I commissioned this from @taytei for y’all as an apology for being so behind. I figured since most of y’all liked the movie marathon part, I thought this scene would be perfect to do. I was gonna post it when I had an actual new update ready, but I don’t know when that’s going to happen now. Anyway, this is just my way of saying that I’m thankful for all my readers and love you all very much and appreciate your patience with me very much, that’s something I don’t get very much from people around me offline.
Thank you again @taytei for making this! It’s exactly how I imagined it and love it very much and I hope everyone else loves it too.
Reminder that I have commissions open and would really appreciate you checking that out!
Fandom: Voltron
Pairing: Klance
Word count: 1,323
Keith didn’t visit his parent’s grave often. He didn’t like to visit his home town often, but Shiro thought that it would be healthy for him to go at least once a year. He said that it would help with processing. Whatever that was supposed to mean. Keith only put up with the routine, because it made the only person that he really considered family worry a little less about him.
There was a flower shop a few blocks away from the graveyard. On the anniversary of the car crash Keith had somehow survived, he would buy the cheapest bouquet of flowers and laid them in front of the familiar names. Shiro probably thought that he had things to say to the already cracking stone. He probably imagined Keith holding back tears at what might have been.
In reality, the visit just made him feel numb. He didn’t tell his parents about the mundane things he’d done in the past twelve months, or ask them if they were proud of him. It was hard to explain to other people that his emotions were too complicated to be soothed by looking at their memory.
Part of him hated the yearly trip. He hated the reminder that this had once been his life. It wasn’t something he missed, but it was so much easier to act like the car crash had ruptured perfection and not ended torment. He didn’t tell people what his parents really had been like, and in return he could pretend that they were what he’d wanted.
After he’d deposited the flowers he took the same hourly train he’d take to the tiny town back into the city and push all thoughts of his former life away until the next year. He didn’t talk to anyone (aside from the girl he bought the flowers from), and he didn’t let anyone talk to him. He did, however, notice people.
Maybe it was more correct to say he noticed a person. It wasn’t odd for the graveyard to have other visitors. Keith always saw bright fresh flowers at the surrounding graves when he threw away the last years withered stems. He didn’t pay much mind to random faces he’d never seen before. It was the familiar one that threw him.
It was the third year of pretending to me morning when Keith took notice of the boy with the choppy brown hair in a worn green coat. He was sitting at an grave almost concealed by the shade of a large oak tree. Keith couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he looked like he was talking, then laughing.
When he left the graveyard, Keith forgot about the boy laughing at a gravestone. A year later, when he happened to glance in the direction of the tree and see the same boy sitting there Keith committed him to memory. The boy was still smiling and talking. Everything around him radiated a cheer that felt wrong in such a depressing and dead place. Keith wanted to know what he was saying, but instead he dropped his flowers at his parent’s stone and walked away.
Seeing the boy with the brown hair became part of Keith’s yearly routine. It became the only nice part of the visits. On the train rides home, he’d try to imagine who this boy was talking to. He’d think up what he might be saying, what his life was like, what his name was. Each year gave the boy a new origin. Keith made up life after life for the laughing boy he never spoke to.
It took a few years for his content with this to wear out. If he was being fair, the sudden change of attitude had nothing to do with the boy from the graveyard. Still, that didn’t stop his frustration from fixating on that too happy smile.
Never had Keith felt the loss of the people who had raised him. There was too much pain—too much contempt—netted around how he remembered them. He didn’t see the crash coming.
He didn’t think he’d ever stop and feel angry that he hadn’t had a real normal life. He didn’t think he’d wonder if things would have been different if his parents had lived long enough to realize they were wrong. Maybe they would have tried to make things better. Maybe they would have loved him.
Keith didn’t understand how anyone could feel anything other than pain in loss. He didn’t understand how the boy in the worn green coat could sit at a grave and laugh.
He wanted to ask. He wanted to scream at that smiling face, because he had never been allowed that blissful closure that this boy had possessed for years.
Keith didn’t buy flowers that year. He didn’t even look at the cracking tombstone of people who he’d never had the chance to forgive. Instead he walked to the tree he’d stolen glances at annually.
He was ready to say something loud, and brash, and regret everything later. He was ready to demand something—he wasn’t even sure what. He wasn’t ready for what he found under the tree.
The boy wasn’t laughing this time.
His head was buried in his hands, and his body shook with muffled sobs. Slowly, he raised his head to look at Keith. His eyes were red. Tears stained his cheeks. Keith felt his heart break for the boy he’d never spoken to.
Without saying anything, Keith knelt beside him. He gently pulled the boy into his arms and held him until he stopped shaking. When the boy pulled away, Keith was ready to be questioned, or shouted at, or told to leave right now. Instead the boy smiled at him
“My name is Lance,” he uttered.
“I’m Keith.”
“I know,” the boy said sadly.
Lance told Keith how everyone in town knew who he was. He told him how everyone silently hoped that he was living a better life than the kind of people his parents were could have provided. He told him why he was at the graveyard the same day as Keith every year.
“Your brother was driving,” Keith repeated the words.
“He was drunk,” Lance looked at his hands. “He shouldn’t have left the house but—”
The tears were back in his eyes.
“Yeah?” Keith asked softly.
“I tried to run away,” Lance sighed. “I was little, I didn’t understand shit. I made it to the edge of town before I freaked out. I called him, I begged him to come get me and not tell our parents.”
“It’s not your fault,” Keith said a little too forcefully.
Lance stared at him for a second.
“You don’t make any sense,” Lance informed him.
“What?” Keith didn’t know what to say to that.
“Everyone here who shouldn’t give a damn what happened thinks it’s my fault,” Lance told him. “You’re the one person who should hate me.”
“I don’t,” Keith realized he meant this.
Sometimes he was glad his parents were gone, and sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he was angry, and sad, and imagined what might have been. But in the end, he’d never thought to hate the car that crashed into theirs. He was only ever mad at the world that put them in it.
He was mad that he hadn’t had a normal family like Shiro had. He was mad that he had to grow up before he was ready. Now he was mad that the incident had ripped apart another life along with his.
“Do you wanna get out of here?” Keith asked.
“What do you mean?” Lance blinked at him.
“I live in the city,” Keith told him. “Do you wanna see what it’s like outside of this place?”
“You met me half an hour ago,” Lance reminded him.
“Not really,” Keith smiled. “We’ve known each other for years.”
“Okay,” Lance grinned back at him. “Let’s get out of here.”
