Archive of Our Own

“and probably to him it feels scary to reach that far / but down on earth there's so much pain /

but way up here we explore galaxies / hey mom, i met a boy / he's super sad /

but i think that i love him / is that bad?”

—  willow smith, boy

• • •

“Time collapses this close to dark stars,” Krolia informs him in that clinical way she has about her, the one that’s been honed through years of undercover collection and extraction work carried out at the Blade of Marmora’s behest. It’s a startling contrast to the phantom feeling of her arms around him, shielding him from the searing flash of light. It is an undercurrent of steely resolve, of careful calculation. It is gentle as a mother bird’s unwrapped wings. “Going through the light triggers glimpses of the past and the future.”

The memories slip slowly by.

He feels them like a noose around his neck, only softer, less unkind—the sense-memory of his mother’s bare arms cradling his infant head. A mirror image of the past pressed flat against the truth of his present. Her arms around him, nineteen years prior and then today.

His childhood home looms behind the family portrait their trio makes, creaky with age and weak around its wooden veranda. The memory wobbles, burns unfinished behind his eyelids. He sees his father’s leathery face, unshaven under the sun. The light around them is heaven-bright. It feels artificial or secondhand somehow, like a stranger’s cigarette smoke accidentally inhaled in passing.

Gradually, it fades out.

He glimpses Shiro’s face next, lips pulled back around his teeth in something crueler than a snarl. His once-familiar irises shine a laboratory pink. A Haggar, druid magic pink.

Hello, Keith, this Shiro says.

It is not his Shiro, the one who used to calmly wrap Keith’s wounds away from probing eyes and comb his raven hair before Sunday Mass (a mandatory foster home extracurricular) and sit waiting for him outside of Iverson’s office for the third time that week because Keith liked to wear his trauma like a pair of code-violating pilot’s gloves. Knuckles bared. Knuckles biting.

Knuckles bloody.

It is not his Shiro and so Keith knows that there is something intrinsically wrong with the image. Something not his own. It’s nothing pulled from his past. His brain feels it over and finds unfamiliar grooves and valleys. Cavity and rot.

The light triggers glimpses of the past…

...and the future, Krolia says, as it unspools before him.

Keith shuts his eyes beneath his Marmora mask and bears it.

• • •

The love story the light leaves him is not one he knows by name.

It exists in the space between splayed fingers, the neighboring tendons of two locked hands. All around him, the quantum abyss sings a broken hymn, a harp-like melody of cosmic sands and glowing balls of gas. The wash of light is wholly white. It flows through him in fits and starts.

Then the color begins to bleed.

A glass cockpit. Vrepit sa. His mother’s Galran hands curled around her ship’s gear sticks as she makes hairpin turns through the dark, dodging laserfire. Earth at a distance, the curve of its body like a god’s faraway grin. His father’s silhouette. His father’s face as he pries the damaged metal away from Krolia’s body. The Blue Lion’s mile-wide forcefield. His mother and father as they stand gazing up at it in that dripping cave from so long ago.

Blue’s knowing eyes, unblinking in the dark.

It snags on something carnal inside of Keith. He sees his own hands against Blue’s shield, begging. He sees the ripples of her energy as his touch registers and is rejected. He feels Lance pull to a stop beside him. Senses the still-alien warmth of him, new at the time that it took place. Recognizes the olive green of his jacket as it enters his peripheral. Hears him say, Maybe you just have to knock. Inhales in shock as Blue absorbs the impact of Lance’s gentled knuckles, drops her guard, and lights up from within, bathing them a brighter, more liquid blue.

His father reaches for his mother’s hand in a memory twenty years old and Keith feels his own fingers catalogue their longing and their love, the rippling desire, the dark blue energy signature that surrounds them.

Keith’s fingers scream out for contact, but he’s years too late.

Bit by agonizing bit, the image of his parents goes white at its edges and the sense-memory of Lance’s body beside his own as they stand peering up at the Blue Lion dissolves.

• • •

“You were stuck on Earth,” he says, after the light has died out and he’s back in his real body. Not a question. An observation.

It’s her answer that cuts him open.

“There was no better place,” she returns, “that I could be.”

• • •

In the glow of the setting sun, his mother presses a final kiss to the memory of his sleeping face, leaves him her knife, then vanishes into the dust.

He and his father—the Keith of today and the Akira of then—stand just outside the house as her ship leaves Earth’s atmosphere, winking out of existence in a flare of pink-red. Her spacecraft’s contrail ribbons the horizon; the vapor trails remain long after she’s disappeared from the darkening sky. Keith presses close to their lone maple tree and wraps two arms around himself, watching both the engine exhaust and the memory of his mother dissipate.

Carved with loving craftsmanship into the bark beneath his head are the letters K + A, bordered by a clumsy-looking heart shape.

• • •

Keith watches the ground beneath his feet reanimate. It puddles back to life like recycled rainwater.

He stares into the abyss through the apertures of his mask as he works to make sense of all the images. He’s nineteen and half-hollow to boot, fatherless around the face yet newly whole again in the wake of his mother’s warm gaze.

When he was six, Keith taught himself tree-speak, studied the whisper of maidenhair leaves in wind. He could capture the slant of the stars through the window his forefingers and thumbs made. His eyes were his telescope—the best money couldn’t buy. He’d caught and freed five moths and two caterpillars by seven, knew which trails the coyotes took and which they avoided, had earned the moniker wolf-boy for his recklessness in the face of wild dogs. At eight, he knew not to near the flames. Had soaked a rag with cold water and worn it like a mask during a grease fire gone awry. Could look at his own hand and call it flammable.

At ten, Keith watched them erect a headstone more than half his height bearing the name AKIRA KOGANE.

At eleven, Takashi Shirogane of the Galaxy Garrison saved him moments before he could crash and burn.

Keith knew by then that fire could be domesticated. Could be called killer and creator both. Could be stoked and extinguished in the same breath. He’d learned to tell wax from wick. He turned twelve and then thirteen to the tune of his own body lit up like a match and still Shiro stayed.

“Fire can be regenerative,” said Shiro, as he stared hard at the bruises Keith brought home thrice weekly, “when it doesn’t impact human development. When it doesn’t injure, Keith.”

At eighteen, Keith became the Guardian Spirit of Fire.

“I finally understand why you left,” he says, at nineteen. “You put the mission above all else.”

Krolia’s eyes flutter shut through her glass visor, brow conflicted. “That’s not true,” she murmurs. Her eyes crack open and she turns her head a fraction, pinning Keith with a meaningful look. Her face goes smooth. “I left to protect the person I most love. You.”

Some fires, her eyes seem to say, are better left doused.

• • •

“The light will be easier to swallow, or slip from your shoulders,” his mother says, with a scientific sort of fascination, “in sleep. Less, and infinitely more—or so I’m told. You should rest your eyes while you’re able. Time is uncertain here and you’re of no use to me exhausted.”

Keith imagines the light an overlarge, hand-me-down coat which drags at his thin orphan’s ankles, its hem collecting dust. He imagines it the first rain of the new season, a crooked half-smile of a moon, the southwest’s dusty dunes. He hunkers down, creates a makeshift nest for himself on the abyss creature’s pockmarked back, and imagines the light is his father’s roughened palms against his cheeks, stroking with a firefighter’s eye for crumbling homes.

Keith’s suit gives a quick atmospheric scan—air quality: 19.6% oxygen, levels safe to breathe, atmosphere compatible with physiology—and he imagines the light is the oak wood rafters in his childhood church. The ribs of his fourteen-year-old crush moving under his palm, to draw breath, as Keith pressed a scared kiss to the boy’s mouth. The weight of the iron in his tiny hands the night before orientation as he smoothed the wrinkles from his Garrison uniform, frowning around all the steam.

The light is Lance’s blue eyes following him in the canteen, internalized in passing and then carried inside of Keith like a subconscious flame of indeterminate age. Azure and snake-tongued. Never not pressing in from all sides.

The light is Shiro’s gleaming hovercycle and dark leather jacket, the wristband he once wore which named his body an hourglass, turned his every waking moment to grains of sand slipping past tempered glass. It’s Adam’s eyes through the lenses of his glasses, and Keith’s wrapped knife, and the shock of Shiro’s white hair through Adam’s brown fingers. An archway of pink flowers and Shiro standing beneath it in a pressed suit, grinning.

Shiro’s grimy hovercycle hidden beneath a rain-wet tarp. The place where Keith’s favorite maple tree once sat. The memory of his father’s leather bunker boots against hardwood, pacing, and then the absence of them. The foster home, with its cornflower blue walls and stained carpet. A dark-furred wolf with yellow eyes. The Black Lion’s monstrous jaw, beneath and above the bare palm of Keith’s left hand.

Lance’s adolescent scowl becomes a teenage scowl becomes a pair of smiling lips opening over Keith’s throat. Keith feels the shock of it rattle through him, tearing at those parts of him made most weak by love, and he arches into the touch in sleep. He feels languorous with longing. He is a creek bed laid out beneath a moving stream. A tongue drags down the line of his jaw and traces its way up an old scar and Keith fists his hand in Lance’s shower-damp hair with a gasp, inhaling brimstone and sea salt and wondrous desire.

The light will tease things from you, Krolia murmurs around the white glare. Things you won’t want to see, and things you’ll later call to the fore like flame. It’s not kind, the light, but neither is it cruel. It is your most terrible and untoward truths laid bare.

Keith squirms beneath it, grasps out for nothing and feels his palm catch on something, is dragged from the dream screaming and thrown into a memory he’s never lived before. The light is new and unfamiliar against his face. The hand in his is warm and dry, calloused up and down.

“Sweetheart,” says Lance, his hair longer, his shoulders broader, the slope of his nose uneven now where it didn’t used to be, “you don’t know the half of it.”

What do you see? Krolia whispers.

I—

Don’t fight it, Krolia orders. Your body will become less and less your own the further you wade. That’s to be expected. Give yourself over to it. There’s no purchase to be found here, Keith. The future is not a foothold. It’s the cliff’s edge, and the tangle of gnarled roots you skinned your knee against at age eight, and the sun setting over a horizon you feel you’ll never reach, or return to.

Please—

What? she says. What is it? Open your eyes and tell me.

With effort, Keith’s eyes flicker open. He inhales sharply and opens his mouth.

Lance—

• • •

There’s a moment before the scene can settle fully, where Keith feels unsteady around the knees and is only half-processing the memory unfurling at his feet.

Then a wall of sound descends all around him—strokes of heavy rain against gravel on a planet he can’t yet recall by name—and he watches himself climb down the Black Lion’s lit-up ramp. He lowers his head to the rain, in respect, or submission. It pelts against his helmet, captures the exposed flesh of his neck, runs down the back of his armor. Keith feels the cold seep like a wet kiss against his own unarmored back. He reaches backwards to fix the fit of his leather jacket as this older, more streamlined version of himself sets off for an alien hostel situated a few dozen yards from his poor parking job.

It’s then that he hears it.

“Keith!”

That he’s able to pick up on and pinpoint it over Pherantheam’s wild winter rain speaks to how well-attuned he’s become to the sound of that voice, spoken just so, in that unflinchingly hungry tone. Enough to scandalize even a troop of high-ranking Blade of Marmora soldiers, he thinks. It raises a path of gooseflesh up and down his arms, sends the hair on his nape standing electrically. He feels his strides lengthen a great impatient distance, then he’s tearing the gloves from his hands and the helmet from his head to toss them aside and sprinting towards the voice, arms pumping.

Lance is a burning beacon through the falling rain. He’s a desert mirage moments from meeting Keith’s parched tongue. Every atom in Keith’s body sings after him. For him.

This set of limbs—supple, military-efficient—seems to know Lance’s warmth the way it knows his absence. Older Keith has weathered and withstood the two weeks away from said warmth, but only just barely.

He senses in his own real life limbs the seed of something similar. Something not yet fully grown. Something that’s already ensnared this older Keith. He’s stupid with it, this Keith.

Stupid with love for Lance.

It sends stunned shivers down Keith’s real body.

Through the deluge, he can almost just make out the shape of Lance in his paladin armor as he moves to greet Keith headlong. Lance’s long legs carry him the distance with gusto, Shadow bounding excitedly at his heels, tail wagging.

Keith’s cosmic wolf makes no move to teleport the last few yards over to Keith; such would be unfair, and according to the quality of this memory and the date during which it takes place, his wolf knows better than to cheat Lance that way when Lance has been kept from Keith this long. Lance, too, at least, seems to be overcome with feeling. For Keith, he muses, awed.

For me. That’s me, he thinks, the attached idiot implied.

Another, “Keith,” sounds, this one more breathlessly relieved, and then Lance is throwing himself bodily into Keith’s arms. The force of his bulk knocks the both of them back several feet.

Keith’s body gives, then holds its ground against Lance’s not inconsiderable weight, all his wiry warrior’s muscle. He gets his arms around that trim waist and is allowed one fleeting look at Lance—his hair gone doubly curly with water where it’s sticking to his forehead, lashes catching errant drops of rain which bead there like translucent pearls, freckles nowhere to be seen in the dead of an alien winter, though this fact does little to dissuade the strength of Keith’s desire, his willingness to map out each inch of Lance’s face under freezing sheets of rain—before Lance’s mouth is on him.

Forcing his lips apart.

Kissing him wide and open-mouthed.

The violence of Keith’s shock—real Keith’s, the one frozen where he stands with eyes locked on this memory version of he and Lance—is a physical knifepoint in his gut. He feels his own mouth fall slack just as memory Keith’s does, like they’re both wired the same somehow, dumb-stupid in identical, hopelessly infatuated ways. Lance’s warm tongue prods his and Keith inhales sharply as something comes loose inside of him.

A dam bursting, his mind supplies.

Every Lance-related feeling Keith has ever kept a lid on, has silenced beneath the weight of the mission, the fall of his Marmora hood, gusts out of him with the force of a flock of Olkarion songbirds. Dizzily, he gives himself over to the memory and Lance’s questing hands.

They’re of the same height in this vision from the future and Keith’s hair is as overlong as ever, sopping wet against the high-collar of his armor. A pink scar curves up from the edge of his jaw, blade-like. His movements are unabashed, well-worn with how often they’ve been carried out against Lance’s body.

Locked in heated embrace, he and Lance give off the impression of a young couple recently bound in holy matrimony.

As if to echo this thought, Keith slides two palms up Lance’s neck to tangle in his shorter hair and knead. Lance’s neck bows beautifully beneath the pressure like he thinks he’s taller than he truly is and their noses mash together uncomfortably up close. The pain of it seems to spur Keith on because he kisses Lance harder, savage. He tilts his head at an angle, the better to catch Lance’s lips from, and Lance grips him more tightly, tries to pull Keith closer where they’re already plastered against each other from head-to-toe.

Keith can taste rainwater on Lance’s mouth. He lets out a broken sound against it that ripples through real Keith like the touch of two palms to a lion’s forcefield.

“Keith,” Lance breathes, after pulling back the required inch to murmur the word into his mouth.

His hands hover at the small of Keith’s back and he makes an aborted gesture like he intends to divest Keith of his armor right here in the middle of the hospice district on Pherantheam. He seems to remember himself before he can, instead smoothing those hands up Keith’s arms.

He is wild and restless with longing, this version of Lance.

“Lance,” Keith answers, winded.

“Arr-ooo,” Shadow yips from their feet.

“Hang on,” Keith pants into Lance’s mouth. “Let me look at you for a minute.”

“S’only been fifteen days,” Lance says, grinning something giddy. The joy of rainfall is still a newfound marvel and it shows on his face, this man who so craves the touch of water against flesh. “I can assure you, nothing’s changed since you last looked.”

Keith says, “Look who’s been counting.”

“Fifteen days,” Lance says, “seven hours and twenty-six minutes, give or take. I can also recite that in Altean units of time, if you’d like.”

The edge of Keith's mouth pulls up on one side. “Only fifteen days and you can’t take your hands off of me.”

“That,” says Lance, “is always the case and you know it, babe. I can, however, remove my hands, if you prefer—”

“That won’t be necessary,” Keith insists, pulling a bell-like laugh from Lance’s lips, which he muffles with his mouth. 

The tiny room in Keith’s brain that he seems to share with this older version of himself overflows with unfamiliar warmth, and memories, a floodgate of flashbacks unleashed.

I prefer you, says older Keith’s mind, laid out on an afghan on the northern shores of Cuba, skin sun-warmed and covered in a fine layer of sand, laughing with eyes closed as the sea ebbs and flows past your feet. I prefer you in coveralls slipped off above the waist when the heat of southern Texas gets to be too terrible, sleeves knotted at your hips, standing on a stepladder in the ugliest room in my childhood home, paint roller in hand as you loudly debate to me the merits of the shade ashen tan versus library leather. I prefer you stooped in the soil next to my mother, who looks on with interest as you dig up sweet roots and homegrown beets with your bare hands, grinning at your finds and thrusting them into her face, waiting for her eyes to light up happily.

And she motions to me where I’m watching the scene unfold from the sidelines, says something like, “Keith! Come here and look at this!” and I do, smiling a small smile all the while, and when I kneel carefully in the dirt I can’t help leaning thoughtlessly forward to press a kiss to the corner of your mouth despite my aversion to public displays of affection, and the significance of the gesture shows on your face like a summer flush, you murmur something like, “You freaking sap,” and my mother and me both laugh, ducking our heads in unison, and the universe clicks inside me in a way I didn’t used to think fate would allow.

At least not for boys like me, who grew up all alone and awful—delinquents in the making who’d learned to survive off of the taste of our own blood in our mouths—but the good in my life has always been about the memories of my father, and the daydreams about my mother, and then Shiro, and then the team, and then my mother again, real and in the flesh, and then you, always you, clogging my brain like a catchy love ballad with an irresistibly sweet tune.

I prefer you, says Keith, as you are, always and endlessly, with everything in my body. I will never not prefer you, Lance.

And Keith—the real Keith in red leather still watching all the Pherantheam kissing—sways on his feet in overwhelmed, heart-stopping shock as a flash of silver catches his eye and then becomes the plain, uncomplicated beauty of an engagement ring wrapped around the third finger of memory Keith’s left hand where it’s resting at Lance’s nape. It sits inset with a cleverly cut moonstone in the color purple.

Its match is, Keith confirms with the flick of a glance, on Lance’s left hand.

He thinks his legs might buckle beneath the weight of this revelation, though it fits so snugly, so luxuriously, beside his assessment of this distant future, where he is allowed to dash dramatically through rainwater to get to Lance, and rake his fingers through his hair, and push his tongue into that wanting mouth.

Keith stumbles back, out of surprise and inevitability and pure, riotous desire, and keeps stumbling until he’s bumped clumsily into the nose of what feels like a large ship. When he whirls on his feet to check for damage, there is a split second of vertigo and blindingly brilliant white light before the canvas shifts.

The blue of Pherantheam’s sky mid-storm evaporates at once. It turns runny with sunset colors in rich oranges and yellows and pinks. Without warning, the rain stops, like a switch has been flipped. Further back, the far-off sound of sloshing waves begins.

When Keith lets himself look, really look, he realizes he's standing nose-to-nose with the Red Lion, whose mouth hangs open. Not five seconds later a memory version of Lance jogs past him and up the ramp, stirring Keith's hair. Lance adjusts the way his helmet sits on his head with a muttered curse. He’s ocean-damp and finely-freckled all over, in a white button-down stuck to his skin with moisture. The shirt flaps with the breeze, parted at Lance’s bare, dewy chest.

He is tenderly unkempt, this memory of Lance, like maybe only minutes before he’d dragged himself lazily ashore after a casual swim out at sea and had been letting himself dry off naked under the sun somewhere. His brown feet are bare and sand-covered where they’re ascending the Red Lion’s ramp. He looks like the vacation version of himself and when Keith thinks to check, he finds no ring on Lance’s finger.

Keith's heart stops, then thunders terribly in panicked staccato. Maybe—but no. It can't be. Do he and Lance fall apart in some version of this future? Are they split up? Considering divorce? Keith would—never. Wouldn't stop to even consider legal separation. It's not in his genetic makeup. You can't undo the kind of love he felt, that monstrous creature that had taken up residence in older Keith's chest just one memory ago. That breed of love—impossible, immovable, solid as rock—doesn't just disappear.

So how did they get here? 

Death? No. Not an option. Cheating? It couldn't be. Keith is loyal as a dog and though Lance might seem flighty to some, Keith knows him. He's firm and unswerving when he loves someone, a grade A hopeless romantic with woefully devoted sensibilities. 

Maybe...perhaps...and this is just a thought, some rankled part of Keith whispers, he removes his ring when he's swimming.

Oh.

Keith lets out a shaky breath.

Get it together, he thinks at himself, with vehemence. Why are you so invested in a future that isn't even set in stone? Fever dreams have hurt less.

He doesn't let himself answer that, just follows Lance up Red's ramp like a lost puppy. He's numb with worry and halfway to attempting to communicate with a figment of deep space when Lance finally speaks. 

“I answer to a madman,” he mutters darkly, ducking inside Red’s unlit cockpit with a sigh. Then he taps irritably at his blue-toned helmet like he hopes that connected through the comm-link. “You hear me, Keith? I share my bed with a madman. A madman. I was luxuriating, by the sea and then the sand, as I was promised I’d be able to when you whisked us all away to Rietheira. And I let myself be whisked! For what! For terribly timed SOS messages! And sand! In all my—my most private nooks and crannies! Answer me, you dick, or I am withholding cuddles for a week! What is this so-called emergency ruining my island holiday?”

Keith comes to a stop at Red’s pilot seat, watching as Lance drops tiredly into it. He slumps over, head in his hands.

“Ugh. Red,” Lance prompts, when his seat remains stationary, the cockpit dark and shadowed with disuse. “Red. C’mon. Wake up. I know you were enjoying yourself—as was I—but I’m here on Keith’s orders, so chop chop. You can work on your tan some other time, buddy, let’s go.”

Beyond Red’s glass viewscreen, Rietheira’s natural light is dimmer than a summer glow. It’s an incandescent pink where the planet’s sun has begun its slow, languid descent below the horizon. Two or three bright blue feathered creatures glide past the glass, giving faint musical cries. A wave rises, then retreats.

Lance frowns and sits up from his slump. “Red,” he says, worry bleeding into his voice, “what the hell is the matter with y—”

As though spurred on by some silent, unseen cue, Red begins to rise to his full height, godlike. He raises his enormous head bit by idle bit until he’s given his face completely to Rietheira’s waiting sun. Pink light pours inside of the cockpit. The once-dark cabin goes radiant with color.

Before Lance can so much as blink, his seat is sliding forward with a decisive click. It jerks to a stop at Red’s dashboard, right in front of a waiting Keith, who had up until this moment been using the lack of light to camouflage himself. Now, he stands backlit by the sun, burnished and blazing at his edges. The remnants of his red paladin are showing through the steadfast silhouette of his black paladin. His hands have been stuffed inside the pockets of his pressed trousers, an immense show of restraint for a man whose default pose is crossed arms and a scowl.

He lifts his head to look at Lance through his dark bangs, smiling crookedly. His collarbone juts past the parted collar of his shirt where it’s been left unbuttoned at the throat. It sits untucked, slightly wrinkled from the island breeze. His skin is the muted pink-red of a Rietheira dusk and his hair has been pulled back into a low ponytail.

If Lance is tenderly unkempt, Keith is carefully composed and still achingly effortless at a glance.

Lance gives a gasp, clutching white-knuckled at the armrests of his chair. “Keith,” he says, blue eyes wide and stunned. “I thought you were—what are you—”

“Take off your helmet,” Keith murmurs without moving.

Lance blinks, slowly. “What—?”

At this, Keith leans forward at the waist to flick lightly at Lance’s helmet. “Off,” he orders, soft.

Dumb with surprise, Lance lifts the helmet from his head to set it neatly at his feet. His hair is damp and curly, the collar of his shirt dark with drying ocean water. “I, um, I was…” he says, adjusting his posture, gone polite with bewilderment.

It’s something this Keith never tires of putting a match to, and watching flare up—the way Lance falls back on his manners in unfamiliar situations, harder and faster the closer he is to home, or even when he’s heard his mother’s voice over the phone recently. Like a person’s accent going thick and uncaring after returning to their motherland, and the source of their true tongue. Adulthood looks attractive on Lance, sits on his brow deferential and urbane.

Keith pushes off of Red’s dashboard and comes to a stop at his chair. He reaches out with one hand to thumb gently at Lance’s bottom lip, then moves his fingers so that they’re gripping Lance by the point of his chin. He angles Lance’s head to his liking, tipped up with mouth parted, and watches those blue eyes flicker, following his movements like a curious magnet.

“Don’t talk,” Keith says. “Just listen.”

Lance, ever the babbler, says, “Wha—”

Stubborn, Keith thinks with affection, and leans down.

He silences Lance with a kiss—slow, unrelenting, arresting in quality and length if Lance’s lax mouth and quiet hum is anything to go by—and uses that momentary lapse in the blue paladin’s concentration to lever himself to the floor, taking the knee with quiet ceremony. The sight they make is undeniable, thrown into warmly romantic color in Red’s cockpit.

And now I pledge my life to you, Keith thinks.

He rummages in his trouser pocket until he finds and removes a small ring box. When Lance’s eyes flutter open after the kiss has been broken, they stare hazily at Keith a moment before widening at the display laid out and waiting impatiently before him: Keith, one knee lowered, the other raised, a dark blue ring resting on a bed of crushed velvet offered up.

Lance’s sharp inhale is loud, jarring in the shared space.

The sound of it lays Keith’s nerves open, and bare. He fingers the edge of the ring box, head bowed, and says, “I’ve practiced for this moment over and over again and I still think I’ll screw it up somehow. Just—um, bear with me, okay?”

Lance nods dumbly, hands cupped over the lower half of his face. He looks on the verge of tears and also like he’s been bowled over by the sight of Keith so unsure, the timid bow of his neck at odds with the so called war-hardened leader of Voltron.

“Everything about me,” Keith begins, after clearing his throat roughly and staring a hot hole into the skin of Lance’s bare chest, “is impulsive. Reckless. Unthinking.”

The grip Lance has got on his own face loosens, slides low to reveal a parted mouth between the criss-cross of his fingers. Teeth over tongue. Held there like that and waiting. A shaft of red Rietheira light has been flung out like liquid and caught by the bones of Lance’s body. His eyes have never burned bluer.

“But you…” Keith murmurs, giving Lance his gaze. “You’re the most deliberate thing I’ve ever done. When I finally let myself think about you like this, after—after so long spent limiting my imagination, I kept saying...I have to do this right. I can’t be unthinking about Lance the way I am with everything and everyone else. For the first time...every decision conscious, every choice given thought, all my words would mean more and cut deeper. I thought being with you would be torture for that reason, at first—”

Lance snorts through his fingers. His pupils are blown and glittering with humor. A faint dimple edges past the press of his left thumb.

“Let me finish,” Keith says, biting his lip against a smile. “I thought being with you would be torture. And in some ways it was. Trying to wrestle myself into order...trying to be their leader and your boyfriend at the same time. And in others it’s...it’s been the most extraordinary experience of my life. Taking you day by day, learning you inch by inch, loving you slowly, deliberately, with eyes wide open. I want to keep doing that. With you. I—I want to choose you and keep choosing you, Lance, for the rest of my life. And I want you to accept this ring—if you do accept it—with that knowledge. That I’ve chosen you, will keep choosing you, will never not choose you, above all else. That’s what this means to me. You understand that?”

Lance nods weakly. His eyes are shining with unshed tears and he presses his wobbling lower lip still with his two front teeth. The skin goes white beneath the weight.

“You’re beautiful,” Keith says quietly. “So beautiful it hurts to look at you some days. And—and smart in ways no one sees, refuses to see, and you make me laugh until my stomach hurts, and you’re capable and impressive and you love so valiantly, Lance, so selflessly. It’s like you’ve got endless reserves of the stuff just waiting to give to the universe. You’re all love, down to your marrow. It’s in your blood, I think. You just...you make it look effortless. And you make me happy...so, so happy. You bring out the best in me. And...and my childhood…”

Lance is crying now, hot-faced and silent into the palms of his hands.

Keith says, clearing his throat a second time and stubbornly pushing back his own tears, “It was never about making my own choices. It was always...take what’s given because you won’t find better anywhere else, not with the way you are. Learn to love the things that feel wrong against your skin. Wear this even if it won’t fit. Find family in strangers you don’t trust—can’t trust—over and over again, with one obvious exception. All the things that have led me to this moment, to you, have made me appreciate that all the more. My ability to choose. To reach my hand out to you, to seek you out through rain or fog, to let myself listen to you even when it goes against my most base instincts. Listen...I—I’ve been agonizing over this decision for a long time, but it’s never been uncertainty about you stopping me from getting down on one knee. Because I’ve never been uncertain about my choice in you, Lance.”

Lance moves his fingers aside to whisper, “What stopped you?”

“It,” says Keith, throat working. He wipes his clammy hand off on the seat of his trousers. “Uh, it was...it was the fear that you’d say no. That you’d leave after I asked.”

Lance scoffs softly and lays his palm to Keith’s cheek, right over the curve of his scar. “Idiot,” he murmurs.

Keith turns his face into that palm, brushes a kiss over Lance’s lifeline, and whispers: “So marry me.”

Lance opens his mouth to answer.

“I,” Keith rushes to add, heartbeat thrumming hummingbird-quick, suddenly desperate to delay Lance’s answer, “um...I thought about proposing to you in Havana or Varadero—one of the two—but we won’t be back on Earth for a while yet, and I thought I could wait a few months, I really did, I promise that this decision was deliberate even if it seems wildly impulsive, I just kept catching myself looking at your left hand and sighing and I thought for sure I was gonna end up giving myself away, I even talked to Shiro and my mom and Hunk, I called Veronica up and she called me stupid over video chat like three separate times, they all said I should go for it, Rietheira is supposed to look just like northern Cuba at the start of the dry season, I asked around and everything, so I know this is the closest I was gonna get to Earth, but still, I can do better if you—”

“Keith,” Lance says, hushed.

Keith breaks off at once, mouth snapping shut.

Lance says, “I did notice.”

Keith blinks. “Huh?”

"All the weird staring. At my hand, I mean," Lance says, mouth rising into a pleased smile. "I thought maybe you wanted to let me enjoy my vacation without being clingy and were having a hard time following through. Hence the weirdly intense hand-staring. I also say poor follow-through 'cause at night you were still acting like a muscly little koala—"

"Okay," Keith says, visibly disgruntled. "I am not little, we're the same height—"

"My large, sexy, muscly little koala—"

"Lance."

Lance cuts off with a snicker.

Keith glares, even though his mouth very clearly wants to join in on the laughter. "I want to hold your hand, always. I just...I didn't want to tempt myself. Or fate. I would have done something stupid."

"How stupid is stupid? Because there are levels to your stupidity, babe," Lance says, caressing Keith's cheek.

"Stupid like," Keith says, after a considering pause, "like repeatedly stroking your ring finger for the duration of our Rietheira getaway."

Lance's hand stills mid-caress. "I want you to repeatedly stroke my ring finger," he interjects, sounding wistful and also a little whiny. "That's so not stupid, Keith."

"You would have noticed," Keith accuses. "You're romantic like that."

"Says the guy proposing to me at sunset!" Lance says, voice rising. "What's more romantic than seaside declarations of love!"

Keith hangs his head and Lance's hand falls away from his cheek. He massages his temples around a chuckle. "You're distracting me. You're always distracting me. With your smile, and your laughter, and your hands, and—and your personality. You—consume me."

"Well, don't say it like I'm some airborne zombie virus," Lance murmurs, rueful.

Keith looks up and holds Lance's eye with utmost seriousness. "I will never get you out of my head for as long as I live."

Lance's breath catches. "Sometimes...I wish I could see inside your head," he confesses in a whisper.

"It's yours," Keith whispers back, picking up and placing Lance's hand against his cheek once more. "Ask me anything and I'll tell you."

Lance rubs a soft pattern into Keith's cheek with his thumb, murmurs, “Can I see the ring?”

At this, Keith's eyes narrow. “I meant after you agreed to marry me, Lance.”

Lance bites his lip, grin widening. “Shut up and let me look real quick, I just need to...” he says, and plucks the box from Keith’s hand to pass a cool, blue-eyed gaze over the color and cut of the ring up close.

His examination is quick as a flash, like he needed only to confirm some secret suspicion. Then he's very politely pursing his lips against a laugh. It's a moment before he breaks. When he does, he throws his head back to loudly guffaw.

Keith twitches. He switches his weight from one knee to the other, growing self-conscious. “Look,” he says uneasily, shoving his hands into his pockets and giving Lance his frowning profile. “If it’s not up to your incredibly high standards, let me know and I’ll return it, alright? You can just—say no. I’m not interested in playing 'will he, won't he' with you, Lance, so say the word and I’ll retract my offer—”

Lance cups Keith’s cheek anew, dragging his gaze back. He's still laughing, harder now, his whole face red with it. There are happy tears running down his cheeks when he nudges Keith back several feet to make room for himself on the floor. He slides from his chair and onto one of his knees, reaches a hand backwards to feel around the underside of his seat, dislodging something with a sly giggle.

Keith stares. “What,” he says, flat.

Lance sets Keith’s ring box at his feet, then procures one of his own. He flips it open with his forefinger and sets it on the raised cap of his knee. “Light of my life,” he murmurs, his grin going softly silly in the half-light. He’s windswept and soggy-haired, chest bare. He’s a summer reverie and the sight of him like this sends Keith’s heart hammering helplessly. “My sun, my moon, my stars. My everything…”

Keith's neck begins to burn. He tries to schools his features before he can give Lance a reaction, but his mouth has already betrayed him. It hangs open. Nestled away in Lance's box is an exact replica of Keith's ring, down to the size and cut of the stone. The only difference is the moonstone's color: it's a deep, swirling red.

“Where to start…” Lance whispers, smoothing a hand down Keith’s shirtfront, then back up. He plays with the first button, fingering Keith's clavicle through the open collar. It sends a hot shiver rippling down Keith's spine. “What should I tell you that I haven’t already whispered into your hair at some point?”

“Lance,” Keith mutters hoarsely, embarrassed by the way he’s being looked at.

“You’re gorgeous,” Lance begins, as though he hasn’t heard Keith. He traces his way down Keith’s body and back up again with his blue eyes. Keith feels it like a physical touch. “Seriously, stupidly, impossibly gorgeous.”

Keith ducks his head, ears hot.

“No,” Lance says, drawing his face back up with a palm to Keith’s jaw. “Look at me while I wax lyrical about you.”

“I,” Keith whispers, overwhelmed.

“The fire in you is unmatched,” Lance says, thoughtful. He strokes his thumb over the clench of Keith’s jaw, looking at him with wonder. “It’s something that’s carried you through life and I hope it never dies. How much you feel and internalize, how you make passion your weapon and walk worlds like...like you’re gonna burn them to the ground. But you never do, Keith, ‘cause you’re a textbook superhero if I’ve ever seen one. You were brought up by two of them, your dad and Shiro. They raised you right, gave you all the tools, and you took them and ran with them. And—and you never let your pain make you evil or unkind. You survived and you overcame and I look at you now and think...God, there’s nothing you can’t do. No divide you couldn’t bridge. No world you wouldn’t save. You’re a paladin of your own making.”

Keith lets out a soft, choking sort of noise. His cheeks go wet and he swipes at them with the heels of his hands, digging them into his eye sockets. He’s flushed bright. Burning with embarrassment, and acknowledgement, and love.

“You’re my hero,” Lance whispers.

Keith shakes his head, shoulders trembling.

“Yes,” Lance returns, final. “Look at me. Sweetheart. C’mere.”

Keith lifts his head and opens his eyes, gone blurry with a film of tears. He shoves his nose into his collar, mops at it where it’s grown damp.

“Keith,” Lance says, with quiet fervor and adoration and every ounce of that stupid, valiant love he’s so full to the brim with. “You’re my home, and my heart, and my hero. That’s what this ring means to me, okay? That’s what you agree to accept, if you say yes. That I’m gonna follow you to the farthest corners of the universe if I have to, so I can keep you. Every second away from you will be a second I miss my home. And it doesn’t matter to me where we settle down to make a life together so long as you're there. From this point onward, the word 'homesick' will be known as my new name for missing you."

“Don’t discount Cuba like that,” Keith whispers shakily.

“Some homes you grow out of,” Lance whispers back. “Some homes you grow up in and others you choose. And that doesn’t mean you love the old ones any less. It just means you’ve picked a new one, because they make you feel like no one else does. Because you want to raise a family with them. Because you want to grow old and die next to them.”

The tears come faster and hotter now. Keith lowers his face against the wetness, letting the tears roll like raindrops down the apples of his cheeks. His snotty nose is a lost cause and his button-down has been ruined. He’s an emotional wreck, he thinks, but the light Lance has turned on him refuses to dim. Grows brighter, if anything, at the sight of Keith so vulnerable.

Keith sniffles and narrows his eyes, glowering at Lance’s ring box. “Hang on. Where’d you get your ring?”

“Allura recommended me a jeweler,” Lance answers, frowning in thought. “And helped me pick mine out.”

Keith’s shoulders sag in defeat. “Same here.”

At that, Lance’s face breaks open on a smile and he laughs again, breathless and beaming. “Marry me,” he says.

Keith scowls and grips Lance by the back of his neck, the fingers of both hands buried in his curly-haired nape. He digs them in harder, says, “I asked you first.”

“I asked you second,” Lance says. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

“That—that’s bullshit!” Keith blurts, gaping. “We proposed within minutes of each other! You stole my idea and my set-up!”

“I don’t think your tear ducts can tell the difference, to be honest,” Lance says, then yelps when Keith yanks, reprimanding, at his hair. “Besides, I’ve been following in your footsteps since we were Garrison cadets. If Iverson’s scary mug couldn’t get me to let up, no one can.”

“What’s that thing they always say in movies,” Keith murmurs, leaning in, “about…‘if your friend decided to jump off a bridge, would you jump too?’”

“First of all,” Lance says, meeting Keith inch for inch until they’ve gently bumped heads. They stay pressed together like that, forehead-to-forehead. “You’re my fiancé, not my friend…”

“I haven’t agreed,” Keith says, eyebrow raised, “to anything.”

“I’m feeling optimistic,” Lance says.

Keith rolls his eyes, grinning incredulously. “Oh, fuck you.”

“Second of all,” Lance continues, looking very proud of himself, “if you jumped off of a bridge, yes, I’d absolutely follow to fish you out of the ocean waiting at the bottom of it and I’d tell you what a reckless idiot you are and then I’d kiss you so stupid you wouldn’t remember your own name afterwards.”

“You talk a big game,” Keith murmurs. “You should kiss me right now, see if that holds up.”

“Answer my question and maybe I will,” Lance murmurs back.

“You didn’t frame it as a question,” says Keith.

“Keith!” Lance groans, frustrated. “You are such a freaking know-it-all sometimes, you know that?”

Keith laughs against Lance's mouth, giddy with it. He’s never felt happier, he doesn’t think. Never felt more buoyant, more free, more outward-leaning and homebound, than he does right now. Never more stupid, about his own name and about Lance and about how badly he wants to start staking out potential cities to settle down in back on Earth and then maybe adoption centers, for animals or tiny babies, and then home goods and hardware stores.

“Lower your baby count,” Keith says, challenging.

“Can’t believe that’s your first thought and not what kind of wedding cake we’re gonna serve at our ceremony—tres leches, FYI and thank you very much,” Lance says. “And I already told you, eight babies or bust.”

“No dice,” Keith returns, pressing a threatening kiss to the corner of Lance’s mouth.

“Mmm, okay, seven babies and two cats,” Lance counters, twisting to search out Keith’s mouth with single-minded mulishness.

“Six babies and one cat,” Keith says, dodging Lance’s mouth.

Lance whines unhappily, leaning in a second, more stubborn time. “Seven babies and no cats. I want so many, Keith, that we’re drowning in them. We’re gonna have little chore charts for each one and we’re gonna paint their nurseries together and take them on road trips and let Shadow slobber all over their little faces and love them so good and they’re gonna be itty bitty Kogane-McClain heroes who look up to us and make Earth a better place.”

Keith cracks, his heart overflowing, and surrenders his mouth to Lance finally. “Fine, fine," he breathes, waist-deep in desire and steadily drowning. "Seven babies, evenly-spaced out and not adopted all at once. And we buy a house first and read all kinds of parenting 101 books. Shiro gets to name at least one, or we name one after Shiro.”

“Yesss,” Lance says, smothering Keith with hungry, happy kisses. “Marry me, marry me, marry me. Say yes.”

Keith laughs, head tipped back, helpless against Lance’s assault. “You say yes.”

“You say yes!”

“On three?”

“One…”

“Two…”

“I’m too impatient!” Lance shouts. “Yes, I marry you, you marry me, I scratch your back, you scratch mine, we’re each other’s forever, let’s make out now!”

Keith laughs harder, stomach aching, and stifles the sound against Lance’s mouth. He’s still teary-eyed and he can feel damp skin beneath the pads of his thumbs as he slides his fingers up, up, up, to cradle Lance’s head by his jaw and cheekbones and chin, and to catch his mouth in a tender, slow-moving kiss.

When they slide their respective rings onto one another’s fingers and clasp hands minutes or hours or eons later, overwhelmed at the sight of themselves—red on Keith and blue on Lance—their moonstones glitter a moment and then go deeply purple, rich and swirling beneath their polish.

“Huh! Does that only happen when we’re touching!” Lance exclaims, looking superbly impressed by the visual display. “Wow, Allura really outdid herself…”

“We’ll thank her later,” Keith says and tugs Lance into a new, claiming kiss.

• • •

Lance slinks into the room to collect him before dawn breaks.

Keith is half-sprawled across a made-up couch in someone else’s home—not one he recognizes at a passing glance, though it’s painstakingly, lovingly furnished and to such a degree that Keith can’t help but feel safe inside the memory of it—when the lanky shadow cuts across the spill of blue light made by the television that’s still on. An infomercial for electric kitchenware is playing on low and Keith’s got a book open across his lap, head bent.

Absurdly, he feels at home. In this strange living room and even stranger house, with its beige walls and religious paraphernalia and patterned curtains in delicate shades of yellow.

The shadow moves across the floor, then swallows Keith up, balm-like. It stills like a ghost awaiting acknowledgment.

Keith looks up. Into Lance’s darkened face, those glinting blue eyes. His hair is sleep-mussed, cowlicked at the back the way Keith so loves—senses that he loves, in this future memory—and his sleep mask has been pushed from his eyes in such a way that his curly bangs aren't in his face for once, baring his brown forehead. Keith has never understood Lance's passionate crusade to rid him of his bangs until now. Lance looks younger without them, and his freckles stand starker, striking against his smooth brown skin even despite the distance. They're treasures of a face exposed to an earthen sun a second too long and Keith stares and stares at them, for an uncomfortable length of time.

The moment stretches out between them like candle-warmed wax, a lover's electric secret.

Memory Lance seems unflustered by all of Keith's staring. Seems to, oddly enough, preen beneath the heated attention, like he's been made smug by the knowledge that Keith can't take his eyes off of him.

Keith wants to put his mouth to those freckles, in both bodies. His own and the body of this future version of himself, older and more open. He sees it on his own face—desire let loose in the darkness between them. It makes his real face go hot the way watching romance movies with adults in the room used to embarrass him, but he can't for the life of himself tear his eyes away from the pair, this memory of he and Lance. 

He's intruding on a moment he wants more than anything to experience firsthand.

Memory Keith's heart gives a hungry tremor, as if to echo real Keith's want. He trails a look down Lance's bare legs, his mismatched socks, says, "What are you doing up—?"

Lance covers Keith's mouth with a warm palm like he means to kidnap him into the night. "Shh," he whispers. "Couldn't sleep. And if you don't lower your voice, you're gonna wake the whole house up and then we'll both have hell to pay. I'll have to explain to all ten McClains—in excruciating, interrogation-level detail—why I'm dragging our tragic hero into my bedroom at three in the morning."

"You're dragging...?" Keith whispers, eyes widening. He's suddenly grateful they're whispering, or his voice would have absolutely cracked on that second syllable. "Me? Into your—?"

"I'm dragging," Lance confirms with a sly smile. 

Keith accepts Lance's outstretched hand without protest. With his other, he sets his book—Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Yoko Tawada, borrowed from the McClain bookshelf—on a coffee table covered in ringed water stains and allows himself to be pulled to his feet.

"Don't look too excited," Lance whispers dryly. "It's just my warm, comfy bed, and my mind-blowing cuddles, and my slowest, softest kisses, and—"

"Your mom," Keith objects, trying to get his brain to play along. His body is already a lost cause—rebelling against all logic, melting into Lance's touch and following helplessly after him. "She was pretty clear about wanting me to sleep out here."

"I'll sneak you back out before she notices," Lance vows. "Just a quick cat nap. Fingers crossed."

"She might hear us—"

"I'll be extra quiet."

"You're never extra quiet. Have you met yourself? You once stopped in the middle of an alien marketplace to talk to a mannequin."

"I thought it was an android!"

"It didn't move or respond to you for at least five minutes, Lance."

"Androids are extremely good listeners!" Lance whisper-yells. "Unlike somebody."

"Hey! I listen!" Keith whisper-yells back, insulted. "I listen so good!"

"Come listen to me over here, then," Lance taunts, waggling his eyebrows in the direction of his room. "No funny business, I swear. I just want to cuddle my boyfriend until I fall asleep. We can count my glow-in-the-dark stars together. I'll be big spoon if you want."

Keith wants. "You can't tempt me with sweet talk," he says, even though Lance absolutely can.

"I love you," Lance whispers, as proof that he absolutely can.

"Dammit, Lance," Keith mutters, caving immediately.

Lance is startled into laughter. "You're looking thoroughly tempted."

"Your mom won't like it," Keith says, glaring. "That doesn't mean I won't."

"That's the spirit!" Lance says, beaming. "And anyway, I don't know why you're choosing now of all times to be a respectful, rule-abiding boyfriend. Any other day and you'd be threatening to 1v1 someone on my behalf."

"That was one time," Keith says, tangling their fingers together. "And it was a cultural misunderstanding, I told you. I thought that street vendor was insulting your face to the general populace. Also, I can't 1v1 your mom."

"Not with that attitude, you can't. I'm joking, babe, relax." Lance throws on a winsome grin that sends Keith's stomach swooping. He sets off for his bedroom at a clip, tugging Keith behind him. "My mom will not crucify you for sleeping in my bed, I promise."

Keith says, "Maybe not, but I'm kind of hoping to make a good impression here. Is that a crime...? Wanting your mom's approval? So I'm welcomed back into your home? And not forcibly removed because they think I wrongfully seduced their son in his childhood bedroom?"

"First of all," Lance whispers, pulling them to a stop at the mouth of a dark hallway, finger raised, "I am already seduced. Eternally. I have been seduced once and for all, capiche? It's a little late for that realization. Second of all: no crucifixions, like I said. We're a Catholic family, so we understand the gravity of execution by nailing, dude."

“Is that not a venial sin?” says Keith, dragging his eyes heavenward. “I only went to Mass for like a year and I slept through most services, so maybe I’m off-base here, but I’m pretty sure you just mortally offended Jesus right then, Lance.”

“You can’t offend someone so hard you kill them,” says Lance, “if they’re already dead.”

Keith lets out a mock-affronted gasp.

“Shh!” Lance hisses, snickering like a little kid when Keith starts to loudly whisper sacrilege! into his ear, reeling him in by his hips. He takes an earlobe gently between his teeth and tugs. Lance squirms away, says, “Oh my God, you think you’re so funny, don’t you?”

“Well,” says Keith.

Lance claps a hand over Keith’s mouth and crowds him into the nearest wall, saying, “Dating me has made you funnier, shut up. Shiro will vouch for me and you know it.”

Keith makes a halfhearted, jokey attempt at peeling Lance’s hand away and ends up ramming an elbow into a framed family photo next to his head. It wobbles, then tumbles from its hook. A tiny, gap-toothed Lance in little leather sandals goes sliding down the wall.

“Shit!”

They both lunge for the frame at the same time, wide-eyed and with twin inhales of terror. Keith freezes with his fingers wrapped around Lance’s hands, which are wrapped around the framed photo, which they’ve saved seconds before it could meet its doom against the McClain’s hardwood floors. They exchange an uneasy look, listening closely for any disturbed sleepers puttering around the house all of a sudden.

Keith’s ears ring in the sudden silence.

“That was close,” he breathes. “Uh. My apologies to six-year-old Lance.”

Lance buries his face in Keith’s hair and laughs quietly a moment, shoulders drooping in relief. “We’re fine.”

“No crucifixions,” Keith says.

“Right, exactly,” says Lance. He lifts his head and remounts the photo from its hook. “At worst, Veronica makes a few embarrassing tweets about us sneaking around like fifteen year olds. Maybe my mom gives you the shovel talk, shows you where she’ll stow your body in the event that you break my heart. Then she cooks you your favorite meal. Bada bing, bada boom. McClain boyfriend hazing complete.”

“I’ll be fine,” Keith says. He leans his head back against the wall, eyes flickering shut. “I can handle whatever they throw my way so long as they like me.”

Lance frowns. Says, “Hey.” Touches the tips of his fingers to Keith’s chin, adds, “Pretty boy. Look at me for a sec.”

Keith opens his eyes to squint doubtfully at Lance in the dark.

“If they didn’t like you, you’d know by now,” he says. “And anyway, I like you enough for everybody. I like you so much it’s practically oozing from all my crevices.”

Keith snorts, wrinkling his nose. “Gross.”

“Shut up. I like you so much it’s...it’s...it’s just radiating off of me, dude,” whispers Lance. “The whole world can smell it on me, you get me? It’s like a neon sign, or a forehead tattoo. ‘Enamored With Keith Kogane Forevermore.’ And at the end of the day...that’s all my family really cares about. Me being happy.”

Keith gets his fingers through the curly hair growing at Lance’s nape, averts his eyes and mutters, “So I make you happy?”

“Yeah,” says Lance, and leans in to whisper his next words directly into Keith’s ear: “That’s kinda how falling in love works. You ever heard of the concept, sweetheart?”

Keith’s eyes flit to Lance’s face, go huge at the word love, expression somehow both carefully accusing and wildly shocked. “I’ve heard of it,” he ventures. “I don’t know. My memory might need refreshing.”

“Oh, that so?” Lance murmurs and his voice curls around Keith like plumes of coffeed steam, warmly inviting. He moves to mouth at Keith’s jaw, roaming slowly over the high swell of a cheek to rest his lips against Keith’s temple.

A shudder shakes through Keith. “Yeah,” he whispers. “You should get on that. Pronto.”

Lance spins them on the spot and begins herding Keith towards the only door in the hallway hanging half-cracked, and he says not a word before dragging Keith into a kiss that looks like it should hurt, but only burns in the good way, secondhand and immaterial but unmistakable still, all teeth and tongue, and Keith—the real Keith, the one watching this scene unfold from the outskirts like a lost wraith, or a voyeur—is only able to catch a glimpse of Lance’s childhood bedroom over the taste of Lance against his mouth.

Mint and midnight promises, he thinks, licking his own lips.

He sees a modest row of medals proudly displayed against a baby blue wall, imagines Lance a seasoned war veteran, then realizes they’re all childhood accolades and awards for feats like Fastest Butterfly Stroke, or, Best Still Rings Performance, spots a blanket-strewn twin bed with a headboard made of metal flowers, glossy Neil Armstrong and Die Hard posters, a row of desert succulents sitting on the sill of an open window overlooking a deserted Havana street corner, a hamper brimming with dirty clothes and a bookshelf lined with adventure novels, framed photos, gleaming trophies, little comic book action figures.

All this in the span of thirty seconds, as memory Keith runs his fingers through Lance’s hair, dislodging his sleep mask with a hushed noise Keith’s ears mistake for anguish, but which really seems to be pleasure, and memory Keith crushes their bodies closer. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut. Lance fists one hand in the collar of Keith’s t-shirt, uses the other to fumble blindly for the doorknob, reaching a hand backwards and shoving.

The door—where a handmade sign that reads ¡Quédate fuera! in a childlike scrawl is taped—slams shut in real Keith’s face.

He stands staring at it in a dumb stupor until the memory eventually flickers, then fades.

• • •

When he comes to again, the newest memory begins at the point between bruised knuckles and sweating glass; Keith’s hand is wrapped around something non-alcoholic and sickeningly sleep-inducing. He has it on good authority that the drink’s effects will begin to kick in within the hour, during which point he’ll be forced to retire to the attached hostel and his tiny, economical bedchambers for what’s left of the night (very little).

He stares hard at the syrup-dark liquid, willing sleep to swallow him. Ice cubes in the shape of tiny aquatic animals float fin-up in his glass. He counts them, head slumped against the granite bar of a planet called Lothos—one in an unending line of extrasolar rest-stops on the way back to Earth.

His eyes, he thinks, have never felt heavier, more terribly untired. Awake, despite the bone-deep exhaustion he’s been carrying around like a second skin for the last several weeks.

He stands off to the side, in his real body, and studies the weary line of memory Keith’s shoulders. He’s got his red paladin armor on and his hair looks a good few inches longer than the last time Keith caught sight of it in the glare of his mother’s glass visor, his visage angled back at him.

The now-familiar scar on this Keith’s face looks recently-given, skin a score of poorly healed burn tissue. The cut of the mark mimics his mother’s, mocking. Sharp, and palely purple-pink, something which sits on his face, half-Galra, half-human. One half of his mother’s, and all Shiro’s.

Around him, the bar is an empty pocket of white noise and amber-colored light. A dull-eyed bartender who’s been saddled with the graveyard shift weaves through the maze of tables to scoop up dirty glassware abandoned by customers now long gone. They dump them one at a time into a bin resting under their three arms, unceremonious. A sad string instrumental plays quietly overhead. A tap is turned on, then shut off, in the time that it takes Keith to draw two breaths.

The fog rising beyond the bar’s windows is faintly red-tinged, shot through with moonlight from the orbiting satellites which surround Lothos, looking down on the planet like bloody little eyes, and someone with a willowy frame—tall, long-legged, hood pulled up around their face—is sweeping towards the exit with the walk of a criminal on the run.

Keith’s eyes catch, then linger with vague interest, before that willowy frame resolves itself into Lance, with his well-worn jeans and broad shoulders. Suddenly Keith’s interest isn’t so vague, becomes the familiar and easily recognizable desire that Lance so often calls up within him, like the warmth of a hearth rekindled. He picks his head up off the bar and spins on his stool, tracking Lance’s movement a moment.

“Hey,” he calls out.

Keith’s voice breaks like the swell of a wave over Lance, taking first his head, and then his shoulders, which go tense beneath his jacket. He freezes. Slowly, he gives Keith his profile, looking caught. “Um,” he says.

Keith tries for a smile. “Got a moonlit tryst with a pretty girl to be at or something?” he says, shooting for casually ironic and missing by a mile, with how he knows the object of Lance’s affections is all wrapped up and cozy back in her bedchambers, sleeping soundly with her band of traveling mice.

It’s been hard to miss, since being back from the quantum abyss. A flock of birds freed in his face, he thinks, would be harder to miss.

The knowledge rests like its own dark-winged avian creature on Keith’s shoulder. It seeps into his voice and colors his words coldly uncaring without his meaning to. He can’t swallow his distaste for the idea fast enough. Lance and Allura, he thinks, haughty, sitting in a tree. He sees his disapproval land like a well-aimed blow. It leaves a crater-like impression in Lance.

Lance stares at Keith for a long moment, blank. Then he’s turning abruptly on his foot and starting for the exit, pace quickening.

“Hey! Hang on!”

Keith shoots up from his barstool, nearly upending his half-finished drink in the process. It’s his second of the night and now his last. He takes two long strides forward and grips the cuff of Lance’s jacket in his fist, forcing him to come to a stop or else watch as the sleeve of his outerwear is ripped from his arm.

Keith says, trying to inject in his voice the commanding tones of a true black paladin, “Wait—”

“Let go!” Lance bursts out, angry and bird-like, startling Keith into stillness.

Oh, Keith thinks, with heat, and wonder, and a pitter-pattering heartbeat.

For all the ways Lance used to play along while Keith took forays into the world of intergalactic leadership, he has never once swallowed his tongue for Keith’s benefit. Never not bared his teeth back at Keith, when challenged or ignored. He has pushed every one of Keith’s buttons, has bitten down on and bloodied Keith’s ideas of teamwork, then soothed the wounds to sleep afterwards with his quiet, kind words.

Even now, Lance is playing by his own rules, carving out a place for himself without waiting for Keith’s commands to travel the distance and find home in him. He’s keeping pace with Keith in some ways and outrunning him in others.

He’s flanking Keith, instead of trailing after him at the expected clip. Instead of letting Keith lead the way without question.

Keith sees in his mind’s eye in this moment the red gases and fogs of Thayserix, starker than on Lothos, and the glowing eyes of Lance’s lion as Keith drifted towards them both in Black. Struck by the image, he imagines them lion-less and watches himself reach through the red gas with the skin of his bare hand, wanting.

He hasn’t stopped dreaming about Lance’s hands since he left. He still dreams about them now.

This, Keith thinks, with something darkly pleased. This is what he’s missed, and longed for, and made to search out in the dejected angle of Lance’s mouth since returning to the team and taking up the mantle of black paladin. The easy rapport of two men on equal footing. The stubborn scowl, and the fierce blue eyes, and the unflinching fight.

I missed you is waiting on Keith’s tongue, preemptive and five weeks too late, simultaneously. He’d like to press it to Lance’s lips. He’d like to spit it at his feet, then grind it into the ground with the toe of his boot till its glow goes out. He’d like to whisper it, psalm-like, into the place where Lance’s shoulder becomes the column of Lance’s throat.

Keith swallows.

Beside them, the bartender wiping down a nearby table pauses, glancing up at the noisy outburst. For a moment, Keith can’t help but see themselves as the bartender must—a scorned lover and his begging boyfriend clinging to him by the jacket sleeve. Except that’s not what they are. Not what they’ve ever been.

It makes Keith go beet red with realization. He lets go of Lance at once, steps hastily back, says, “I—”

“Don’t follow me,” Lance warns, then whirls on his feet and slams his way through the bar’s glass doors, out into the gathering fog.

His silhouette goes red-rimmed. He’s never looked more red paladin than he does in this moment, his hair picked out in brilliant crimsons by Lothos’ sibling moons, Haila and Harlant. Keith follows him through the doors like a moth to flame, itching to feel himself singed.

At the sound of Keith hot on his heels, Lance stops halfway down the beaten, lanter-lined path to round on him with the bright, sparking fury of an electrical storm. “You never listen, do you?”

Keith plants his feet with a soldier’s grace and stares. His hands spasm around nothing; he touches his fingertips to the hilt of his blade, drawing cool comfort from its ridges. “You,” he whispers, then clears his throat violently. “You’re wearing a backpack.”

Lance grips it by the straps and hitches it higher, lifting his chin like an ornery little kid confessing his runaway plans to the police. The line of his brown jaw is Keith at thirteen. The blue of his eyes is like nothing Keith has ever seen.

“Yeah,” Lance says, a challenge. Daring Keith to extrapolate, to put the pieces together with trembling fingers. “I am.”

“Lance,” Keith says. “Why are you wearing a backpack?”

Lance swallows hard. He says, “You know why.”

“No,” Keith says and a twig snaps under the weight of his next footstep. “You—you—why? What are you—?”

“Look, it’s not forever, Keith,” Lance says, biting. Keith could laugh. Keith could cry that’s what they all say! and drag Lance back to the hostel kicking and screaming. “It’s just...it’s an interlude. A ‘to be continued.’ Whatever. I’m—I’m only temporarily leaving. I’ll meet you guys back on Earth. I’ll get a head start on Garrison intel, coordinate with Sam and the rest of them, I’ll—”

“You can’t!” Keith explodes, hands fisted at his sides. His breath rattles harshly through his teeth, chest heaving.

Lance gives Keith his gleaming canines. He stomps forward, crushing leaves and twigs beneath the soles of his sneakers, to crowd Keith into a tree, jabbing a finger at his chest plate. “Oh, can’t I? You got to leave the team, Keith. You got to go out there and find your truths without asking us first. So why the hell can’t I? There are five pilots perfectly capable of filling in the blanks. Shiro has a new arm and he’s dying to get back to flying. So, yeah, I think I can, thanks. I don’t need your approval and I definitely don’t need your goddamn attitude.”

Keith wants to say: I got to do that because no one was supposed to care. No one was supposed to notice a difference. I got to do that because I’m not you, the one with the blinding grins and the warm hands and the sweet words, and I came back stronger for it. Your absence will shatter us. Your absence will prickle like an open wound. Your absence will never stop bleeding.

But in the angle of Lance’s scowling mouth, Keith can already read a waiting retort. Now you get to hurt like I did when you left. Now you get to see how we suffered. And I’ll come back stronger for it, too.

“That,” Keith says, stumbling over his words. “That was different.”

“No, it wasn't,” Lance says, slowly. “We’re cut from the same cloth, you and me.”

Keith holds himself very still, poised like prey against the soft, dewy bark of an alien tree whose leaves shiver wistfully in the wind. He says, “Why. Give me a reason.”

At that, Lance pulls back, spine straightening. He licks his lips shiny and looks anywhere but Keith. “I’ll find my way home myself,” he mumbles. “I’ve got a map. I’ve got a route of escape ready. I’ve got contacts and allies and contingency plans all lined up. I’ll be fine.”

“Why,” Keith implores, voice rising, “are you leaving?”

Lance backs up several paces, looking out towards the bloodied skyline with obvious impatience. His hands haven’t settled since Keith caught him halfway to running home; now, they make restless soothing motions against his own thighs. “Look, this has been real fun, buddy, but I’ve got places to be, people to see—”

“Do you care that little?” Keith whispers. “About your team?”

Lance whips his head around, pinning Keith motionless. His eyes flash an angry half-red, half-blue in the evening light. “I already gave my life and died for this team,” he says. “I don’t need to prove myself to anyone and especially not you.”

“You gave your life for Allura and I think we can all guess why,” Keith says, because it’s the lowest and easiest and nastiest blow, and he wants to make Lance burn back. He spits the words, then wants immediately to take them back. The look on Lance's face is pale and stricken. Keith’s stomach bottoms out, horrified. “I’m—wait—I didn’t mean that—Lance—”

“Fuck you,” Lance says quietly. He purses his lips, looking gruff with emotion, and runs his knuckles quickly under his eyes. His body language is embarrassed, overly vulnerable and self-hating for it. Keith has never wanted so badly to undo something. “I’d have done the same for any of you. Any day of the week. I almost died for Coran. I wept for your brother. I saved you before Ezor could take off your head. So fuck you, Keith.”

“Wait, please,” Keith says, latching onto Lance’s arms, suddenly desperate. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, okay? I’m just—fuck. Lance, you sprung this on me with no warning. Please. At least let me tell the others. We’ll...we’ll figure something out. We’ll see you off and make sure you’ve got adequate supplies. I can go wake them up right now. It’ll take me five minutes, tops.”

“I’m on a time crunch,” Lance whispers, shaking his head. “Please just...don’t make this harder than it needs to be. I wanted something quick, painless, no tears. I didn’t want a big going away party because this isn’t supposed to be a goodbye. It’s...it’s a see you soon. Listen, I—I left you a letter, okay? Back in your room. Just...read it. It’ll explain everything.”

“It sure feels like a goodbye,” Keith whispers.

“Only because that’s what you’re making it,” Lance whispers back.

Keith makes a mournful sound, eyes wet, and yanks Lance into his chest, wrapping him up in a tight, anguished embrace. “Get home safe,” he says into Lance’s shoulder. He digs his fingers in, hard, grounding, an entreaty. “Please. Call us. Something. So I—so we know. How you are.”

Lance nods into Keith’s neck, gripping him back. “Read my letter, Keith. And...and I know I’m leaving them in good hands, alright? You’re a great leader.”

“Only because you were there to make me into one,” Keith whispers.

Lance pulls back, wiping embarrassedly at his eyes. He sniffles, says, “Nah. Anyway. Um. Pass along the message for me, will you? To the others, I mean.”

“Okay,” Keith says, and without another thought reaches down to unstrap his scabbard. “But only if you take this.”

Lance glances down, then does a double-take. He’s already loudly objecting, hands raised, and rapidly retreating on his feet.

Keith grabs hold of Lance’s wrist, holding his arm still, and slaps his blade into Lance’s shocked, pliant palm. “Yes,” he insists, over Lance’s nonsensical babbling. “Please. It’ll make me feel a lot better about this whole thing.”

“It was your mother’s,” Lance says, appalled. “It’s—it’s priceless. I can’t accept something like that. No way in a million years, no, no, no, dude, take it back—”

“It’s in good hands,” Keith returns. “My mom left it to me for protection right before she left Earth to fight in our war. She’s told me since then that it was a gesture of goodwill made for someone she couldn’t bear to part with. At least...not without leaving them—me—a piece of herself.”

Lance falls silent, wide-eyed at the insinuation. “Oh,” he whispers, finally accepting the knife, gently fingering the worn scabbard and the elegant twist of the blade’s hilt. He stares down at it, mouth parted and softly stunned.

“Be safe,” Keith whispers. “You can return it to me when we reunite on Earth. Because we will, alright?”

“Yeah,” Lance says, already beginning to fall slowly back. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, man. And don’t forget to read my—”

“Your letter,” Keith says. “Right. Okay. Um, I will.”

“Okay,” Lance says.

“Okay,” Keith says.

“I’ll, uh, just,” Lance says, hooking a thumb over his shoulder and half-turning towards the red light in the distance.

“I,” Keith says, louder than he means to, stepping quickly forward and making an aborted gesture with one hand like he means to yank Lance back into his orbit by the collar of his shirt, leave a parting kiss pressed to that grief-stricken mouth. “I’ll—miss you.”

Lance is twenty yards back now, shadowed but for a faint red outline, his hood drawn up over his face. “Read my letter,” he repeats, sounding pained, then turns into the treeline and vanishes, the black swallowing him up.

Keith stands rooted to that spot for long, interminable minutes, watching the place where Lance melted into veined, trembling trees, until his vision begins to swim, his sleep syrup finally kicking in. He sways on his feet, tunnel vision shrinking to tiny pinpricks, and when he staggers backwards, bumbling blindly through the thicket with a curse, he crashes clumsily into the arms of his mother and Shiro, who are waiting at the bar’s entrance, arms flung out to catch Keith.

“What’s going on?” Krolia says, taking Keith’s left arm in hand. “You weren’t in your bedchambers—”

“Keith,” Shiro says anxiously, hauling him to his feet with a frown when Keith begins to lose his footing a second time. "What happened? Something you ingested—?"

“He’s gone,” Keith whispers brokenly, a lump rising in his throat, before he slumps forward, blackness swarming, as he’s dragged unwillingly into unconsciousness.

• • •

WITH THE RIGHT PERSON, A SMALL HOUSE CAN HOLD AS MUCH HAPPINESS AS A BIG ONE.

• • •

In this memory, one version of Keith lies draped over Lance’s tiny twin bed in the heart of Havana, boxed in by a white-bellied golden retriever, and another lingers at the doorjamb, gone blurry and moth-bitten with time.

The real Keith is fading from the foreground to blend in seamlessly with his surroundings—those worlds and wonderful moments which he can’t help but inhabit as the quantum abyss has its wicked way with him. His mother’s voice resounds: Your body will become less and less your own the further you wade. Keith is all ocean. He’s waist-deep and wonderstruck. At the edge of his mind, he is this Keith and every Keith, all at once.

He’s wide awake in his own body and sleeping soundlessly in Lance’s childhood bedroom, simultaneously.

Lance’s mattress is soft beneath the skin of his back. Around the mental clutter, he can remember with selfish recall the feeling of pressing Lance into this very bed the night before to kiss him senseless, and of being pressed into said bed by Lance to be kissed senseless in turn. His mouth is his own. His mouth is Lance’s.

His mouth is twin sensations—an ebb and flow.

The summer sun is glorious and honey-like against Keith’s skin. It throws long lines of light up and down his recumbent body through Lance’s crooked, hastily-drawn blinds. The effect is not unlike a tiger’s stripes, though Keith couldn’t look farther from fierce if he tried. He’s cuddled up and drooling against the giant puppy—Luz, a beloved family pet—and wearing basketball shorts and an oversized crew-neck stolen from the depths of Lance’s closet. It’s torn at one shoulder and reads HARVARD in white block letters, has been rucked up at some point by a thoughtless, dreaming hand to expose the pale skin of his navel.

A tender sense of belonging begins in the pit of Keith’s belly. It's reflected back at him by the memory version of Lance, who stops in the doorway with a towel paused over his wet hair to blink at Keith in his bed. A soft laugh escapes through his lips. He’s got a look in his blue eyes like he’s falling in love all over again.

Keith crosses his arms against the intense sensation of being watched and taken carefully apart by a man who knows him intimately and at every angle. He tries to see himself as Lance might in this moment and catches small parts of a much larger picture: his empty scabbard still worn at his hip; his mother’s knife set tentatively to the side, on Lance’s nightstand, beside a tangled pair of headphones and a mermaid-shaped alarm clock; the calloused heels of his feet; his long, dark hair pooled on Lance’s pillow like crowfeather.

He thinks his scar’s coloring looks strange beside his Cuban tan. Even stranger: Shadow is curled up on the floor, looking distinctly displeased with the current sleeping arrangement.

Lance scrubs the towel through his hair and approaches the giant space wolf with a quiet snort. “Aw, buddy,” he whispers, bending forward to run his fingers through Shadow’s fur. “Did your dad abandon you for the cute blonde?”

Shadow twitches irritably, glancing sidelong at Luz, then snuffles his disagreement on the matter.

“Did not,” Keith mumbles through closed eyes, stretching out his muscled limbs with a groan and snuggling closer to a snoring Luz. “And anyway, everyone knows I have a thing for mouthy brunettes.”

“Oh, really?” Lance says, smirking. “What gave them that idea?”

Keith pointedly ignores that, goes, “Shadow, I told you to get up here. ‘S plenty of room.”

With a huff, Shadow pushes to his feet and leaps onto the bed. He paces tiny circles a moment before squeezing in on Keith’s other side, in between his owner’s back and Lance’s blue wall. He settles in on his belly, lies his chin at Keith’s feet, and blinks up at Lance as though to say, you joining our cuddle-pile or what, man?

Lance rises to his full height, wrapping his towel around his neck. “Babe,” he says, reaching a hand out to push the bangs back from Keith’s pale forehead. “Let me get you a headband. Some of us prefer to see your eyes while we’re making conversation with you.”

Keith catches Lance’s wandering hand with his own and turns his face into it, mouth moving softly over Lance’s palm. “Mm,” he murmurs, eyes still closed. “M’fine. It’s not even eight o’clock yet. You can’t enact your No Bangs rule before then, you know that. We have an agreement, Lance.”

“I can try,” Lance says. “You know my anti-bangs agenda wouldn’t exist if you’d let me trim them.”

“Mm, no. Get over here and cuddle me,” Keith says.

Lance rolls his eyes, mouth pulling up on one side, and muses: “If fourteen-year-old Lance could see you right now...laid out on his bed like this...looking like a five course meal…”

“Yeah?” Keith says into Lance’s palm. “What would he do?”

“Run back to his dorm and whip out his password-protected diary. Write down something like, ‘Finally got Keith into bed,’ in gel ink,” Lance says. “‘And they said dreams don’t come true. I think marriage is imminent. Will keep you posted. Xoxo. Love, Lance.’”

Keith comes awake at once. He makes a loud noise of protest and shoves Lance, incredulous. “You would not! At fourteen! You couldn’t even look me in the eye without blushing!”

“Fine, fine!” Lance laughs. He grabs at Keith’s swatting hand and presses it flat against his chest, right over his beating heart. “Maybe seventeen-year-old Lance, then. Fourteen-year-old me was still obsessed with figuring out who takes whose last name in the event that we get married.”

“Kogane-McClain,” Keith says, without hesitation. “Hyphenated. Now get over here.”

“Kogane-McClain!” Lance parrots, mock-outraged. “Why does your last name get to be first!”

Keith tugs Lance down on top of him with a huff of exasperation, says, “Sounds better. Also, my kisses are superior, so. I get dibs,” and peppers Lance’s laughing face with noisy, smacking kisses.

“McClain-Kogane rolls off of the tongue, I think,” Lance says, leaning back. Then he plants his elbows and holds Keith’s sleepy face still, considering. His thumbs make thoughtful back-and-forth motions against Keith’s cheekbones, that pink scar, the mole that sits at his right temple. “I know! We’ll take a vote!”

“No we won’t,” grumbles Keith.

“Mm, maybe not,” Lance concedes easily. He dips forward to catch Keith’s lips in a kiss, humming something happy. With the fingers of either hand, he smoothes Keith’s bangs back, stroking light and featherlike. He’d seem almost absent-minded about it if you didn’t know him better.

(Keith does.)

He slaps Lance’s hands away and twists his head to evade Lance’s next kiss. “Stop it.”

“Let me get you a headband!” Lance pleads. “Your pores will thank me!”

“No!” Keith snaps, gripping Lance by the hair at his nape and tugging him insistently forward. “Shut up and kiss me.”

Lance’s mouth falls upon Keith’s with a soft breath of laughter, his blue eyes dancing.

• • •

Keith,

My mom always says handwritten letters are more romantic (devices from an era of the past, now long gone, an idea she got from one of her favorite Márquez novels). My father always says they’re more heartbreaking, how easily they can be lost or destroyed.

Half of me hopes this letter will slip through the cracks before you can find it. Half of me hopes you’ll rip it to shreds. There is no part of me that hopes you’ll read this. But I’m writing it anyway. I like writing by hand, and I like the sound of my own voice, and......

And anyway.

There’s so much I want to say to you and so much I never can and I’m still sorting through most of it in my head, trying to understand why you make me feel so.......off-center, even now. Like I’m trapped in the airlock and about to be sucked into deep space forever and I can’t see you on the other side of the reinforced glass, you and your sword and your tight black jeggings. Like the gravity’s been shut off and I can’t find my footing. Like I’m staring you down and I can’t tell what you’re thinking, because I can never, ever tell what you’re thinking, Keith.

I’ve been watching you rise through the ranks since I was a scrawny 12 year old cadet and I thought maybe I’d get less stupid about you with time, but the minute you showed your dumb mug after your 2 year space whale odyssey, it was like...the same thing all over again. It had only been a few weeks—a month at most, I think—for us, so why did I feel those 2 years? Why did the sight of you still make me feel like I’d just come off a 25 mile marathon?

I don’t know. I think I know. I’m sure I know. And you scare me so much.

Fuck.

Okay.

This letter isn’t a confession. It can’t be. I don’t even know if you’d want it to be. Sometimes I think you might........but then I think, no. I’m back in that Garrison hallway and you’re looking right through me. I’m sitting behind you in Aviation 101, trying to sneak a look at your paper. I want your name, just based on what I can see of your hands, and that stupid mullet you’ve got, and the fact that you’re here on Takashi Shirogane’s recommendation. Everyone’s talking about you, the quiet delinquent with an aviation legend in his corner. I keep fantasizing about being your best friend, meeting Shiro through you, the two of us becoming his child prodigies or something. I tell myself I’m gonna keep my eye on you, that I won’t let you out of my sight, and I never do.

Lame, right?

Then I’m hovering awkwardly at your lunch table, that first week, for maybe .5 seconds, IF THAT. I end up chickening out and turn tail before I can ask if the seat next to you is free. I slide into the first open spot I see, next to this behemoth of a kid in an orange bandana. I keep thinking: I can’t look back, I can’t look back, I can’t look back, for YEARS I am thinking this, Jesus Goddamn Christ, and I keep fucking looking back, against my better judgment and every warning siren blaring in my head, I keep searching you out in a crowd, like I’m fucking stupid for you.

I am so goddamn stupid for you, Keith.

I write home about you that first year. My sister Veronica thinks I’m out of my mind. Why are you swooning over a little asshole who won’t even give you the time of day? she writes back. I don’t know, I tell her. I don’t know and I can’t stop and then you’re gone and I’m rising through the ranks but it tastes so bitter in my mouth ‘cuz everyone knows it’s only because you’re not there to keep me below the threshold, my fucking TEACHERS know it, they won’t let me live it down, I can see it in Hunk and Pidge’s eyes for God’s sake and it kills me, absolutely eats me alive, and I just know. I will never stand up on my own.

And then you’re back again and I’m looking at you through a pair of binoculars and I don’t even think. I’m just running. I just have to beat you, I have to prove you wrong, I have to make you sorry.

I keep thinking I have to make you crazy like you did with me. I have to get back at you, for doing this to me.

It’s fucking terrible, this feeling. I’ve only ever experienced it twice before at this level. The second time is part of the reason why this can’t be the confession that I want it to be. That I would like it to be, in a perfect universe.

Right. Okay. Quiznak. I digress.

I want to say, first and foremost, before we get to the meat of this letter, that you’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had. I know you probably don’t return that feeling and that’s okay. I don’t expect you to.

I just....I haven’t had a whole lot of people in my corner. My family, but I don’t really think that counts. It’s something, though, so I suppose I should count myself lucky. I can’t blame the rest of the world for looking at me and laughing. Not when I’m the one always making jokes, out of myself and others.

And I know you and I didn’t have the best beginning, but when I need to channel my restlessness and my sadness and the wild ugly feelings in me and make them into something productive, you’re always the first face I think of. You made me worse, and then so much better, Keith. You...you motivate me, and push me, and then keep me tethered, in a weird way, even when you’re not around to grip my hand.

And the first time I ever felt like maybe I’m not unwanted out here was that day I came to you about leaving the team and I remember you gave me this look like I was crazy for even considering it. I always think of that look. It keeps me up sometimes. I go back to it constantly, when I feel like ripping my hair out over stuff.

I’m thinking about that look now, because I’m leaving in spite of it. I have to, is the gist of this letter. I know you’re probably doing that disapproving black paladin scowl right now and I don’t blame you, but it’s something I need to do, Keith.

Just please hear me out.

I don’t think I can find the sense of belonging I need with you guys right now. I’m too messed up over stuff. I don’t fit with anyone anymore—maybe not ever. I think a lot of my friendships out here were mirages. There and gone again and there’s that one saying that’s like....madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I can’t keep giving and expecting to see it returned. And I don’t blame you guys, is the thing. I’m the weakest link and the worst outlier.

I need to take time to myself and find my footing on my own and get back to Earth without the team. I think maybe then I won’t feel so useless, if I can prove to myself that I can. That I’m capable of standing on my own.

I want to stand on my own. I have to.

I think my feelings for you—and this unnamed second party—haven’t worked...haven’t computed or made sense or felt completely right for me for so long and it’s because I’m treading water with you two, like I’ll never catch up, never be good enough, never ever in a million years deserve either of you. So I need time away from the both of you, to clear my head, and move on, and be with my family again. Then I can start over and fall in love forreal, maybe even on Earth like I’ve always wanted.

Anyway, you’re probably wondering about this supposed second party and I’m sure you’ve come to your own conclusions about who it is.

Yeah, so. It’s Allura.

I didn’t mean to fall for her, but I guess that’s just par for the fucking course with you two. And before, I was like, Jesus Christ, what is up with my heart? These two are night and day, right? But then I got to thinking about it, really thinking, and I had to retract all of it. Because I totally have a type. You’re both whip-smart, and fiery, and stupidly courageous, and you love with SO MUCH of yourselves, you would do anything for the people you care about, you would give your lives for this cause if you could, and you both push me to be this better, more mature version of myself. I’m drawn to you both like ocean water to moon.

I could wax lyrical about this girl, Keith. The way I did with you in this letter. She’s leagues—LIGHT YEARS—ahead of me and that’s why I can never be with her.

Why I can never be with you.

But this is progress for me, you should know that. Haha.

I’ve been stewing in these feelings for Allura for a long time but I’ve been denying the feelings I have for you for even longer.

Do you remember that time, after we’d just gotten together in space, when Sendak attacked the castle back on Arus? And after we’d beaten him, you made a beeline for me for some stupid inexplicable reason and you reached out a hand? And I grabbed hold and then I didn’t let go? That was the first time where I went....okay, shit. Maybe these feelings are more real, more immediate than I thought, more than wanting to angry-kiss a rival I’ve hated for a long time because I’m young and sexually frustrated. And maybe I’m gonna have to confront those feelings, because for the first time, I felt seen by you. Completely stripped bare. And then I got so scared, Keith.

I woke from cryostasis to this wild sense of terror and I knew I had to bury it all before you could catch a whiff of it on me, so I did. I just kept seeing your face, and that stupid smile you’d given me, and it was everything I’d always wanted from you, but I was back to being that scrawny, loser of a 12 year old cadet standing a foot from your lunch table, too scared to ask if I could sit with you, too scared to ask if you wanted to share my sandwich, too scared to even look at you when your eyes weren’t on something or someone else.

I’m sorry I was too scared. I pushed you away and I lied about forgetting because I was too chicken to reach out with my own hand.

And I’m sorry I can’t be what you need, or want, that I can’t stay and keep your old lion warm, I’m sorry you came back to the team two years later and seemed, for the second time, to look right through me. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I’m so crazy about you and Allura that I have to go and erase it all. I’m sorry I thought my feelings for her would cancel out my feelings for you.

That’s not how love works.

‘Cuz I saw your face on that comm screen and it all came rushing back, years of gut reactions and terror and attraction, and I’m sorry I didn’t know what to do with it all. I’m sorry.

But I’m gonna make it right again, okay? And when we reunite a third time, you and me, it’ll be you who’s chasing me down—maybe a beach instead of a desert this time, alright?—and I’ll be whole again. And you won’t look through me. You’ll see me. You won’t be able to stop looking. You’ll try, but your eyes won’t let you. And I’ll be my own person, better than ever, more badass and level-headed than you’ve ever seen me, and all the lions—EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM, MARK MY WORDS!—will be begging me to pilot them. I’ll be rolling around in lion love.

And you and Allura, you’ll see what a catch I am, but it’ll be too late, because I’ll have found closure in Cuba and moved on.

So that’s just it.

I’m gonna beat you to Earth.

I’m gonna outrun you and it won’t be because you let me. It’ll be because I got faster, smarter, better.

Just this once, I want that and just this once I’m gonna beg the universe to let me have it.

I want to go back to feeling wanted. I want that feeling again, Keith. Allura said to me once that I’ve got greatness within, so I’m gonna go out there and find it, one way or another.

And I.......I said this thing to her after the Lotor incident, when she’d been beating herself up over trusting him. I said something like.....I’m a guy who’s made a million and one mistakes. I know better than anyone what that feels like. But all you can do in the aftermath is get up and try to make things right.

So that’s what I’m doing for myself.

Maybe I’m nothing but a stupid kid from Cuba, but I’m a stupid kid from Cuba who’s gonna prove everyone wrong. And that........that’s gotta count for something, right?

What I’m trying to say is...........is that I’m gonna show the universe.

And I hope you’ll all forgive me for it.

See you in Varadero.

Lance,

“Nunca digas adiós, porque adiós significa irse lejos, e irse lejos significa olvidar.”

• • •

The next sliver of the future opens on something simple, something crude.

An extravagant feast—rising steams, a rotating collection of servers and finger food platters, vast arrays of spiced meats with four-pronged utensils protruding from roasted flank, crystal bowls filled to the brim with sauces and fragrant fruit juices—laid out on a table made of glowing glass, on a planet with a name composed entirely of numbers. There is tension in Keith’s shoulders where he heads the table, this culture’s guest of honor at a dinner intended to cement a hard-fought Coalition alliance. Betrayal is imminent.

The dagger brought to his throat by a wily guard moments after he shows his insolence like the flash of canines during heated political debate is only half-surprise. Keith had been expecting something retaliatory. Bloodying, even. The scrape of the chair to his left, less so.

He holds himself absolutely still. Allura’s lessons in etiquette have taught him never to betray his real reactions to allies, least of all those that have a clear advantage over him and his team. He makes himself a statue. His throat does not flutter against the keen edge of the blade. He does not so much as swallow to the cold press of steel.

He’s tasted luxite and blood before and emerged stronger for it. He’s limped his way free of the Trials of Marmora. He’s brought his brother back from brink of death and held him close to his chest afterwards. An ill-aimed dagger won’t—can’t—unravel him.

Helpless against the urge, though, he lets himself glance quickly to the left, towards the sound of the scraped-out chair.

Lance has risen to his full height like wildfire and drawn his broadsword without hesitation. He levels it at Keith’s assailant, point to jugular. His knuckles are blood-white around the hilt, jaw rigid as a block of stone. There’s something in his blue eyes—coldly cruel—that Keith has never seen angled at another living person before. It is not, as these things go, an idle threat.

Keith can’t drag his eyes from him. His pulse throbs wildly at his throat for reasons which have nothing to do with the dagger currently digging into his carotid. In this moment, Lance carries in the sinews of his body the ruthless and unforgiving elegance of a warrior-king one moment from waging war. From laying siege to Troy to win back a lover.

“Not him,” Lance says, deathly quiet, and his gaze never strays from the guard’s face. “Not ever.”

The guard goes stockstill, lips thinning unhappily.

“Lower your weapon,” Lance says, “or I’ll make you regret it.”

A scoff sounds from the opposite end of the table. “You would really ruin a royal alliance for the filthy mouth of a heretic?” says the Queen, aghast, in her native tongue.

“For that filthy mouth in particular?” Lance sends Keith a heated look like he can’t help himself, winks, and presses his swordpoint more firmly into the fat of the guard’s neck without so much as a glance at the man. The guard lets out a tiny gasp as the table tenses. “I would do much worse, ma’am.”

Across the table, Allura buries her face in her hands to muffle a disgruntled groan. Shiro coughs into a metal fist and awkwardly reorders his silverware. Pidge mutters something to Hunk that has him smothering a snicker against gloved knuckles. Coran does not look up from the three-cream pastry he’s currently cramming into his mouth.

Color spills across Keith’s face, immediate and flood-like. He aims something half-scowl, half-affection at Lance.

“You should step back before I can embarrass my husband any further,” Lance says to the guard, holding Keith’s eye all the while. His mouth curls, turns softly adoring. Keith’s flush worsens. “The more flustered he is, the worse off you’ll all be, and I can only do so much to salvage this political partnership once he gets going.”

In a flash, Keith has disarmed the guard and twisted his arm painfully behind his back. His chair clatters loudly to the floor. He huffs, shakes his bangs from his eyes to clear his vision, and says, “I can take care of myself.”

Lance raises his brows as weapons are drawn up and down the dining table, like clockwork. “No thank you?”

Keith rolls his eyes and turns his head a fraction, offering his smiling mouth up.

Lance swoops forward to capture his lips in a hurried kiss, then seems to lose himself against Keith’s seeking tongue with a soft noise. He jolts when a loud, “Seize them! We’ll take Voltron for ourselves!” rings out across the room.

“Bastard,” Lance breathes, the fingers of his free hand buried in Keith’s hair. “Quit distracting me with your mouth in the middle of a coup.”

Keith presses a promising kiss to Lance’s jaw and whispers: “Rain check.”

Lance swears colorfully and backs away, a flush high on his cheeks. He knocks his knuckles together and his broadsword splits in two, transforms into twin katanas in gleaming red. “The things I do for love,” he mutters, raising his weapons. “Babe! On your right!”

Keith ducks as a knife goes sailing over his head and lodges itself into the wall behind him. He shoves the guard to the floor with a snarl and a well-aimed kick, watching with vicious glee as his dagger goes skidding halfway across the room. Then he draws his bayard, pressing close to Lance, back-to-back.

“On three?” Lance shouts, over the clang of weapons meeting weapons and loud screaming.

“One,” says Keith.

A bowl of punch smashes to the floor beside them and a thousand shards of rainbow crystal go bouncing.

“Two,” Lance answers, as he regrips his blades.

“Three,” Keith finishes, and they both lunge.

• • •

Veronica: Leandro, is it true you’re bringing your childhood rival into our good christian home next week? The very one that you used to complain about in strongly worded 5-page letters sent home weekly that contained phrases like “long flowing mullet” and “eyes like the night sky” ?

Lance: we are catholics you fool

Lance: and fuck you, frankly

Veronica: Same thing we’re just better at guilting people into seeking absolution

Lance: AND LAY OFF he’s my boyfriend and the love of my life and he’s going to be your brother in law someday probably if i have anything to say about it

Veronica: You always have something to say about something

Veronica: Also, little premature to be thinking about marriage, don’t you think?

Lance: no i’m latino

Lance: and a hopeless romantic just ask my extensive, alphabetically ordered collection of sandra bullock romantic comedies

Veronica: Tell Keith I said to sleep with one eye open

Lance: i’m not telling him you said that

Veronica: Tell him I have put together a comprehensive boyfriend questionnaire in preparation for his visit (with Luis and Marco’s help) and that he can expect an atmosphere of legal interrogation upon arrival and also hard-hitting questions such as:

1. What are your intentions with my brother

2. What is your stance on children

3. What are your favorite baby names

4. Do you enjoy reptiles as a pet and why or why not

5. Do you believe in horoscopes

6. Complete this sentence: “My boyfriend’s family is _____.”

7. What is your favorite thing about Lance

8. What is yours and Lance’s song

9. What is your favorite movie to watch together

10. Where do you see yourself (and Lance) in 5 years

Lance: 1. I intend to make him happy for as long as he lets me.

2. They could be smarter, as a whole.

3. Lance and I like Excalibur. It’s gender neutral.

4. I love a good lizard. I think they’re neat.

5. No but Lance reads me mine every morning. They’re like little emotional pep talks and I like hearing his voice when I wake up.

6. My boyfriend’s family is reading this sentence. (Lance says you guys are nosy, so this is an educational guess.)

7. I couldn’t choose. I like his sense of humor and his kindness and his smile and his elaborate skincare routine and his wanderlust and what a humanitarian he is at his core and how good he is with kids and animals and just people in general. He does a lot of heavy lifting for me when we have to interact with people in large group settings. I like that he’s so family-oriented. I don’t know. I love so much about him.

8. “Africa” by Toto. Lance says “Love On Top” by Beyonce is also a contender.

9. The Proposal and Ocean’s 8, with snacks. (He really likes Sandra Bullock and pringles and I like watching his reactions. Sometimes he uses my shirt to wipe the crumbs from his hands off. He only gets away with it because he distracts me with kisses while he’s doing it.)

NO I DONT! - LANCE

10. I’ve learned that living in the present is easier than trying to make out any kind of future in the far distance. I see myself as I exist right now and right now I am stupidly in love with your brother. Don’t see that changing anytime soon, if ever. Hope that suffices.

- Keith

Veronica: Fair play, my brother’s childhood-rival-turned-boyfriend, fair play.

Lance: Thank you please don’t interrogate me when I get to Havana - Keith

Veronica: No promises, Lizard Boy.

Lance: Lance says he’ll bring you candy and let you ride in Red one (1) time if you promise there will be no interrogations - Keith

Veronica: Okay, Jeggings, you have yourself a deal. I’ll see you at 7PM sharp Saturday night with five candy bars and a Sandra Bullock movie at the ready. Also, we’ll be doing a live reading of all of Lance’s best, most emotionally riveting letters from his time at the Garrison. Expect to hear yourself brought up at least 700 times, with varying degrees of adoration masked as hate.

Lance: NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! ABSOLUTELY FUCK YOU I’M TELLING MOM

Lance: Keith again. I took Lance’s tablet. I look forward to it. - Keith

• • • 

The first thing Keith spots is the broad span of Lance’s brown shoulders, gone deeply freckled through the loose-fitting muscle t-shirt he’s wearing.

He’s standing with his back to Keith, in blue board shorts and rubber flip-flops, bent over double where a rickety sand fence overlooks Varadero Beach and its jewel blue surf. The setting sun’s dying light wraps around Lance like liquid gold. His hair is a halo beneath it, lit up as if in flame.

Guardian spirit of fire, Keith thinks, with two kinds of yearning and a dry tongue. Crown prince of burning. Of scorching. Of ruin and rebirth. Lance is a kind of fire and Keith’s body longs to sing, to torch beneath the heat of him. His eyes ache looking at all that bare skin, darker than he’s ever seen it on account of Cuba’s careful ministrations.

Keith imagines charting a course down the line of Lance’s curved spine, then back up, to rest his lips at the boy’s sun-drenched nape. To open his mouth over that stretch of throat and bite down with intent to claim.

It’s an image so visceral as to be kneejerk. Keith has warmed his body beside fantasies just like it for as long as he’s been aware of Lance’s bright eyes, and grinning mouth, and gun-calloused hands. He’s never acted on the impulses, though. That’s not the kind of relationship he and Lance have. It never has been.

Never will be.

Keith reins the urge in, wrestles his longing into silence before he can give himself away over the sound of the crashing waves and the Spanish reggaeton pouring from the open doors of Lance’s father’s beachfront property. ¿Qué horas son, mi corazón? someone sings in a crisp baritone, to the voice of an anchorwoman reeling off: doce de la noche en La Habana, Cuba.

Keith can still feel Lance’s father’s hand in his—huge and hard-palmed—those stern brown eyes sweeping down Keith’s body, then back up, as Keith fumbled his way through introductions, gesturing awkwardly to the funny-looking team flanking him.

A hulking Samoan boy in an orange bandana, his mousy partner-in-crime at his side. An alien princess and Keith’s weary older brother like twin pillars, two sides of the same intense coin, white-haired and heavenly-seeming in the light of day. A pair of avenging angels. Coran, with his handlebar mustache and his elfin features. Keith's stone-faced mother and his cosmic wolf.

“You’re Keith,” the man said flatly, staring. His accent was thick as molasses in his mouth, his English crisp.

Keith stared back.

In that moment, he could recall with startling clarity the warmth of Lance beside him on the observation deck, when Shiro had still been missing in action and Keith was sweating himself silly trying to wrangle Team Voltron together in Shiro’s absence, and when the heat got to be too bad, Keith could always count on Lance’s hands to bring him back down, tether him to solid ground, warm his skin through his clothes.

Lance’s face that night, Keith could remember crystal clear. Given to the starlight like an offering, as he leaned his weight against either arm, palms flat to the ground.

My dad’s a real hard ass, he’d said right then, out of nowhere. Keith couldn’t remember when Lance had slid into the room to join him at the glass viewscreen. One moment he wasn’t there and the next he was. He wasn’t always like that, though. I still have all these formative memories of him, from when I was a little kid. Just like—the two of us smiling and laughing like crazy. Me standing on his giant feet in front of a taco shop, dancing to an Orishas song at sunset. Him tossing me into the air, or—or letting me sit on his shoulders, spinning me around by the ankles or chasing me into the water.

A breath. Lance’s mouth lifted bitterly on one side. He wouldn’t look at Keith.

Then he and my mom fell apart, Lance went on. They got divorced when I was around nine or ten and...and I swear, he was this whole other person. We moved to Havana to escape it all, my mom and my siblings and me, and he stayed in Varadero. I only ever saw him once in a blue moon after that. It was...God, it was awful, going over to his house and having to be around this angry shell of a dude. It’s like...it’s like the foundations of a house giving in, to have all this love and support and strength, to lean on a guy and then have him ripped away from you like that. I couldn’t even call him my dad without feeling like a fraud.

What are you saying? Keith murmured.

Lance drew his knees up to his chest and pressed his cheek into them, looking over at Keith finally, with the full force of his sleepy eyes. I dunno, dude. I just...I know it’s not the same, your situation and mine...you losing a brother...and I’m not much of a house myself, but I feel your ache. That’s what we always say in my church back in Cuba, when someone’s hurting. Tu dolor es mi dolor. Your ache is my ache. And I...I feel your ache. So if you ever need a guy to lean on...I mean, I’ve got sturdy shoulders, Keith. That’s all. An embarrassed shrug.

Oh, Keith whispered. He ducked his head, bumping shoulders with Lance. Thanks, then.

Lance bumped back, and then neither retreated the way decorum dictated, so that they were sitting pressed up against each other at the arm and peering out at the panoramic view of the Theres’ star system through the windows of the observation deck, sharing one another’s warmth.

Keith could recall in the moment that he met Lance’s father for the first time, with startling clarity, the unending understanding and warmth in the blue of Lance’s eyes, his hand on Keith’s shoulder through the plates of his paladin armor. He could call these things to the fore of his mind so readily because that unending understanding, that warmth, was not present in Lance’s father’s eyes.

It did not appear to be a genetic gift, that warmth, but an acquired gem.

Keith stared into Lance’s father’s eyes and squared his scarred jaw. “I’m Keith,” he confirmed, offering his hand and waiting patiently for the man to shake it. “I’m here to see your son. He’s—I’ve never met anyone like him.”

He’d meant it to be a compliment, to nature or else nurture, but it came out all wrong, alien in Keith’s mouth like he didn’t know how to navigate the footholds of this kind of love, the one where you couldn’t go a day without imagining their voice even as it slipped surely through the fingers of your memory. The one where you scrabbled after the memories like the bouncing beads of a broken necklace.

Keith said, “I...please, if you’ll just let me—I need to see him—”

Shiro laid the palm of his Altean prosthesis to Keith’s shoulder and said to Lance’s father, “Your son is very important to Keith.”

Something in Lance’s father stilled at this, then began again in double time. “Right. He’s, ah, he’s through those back doors,” he said, and pointed the way to Keith with an introspective little frown. “Probably watching the waves.”

Keith went.

Keith is.

Keith’s heart: a war drum in his chest.

Lance’s hair is wind-wild and loose around his jaw, curly all over like he hasn’t spent a moment since landing in Cuba dry. It’s been five and a half months since Keith saw him last, Lance is two weeks to twenty years old, and the bleeding ink of his goodbye letter is practically tattoo to Keith now. He looks and looks at Lance, at the blades of his shoulders and his muscled biceps, and his mind spits: I’m gonna outrun you and it won’t be because you let me. It’ll be because I got faster, smarter, better. Just this once, I want that and just this once I’m gonna beg the universe to let me have it.

You have it, Keith thinks. Anything. I’ll give it to you.

I want to go back to feeling wanted. I want to have that feeling again, Keith.

He inches infinitesimally closer and thinks: It’s yours. Take it.

Maybe I’m nothing but a stupid kid from Cuba, but I’m a stupid kid from Cuba who’s gonna prove everyone wrong.

Lance, he thinks, with growing misery, and joy, and lightheadedness, and something in him fractures, splits beneath his feet and tries to swallow him like the crest of a Cuban wave. Lance, Lance, Lance.

See you in Varadero.

“Lance,” Keith croaks.

Lance twists at the neck and a dimpled smile is waiting, warming that lovely mouth for Keith, like reflex. Like he learned the gesture by rote. Then Lance seems to register the reality, the gravity, the breadth and momentousness of the moment and his eyes go comically huge in his face. His pupils expand like oil slicks, blue irises shrinking.

“Keith,” he gasps out, whirling around fully, braced up against the sand fence like he’s been cornered when least expected.

Keith bends at the waist to begin removing his boots, very slowly, his eyes never leaving Lance. He feels like a jungle cat poised to sink its teeth into its next meal. “‘And when we reunite a third time, you and me,’” Keith recites, tugging first the left boot and then the right from his feet, “‘it’ll be you who’s chasing me down—maybe a beach instead of a desert this time, alright?—’”

“K–Keith,” Lance says, high and flustered, his face going a brilliant shade of red.

“‘—and I’ll be whole again. And you won’t look through me. You’ll see me,’” Keith says, as he toes his socks off and crosses the threshold from gravel to sand. He drags his eyes down that nimble body, then slowly back up, and imagines it’s his mouth doing all the work.

Lance exhales shakily, knuckles white around the galvanized wire of the sand fence. “Okay, you—you’ve made your point. You can stop now.”

“‘You won’t be able to stop looking,’” Keith murmurs. He draws to a halt a foot from Lance. “‘You’ll try, but your eyes won’t let you.’”

“Stop looking,” Lance whispers, unable to break eye contact but flushing hotter the longer he lets himself stare. “Please stop looking.”

“I can’t,” Keith whispers back.

Lance finally caves, dropping his wide eyes with a muttered curse.

Keith puts a forefinger to his chin and tempts that blue-eyed gaze back to his face. He says, the challenge in his tone only barely leashed: “I’ll give you a five second head start. Then I’m chasing you down this beach.”

“Haha,” Lance says awkwardly, trying for flirty innuendo and only just barely missing, “and then what?”

“Five,” says Keith.

“S–shit! Keith!” Lance yelps, sliding out from between Keith and the fence. He kicks his flip-flops off and starts up a backwards jog. “What are you gonna do!”

“Four,” says Keith.

“Dude!” Lance shouts, panicked, finally spinning on his foot to face forward.

“Three,” Keith calls.

Lance vaults over the sand fence and takes off for the water, laughing like a maniac all of a sudden. He rips the shirt from his back and tosses it in Keith’s direction, where it flutters a moment before settling in the sand non-threateningly. He yells, “You better hope you can handle the Cuban surf at half-past seven o’clock, you city slicker!”

“Two,” Keith shouts, grinning, as he sheds his leather jacket and starts in on his t-shirt.

Lance whirls around as he reaches the shore right in time to watch Keith slip out of his t-shirt. He makes a high-pitched noise of shock at the sight, mouth agape, and ends up losing his balance. He flails momentarily, arms windmilling, then lands on his back in the water as a small wave breaks over his head. “Wha—! Unfair!” he splutters.

“One!” Keith yells. He leaps the fence with barely a care and makes a break for the water, watching in delight as Lance attempts to find his footing and wade deeper into the water, tossing increasingly wide-eyed looks over his shoulder as he splashes his way out to sea. “You sure you can handle the Cuban surf, McClain?”

“Oh, fuck you!” Lance shouts. “I haven’t seen you shirtless since your two-year space whale pilgrimage! You have an unfair advantage over me!”

“You saying you’ve been looking before then?” Keith yells, as he hits the water.

“Wha—! No!” Lance yells back, flushing bright red. “Ugh! You’re so annoying! Leave me alo—”

Keith tackles him into the water, laughing like crazy.

• • •

“See,” Lance says with a thoughtful lilt to his tone, drawing his sticky chopsticks high above his head and dangling the stir-fried noodles caught in their clutches over his open mouth, “I didn’t think I could like Texas, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Mm?” Keith hums, cracking a fortune cookie open and sliding the little creased fortune free of its cleverly-folded confines. He stuffs the broken cookie pieces into his mouth, chewing soundly, and smoothes his fortune out over his paint-splattered knee.

Lance swats ineffectually at Keith’s hands where he’s lying with his head in Keith’s lap, a carton of chicken chow mein balanced precariously on his belly. Earlier when Keith made an offhand comment about the potential choking hazards of lying on your back and demanding that your fiancé hand-feed you hot eggrolls, Lance had replied, “Much of what I do in the name of love is a choking hazard,” and then Keith ended up coughing his soda up all over Lance’s shirtfront, blushing furiously and trying to silence his snickering husband-to-be with a hand clamped over his mouth, so Keith has given up entirely on any pretense that Lance will ever listen to him about dinnertime safety hazards, or life in general.

He sticks another cookie-piece in his mouth and pointedly ignores Lance’s annoyed swatting.

“You can’t eat that without finishing your whole meal first, Keith, that’s illegal!” Lance crows, trying and failing for about the third time in as many minutes to grab at Keith’s last remaining cookie crumbs. “Now your fortune won’t come true.”

“Says who,” Keith asks and pops the last piece of his cookie into his mouth with a defiant eyebrow raise. “I’m in charge of my own destiny.”

“I’m like ninety-nine percent sure you stole that line from Britney Spears,” Lance groans, jabbing a chopstick at Keith’s chest upside down. “This is why I can’t take you anywhere.”

“You’re getting peanut oil all over my shirt,” Keith says.

“I’m about to get my mouth all over your mouth,” Lance gripes. He tosses a piece of orange chicken into his mouth and waggles his brows at Keith, licking over his lips very deliberately.

It should be a gross display and not at all visually arousing, but Keith is desperately in love and everything Lance does is automatically hot, so. This is his life now.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Keith says, over the sound of his own desire to kiss the rice vinegar and soy sauce from Lance’s lips. Then: “Hm. I think you were wrong and my cookie really was psychic.” He yelps a surprised hey! when Lance snatches his fortune from his hands and holds it up to the light of their living room, arms extended above his head.

Lance folds one knee over the other and reads out in his best, most crisp salesman voice: “‘THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK.’ Huh.” A pause, as that sinks in, his head tilted cozily in the cradle of Keith’s thighs. “Well, shit.”

Keith laughs and plucks the tiny paper rectangle from Lance’s hands. He flattens it over Lance’s forehead, fortune-up, and says, “They might as well have taped it right here for me. Preferably when I was still a clueless, prepubescent Garrison cadet.”

Lance frowns, squinting very seriously up at Keith. “Stop saying cute shit like that or I will be forced to make out with you until the end of time and then nothing will get done around here.”

Keith says, “I—”

“No, wait, I changed my mind,” Lance says, cutting Keith off and dragging his face down with two hands to his cheeks. He adds, Keith’s face paused a mere three inches above his own: “I gotta make out with you forever anyway. You’re too cute. Also, the world deserves more upside down Spiderman kisses, frankly. I’m Spiderman in this scenario, by the way, and you’re ginger Kirsten Dunst.”

Keith says, “As long as I get to kiss you I’m happ—”

“Ugh,” says Lance, and forcibly tugs Keith’s face the rest of the way down.

“Wait,” Keith says against Lance’s mouth.

“Babe,” Lance whines. “You are so not following the script here. Your line is: ‘You are amazing,’ and if I’m being honest, you have no right to complain about bad breath right now.”

“That’s not it,” Keith murmurs into Lance’s lips, huffing a laugh.

“And then,” Lance murmurs back, “I say, ‘Some people don’t think so.’ ‘But you are,’ you insist, because you totally have the hots for me and who could blame you when I look the way I do in spandex? And I go, ‘Nice to have a fan.’ Now you ask me if you get to say thank you (with your mouth). Steamy kissing ensues. We can just pretend it’s raining. Aaaand...action.”

“It’s alarming how much of this film you have memorized.”

“It’s alarming how good I am about to kiss your dumb face,” Lance retorts.

Keith rests his mouth against Lance’s temple and laughs for a long, breathless moment like that, lips open over an old flesh wound that has since scarred over. “Is this one of your old teenage fantasies? Reenacting old Toby Maguire Spiderman scenes? Please tell me it’s not, Lance.”

“Maybe so,” Lance says, grinning, then adds: “Let’s pretend I never said that by making out till we can’t feel our lips.”

“Hang on. What I wanted to say,” Keith presses on, “is that earlier...you said you didn’t think you could like Texas, but maybe you were wrong.”

“Oh, that,” Lance says, eyes gone wide with wonder. “Yeah, well, originally I...I just kept picturing really rude squirrels and racism. And giant cowboy hats. But then I thought about how you’d spend a hundred years in Cuba with me if I asked, so I decided to be a big boy and suck it up. I just—didn’t expect anything like this, going in.”

“This?” Keith murmurs.

“This,” Lance confirms. “What I mean by that is...is getting to lie on your living room floor with my head in your lap while we eat Chinese takeout together and listen to a band of crickets having the time of their life through your screen door. And I get to just—just love you quietly. In private. And my biggest worry right now is what color we’re gonna paint the bedroom walls tomorrow, which is the kind of thing that should always be my biggest worry for the rest of forever. Doing dumb, mundane stuff with you. And kissing. Lots and lots of kissing.”

“Our,” Keith corrects.

“Huh?” Lance says, looking bleary-eyed with want.

“Our living room,” Keith reiterates. “Our screen door.”

“Oh,” Lance mumbles, mouth a small o of surprise.

He’s everything Keith wants, all laid out—an ornery smudge of a man, a brightening before the eye, in a muscle shirt gone dark with sweat and paint-speckled coveralls unrolled to his waist. He’s shadowed and light-dappled both, his hands warm and sword-calloused against Keith’s face, the both of them poised on the cliff’s edge of a kiss.

The living room around them is practically bare, a clean slate: two step ladders, a row of unopened paint cans, rollers and brushes, several rolls of blue masking tape, and an electric fan, all spread out over several hundred square feet. The front door has been propped open with Keith’s boots, the screen shivering slightly in the wind. Lance’s shortwave radio is turned low. Latin dancehall plays quietly over the sound of singing crickets. The fan looks left, and then right, whirring softly and stirring a sleeping Shadow’s fur. An armful of 99c prayer candles have been arranged around the space, lit from mantels and built-in shelves, some glowing faintly from the floor, picking a yellow path out across the scratched hardwood.

Keith strokes over the curly hair growing down the sides of Lance’s face, so taken with him it hurts.

You’re everything I want, he thinks, and mouths slowly over Lance’s jaw.

Lance breathes in, bracing himself against Keith’s hair, his fists curled. His eyes fall shut.

“My favorite thing about you here, in this house,” Keith whispers, “is that I don’t have to ask you to stay. Don’t have to be asked to stay. We just...are. Together. For good.”

Lance shudders and tilts his chin up, holding it at an imploring angle. “Home,” he murmurs.

“Yeah,” Keith concurs, chest aching, and finally, finally, he drops a slow, upside down kiss to Lance’s mouth.

The angle is strange, and new, but good, still good. It requires minute adjustments and alterations before they can find their fit, the perfect slant for open mouths. Lance catches Keith’s bottom lip between his teeth and holds it like that a moment, savoring. He withdraws and captures Keith’s lips, again and again. Lazy with it. His hands grip Keith hard and keep him there, held and burning. A sharp breath slices out of Keith, his hands hot against Lance’s throat, that fluttering pulse. It’s rapid against the pads of his fingers. He slides his tongue into Lance’s mouth, searching, and Lance makes a wounded noise, yanking Keith lower.

“Want you,” Keith whispers.

“Already got me,” Lance returns.

“Forever,” Keith clarifies, brow knitted.

At this, Lance nudges Keith back a few inches to laugh, eyes crinkled. “In case it’s slipped your mind, sweetheart, that’s already been established,” he says, holding up his left hand and his gleaming engagement ring. Then he uses that same hand to smooth Keith’s brow out, thumbing the wrinkle flat. His mouth ticks up, fond.

Keith sighs and presses his forehead to Lance’s. “I wish we were already married.”

“Soon,” Lance vows, the longing in his voice stretched between them like a strand of honey. “And regardless...the terms and conditions remain, whether we’ve got legal proof of the contract or not.”

“What’s that?” Keith asks. “The terms and conditions…?”

“We’re stuck with each other,” Lance says simply.

Keith rolls his eyes. “‘Stuck’ implies I won’t enjoy every second of it.”

“God,” Lance breathes. “You turn into such a sap as soon as I get my mouth on you.”

“Speaking of mouths,” Keith says.

Lance raises his eyebrows, throwing on a shit-eating smirk.

Keith nips at his lower lip, reproachful. “Not that. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

Lance throws his hands up, linking them behind Keith’s neck. “Oh, c’mon!” he says, pouting. “You made that one so easy!”

“Speaking of mouths,” Keith continues. “You haven’t eaten your fortune cookie yet. I want to know what yours says...” He snags the last remaining cookie out from between their mess of Chinese takeout cartons and holds it out to Lance, expectant.

Lance shakes his head, batting the proffered cookie away with a stubborn frown. “I already know my future,” he murmurs, and pulls Keith into a new kiss.

• • •

Lance is sitting with his feet buried in the sand, in a pool of early evening light which falls across his face like a warm glaze, when Keith thinks to go looking for him the day after docking on Earth.

Well.

Thinks to go looking is generous, considering. Keith’s mother is still at his arm, and in his ear, directing him through the glass doors of the McClain home and down towards the sparsely-inhabited beach with a vengeance.

There’s a dirty hand towel thrown carelessly over her shoulder and her hair is long enough now that she’s able to pin the spiky mess back with a series of well-placed barrettes and hair ties. She’s been in and out of the McClain kitchen all afternoon, trying to pull her weight and prove herself with such enthusiastic intensity that even Lance’s father had begun to look overwhelmed in her presence, until he’d abandoned his post at the stove entirely to give her a wide berth.

A smudge of flour that Keith stubbornly refuses to point out—as payback for her meddling in his lovelife—rests at the right hand corner of her mouth.

“Go,” she hisses, shoving him once more through the glass doors where he’s made himself into an unwilling rock. “You look lupine with sadness, I swear.”

“I do not,” Keith mutters, sulky.

“You do. Now straighten your collar and put away your fangs before you frighten your very human crush,” she says, taking her towel in hand and smacking him lightly across the shoulders with it. “I should know, given that I fell in love with one myself.”

Keith scowls and grits his teeth till he feels them go flat again, can run his tongue beneath each tooth without fear of drawing blood and flooding his mouth with the stuff.

“You will brood yourself into a pile of ash and bones at the rate you’re going,” Krolia says, very stern-browed and motherly, all things considered. “Is that what you want? Hm? To grow old and wither away all alone, with nothing but the fossilized remains of whatever’s last died out here for company?”

“No,” Keith mutters, scowling harder and feeling five years younger than he really is. “You are so rude, you know that?”

“One of those horned equine creatures, maybe...” Krolia goes on, tone contemplative. “I’ve always wanted to see one for myself. I wonder if they exist in Cuba. You should ask your blue paladin if they're native to his country.”

Keith pauses with one foot out the door. “Uh...unicorns, you mean...? Because those aren’t real.”

“What!” she says disbelievingly. “But your father said—!” She cuts herself off at the sound of Keith’s quiet laughter, growling: “Dammit! That liar!”

“I think he was pulling a fast one on you, Mom,” Keith says, with the bare beginnings of childhood yearning edging into his voice.

“Yes, yes, how hilarious, now I need to crossexamine my entire repository of Earth knowledge for peace of mind,” Krolia says, groaning. She puts her hands on Keith’s shoulders just then and gives him a gentle, rousing shake. “Now. What have I told you about communicating clearly and healthily with the people you love?”

“That I need to do it,” says Keith.

“Precisely,” says Krolia, steering him towards the swaying shoreline and Lance’s hunched silhouette. “He’ll never know what you’re thinking unless you tell him in no uncertain terms and he certainly won’t consider coming back to the team if you never ask it of him yourself.”

Keith says, “But—”

“No buts,” says Krolia. “Did you father raise you to be a coward or a quitter?”

“No—”

“Good. Then this part should be easy,” says Krolia, and with one last shove, Keith stumbles the rest of the way up the sandy hillside, towards the sand fence bordering Varadero Beach, upon whose other side Lance sits with knees drawn up, staring off into the hissing ocean.

Keith climbs the fence with first one leg, then the other. He leans his weight casually against it, arms folded. It’s a defensive gesture he recognizes and refuses to correct in himself, for the sole reason that he can hear in his own head Shiro’s Galaxy Garrison voice, deeply reprimanding, as it comments on his poor posture and then veers off into a tangent about body language as precursor to a person’s personality. This, followed by Adam’s rough laughter.

“Lay off, Takashi,” Adam says in Keith’s head, smiling. “The kid is a rebel in the making. Let him wear it on his sleeve if he wants to, while he still can.”

“Yeah,” says fourteen-year-old Keith, who had found in those kind brown eyes a second, surrogate sort of father. “I’m a rebel, Shiro.”

With a shake of his head, Keith clears his throat and makes himself comfortable beside Lance.

There’s light enough for the both of them on this thin slice of beach, but whereas Keith’s skin goes pale pink beneath it, Lance’s seems to glow golder, deeper, darker and luminously tempting. He’s Apollonian at a glance—ancient myth meets summer war hero—until you let your eyes travel the full length of him and the rest falls quickly into place.

He goes unrepentant teenager the longer Keith looks, the last dregs of a nineteen-year-old boy on his way to twenty. He’s got on light wash jeans rolled up at the ankles, distressed and gaping at either knee, and an affectionately faded, loose-fitting t-shirt whose sleeves have been slashed clean off, probably in a fit of adolescent revolt. It says CUBAN BOYS DO IT BETTER and stops at his navel, above the waistband of a pair of boxers peeking out of his jeans.

The sight of him so uncaring, so earnestly human, does funny things to Keith’s physiology. He feels his fangs extend in a fit of disgruntled flusteredness and pushes them back with a sigh, ducking his head before his eyes can flash yellow and frighten Lance off. His cheeks burn with a new and strange embarrassment, at his inability to master his own body.

“You and your mom,” Lance says, apropos of nothing, without looking up from the peeling bandaid he’s picking at around his elbow. “She looks like...like a lioness carrying her cub in her mouth by the scruff of his neck, when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Try to resist her,” Lance answers, smiling only very slightly.

“Ah,” Keith says, with a rueful nod. “You’re your mother’s son before anyone else’s. I almost forgot, since being here with you and your dad.”

The night before, Keith watched his fingers prune up from too long spent splashing around the surf with Lance, a bodily reaction he’s had no need to confront up to this point. His showers growing up had always been utilitarian, two minute affairs, timed to best conserve hot water and money.

The water—and the ocean in particular—has never called out to Keith the way it does Lance, outside of his own hygienic needs, but Lance had said half the fun was watching your limbs bend beneath the blue, feeling sand and seashells between your toes, swallowing too much salt and coughing it up afterwards, throat burning, so Keith collapsed backwards into the waves and then the sand, laughing so hard his stomach hurt. Later, they walked a lazy, meandering route home, down the beach and back again like neither wanted the night to come to an end.

Lance gave his face to the moon and said, flip-flops clutched in one hand by their rubber straps, “You have not lived, Keith, until you’ve dried off by moonlight. The mosquitoes and moths around here don’t like sharing, so it’s always a bit of a bloodbath.”

“Yeah?” said Keith, and tipped his head back, shaking out his wet hair like a dog and sending water flying.

Lance ducked, snickering, and shoved Keith. He only laughed harder when Keith shoved him back. Keith watched the sound burst forth from Lance’s mouth with rapture, feeling all of fourteen years old and hopelessly in love again.

The way Lance talked about Cuba, and his family—with poetic preoccupation—made Keith want to dig his heels into the sand and stay. It made him, absurdly, want to bundle Lance up and stuff him inside the mouth of the Black Lion, before the ocean could swallow him up first herself. He imagined holding the flat of his palm to Lance’s ribs and biting beseechingly at that smiling mouth. Imagined lying his ear to Lance’s bare chest and listening hard for the sounds of the sea. Imagined asking Lance to come home with him, without even knowing what the word meant.

He did none of these things.

Can you imagine, he thought, as he watched Lance climb the steps of his porch, bathed yellow with lamplight and humming quietly to himself, wasting your days and nights here, your hand in his? Falling in love with this version of him, the one who leans into the moth’s touch and laughs with reckless abandon and wears his hair long and curly?

Maybe, he thought back. A different Keith.

Keith is learning to let himself unravel at Earth’s feet, in slow and tender increments. It’s easier with Lance by his side, grinning and wet-haired, all slicked up with sand. It will continue to be easier, he muses, if Lance agrees to come back with him, which is half the problem and all of Keith’s whining heart.

Now, Lance shrugs his bare shoulders, laying his cheek flat against the tops of his freckled knees. “I like seeing you with her. Mom’s tend to bring out the best in their kids. It shows with you. How much she loves you and how much you love being loved by her.”

“Oh,” Keith murmurs, not expecting that but distinctly pleased by the admission all the same. He lowers his head against Lance’s bright-eyed gaze, then sighs when the back of his neck begins to burn hotter. “Can you stop smiling at me like that? It’s...really distracting. Disarming. Um.”

Lance furrows his brow, smile melting into a frown. “Like what?”

“Like,” Keith murmurs, “you’d let me do whatever I wanted to you, if I asked.”

Lance’s ears pinken almost immediately; an unfamiliar sense of triumph steals over Keith at the sight of him so unnerved, so easily unbuttoned and laid bare. The line of Lance’s mouth is softly stunned and Keith’s for the taking, if only Keith would ask after it and reach out with the fingers of his left hand. If only he’d close that hand around the back of Lance’s neck and yank inwards.

With a small noise of irritation, Lance shoves his face into his knees. “God,” he says. “This is unbearable. This is torture. When did it get like this, with me and you? Because I don’t remember it being this bad, before.”

When I went two years and then five months without seeing you, Keith thinks, and tried to muzzle my feelings for all of it.

Aloud, he says, “I don’t know,” and slides slowly into sitting, his legs sprawled out thoughtlessly in the sand. A luxury a pilot used to making himself small for his ship is not often afforded. He basks in it, wiggling his toes against the salted wind. “I don’t really remember a time before it. The unbearable torture, I mean.”

“Gee,” Lance says, blue eyes emerging from behind his knees to narrow playfully at Keith. “Thanks.”

Keith forgets for a moment to be a normal leader trying to open up a professional dialogue with a former teammate and looks a long, stupid while at Lance. He thinks it must be painted across his face, as true as bruising or blood: I WANT YOU SO BADLY. And the Allura in his head is saying all sorts of things about schooling your features and making yourself unreadable when you’re in enemy territory, when you don’t know the lay of the land or what waits ahead, but Keith can’t hear any of it over the sound of his own longing.

So he lets himself look some more, selfishly unconcerned.

“Keith,” Lance admonishes, sounding embarrassed.

“Sorry,” Keith says, immediately averting his eyes and biting down on his bottom lip like a scolded little kid. “I’ll get better at this, I swear.”

“At what?” Lance whispers.

“At making it less obvious,” Keith whispers back. “I just...need time. To bury it all.”

“Oh,” Lance says, blankly, and turns his face back into his knees.

That reaction doesn’t bode well, if the state of Keith’s teeth is anything to go by. He clenches down on them and looks out towards the receding shoreline and dark-hued horizon. “Your dad said,” he begins, digging his fingers into the sand to ground himself, “you were thinking of staying behind.”

Swallow your fear, he thinks. The man who raised you tamed fire for a living.

“On Earth,” Keith adds, his dislike for the idea blatant. “For—for good.”

Prove me wrong, he wants to say. Call me an idiot.

And then, gone sullen with it: tell me what Earth has that I can’t give you out there, that I wouldn’t cross star systems to deliver you, that I wouldn’t drop at your feet if you asked.

I am beyond defeat, he wants to yell, from the top of his lungs and then the bottom, and stuck somewhere near begging. Don’t make me beg, Lance. Black paladins don’t beg.

This one might, whispers a traitorous part of Keith, for boys like him, and in the back of his burning throat knows that it’s true.

“Well, yeah,” says Lance, shrugging something loosely nonchalant, something at odds with the pinch between his brows. He’s poorly-practiced and still an awful liar. “Now that I’m back home, I guess I’m starting to wonder if I ever really belonged on the team. I...I fit better here. On Earth. And I was thinking...maybe I could still do groundwork down here, with the Garrison—”

“You fit fine with us,” Keith objects at once, and a slew of angry images pours forth to flank his claim: Lance bent over and laughing into the meat of Hunk’s shoulder; Lance clasping hands with and grinning at Shiro; Lance applying homemade facemasks to Coran and then Allura’s skin, his brown fingers working to plait the hair on their heads afterwards; Lance with his long legs slung over the back of the rec room couch, loudly distracting Pidge from the monotony of her work.

Lance, his gloved palm hot against Keith’s. Lance, his voice shrill and piercing through the comm-link in the middle of a mission gone amiss. Lance, his bare back pressed to Keith’s, their arms linked. Lance shoving and snickering and embracing. Lance solving Keith like a Rubik’s cube with the pads of his clever fingers. Guiding Keith, hands firm. Yanking Keith back from the brink by the collar of his suit. Smiling softly at Keith with his whole body, bright eyes shining.

“I don’t,” Lance says, mulish. “I’m the extra piece in a puzzle no one needs.”

“I do.”

Lance stills, taken aback by the strength behind Keith’s words. His face is frozen on something halfway to argumentative. “I—what?”

“I need you,” Keith murmurs and knows at once how true the words are, with how badly they bite on the way up. “You...you’re my right hand. That means you’re indispensable. Absolutely necessary. Without you, I wouldn’t be the leader that I am today. You—you said in your letter that Allura told you you have greatness within. She was right. But you’ve also got this extraordinary ability to...to recognize and uncover greatness in others. In your teammates. In me. You found that and brought it to the surface when no one else could. When I was terrible at what I did.”

Lance’s mouth opens and closes, fish-like. He says, “Anyone would—”

“Anyone didn’t. Couldn’t,” Keith says, with finality. “It was you and you alone.”

Lance shuts his mouth with a click, for once speechless.

“You stuck by me when you didn’t have to, when no one asked it of you,” Keith goes on, merciless. “When I almost led our team into a trap and killed us all, because I was so consumed with rage. When I was too reckless to be what they needed. You never stopped trying. You...you stayed by my side. So I’m not leaving yours. Not by choice. If you stay, then so do I.”

And he lets himself imagine it for one silly, whimsical moment, thinking first of Cuba’s dry heat, how well it holds up against the American southwest’s, and then of Lance winding aimlessly through the streets, past apartments packed tightly together in baroque colors and cuts, with metal terraces and mile-long laundry lines, dragging Keith behind him by the hand.

He might shirk his responsibilities as black paladin to learn Lance like a wave, going a slow and mild tan during his time here. He might duck inside a tent to taste-test new foods, huddle beneath the shade of an awning in the middle of a farmer’s market while Lance tries on sunhats, count and trade currency with Krolia, sending her off to have her fun in the heart of Havana. She might enjoy it. Might encourage it, even.

Lance doesn’t seem to share the sentiment. His face has an incredulous cast to it when Keith chances a look at him.

“That’s my offer,” Keith says defensively. “Non-negotiable.”

Lance spreads his legs out and leans forward, forcing his way into Keith’s sightline. He bursts out, “What! Keith! You’re their leader. You can’t stay behind. They need you. Voltron needs you. The—the whole goddamn universe needs you!”

“And you’re our right hand,” Keith says, refolding his arms at his chest and shrugging, the picture of patient placidity. “I need you. So if this is what it takes...I’m here. I’m by your side, ready to return the favor. I’ll stick it out with you for however long you need. And...and if I’m not doing enough to keep you on the team, I’ll do more. I’ll make everyone do more. That’s a promise.”

“You...” Lance whispers, horrified. “You can’t let them fall behind for me.”

Keith turns his head to hold Lance fast, with the force of his stare and every ounce of repurposed violence, of aggression and viciousness kept at bay in the angle of his wrist before he lets a blade fly from his grip. “I’d do much worse,” he says, “for you, Lance.”

Lance soaks that up like a sponge, looking winded and punch-drunk and just this side of hungry. For what, Keith can’t decide. Doesn’t want to put a name to it—to the way Lance is looking at him, in this moment—lest it turns to soil and soot between his fingertips.

It’s transitory, that look. The moment between danger and outward reaction, between an acquired target and a pulled trigger. Dopamine precedes epinephrine, before the body catches and begins again under newer, more accelerated conditions.

Keith thinks about how adrenaline is just another name for anger, fear, excitement. He doesn’t know which one is winning out on Lance’s face right now, but still he holds this image of him, the Cuban skyline at his back, flat in his mind. Pinned still like a butterfly run through with a thumbtack. Keith commits all the lesser details to memory, cups his palms protectively to this version of Lance, preserving the memory for posterity. The want in those eyes. The considering twist to that mouth.

He may never see something like this again.

For a moment, Lance seems incapable of speech. He blinks his blue eyes. He laves his mouth with his tongue, turning it impossibly pinker. He looks at Keith as though through the lens of a magnifying glass. Dissecting. Gauging, like a pilot testing the throttle of a new ship yet to be broken in with both hands.

Keith stares back. His eyes linger at Lance’s mouth, without his meaning to, stuck on the tiny, chapped piece of skin that seems to be peeling at the bottom left hand corner of his lips.

How human, Keith thinks, with awe, and feels himself turn less so. He catches and corrects himself and so misses the minute cue Lance has sent over like a flare through snow—how he’s begun to slowly turn and twist towards Keith the way a searching flower might towards sunlight.

Keith fumbles the cue. Fails to pick up on it, distracted by Lance’s mouth and throat and sternum, the places where his gaze has strayed. He feels the heat of Lance enter his space almost a moment too late, with the kind of body language that says a kiss is imminent: neck extended like a flower’s stem, head tilted, lips parted.

Keith’s eyes go huge with realization. He turns his face from it at the last second, into the sun and away from Lance’s mouth, effectively blocking the kiss. His shoulders hover somewhere near his ears, high and alarmed. Caught completely off guard.

“Don’t,” he mutters, jerky. His whole face is hot, with compliment and embarrassment both.

“You don’t,” Lance snaps, going furious in an instant. “Don’t—don’t you dare look at me like that if you don’t want—me.”

Keith says, “What?” He turns to stare at Lance in confusion, eyes bright and blurry with sunlight. Lance is haloed and limned with gold when he lets himself peek, like a fallen angel, or star. He hurts to look at. “You—like what?”

“Like,” Lance seethes, his face dark with rejection, “you’d—you’d topple the Galra empire for me, if I asked. Like you’d raze an entire army, flatten a whole freaking civilization for me, if I asked, Keith. Like that. So...so...you ‘don’t,’ alright!”

Keith shakes his head, feeling lost and lightheaded. “I would,” he says. “All of it. In a heartbeat.”

“Then let me kiss you!” Lance shouts, throwing his arms wide. “Or—or kiss me. One of the two. What the quiznak is wrong with you? Did your brain turn to Galra mush during those two years on that whale? Do you know anything about wanting someone and rewarding them for it?”

No, Keith thinks, and then: yes, yes, God, yes, let me learn, like a mantra.

“I can’t,” he says instead, miserable.

“...You can’t,” Lance repeats flatly.

“No,” Keith says. At the incredulous look Lance has turned on him, he firms his jaw and soldiers on. “I don’t—share. Okay? Alright? Is that good enough for you? If it’s your mouth you’re offering me...no one else gets to have it, Lance. I don’t...I’m not...I cannot compete for your attention. Not anymore. So, no, you can’t kiss me. No, I will not kiss you. Not when you like someone else.”

Lance says, “What.”

Keith lowers his gaze to the sand, scowling. “I read your letter. I have eyes. Don’t treat me like I’m some kind of idiot. I know all about your feelings for Allura, seeing as you’ve made them abundantly clear, and no offense to either of you, but I’m not interested in playing stand-in for the girl of your dreams.”

“I love her,” Lance says, like a rebuttal.

“I know that,” Keith snarls, wounded. He feels his fangs sharpen to a point, pressing pointedly against the skin of his lips. He makes no effort to hide them from view. “Try not to rub it in, will you?”

“No,” Lance says. “You don’t know anything. I love her—”

Keith’s eyes flash an infuriated yellow. “Lance—!”

“But I’m in love with you,” Lance finishes, calm as a lake.

Keith freezes, mouth hanging agape. He tastes copper on his tongue. His ears are ringing, in shock and in disbelief. His whole body has been lit up, as if with electricity, and every inch of him feels sensitive to Lance, turned towards and facing that blue-red warmth like a weathervane. The response letter he handwrote at a hostel desk five weeks ago has been crushed in the fist he shoved in his pocket seconds ago.

Keith whispers, “You—”

“My feelings for her passed,” Lance goes on, pressing closer to Keith in steady one inch increments. “During the interim, I mean. I gave myself time to check last night, just to be sure. But I am. Sure, that is.”

“In your letter, you said,” Keith gets out, desperate and rapidly gaining momentum. He’s thirty seconds from catching fire. “You said you came here to find closure and move on. From—from both of us. From me.”

“And what did you say,” Lance says, “about the way I look at you?”

Keith’s throat spasms around a sharply inhaled breath of air. “I,” he says, tongue dry. “That. That you’d let me do whatever I wanted to you, if I asked.”

Lance levels a look at Keith, fearlessly unflinching, and slow-blinks his thick lashes. “So ask.”

“How can you be sure,” Keith says. “What if—”

“It’s just you, Keith,” Lance says quietly, rising up on his knees in the sand. He splays his hand like a brand, like a claim, over Keith’s quivering throat. Nudges Keith’s chin up with a hooked forefinger. “I know how to read myself now. I’ve gotten real good at it. I know what you do to me and haven’t stopped doing to me since I was twelve years old.”

It burns, to hear it out loud like that, in layman’s terms. “Twelve years old,” Keith whispers, dazed.

“You’re the first and only boy I’ve ever loved like this.” Lance swallows like he’s steeling himself for a mile-high dive. “With—with this much of myself. I’ve never loved anyone as long as I’ve loved you.”

Keith squeezes his eyes shut as though Lance has landed a blow. He’s a live wire. A candle’s flickering tongue. He’s a slow-moving flame tempted towards Lance’s endless blue. Don’t tempt me, he thinks. You can’t bank a blizzard. Can’t sweet-talk a wildfire.

Lance moves closer, dragging his knees across sand, says, “You like the sound of that, don’t you? Me, carrying a torch for you for eight years straight?”

Keith nods stupidly, mouth falling open at the first touch of Lance’s lips to that private place tucked away behind his left ear.

“Is that what you wanted to hear me say?” Lance whispers into the skin there.

“Yes,” Keith whispers. Then: “Say it again.”

“Been thinking about doing this for a long time,” Lance murmurs, mouth charting a course up Keith’s throat, over his jaw, tracing his way around Keith’s scar and back down again. “Thought about what you’d look like when I finally did.”

“Please,” Keith says, all begging black paladin.

“Please,” Lance says, “what?”

Keith opens his eyes to throw Lance a mean look, desperation clawing at the cage of his ribs. “Please come home with me,” he says through his teeth. “Please say you will.”

Lance pulls back. “I don’t think you know the meaning of that word,” he says, not unkindly, like Keith is a child playing with big boy words. Like he’s at risk of bloodying his own palms by wielding it that way, so carelessly. “I don’t think you know anything.”

“I know how I feel about you,” Keith says lowly, viciously, drawing his mangled letter from the confines of his pocket and offering it up. “I know enough, Lance. I know what I’d risk to get you back. I know more than I think you can imagine, than I think you’ve ever considered. Read my letter if you don’t believe me.”

“No.” Lance sits back on his haunches and stubbornly refuses the heap of crumpled paper. “I want to hear it out loud first. I want it in your voice and I want to get to look at you while you say it. I’ve said my piece, so it’s your turn. Use your words, Keith, and take what you want.”

Dear Lance, he thinks about saying, thinks about hunching over a hostel desk and writing down, then scribbling out with angry black swirls of ink. Dear Lance, I hate you. Dear Lance, why did you leave? Dear Lance, why did I let you leave? Dear Lance, come back. I’m sorry. Please. It’s so lonely out here without your brightness. Dear Lance, I grind my teeth to dreams of you. Dear Lance, I love you, I love you, I love you. Tell me how to stop loving you. I never learned how to unlove the people who left me. Dear Lance, I don’t know how to survive off of the memory of you. It’s not enough. Dear Lance, I wish you were here.

Lance,

I miss you.

“I love you—fuck—I love you, okay? And I can’t figure out how to stop,” Keith bites out, angry, bristling like a bloody wolf, and Lance shoves him shoulders first into the sand and seals his gasping mouth with a kiss, hard and furious, and a plaintive noise is forced from Keith’s lips like the first and final shatter of sea glass against water.

Keith thinks: now you’ve done it. Keith thinks: I’m ruined for good. Keith thinks: I’ll never be able to stop, now that I’ve had a taste, and loops his arms around Lance’s neck, caging him in with knees tucked up towards his chest and clamped down around Lance’s hips from either side. He swallows Lance’s frantic breaths and kisses him back, using teeth, terrible and clumsy with it, a fourteen year old fumbling his way through the dark all over again, but Lance doesn’t shrink beneath the warmth of it the way Keith’s old, nameless Garrison fling did. He gives back just as good, just as fierce, gripping Keith with hands curled under his knees.

Lance rips his mouth from Keith’s to press a line of frenzied kisses down the line of his neck. He gasps out: “What do you want?”

“I want,” Keith says, panting, staring dizzily up at the Cuban sky where it’s gone muddy with color, swirls of the stuff, hot pink and boiling red and buttery orange, “my knife back. I want to debunk every stupid thing you wrote about yourself in that letter. I want to debunk it over dinner. Dinner...ah...dinner as in a date. And I want”—careening fast and uncaring down the hillside of greed, of getting to ask for what he wants, of getting to expect Lance to give it to him, Keith keeps adding on to his own list—“you to read my letter. Not where I can see. And I want you to come back to the team. And I want you to pilot Red again. And I want to get to kiss you whenever I want, anywhere I want, all the time. And you don’t get to kiss anyone but me.”

“Jesus H. Christ, all you had to do,” Lance breathes, as he pulls off of Keith’s neck with a wet sound that promises dark, hard-to-hide hickeys to come, “was ask.”

• • •

Old Havana is a miracle of color.

All the people here walk with a cant in their step. They wear belonging like beaded necklaces and beaded necklaces like religious proclamation. Keith walks past a mural of a dark-skinned woman with flame for hair. Below her image sit the words DEFIENDE LA TIERRA! He thinks about how British troops fell dead to fever in these streets a few hundred years ago, too weak to survive its heat and its people. He thinks about how Havana has been captured and freed and captured again, a fist opening and closing over a butterfly. Wiggling away from greedy hands like a fanged reptile through the underbrush.

Keith did his reading on the flight over, Lance’s cheek pillowed on his shoulder, his eyes following Keith’s finger as it moved across angry blocks of text. Sometimes he read a sentence, then looked up to check for Keith’s reaction, reaching a hand up to thumb Keith’s frowns smooth. Other times he plucked the tablet from Keith’s hands to show him more Facebook photos of Veronica and Luis and Marco—a much-needed reprieve from the Cuban suffering documented—faces Keith is already beginning to put traits and memories to, without having met them himself outside of the occasional bout of instant messaging.

“No wonder you’re a hero,” Keith had murmured at one point, brow wrinkled, as he waded deeper and deeper into Cuba’s history.

“Being a paladin is nothing new,” Lance had murmured back, lips moving softly against Keith’s throat. “We here know a thing or two about evil empires and stolen land.”

The photos didn’t do the city justice. They move past pink ice cream shops with tiny metal signs proclaiming HELADOS! CONO - $6, PALETA - $5, BOCADITO - $10, rolling carts abounding with dewy, thick-skinned fruit, pedi-taxis and wailing children. The ocean sits at their back, bordered by women in floppy hats and shirtless men with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. Keith sees blue for miles—cobalt, teal, indigo—and senses the lifeblood of Lance in the architecture, in the pastel paints, in the bands of brown boys carrying bongo drums on their backs.

NEVER FORGET THE ROOTS, says one painted wall.

CONTRA TODA AUTORIDAD, says another, a Cuban flag hanging from the terrace overhead.

Keith does his sightseeing and turns a slow and steady pink beneath Havana’s light. Lance watches this happen from below the brim of his straw sunhat, looking laughingly at Keith as he digs his brown thumbs into the mango he purchased moments earlier from a nearby street vendor. He cleaves it smaller. A quiet laugh loiters at the corners of his mouth.

Keith narrows his eyes dangerously.

Lance bites into his mango’s meat and smiles, looking delighted.

“Don’t,” Keith says, as he drags the hair tie from his hair to neaten his ponytail, “say it.”

“Say what,” Lance asks innocently.

Keith sighs and hangs his head. He holds the collar of his tank top away from his sweaty chest, flaps it back and forth a moment to get some much needed air circulation going, and makes a small noise of complaint when his damp skin begins to cool uncomfortably.

The city around him is a blur of movement and of creamy color. A long-haired girl in a billowing skirt dashes past him with ankles like lightning, running alongside a bike overflowing with children that then overtakes her. She shrieks and pumps her arms faster, turning into an alleyway and disappearing. Keith looks at her and then Lance through the fall of his bangs, scowling.

Lance tilts his head and bites sweetly at his mangled fruit. He catches a stray drop of juice rolling down his chin with the pad of his thumb, pushing it back up and onto the flat of his tongue.

“Oh,” Lance says around the thumb in his mouth, playing dumb and looking altogether irresistible while he’s at it. “Did you want a bite?”

Keith directs a heated look at his boyfriend through the fan of his lashes. He skims his eyes over Lance’s crisp shark-patterned overshirt, worn unbuttoned on top of a muscle tee, the crucifix laid carefully over his heart in preparation for their visit to the Havana version of the McClain family home tonight—“Me and God are on speaking terms, don’t get me wrong,” he’d said when prompted by a glance from Keith, “I just haven’t been the most model Catholic these last few years, in terms of penance and scripture and prayer. Well-placed religious paraphernalia reassures”—and his jean shorts. His legs are brown and prickly. He looks the opposite of homesick.

Homestrong. Homesound. Homesteady.

Keith says, “Did you want to say ‘I told you so?’”

“God, yes, I thought you’d never ask,” Lance says with a grin, stuffing the last of his mango into his mouth and chewing obnoxiously. Hands free, he digs into the little leather satchel he’s wearing across his chest without preamble. He swallows and adds: “You know me so well, gorgeous.”

Keith huffs and resigns himself to at least an hour of teasing.

Lance extracts a bottle of sunscreen from the depths of his bag and snaps it open. He says, “Remember when you said you could handle the Havana heat on the way over? I told you so. Remember when I told you to wear a white tank top instead of black because black absorbs heat and you said you’d be fine? I told you so. Remember when you said you don’t burn? I told you so.”

Keith purses his lips, gloomy-eyed. “Are you done?”

Lance squeezes a dollop of white product into the palm of his hand and says, “I love being right.”

“Honestly,” Keith tries. “I don’t need any—”

“You cannot scare the UV rays off with your glare, babe, it’s just not scientifically plausible, even I know this,” Lance says. He stuffs the bottle of sunscreen under his armpit and rubs his newly-freed hands together, tongue poking out from between his lips.

Keith says, “I—”

“I offer you kisses in exchange for your silence,” Lance counters.

Keith’s mouth snaps shut.

Lance bites his lip, snorting, and begins rubbing the sunscreen into Keith’s cheeks. “You are so easy, it’s laughable. How does it feel knowing I’ve got you wrapped around my exceptionally attractive finger?”

In answer, Keith tilts his head up, impatient.

Lance rolls his eyes and drops a fond kiss to Keith’s mouth, all the while spreading the sunscreen up over his forehead, along the underside of his chin and jaw, down his throat and clavicle. He tastes like mango and mint on Keith’s tongue. Keith stands there and takes it, lazy with lust and secretly pleased by all the attention and pampering.

“Mm, my arms too, loverboy,” Keith murmurs into Lance’s mouth, extending them in request.

Lance pulls back an inch, brow furrowed, then pauses. His blue eyes are suddenly very narrow. “You...” he says, on the brink of realization. “Oh! Okay. Say it ain’t so.”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Keith says.

“If you need a sunscreen massage and kisses in the middle of a Havana farmer’s market, there are easier ways to go about getting them. Honestly, babe, all you had to do was ask. I am extremely accommodating, especially when it comes well-muscled, wolf-adoring black paladins who never take my advice and wear their hair too long.”

“I resent that.”

“I answer to ‘please and thank you’ and ‘stud muffin,’” Lance says, smirking.

“Please and thank you, stud muffin,” Keith recites, biting back a smile at the dumbfounded look that earns him.

“I...” says Lance, “didn’t think I’d get this far.”

Keith laughs and rests his two elbows on top of Lance’s shoulders, wrists crossed. Casual and intimate up close and quietly possessive from afar. Lance is never not earning meaningful looks from strangers, but they’re especially rife today, Keith thinks, as he leans forward to press an unhurried kiss to Lance’s pliant mouth, drinking up his pleased noises with a smile.

Tonight, he’ll meet Lance’s family in his best shirt and proper jeans, because Lance has made clear that leggings, jeggings, yoga pants, or any combination thereof are formally forbidden. Tonight he’ll shake hands with a long line of McClains, introducing himself as Lance's boyfriend of seven months. Tonight he’ll sit on a swing with Lance’s dimpled, curly-haired mother and watch her flip through her favorite photo album, showing off glossy, dated snapshots of a younger Lance—bare-chested and howling, wolf-like, while wearing a Cuban flag the way you would a cape during an old World Cup, sitting on someone’s shoulders and laughing with his head tossed back in the middle of Havana Pride, streaks of pink-purple-blue paint running wetly down his cheeks, smiling fresh and close-lipped with his tidily gelled hair and his Galaxy Garrison collar buttoned at his throat.

And she’ll nudge him, smiling, say, “You take care of him for me, okay? I can only do so much from Havana and I’ve heard about what you’re capable of.”

“Yeah,” Keith will say, earnest and warm down to his toes. “Of course. I’ll take good care of him.”

“Gracias, niñito,” she’ll say, eyes crinkled softly, “and welcome to the family.”

• • •

Lance,

My mom says home is sometimes not a place, but a person.

She says love is about knowing when to leave, or let go of your home. I am slowly learning that it is also about knowing when to grab hold, when to admit to someone that you messed up and you’re gonna make things right, and when to chase the boy you have feelings for down his favorite beach at full speed.

I’m ready to get used to following you to the ends of the universe, if that evens the playing field a little.

(My mom wants me to let you know that I’m terrible at letting things go, least of all people who I’ve “latched onto and decided are now mine forever.” Apparently you fall into this category.)

Keith,

P.S. 13-year-old Keith is sorry for looking through you. 18-year-old Keith is still agonizing over the memory of your hand in his.

22-year-old Keith can’t take his eyes off of you.

• • •

When Keith is ripped from the dream and tossed back into his body, the movie reel of a future going dim and dreamy behind his eyelids, he wakes to darkness. For miles, there is nothing but darkness. The light has shrivelled up and crawled away to die elsewhere, as though to say, your happiness is hallucination. Your fire is phantasm. You are nothing without me.

“I’m not nothing,” Keith says, fangs elongated, into the still and quiet stretch of space. His breath is heavy and frantic in his mouth. “I gave you what you fed me. I am you.”

Beside him, Krolia looks up from the shelter she’s begun to fashion from something that looks like palm leaves and hemp twine. Her brow is damp with sweat and she’s frowning. She says, “What?”

Keith sits up and stares into his lap, head ringing. He feels feverish with fluster. White spots dance behind his eyelids. White spots dissolve behind his eyelids. Like starbursts, or sparklers. Their afterimage: a brand. The light has gathered and melted from him like heaps of snow, glaringly silver. He feels cold in the absence of it. His brain is a scratched record of Lance, Lance, Lance. Lance’s hands and mouth and laughter. Lance whispering, I love you. Lance removing the gloves from Keith’s hands to kiss the blood from his knuckles. Lance with corded arms wrapped around his waist from behind, chin nestled at Keith’s shoulder.

“What did you see?” Krolia murmurs.

“Nothing,” Keith answers, voice rough. And then: “Everything.”

• • •

In Keith’s most favorite memories from the future, the ones he keeps cradled close to his chest to be carefully unwrapped and revisited like sweets stolen from the Garrison’s canteen by greedy, half-bruised fingers, Lance says, “You don’t know anything,” because it’s something he delights in laying at Keith’s feet, barbed and tender both, and it is often followed by lessons in how little Keith knows, how much Lance wants him to learn, which places on Keith’s body burn the best when Lance warms them with his wandering mouth.

He journeys slowly through the quantum abyss and the light comes and goes like flame from a leaky lighter. His hair grows longer and he accumulates a small collection of mementos during his travels alongside his mother—a blue rock washed smooth by a creek, the abandoned rib of a long-dead mammalian creature, a set of frayed earphones he finds hanging tangled from a twelve-armed tree. He has no real use for the earphones, so he uses them to tie his hair back during the warmer days. He finds and raises a cosmic wolf with dark fur and yellow eyes and feels the self-made prophecy running through his veins sing at the sight.

When the days strain too thin, bleed blearily into one another over a period of two years, he lets himself revisit the odd memory of Lance, kept warm in the cavity of his chest. He reminds himself that he is but a tiny cog in a much larger machine that serves to disband an empire and bring absolute freedom to the universe. He reminds himself that a dark mole sits on the small of Lance’s lower back and that Keith’s mouth remembers wanting and searching it out in darkness the way the brain recalls an old friend’s face in its dream state.

He reminds himself: the future is yours for the taking. Grip the blade by its hilt and dig its point into the stone’s surface. Carve with loving craftsmanship into its skin the letters K + L, bordered by a clumsy-looking heart shape. Shed your second skin and wade waist-deep into the waters of Cuba, arms spread in supplication.

He reminds himself that home is sometimes not a place, but a person, and that home-people might lie at the fork of your future, and that they might not, and that it’s in your power to find and choose them. To raise a family with them. To grow old and die beside them. To paint their walls a million colors and make them irrevocably yours.

And other times the soldier in him rears its ugly head and reminds him that certainty is about survival and not love. Not how badly you want to return home, into the waiting circle of his arms, the boy you love. Certainty is knowing when to walk away from a burning home. Certainty is foretelling disaster or death and then dodging it. Certainty is leaving your home behind to keep it safe the way his mother did twenty something years ago.

When Keith thinks about that—about doused fires and survival over love and the mission as it eclipses the blue of a brown boy’s eyes—the memory of Lance always draws him back from the brink to murmur, “You know nothing,” into Keith’s ear, mouth hot as it roams slowly down his neck, leaving bruises behind to remember him by.

And Keith bares his throat like a promise. Imagines hitting the throttle and hurtling towards one future in an unchangeable course he’s handpicked for himself. Sees the splay of Lance’s fingers at his bare hip and thinks: I know you and you’re not nothing.

You’re everything.

“So show me,” Keith says back, always says back, never stops saying back, as he chases the sense-memory of Lance home.