.
“Shit, babe, I’m sorry,” Keith says desperately, embarrassment replaced with panic. Everything feels like it’s crashing down around him, as dramatic as that is. He’d been so excited for this. Now it’s a whole mess. “I didn’t mean to — fuck things up, shit, we can leave.”
Lance shakes his head. Blindly, he reaches over the grasps Keith’s hand, holding tightly. His own hand is damp from his tears.
“No, no, it’s — perfect,” he whispers, voice hoarse. “I —”
His chin trembles, and more tears spill over his cheeks. As the music swells along to the climax of the first dance, Lance lifts the armrest separating their seats, half crawling over Keith until his head is tucked in the crook of Keith’s neck, arms folded between their chests, hands clutching at the fabric of his sweater. His voice is wet with tears and soaked in an emotion Keith can’t quite name, an almost — relief.
“It’s been so long. I didn’t want to — I thought I wouldn’t be able to do this again. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”
Keith lets a huge, relieved exhale, sagging forward. He wraps himself more comfortably around Lance’s frame, squeezing him back, pressing a lingering kiss to his temple.
Growing up has been…hard. For the both of them.
They’d been told by everyone who knew them that they were being stupid and reckless. Keith has been promised that they won’t last more than two years by almost every grownup he’s ever known. Even his own brother had sighed his trepidation when Keith told him, stubborn and bold-faced, that he was moving in with Lance, that they were going to start their lives together the second they pulled off their caps and gowns, that they were ready for the next step. That they were eighteen and ready to face the world.
“Sacrifices,” Shiro had warned, “are going to be half your life now. It’s not that I think you can’t, Keith. I just. There’s a reason people don’t move in with their highschool sweetheart they summer after they graduate. Katy Perry wrote a whole song about it. It’s a banger.”
Keith hates it when his brother is right, and this time he was right about so many things in consecutive order. Living on your own is hard. Learning to live with someone else is harder. Doing it in a city far away from home, while balancing school and work and rent and groceries, is the hardest.
“I miss dance,” Lance croaks, and Keith closes his eyes and breathes deeply and holds Lance tighter.
He knows Lance misses dance. He knows that he hasn’t so much as listened to a ballet since they moved to New York, unless it’s in the dead of night, and he thinks Keith is asleep, and he puts in his headphones and moves their furniture as silently as he can to the edges of their tiny ass studio apartment and laces up his falling-to-pieces pointe shoes and dances like the very act of it is tearing him apart, and cries the whole time. And then stashes his shoes in the bottom of his gym bag and crawls back into bed and pretends again in the morning that he left his pointes back in Arizona. And Keith looks away and lets him because school is already twenty thousand a year and in no shape or form can they afford that and money to rent a studio.
But Keith can give him this. For a little bit, maybe, even if it’s little kids with handmade costumes pirouetting across a stage.
“I know, bluebell.”
Lance exhales, shaky, breath ghosting across Keith’s collarbones, and finally turns back towards the stage, keeping tucked under Keith’s chin. The kids dancing as the Snow Queen’s ladies-in-waiting are — three years old, maybe. At most four. They keep twirling right into each other like clumsy little bumblebees. It’s maybe the cutest thing Keith has ever seen in his entire life, and what’s better is the tiny smile that graces Lance’s face, despite the tears, growing bigger every time one of them wobbles back up to their feet and prances on, oblivious.
They watch the rest of the play in silence, Lance hands entwining with his sometime around the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy and holding fast. They stand and clap as loudly as the gathered parents, louder even, at curtain call, as each kid jumps and twirls across the stage to thrown roses and cheering. It’s adorable.
They’re among the first to walk out, because the majority of the crowd surges towards backstage to collect their kid, so the walk is blessedly unrushed. They take their time, observing the pictures of grinning ballerinas that line the walls and numerous awards on endless shelves. Keith is filled with a deep and strong longing, a strange feeling of coming home — years of waiting on plastic chairs for Lance to finish solo practice when they were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Of taking his boots off at the door and quietly sneaking in the back of the studio, ducking away from other dancers’ boring stares, to watch Lance shine under the studio lights, reflected a thousand times by mirrored walls. Of the smell of lemon cleaner and polished hardwood floors and satin.
He notices a poster on the wall, among dozens of drawings and pictures of intricate sets, and freezes.
“Lance,” he says, tilting his head, “look.”
At the end of a hallway, right next to a door, is a hand-painted banner, reading: WE’LL MISS YOU, MISS RAULA! HAPPY RETIREMENT!
He squeezes Lance’s hand. “I bet they’re looking for a replacement.”
Lance stares at the poster for a long time. “You think?”
“I think it wouldn’t hurt to shoot them an e-mail.”
Smiling, Lance stops them in the hallway, puts his hands on Keith’s shoulders, stands on his tiptoes, and kisses him, long and sweet and loving.
“I’m already in a pretty tight spot now,” he murmurs, still standing so close to Keith and smelling so sweet that he has trouble focusing on his words, “‘cause this is already kind of the best Christmas gift ever. If that ends up being true I’m never topping you again.”
Keith laughs, suddenly, not expecting the turn, and Lance grins, pulling Keith down to him and kissing him again. It’s less of a kiss and more of a press of smiles, a clack of teeth, a shared laugh.
“I love you, Lance. Merry Christmas. I will be the Gift Giving King forever.”
“Shut up, goober.” He lifts Keith’s arm, tucking himself under it as they walk back out into the snowy December night. “I love you too.”
———
based on this post (third slide)
