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autisticlancemcclain · 8 months

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Keith doesn’t sleep a wink the following night. He quickly packs a bunch of supplies into a pod, and then spends hours staring at the base's scanners, waiting for the castle to pop up. He doesn’t hesitate for even a second when it finally does, barely remembering to check in with Kolivan before speedily manoeuvring out of the base and into the castle’s waiting flight deck.

As promised, the team is gathered there to meet him, clambering over each other to be the first to greet him when he walks out of the pod. It should be flattering, should make a pleased flush redden his skin from his neck to the roots of his hair. It’s everything he’s ever wanted; that kind of love, that kind of joyful acceptance, an excitement to see him.

But he barely even notices. All of his attention is trained on the figure so far away from everyone else he’s practically shroud in shadows, stiff and stone-faced. Lance stands with a duffel clenched tightly in his fists, jacket zipped up to his neck and hood halfway pulled over his hair.

Everything he sees makes him want to fall over. He almost feels nauseous, and he’s not entirely sure why. Lance has his off-days, Keith knows this. There were days when Keith had to help Lance fight his way out of bed, and when he did the same for Keith. Keith has held him as he sobbed himself to pain on the observation deck floor. Keith has watched him get overwhelmed and mean and snappy and then guilty for days afterwards.

But he’s never seen Lance like this. He’s never seen Lance…shrink, collapsing into himself so deeply, keep himself so distant. The closest thing he ever saw was when he came to Keith’s room talking about five lions and six paladins, about a seventh wheel.

I solved that problem, he thinks, increasingly desperate. Lance was backed into a corner so Keith threw himself out of the room to give him space. That was the point, that was the purpose, that is why he has stayed in a stupid grey bunk he hates and nodded blankly to masked people he’s not allowed to familiarise himself with and stubbornly refused to leave a man behind no matter how much trouble he gets in.

He was supposed to have fixed things, and now everything has gotten worse.

“Keith!” Pidge screams the second he emerges from the door, sprinting at him and damn near tackling him to the floor. Despite himself and his dizzying confusion he smiles softly, squeezing her right back.

“Hey, Pigeon,” he says, and she must have really missed him because she doesn’t even deck him for it.

“You need to call us more,” she grumbles at him, and he snorts and asks her how that holoprojector he asked her for is coming along.

Before she can launch into yet another rant about how far from the realm of possibility that is, the rest of the team catches up to her, and this time he really does hit the floor. Luckily he lands sprawled on his brother, who only sighs fondly and flicks him on the forehead.

“We’ve all missed you so much,” he says. “Not the same here without you, squirt.”

Because Keith has misses his brother, he refrains from turning around and throwing hands with him right in the hangar, because why would he call Keith that he’s a grown ass man, basically, not six, Shiro what the fuck. The team teases him anyway because they are the worst, but Keith rolls his eyes and takes it. Between Hunk’s bawling and Pidge’s snark and Allura’s hand gripped in his, Keith can almost pretend like he’s just back from a quick and risky errand, that everything is normal, that his family is just excited to see him and they’re gonna head off for dinner together in a few. The familiar foreignness of it all is almost settled around him like a heavy blanket.

Almost.

“I believe we have an exchange to get on with,” drawls a voice so pretentious it makes Keith recoil even before the cruelty of his words kick in.

Lotor stands in the middle of the room like he’s centre fucking stage, hip cocked, inspecting his nails, casual and unbothered. A quick glance to the side confirms that Lance’s jaw has tightened at the comment, posture tensed further. Keith looks back to Lotor and wishes with his whole heart that he had laser eyes via Clark Kent so he could fucking obliterate him. He settles for intensely praying for his downfall to the universe, which isn’t enough but will have to be until Keith can sacrifice him for the greatest good or something.

An exchange. Like Lance is a fuckin’...low rate commodity, or something.

Keith is honestly more disturbed by the fact that no one else seems to be terribly bothered by the comment. He wonders if he’s being too sensitive, if he’s reading into things, if his own hatred for Prince L’Oreal is clouding what could be a similar relationship to what Keith and Lance have, with all the insults and competitions.

The actual thought of that makes him physically gag.

No, that’s not it. Keith is not mistaking the pain that is radiating off of Lance, the way the air itself in the castle feels wrong.

“I’m ready to go if you are, Lance,” Keith calls, as softly as he can manage. Unfortunately it doesn’t manage to go far, and Lance only nods once, tightening the duffel over his shoulder and walking over. His steps are deliberate, at least, no downtrodden shuffling – there’s some stubbornness within him still. It’s better than nothing.

“Aw, no, already?” Hunk complains, sniffling.

Despite the storm raging in Keith’s head, he manages a smile in Hunk’s direction, equally flattered and amused by the affection.

“We’ll be back, man,” Keith promises. “Mission is only supposed to take a few days. Maybe we’ll finish up early and I won’t tell Kolivan, huh, Lance? Spend a couple days here.”

He smiles as brightly as he can manage in Lance’s direction, receiving only a tight-lipped grimace in response, an attempt without the verve to follow through.

“Yeah, sure.”

He gives the pile of teammates a wide berth as he climbs into the pod, disappearing quickly into the back. Keith tries to pretend his words weren’t sullied with bitterness.

It takes longer than he would like to finally bid everyone goodbye and crawl back into the pod, which he feels a little bad about. Both because he doesn’t want to feel like any interaction with his family is at all a burden, even a goodbye, and because he doesn’t want to keep Lance waiting. But he’s in a rough place right now, off-kilter and almost disoriented, so he cuts himself some slack, breathing deeply as he pulls out of the hangar and back into dead space. He puts the tiny but powerful thrusters up as high as they will go, zooming along at top speeds. He stays in the pilot’s chair, hand firmly on the yoke, until the castle is well out of view, until they are surrounded on all sides by endless darkness. Only then does he steel himself to put the pod on autopilot, to breathe deeply and turn around to face the oppressive awkwardness filling up the small space.

“Hey, Lance,” he says quietly, sitting gingerly on the floor in front of his seat. He’s relieved that Lance doesn’t straight up move away like he expected. He’s even more relieved to notice that Lance doesn’t tense up at his mere presence.

He barely acknowledges Keith past a nod of the head, though, which is depressing. Keith wants to ask another question, get more than a nod out of him so desperately it’s actually embarrassing, but he manages to restrain himself. He knows maybe better than anyone else what it feels like to be crowded by questions when you already feel like you’re suffocating. Keith will just have to wait for Lance, however long it takes.

Thankfully, he doesn’t wait very long.

“I didn’t get any details.” Lance’s voice startles Keith, not because he isn’t expecting it – all he’s been doing is waiting for Lance to talk – but because it’s nothing like he expects. His voice is almost normal, not strained hoarse or even bitter like it was earlier. If Keith squeezes his eyes shut and pretends the last several months didn’t happen, he can almost convince himself that he and Lance are sitting at the briefing room table late at night, heads bent together, trying to iron out a plan for their upcoming mission. He wants that back so badly he aches with it, but the ache is familiar enough now that he thinks he can bear it.

“It’s, uh, a quintessence hunt,” Keith explains. “Or, well, kind of. Hopefully. Kolivan gives a lot of details at once and he speaks in this super depressing monotone and I swear to God I do everything I can to pay attention but at some point it just sounds like the teacher in Charlie Brown. So. That’s my bad.”

He has to force air back into his lungs by the end of it and he’s red in the face to boot. That’s maybe the most words he’s ever spoken in one go (hyperbole whatever let him live) and of course he sounds like the biggest dweeb. Why hasn’t becoming a super cool space ninja made him more aloof and mysterious? This isn’t fair. What happened to gay rights.

To his great surprise, his dorky ramble is rewarded by a flash of Lance’s smile, so brief he would have convinced himself he imagined it if he hadn’t spent so much of his life seeking it out. It’s gone faster than it existed, Lance’s expression falling back into something carefully blank, but the fact that it was there at all is the biggest relief.

Lance takes the tablet Keith hands to him, mission file pulled up and ready to go. He squints slightly as he reads it, tilting his head to the side. “We have to go through…wait, Keith, is this right?” He flips the tablet over to Keith, zoomed in on a pair of coordinates. “This is, like, right next to a black hole. RIght right next to, worryingly next to. I don’t like how close this is. This pod is not really built for that, I don’t think.”

Keith doesn’t recognise the coordinates, so he can’t really say, but there’s a fair bit riding on this mission, so he doubts Kolivan has fucked this particular detail up.

“Well, it’s either safe or no longer our problem.”

“I suppose.”

A little disappointed that Keith’s attempt at a joke didn’t do much to lighten Lance’s expression, he lets them lapse into silence, tilting his head back onto the seat and closing his eyes as the pod zooms forwards.

They have a long journey ahead of them.

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#next chapter is the offical crash babes!! drama drama drama!!#vld #voltron #keith #keith kogane #lance #lance mcclain #klance #pre klance #space whale #space whale au #langst #klangst #observant keith #red paladin lance #blade keith #my writing #fic #longpost

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