Day 2 of Klancetober 2025, hosted by @corvus--rex! I went with all three prompts because I'm an over-achiever.
Witch 🧹 Candles 🕯️ Stars 🌟
And a little musical accompaniment if you like...
***
The autumn feels like death in a way Keith never understood until he’d been dead.
It’s been a year since then: since he literally came back to life. A year with Lance, who had been there for all of it. A year of making good on dreams he’d always intended to pursue but, in his previous nineteen years, never did. A year of what has sometimes felt like borrowed time.
Anyway.
Now, “fall” feels literal in a way it never had.
The sun has already gone down, though light still saturates the sky. They step out of Lance‘s hand-me-down Camry and onto the unpaved driveway outside the cabin. The drop in temperature from the afternoon—from even a few days ago—is noticeable. It’s like someone’s pulled the rug out from under summer.
“What’s with that face?” Lance asks, shutting the driver’s-side door.
“This is just my face, Lance,” Keith replies, offhandedly. Not even impatient, since he’s spent the majority of his life navigating other, less-kind people’s reactions to his resting bitch face.
If it takes him a second longer than it should to pull what feels like the over-contemplative glare on his face away from the twilit treetops and over to Lance, well… He’s spent most of his life doing that, too. Looking off in inappropriate directions, seeing too much.
“You’d better get excited,” Lance half-teases as his voice shifts around the back of the car. It’s only half a tease; because Keith knows exactly how seriously Lance took setting all of this up. “I’ve never had the chance to celebrate a one-year anniversary and your brooding is not going to mess it up!”
“I am excited.”
Keith makes his own way to the open trunk, gravel crunching under his boots. He hears it shifts under the weight of Lance’s trainers and, then, both of their duffle bags.
“It just looks like that wind might pick up,” he explains, gently slipping the strap of Lance’s bag back over his head.
“I’ve got them, amor,” Lance says—but he ducks under the strap, anyway.
“Indulge me,” Keith says simply.
And Lance does, his gaze going soft and fond. Heat floods through Keith, contrary against the scolding fingers of cold air cutting through the treeline. This warmth is the stuff of fantasy realized: the very idea that there’s someone this good looking at him—at Keith—like this so often in these shortening days.
The wind does pick up later that night.
As the night gathers deep and vast around the cabin, they get a good couple hours of normalcy. They unpack—read: Lance sets an unfathomable number of bottles on the bathroom counter while Keith throws his shit on the floor of a bedroom with linen curtains and a chunky wooden bedframe. They take a quick peek into the crawl-space that’s accessible via an over-sized ladder set into the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom—read: Keith climbs the ladder and shoulders the raw-wood door in the ceiling open while Lance stands at the bottom and asks if their AirBNB host would really appreciate guests letting all the ghosts out of the surely-haunted attic.
“Well, if the place wasn’t haunted before, it is now that we’re here,” Keith says, letting the panel in the ceiling fall closed.
Lance is not impressed by the attempt at humor—by any attempt calling himself a ghost/zombie/whatever horror flavor he happens to be into that month.
Keith acts duly impressed when Lance picks up a little remote from atop the mantlepiece and turns on the electric hearth. Lance attempts to punctuate the mood-setting by adding some music, but he fumbles with the bluetooth setting on his phone long enough that Keith starts to feel a laugh bubble up in his chest. Because Lance is standing there in his socks from this month’s Awesome Socks Club in the middle of the huge faux-fur rug in front of the fireplace and Keith loves him so much he’s not sure, if he does start laughing, if he’ll ever be able to catch his breath again.
“Ta da!” Lance says with a flourish as the music kicks on. It becomes a playful little roll of the shoulders, in time with the soft beat of the Spanish ballad. And Lance looks so pleased at his own success, Keith decides he just has to taste that grin of victory for himself.
Of course, Keith is who he is, and when he takes in the fire and remembers its source, Keith forces them to stop making out long enough to find a couple flashlights and put them in a conspicuous place.
“For just in case,” Keith says.
He’ll be glad for his habitual paranoia. Because the “case” comes along less than twenty minutes later, when the electricity goes out and the fire stops burning.
“Aw,” Lance mutters, with a pout that Keith can see even in the dark.
“C’mon,” Keith says, refusing to let a single moment go to waste. “We’ll go outside and watch the stars come out. And if the electric is still off by the time we go back in, we’ll track down some candles…”
“You’re shivering.”
Lance’s teeth are actually chattering. “’S never this cold in Cuba.”
Keith snorts little. “It is in Las Vegas, though.”
“Yeah, for like three days out of the year…”
Lance can’t be as genuinely annoyed as he sounds, though, because he bumps further into Keith’s side and rests his head against Keith’s shoulder as they both look up at the stars.
The solar-powered bistro lights on the porch behind them render their breath visible. At first, that layer of cloud veils the stars. But they walk forward together a few steps, into the vast, complete darkness, and the sky opens to them. It’s deep enough into the evening that most of the stars have already come out. Still, as they stand there, hand in hand, a few stars wink to life like zipping fireflies, and that sight feels warm despite the chill.
Keith feels Lance squeeze his hand.
“Thank you,” he hears.
Head whipping in Lance’s direction, Keith says, “You’re the one who arranged all this.”
Gorgeous and sincere under the starlight, Lance says, “Thank you for coming back to me.” And Keith doesn’t have to ask him what he’s talking about. “Thank you for not leaving, after that. For not going anywhere else.”
Dammit, it’s too early in this trip for Lance to be making Keith cry. They may have a bet, but that’s not why Keith makes himself clench and unclench his fists in an effort to stave off tears. It’s just that he wants to have a clear memory of all of this, a memory unimpeded and unblurred. Starlight crystal-delicate; a home borrowed but no less theirs while they make it so; Lance limned in silver from above and gold from behind.
“No place I’d rather be,” is all Keith says when he turns Lance fully towards him and draws him down so Keith can bury his face in Lance’s hair, can draw in the familiar smell of him among the strangeness of a night lit by enough stars to lose count of.
An hour later, the electricity is still out, and they do have to track down those candles.
The bistro-lights along the back porch are apparently the only solar-powered thing in the cabin, and their ambient glow is not enough to finish up their evening by—especially, Lance complains, since they’ve been deprived of the most romantic feature of the cabin: the electric fireplace.
Keith would argue that the light from dozens of candles more than makes up for it.
They’ve arranged them all in the main living space, little flickering tea lights and Christmas-red tapers and scented three-wick monstrosities filling up the space on the stone hearth. Wax has started dripping down onto the floor from the tapers despite their best efforts to set strategic dishes and coasters in place.
But if Keith has anything to say about it, he and Lance will be distracted long enough that the candles will just burn out and the wax will cool before they have to deal with any of it.
“What’s with that face?” Keith asks, trying to smooth out the furrow between Lance’s brows with his thumb.
“Just thinking.”
“About?”
They’re lying together in the nest of blanket’s they’ve made, clothes discarded, warm despite the lack of forced-air heating or a real fire. Lance rests his head against Keith’s chest, but Keith can still see the way his mouth has gone tight and his forehead lined as he stares ahead into the candlelight.
Lance makes a sound that tries to be dismissive. “I already got all sappy. I’m done. ’S your turn.”
With that, Lance flicks his hand back, lightly tapping the back of it against Keith’s chest.
“Usually you’re the one asking me what I’m thinking,” Keith remarks. Lance smirks lightly. “I do like a bit of role reversal.”
“Uh huh,” Keith scoffs, feeling one side of his own mouth pull up. “But no,” Lance continues, suddenly serious again. He shakes his head. “I’m good. Sorry, I mean… I don’t want to keep going somewhere else in my mind. I just want to be here with you. Because that’s why we’re here.”
“I’m never more ‘here’ than where you are,” Keith says before he can stop himself.
It barely makes sense—and if it makes the kind of sense he intends it to make, it’s entirely too close to “sappy” for comfort. But it seems to land just right for Lance, who sits up, pushes away a little, and looks directly into his eyes.
“I know,” Lance says. He reaches out with one hand to lightly over Keith’s face: his brow, his cheeks, his lips. And then Lance leans in again and kisses him in a way that makes Keith feel like he’s never going to be cold, again.
