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autisticlancemcclain · 11 months

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In all the love songs Keith has heard (and he’s heard many, both his Pa and Shiro were big ballad fans), he’s always heard laughter described as angelic.

That’s how it is. Over and over again. When you fall in love with someone, when cupid’s arrow strikes, their laughter will be like musical bells, like windchimes, melodic and beautiful and entrancing, and you will never want to hear anything else.

Lance sounds like a hyena on crack when he laughs.

Keith is obsessed with it.

The love ballads got one half of it right, he supposes. He does shut the fuck up and listen when Lance laughs. It is like the only sound he can hear.

It’s just not…musical.

“Your sighs get any dreamier and he’s going to hear you,” Shiro says idly, colouring his nails with Sharpie.

Keith drops his chin from his hands, turning away from where he was watching Lance laugh with Hunk and Allura and scowling at his asshole brother. “He is not.”

Shiro snickers, not even bothering to look up. Keith wonders if it’s morally acceptable to smack the shit out of someone with only one arm, or if Shiro will call foul and convince everyone that Keith is somehow the asshole here.

“Is so. You’re so besotted that even I’m embarrassed for you, and I usually just laugh when you’re being humiliating.”

Keith decides that the potential reputation tarnishing is worth it.

“Ow!” Shiro cries, clutching his flesh arm with way more drama than necessary. “My arm!” He glances over at the scattered stares he receives, from various uniformed officers, and pitches his voice louder to get more attention. “My only remaining human arm!”

“Keith, stop trying to kill your brother,” Coran admonishes. “He’s sensitive.”

Shiro shoots him the tiniest smirk before returning to his fake pout. Keith’s jaw drops in indignation. “Wh — he antagonized me — it’s not my — Coran!”

Coran only raises his eyebrows. “Is there a problem, Number Three, or shall I get your mother involved?”

Pidge makes an obnoxious oooooooooh sound, wiggling her eyebrows at him, because she and Shiro are the worst, actually, and for good measure Coran is too.

“I hate this family,” Keith mutters, sinking into his seat. “All of you suck.”

“Okay, emo boy,” Shiro says patronizingly.

Unfortunately, Iverson walks in and starts the Atlas briefing before Keith can smack him again. He settles for glaring at his dumbass brother, who sticks his tongue out at him like the toddler he is, and then vows to pay attention to the meeting. He is the black paladin, after all.

He lasts four whole minutes.

It’s not his fault. If anything it’s Iverson’s fault. The meeting is boring as hell, and a quick glance around the meeting table shows that the only person paying attention is the note-taking robot Pidge made, and that doesn’t even count ‘cause it’s a robot. Several senior officers are outright sleeping. The MFE pilots are quietly passing around a game of dots. Hunk has blatantly pulled out an engineering project of his and is working on it in full and total view of Iverson (he still hates the man for what he did to Lance when they were cadets, claiming that since Lance has forgiven him, someone needs to hold a grudge). Pidge and Matt seem to be communicating in Morse code. Allura is directing her mice in some kind of acrobatic performance, and Coran is helping her. Shiro is trying to see how many spitballs he can land on Iverson’s blind side before he notices (he’s riding the line with 34). Lance is staring at Keith.

Lance is staring at Keith?

He startles when he meets Lance’s brown eyes, but Lance only smiles, wiggling his fingers in a little wave. Keith tilts his head in confusion, trying to wordlessly ask Lance why he’s staring, and also manage to keep his rapidly creeping blush under control.

(He likes it when Lance stares at him).

Lance squeezes his eyes shut instead of answering, and a moment later Keith feels a prodding in the back of his mind; a familiar presence, hot and fiery and all-encompassing.

Red.

He lets her in, lets her familiar feeling envelop his mind. She struts primly in his mindscape, nosing at Black as if to say I was here first, so just remember who’s boss.

Black lets her prance around with fond amusement.

Before Keith can ask her why she’s pushed her way through — not that he minds, he’s happy to have her, but she hasn’t felt the need to visit him in a while so he’s curious — he feels another presence almost knock on his subconscious, request access to his mindscape.

Red has…brought someone else?

Can she do that?

Red looks at him flatly, like his doubt is a personal offence. Before she can start admonishing him, the presence pushes again; not urgent, but insistent, almost as if someone is knocking on the door of Keith’s mind and doesn’t want to be ignored.

Beyond curious, Keith lets them in.

The second Keith opens his mental door, it’s like they rush in, flowing in like the white rapids of a river, strong and fast and excited, cool and bubbly. There’s so much of them that it takes Keith a good couple of minutes to conceptualise just who exactly has followed Red into Keith’s mind. The rushing water takes shape into a person; tall, gangly, broad-shoulders with a mop of curly brown hair and bright brown eyes, freckles spotted over their nose and grin wide and sparking.

Keith gapes.

“Lance?!”

“Is everything alright, Kogane?”

Keith blinks open his eyes to find the entire meeting table staring at him, expressions ranging from confused to knowing to outright teasing. He realises all of a sudden that he’s spoken aloud, and not only spoken but called Lance’s name out, loudly, for seemingly no reason, in the middle of a crowded meeting.

His face flames.

“All is well,” he chokes out. “Please carry on.”

Iverson narrows his eyes at him for a moment, but eventually shakes himself and continues. Keith stays bright red for several minutes, staring pointedly down at the table, ignoring the various sniggers he can hear with every ounce of his effort. Unfortunately, some of the teasing laughter is inside his actual literal brain, what the fresh fuck, so it’s a fruitless endeavour.

Are you still freaking out? the Lance inside his head (???) asks.

What in the gall brained fuck is going on, Keith thinks back at it, looking at Real Lance in a decent mix of panic, confusion, and the actual phonetic sound that an exclamation point mixed with a question mark makes in your brain. Real Lance has his eyes closed, brows creased in concentration, and the tiniest of smirks pulling up at his lips.

Close your eyes and meditate, doofus, Mind Lance tells him. I’m using a lot of energy right now so I don’t have the space to try and reign you up here.

Despite the fact that Keith is so confused that a thousand professors could not explain his current situation to him in any way that makes sense, he listens, closing his eyes tightly and visualizing his physical bond with Black, like he does when he flies. It helps him sink into the semi-astral plane of existence, usually so he can meld with his lion and the rest of the team when they’re forming Voltron, but whenever he’s trying to reach his own mindscape, too. He’s still aware of his physical body, he’s not quite projected out of it, but he’s not wholly in it, either. Most of his essence is focused on seeing as his mind sees, without the constraints of the physical plane.

“Took you long enough,” Lance huffs.

“What the fuck,” Keith responds.

He packs quite a lot of questions into that what the fuck, he thinks. Like ‘what the fuck are you doing here’, for starters. Or ‘what the fuck just happened with the water and Red and everything else’, if he wants to be specific. Or, if he really just wants to cover everything, ‘what the fuck is happening’ might just do it.

“Your internal monologue fascinates me,” Lance informs him.

Keith flushes. (Does he flush in his mindscape? Does he have the blood and physical body necessary in order to flush? Or is he just embarrassed, so his perception of himself is blushing because that’s the only way he knows how to conception use the feeling? God, Voltron magic shit is so weird. Keith lowkey misses mapping energies alone in the desert and wondering if he was delusional.)

“Stop hearing my internal monologue,” he orders.

Lance pouts. “You’re no fun. I want to hear all the juicy gossip you think about me because you’re too emotionally stunted to say it.”

Lance is only joking, Keith knows he is. He’s leaned forward slightly, like he always does when he’s teasing, and his smile is close-mouthed, unserious.

But Keith of course panics anyway.

A million snapshots of Lance flash through his mind — Lance laughing, head thrown back, barely holding himself up; Lance dancing around the briefing room at two in the morning as he plans a mission; Lance with his tongue stuck out of his mouth, concentrating hard on tiny knitting needles and tiny little mouse-sweaters; Lance with tears shining in his eyes, glancing at a projection of Earth, long before they finally made it home; Lance dirty and hurt, cradled to his chest as Keith runs him too a pod after Sendak. A thousand moments of Lance when Keith was fondest of him, when just looking at him made the ballads Keith grew up with play in his head.

He hurries to shove the memories in an obscure corner of his head and prays that Lance doesn’t see them.

“Can you actually hear my thoughts,” Keith asks, a little desperately.

Lance waves a dismissive hand. “Nah. I get emotional impressions, but that’s about it. I can’t even see anything in here expect you and Red, basically. And Black. Hi, Black!” He waves excitedly to the lion, who sits regally in the dead centre of Keith’s mindscape. She turns to the red paladin in amusement, nodding her head once. Lance beams.

Keith feels a rush of fondness for him so potent it makes his heart hurt, a little.

“Woah,” Lance says, looking at him a little wide-eyed. “I felt that, Willie Nelson. Holy softie.”

“How and why are you here,” Keith says, blatantly changing the subject and not giving even one single shit about being subtle about it. Lance is looking at him too closely.

Luckily, Lance indulges him, or is too excited about being here in general to resist talking about it.

“Isn’t it so cool?” he gushes. “I’ve been working on it with Red for ages! I figured since we all have that emotional bond with each other and the lions during Voltron, and we keep our lion bonds outside of Voltron, we should be able to communicate with each other outside of Voltron, too. Red wasn’t sure if it was possible but she helped me try, and I figured I’d try with you first because it would be the easiest, since we’re so close and all. And you’re more likely to let me in your head.”

He says it so matter-of-factly. Like it’s obvious that they are so close, and that Keith loves him so much that he wouldn’t mind Lance in his head, not really.

The worst part is that he’s right.

With anyone else, this would feel like an invasion of space. Keith would be defensive immediately, angry even, throwing them right the hell out of his head and yelling at them as he does it.

But with Lance?

He’s a little shocked, sure. And worried, that Lance is going to see all the parts of him that Keith isn’t ready yet to show him; the parts that he doesn’t yet know how to say, how to show. The parts of Keith that soften every time Lance smiles at him, the parts that light up with gleeful competition whenever Lance eggs him on, the parts that chafe and ache but smooth over when Lance sits with him quietly when he’s hurting.

Keith knows that Lance knows that he loves him. He doesn’t exactly hide it. He’s not sure he would, even if he could.

But he’s not ready to tell him. Not yet.

He takes a deep breath. (Or whatever the mindscape equivalent is).

He knows Lance won’t go looking.

“And you decided to pull this telepathy shit in the middle of a random meeting?” Keith teases, allowing some of the worry to slip away.

This is, after all, cool as shit, even if it’s weird.

“It’s not an important meeting!” Lance defends. “It’s boring, and I needed entertainment! Besides, Pidge’s bot will give us all the notes anyway.”

“Yeah, yeah. Slacker. Some right hand man you are.”

Keith spends the rest of the dead-boring meeting teasing and chatting with Lance in his mindscape, which is great because he both gets to mess with Lance, which is always a net positive, because he has the upper hand in his own head, and because he gets to look like he’s paying attention in the meeting and actually be completely checked out.

“Oh, hey, I think the meeting’s ending,” Lance says. “I can hear Iverson winding down a bit.”

“Time to get out of my head then, you squatter?”

Lance rolls his eyes, waving to Red to get her attention. She stalks over, nosing him in the head like a mother cat to her kitten. Lance bats her away. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll head out. But only because I’m not practiced enough at this thing, so if I stay in your head it’ll look like I’m frozen or something. Once I figure out how to look normal and still beam my thoughts into your head, you’re never going to be without me even once in your life.”

Lance is teasing again. Keith can tell. But still, he’s totally helpless to stop what comes out next.

“I’d be okay with that.”

He sounds so besotted he wants to smack himself. But before he can even have the space to be embarrassed, he feels a wave of emotions that aren’t his — Lance’s, from the other end of their connection, a mix of embarrassment and selfish pleasure so thick that Keith can feel it even though they’re in Keith’s mindscape.

His jaw drops.

Lance wants Keith’s undivided attention. He’s preening over it.

“I gotta go,” Lance says hastily. “Uh, meeting ending and everything.”

Before Keith can so much as stop him, he feels the same strange feeling as before, the cool, rushing water of a river, only this time it’s flowing out of of his head rather than into it. Lance has retreated hastily from his mindscape, and Red follows, much slower and much more smug, visibly laughing at her paladin.

When Keith opens his eyes again, Lance is bright red, and won’t meet his eyes.

Keith smiles. Maybe he’s not the only one who’s not quite ready to spill his guts.

———

part two

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