*Lance and Keith have to share a room for some reason*
Lance in the dead of night: Keith... you awake?
Keith faced away talking into a pillow: No
Lance: Right well-
Keith: What is it?
Lance: I had a question for you-
Keith: I swear to god, if you've just woken me up to ask the worm question? I'm gonna kill you!
Lance: No! No! I wasn't! That's not what I was gonna ask...
Keith: That sounds suspiciously like that was exactly what you were gonna ask me...
Lance: No... I was gonna ask...
Keith: Yes?
Lance: ... are we friends?
Keith:... what?
Lance: Are we friends? Cause I mean I know we've stopped arguing now but we never really clarified if like... we're friends or not?
Keith: I mean... I figured it was obvious...
Lance:... which is?
Keith: Yes, you idiot, do you think I'd let you stay in my bed if we weren't at a bare minimum friends?
Lance: Well, I dunno, you're pretty violent in your sleep, I've spent a few nights now dodging kicks and elbows so I don't know if that's your subconscious hatred of me coming through in sleep
Keith: ...I don't do that...
Lance: You totally do. That bruise on my forehead wasn't from training, that was from last night when you elbowed me at like 3 in the morning and woke me up
Keith: Whatever, point is, I don't hate you and obviously we're friends. It's friendship that has stopped me from murdering you for waking me up at this time
Lance: Well I figured you nearly broke my collar bone just now, so fair punishment you know...
Keith: Asshole...
Lance:....
Keith:....
Lance: ... So... would you still care for me if I was a worm?
Keith: I fucking hate you
Lance: You're the one that brought it up!
Keith:....
Lance:..... Keith?
Keith:.... Are you like a worm from the offset or did you turn into one?
Lance: Hahahahaha
Keith: You asked! I mean if you were one from the offset I'd probably still care, I maybe wouldn't have initiated a friendship but like I wouldn't feed you to the birds immediately.
Lance: You've got this planned out huh?!
Keith: Is there the possibility of you transforming back if you got turned into one? Is there like a quest to resolve that going on? Stop laughing these are important for me to consider my answer!?
Lance: None of that is important to whether you'd care about me!!
Keith: Well, no cause that's a given, you idiot, but like how far I'm willing to go to care is important in this!
Lance: Right well, I'm going to sleep while you figure this out
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Keith doesn’t miss Earth the way everyone else does.
He does miss it, of course. He had a few months early in their journey that he stubbornly insisted he didn’t, but he’s grown enough now to admit that yeah, wifi was nice. So was non-recycled air. And a yellow sun. (God, it’s so weird to genuinely miss a yellow sun. He never thought that shit mattered.) None of this even covers how much he misses, to his grand shock, the culture of Earth — it’s strange and humbling to have to explain what a car is. Or a country. Or the concept of global warming, which is an embarrassing thing to have to put into words to someone who’s never really heard of it. (Like genuinely very humiliating. Explaining to someone that they very nearly shortened the life span of humanity because of consumerism, essentially, is something he still thinks of and just shudders.)
Mostly, though, he’s happy to be in space. Space is weird as shit and so is he, so he feels like he has an easier time just functioning, really. He likes the untethered-ness of it all, the lack of general structure. He doesn’t spend a lot of time wishing things were different.
Except for right now.
His sword, which he has been boredly slashing and poking at the wall of the Empire ship, gets stuck in the tiny crack where two sheets of metal panelling are pushed together. He huffs grouchily at it, pulling it out, then has to plant his boot on the wall and yank when it refuses to do so. The tip of the blade gets unstuck quicker than he’d expected and the change in force startles him, sending him sprawling on the floor.
He scrambles to his feet, bright red, clearing his throat and trying to roll his shoulders casually, as if he was intentionally on the floor. He looks like a huge massive dork, so thankfully no one was looking his way anyway.
“Are y’all almost done?” he calls, trying really hard to sound like he’s just innocently inquiring and not whining. It is no easy task — he’s bored and he’s hungry and he’s restless and this stupid ship smells like a stale refrigerator and he’s really really bored, in case he forgot to mention.
He scowls when no one answers, sticking out his tongue at the green and yellow paladins, both of whom are hunched over a control pad, wires everywhere, trying to hack in or out of something. Keith’s not sure. They told him and Lance to keep watch at the door and then stopped responding, basically.
This is the part of Earth that Keith has missed. Back home, Keith got to do all the investigative shit, too. Don’t get him wrong, he likes being the stabby one, as Shiro has so patronizingly put it; he likes being the one to run head first into conflict with a smirk on his face and a sword on the ready. It’s fun to be the impulsive one and be rewarded for it. It’s fun to be able to wreck Empire shit and practice witty one-liners to shoot off at annoying generals and sergeants or whatever the Galra equivalent is, just to watch their eyes twitch in rage before Keith cracks them one. All missions are two parts, essentially, fucking around and finding out, and Keith loves having free reign to fuck around.
He just wishes he got to be part of the finding out, too.
He sighs, long and loud and petulant because obviously no one is listening. He knows that his investigative research with Blue was at a very different level than all the stuff Hunk and Pidge do. He understands that on an objective level. If he wants to be part of the find out portion then he has to be prepared, has to put in the effort to learn and keep learning, to know how to recognise red flags and read code and all that nerd shit.
But computer science is just so boring.
Keith is a science person. Duh. He went to pilot school. Physics was eighty percent of that whole spiel, and he’s always had an affinity for chemistry, even if said affinity caused a lot of explosions and also Adam’s blood pressure condition. Science is cool as shit.
But coding is fucking boring. He has tried and tried to sit down and learn it, but every time Pidge tries to explain the basics his eyes glaze right over, and it’s not fair to her to waste her time.
He sighs again. He gets to wait, then.
Deciding that he’d rather not slash a hundred new scratches in the ship’s wall, lest the damn bridge feel more like a prison cell than it already does, he starts to pace, swinging his sword back and forth randomly. He could try to practice a few of the techniques and swordplay choreo he’s been learning, but that’s no fun without a partner. He’s become spoiled with the castle’s training bot. With Shiro hanging back with Coran and Allura, there’s no one around to clash swords with.
He perks up. There is, actually. He forgot that Lance had unlocked a sword when he first got switched to Red.
He spins around, trying to find where Lance ducked off to. He expected to find him leaning on Hunk’s back or pestering Pidge, like he often does — they’ve long since learned to work around him — but he’s nowhere to be found. Keith walks around the area, poking his sword at piles of sentry parts he cut up a few hours ago, peeking behind control panels and various big important chairs. Nothing.
“Lance?” Keith calls softly. Something like worry sours his stomach.
Please, for the love of all things good and holy, don’t let Lance have been hurt or taken this whole time. Keith will never forgive himself.
Thankfully, a hand sticks up by the far end of the bridge, blue armour glinting in the ugly purple lighting. Keith heaves a huge sigh of relief, jogging over. He thought he’d seen Lance before Hunk and Pidge had hunkered down to get info. But in that brief moment of panic, he wasn’t sure.
“Whatcha doing?” he asks as he comes close enough to Lance to speak. The red paladin has wedged himself between some kind of steel storage bin and the wall, in an impossibly narrow sliver of space, which explains why Keith missed him when he was looking.
Lance doesn’t answer right away, instead nudging a roll of wire with his foot. He has something resting in his lap, and wire is looped around his fingers, sliding back and forth as he carefully weaves it into a pattern. Keith watches, intrigued, for several passes of the craft.
“Nicked it from Team Punk when they really started to get wrapped up in their nerd corner,” he explains, finally looking up at Keith to shoot him a wry grin. Keith grins back. “Standing guard is boring as hell, especially when we took out all the sentries and barred the doors. And the castle is parked outside, so hell if I know what we’re guarding for.”
“Fuck, I know,” Keith groans, sitting down in front of him. Honestly, there is no real reason for them to be here. He half suspects Shiro has sent them all out for some peace and quiet, which is rude.
He grabs the spool of wire by Lance’s feet, inspecting it carefully. It’s very thin, and flat instead of a round tube-ish shape that wire usually is. There are two wrapped around the spool, too, one red and one blue. Keith curiously looks back over to Lance’s lap, trying to get a better look at what he’s doing with the wire. He doubts it’s anything mechanical — Lance gets as bored as he does when Hunk and Pidge try to explain stuff — but he’s intrigued on what has kept Lance’s interest for so long.
He’s surprised to find that he recognises what Lance is making, or at least sort of. It’s a long, spiralling chain, like the wire has been woven together to make some kind of mini spiralled staircase. He remembers, although vaguely, seeing other kids at recess in elementary school, sat down all over the place, clambering all over each other with flat plastic string, making boxy keychains or scratching spiral bracelets.
“Oh, hey, I know that stuff,” he says. He scrunches his face, trying to recall the name of the craft and coming up completely empty. It’s not friendship bracelets, the string was too stiff for that. Not that loom elastic thing either. “I don’t know the name, though.”
Lance chuckles lightly, sliding a last piece of string through a loop before tying it all off. He hooks it next a growing collection of them that Keith just notices, with a wide array of colours and patterns, hanging off his utility belt like leaves from a branch.
“I don’t know the name, either.” He tilts his head in consideration. “Well, I do. I googled it once, and I got some strange French name that didn’t fit, so I never used it. No one ever, like, sought it out or anything. Someone just came to school with a pack of the thread and everyone was obsessed with it for a week before forgetting about it.”
Keith tilts his head in acknowledgment. That’s what he remembers, too, but he doesn’t remember ever having any friends who would give him any of the string to try, nor was he ever comfortable enough with whatever foster parents he had to fumble through a request for the string.
“…Can I try?” he mumbles, after watching Lance start and weave a new one. He’s not entirely sure why, but suddenly his cheeks are red, and shyness pricks at the back of his neck. He’s suddenly nervous that Lance is gonna laugh at him, gonna tell him no, gonna give him a weird look for asking at all.
It’s ridiculous. Lance wouldn’t do that, and there’s nothing wrong with Keith asking. But he feels the nerves anyway.
“Sure,” Lance says easily, tugging on the strings and setting his chain aside. He smiles brightly at Keith, brown eyes crinkled and soft, and although the shyness fades away his blush goes nowhere. If anything, Keith feels his face get hotter. “What colours do you want?”
Keith clears his throat, wishing the flush away. He points to the red and blue spool he’d seen first. Lance quickly unravels thread to the length of his arm, matching up both colours before cutting. He sets the spool to the side then carefully lines up both threads, folding them in half and wrapping them over his thumb too quickly for Keith to see what he does exactly.
“I’ll start it for you, ‘cause it’s hard.”
“Hey,” Keith protests immediately. “I can start my own.”
Lance raises an eyebrow. He blinks at him, slowly, for several moments. Keith huffs and looks away.
When he looks back, Lance is grinning, and he holds out the carefully started craft.
“It’s genuinely very difficult to start them,” he promises. “I’m the only one of my siblings who knows, they used to ask me to start theirs all the time. It’s way easier to do rather than start, trust me.”
That mollifies Keith a little. He does trust Lance, and now that he thinks about it he can vaguely recall how one person on the playground would hold court while a million people crowded around them, fielding dozens of requests for starts.
“Okay, watch me first, then I’ll walk you through doing it yourself.” Slower than he was moving before, Lance loops and weaves the thread, taking great care to keep his hands open so Keith can see the entire process. The chain he’s making looks different from the one he made earlier, and Keith says as much.
“Yeah, this one’s a box chain, it’s way easier. The spiral one is hard.” He snorts at Keith’s pout. “Don’t give me that look, doofus. You can work your way up to spiral. Try this one for now, okay?”
He hands the started chain off to Keith, then scoots out from his little nook, settling in beside Keith to help guide his hands.
Right beside Keith. His entire left side is pressed against Keith’s entire right, and he slides one hand under Keith’s arm, accidentally brushing across Keith’s ribs, to help guide his hands. Keith tries everything he can to stay still, breathing shallowly out his mouth, determined not to move even a muscle, either so Lance doesn’t move or does he’s not sure. He’s not sure what’ll make him feel less like he’s going to explode, less like every spot Lance touches isn’t going to burst into flames.
“Okay, start with the loops. See how there’s already kind of a square shape? Flip the red thread in either side of it, yeah, like that. There should be two loops and the extra string should hang opposite of each other. Okay, now take the blue string, and weave it over and under — yeah, just like that! It should create four mini squares in a big square, you nailed it.”
Lance looks up at him to shoot him that big beaming grin again, and Keith tries to muster a weak smile back at him, realising for the first time that he has yet to breathe and he should probably do that before the spots in his vision get any worse and he passes out.
This is fine, this is normal, Lance touches people all the time. He is a touchy person. This is so not worth him going batty about, what is his brain’s deal.
“Alright, now loop the extra thread around your fingers and pull it away from each other. It’s kind of a pain because it’s super smooth so it doesn’t really want to stay together, and it takes a learning curve, but — oh, hey, you got it! Good job. Now do it again.”
Trying to remind himself to breathe every few seconds, Keith repeats what Lance taught him, over and over again until the chain starts to look like an actual chain, to Keith’s pleasure. He’s fascinated by the quick way the squares build, how the layers are so thin but it doesn’t take long at all for them to stack into something longer than his pinky finger.
Keith blinks, startled, when Hunk and Pidge clap their hands, calling out that it’s time to go. He realises that there’s a bit of a crick in his neck from hunching over, the tips of his fingers feel raw, and the chain has become as long as his hand. Although it hasn’t felt like more than a few minutes, he’s clearly been doing this for a while.
This is amazing. A boring mission has never flown by this fast before!
“Looks great,” Lance says, genuine pull of his brows belying the truth to his words — he’s not just saying that at all. “You picked that up fast.”
Keith coughs, standing on wobbly, half-asleep legs. “Uh, yeah. I’m good with my hands.”
Lance makes a strange noise as he bends down and tucks the spools of wire away, a muffled, kind of derisive snicker. “Yeah, I bet you are,” he mumbles to himself, turned away, as if he didn’t mean for Keith to hear it.
Keith stumbles. His jaw drops. Lance is out the door and on his way to his lion before Keith can react.
He twirls his chain in his hands when he finally remembers how to do other things rhan have Lance’s words repeat in his head a bajillion times, walking slowly to his own lion. His right side still tingles ever place Lance touched it. He grins a little to himself, remembering the easy way Lance guided his fingers, smiled at him.
Maybe these boring missions aren’t so bad after all, actually.
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