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autisticlancemcclain · 5 months

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The ship was shaking like a kid holding a goldfish bag.

It was not, in case you were wondering, a good time.

Keith grit his teeth, planting his boots on the ground and half-walking half-climbing over to Allura, who was paler than Keith had ever seen her. The grip she had on her podium was tight enough to drain the blood completely from her knuckles. Despite his own fear, Keith’s heart softened for her.

“How is it looking?” he asked, shouting over the noise of a thousand asteroids and a million laser strikes. All while their lions sat, drained of quintessence, locked in their hangars

One goddamn thing after another. Jesus.

“It is looking bad,” Allura shouted, not taking her eyes off the space in front of her. “I can’t – Coran, I can’t hold it on my own!”

Coran looked back at her grimly. He had probably the most success keeping upright – seriously, was it posture or did he have a steel rod anchored to his back at all times – but even he was struggling against the whipping and shuddering of the massive castleship, attention focused on the controls. Trying to keep the shield up as well as possible, trying to get their own defenses running. Trying, as always, to keep the castle going, even when the odds were a million to nothing.

“You can,” he encouraged. The effect was less encouraging when a massive asteroid hit the side of the bridge point-blank, throwing him right off the controls and splat into the walls. Despite Lance and Allura’s cries of alarm, he made a startlingly dignified crawl back to the deck controls.

Hell of a man, that advisor.

He continued once he was steady, sweat beading on his brow but gaze soft and assuring. He waited for Allura to meet his eyes, then nodded, once. “Focus, girl. Hands on the spheres. Mind cool on the exhale. However we need to get out of this – you can guide us. Make your decision. Your team is behind you.”

“Yeah!” Pidge cheered, lifting her fist in emphasis from where Shiro held her steady, eyes trained on her computer screen. Blaring red lines of code Keith could not pretend to read flashing rapid speed in front of her, and she typed back at it just as fast, keeping their crackling systems at bay. “You got this!”

Allura breathed out. The tense line of her shoulders softened, just slightly, despite the ongoing chaos. She lifted her hands and rested them, gently, on the podium spheres as Coran instructed. They glowed.

“We retreat,” she decided, nodding to herself. “We’re already low on quintessence, standing to fight will drain us dangerously. We must get to safety if we are to survive with our home intact.” She bit her lip, eyes opening. “But, uh, full disclosure, I have enough strength in me to open a wormhole and that is About It. I will be out of commission the moment it closes.”

Hunk shrugged. “We’ll catch you, then.”

“Try not to wormhole us into a black hole,” Shiro suggested, smiling slightly. “We’ll manage anything else, Princess.”

She laughed slightly, thankfully, but within seconds called out for everyone to brace themselves. Keith did as she heeded, or he tried to – but the castle got hit as he tried to crawl back to his seat, sprawling him on the floor. He glanced over at Allura, panicked, but her eyes were already glowing, and the space in front of them was already starting to warp. He swallowed roughly, squeezing his eyes shut. The floor was shaking too badly for him to get his bearings. He couldn’t get his feet under him, couldn’t stand, couldn’t dream to crawl to his seat. He stilled, resigning himself – he didn’t know exactly what would happen if he wasn't strapped down and protected during a wormhole jump, but it couldn’t be good. He had to hope for the best.

“God,” sighed a voice to his left, “you’d die without me, Dropout.”

A hand clenched the back of his jacket and yanked, pulling him tumbling onto another body. Quick as lightning a seatbelt was stretched over him, clicking into place just as the space in front of the castle finally warped, bright blue, and the entire bridge lit up so bright Keith was blind with it.

When the light finally died down, Keith was half-convinced nothing had changed. The castle stopped shaking, but instead it was plummeting, hard and fast, controls dead and energy gone, towards the surface of a planet.

“Someone catch Allura!” Coran shouted, and on queue the princess’ eyes rolled up in her head and she slumped forward. Luckily, Hunk had been more prepared than the rest of them, seatbelt already off and arms extended to catch her. He carried her back to her seat, buckling her in carefully, and strapping himself in next to her. Wise move – trying to crawl back to his own seat, fighting against the G-forces, would be near impossible.

There was a click, and then a shove, and then Keith got to feel those G-forces firsthand.

“What the hell!” he demanded, barely managing to catch himself on the arm of the blue paladin’s seat. “I coulda brained myself!”

Lance shrugged, playing for innocent, but a smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. Keith could’ve strangled him. “What? Thought I’d let you get back to your own chair. You're welcome for saving you, by the way.”

“Some saving, jerk! We're still falling!”

“Yeah. Personally, I would find somewhere to buckle up.”

“You’re so annoying,” Keith growled, and it was by spite alone that he managed to stomp back to his own seat and buckle himself in. He was bright red, anger making him hot – Lance always made him like this, so furious he could barely blink. One day they’d be making progress, working together like a dream, wiping the floor together, and the next it was like a switch was flipped. Like Lance was reminding himself that he and Keith could never get along. It was ridiculous, and Keith couldn’t for the life of him understand it. Was he so bad?

“Incoming!” Pidge shouted, shaking Keith back to himself. Her screen was now linked up with Coran’s, the only two things on in the entire castle – electronics seemed to come alive when Pidge touched them – and diagrams of the castle systems were blaring red, flashing with symbols Keith didn’t know, but recognised as bad. “The nav and power systems are down! It’s not safe to get anyone back there to force them back on manually, but I think I can get steering up in a sec. Shiro, I need your arm for power. Hunk, keep on Allura, make sure she’s upright when we crash, we don’t want a spinal injury. Lance, Keith, I’m turning steering over to you guys. Don’t fuck it up.”

Despite their bickering, both of them nodded. Neither of them particularly wanted to be turned into paladin pancake anytime soon, so they could collaborate for one thing.

Seconds after Pidge spoke, a screen flickered to life in front of Keith. Stats blinked back up, glitching rapidly as they translated themselves into words and symbols Keith could understand. The hologram shifted and expanded to its usual 3D model, joystick in the middle, thrusters and controls to his left, a screen with Lance’s comm line to his right. In his little screen, Lance met his eyes, eyebrows raised in question. Keith nodded. Together, they wrapped their hands around the joysticks, breathed out, and let their minds fuse.

As always, it was a freaky feeling. Imagine the weird, shuddery feeling you get when you say the same thing as someone at the same time, voices layering, tone mixing, for a moment your own voice and the voice of a stranger synching into one. The weird, deja-vu-but-not of it, the uncanny valley feel of recognising your own voice but…different.

Then multiply that freakiness by a hundred, and you still won’t quite get it.

On some levels Keith was aware that he was his own person. He knew his name, knew his hands, knew his history – or well, some of it. Nothing about himself had changed.

But at the same time, he was also Lance Esposita-McClain. He knew his name, knew his hands, knew his history, more of it than he could ever get from shared stories or mind melds. There’s no telling the way your sister’s arm feels hooked around your neck for the sixth noogie in as many minutes. There’s no explaining the way your breathing only gets calm with your feet in the saltwater. There’s no describing the curve of your mother’s smile. Nothing Keith was seeking out – no memories he would even know to look for – but they were there, simmering, triggered by a smell or the crook of his finger in a particular way. Memories stored in the body and the soul and the senses, not in the brain, shared when two consciousnesses become one.

Lance’s mind was hyperspecific. It complemented Keith’s well, with all his flitting, quick detail-oriented observance. As Keith jumped from angle to angle, noticing the planet’s curve, the pull of its gravity, the heat of its atmosphere, Lance zeroed in on an island, one of the only ones big enough for them to land. While Keith kept their craft in control, steering along the air currents, Lance kept them directed, single-minded focus on a stretch of rocky beach – not exactly a soft landing, but not a lot of living things for them to destroy when they crash. (Keith would’ve chosen to land in the meadow. Crushing frogs and bugs or whatever is never something on his top priority list of things to avoid. But he didn’t argue when Lance nudged them towards what is about to be a very bumpy landing.)

“Brace yourself!” he shouted, not daring to look away to make sure his friends were buckled. Trusting that they were, he held his position, letting them plummet, coming closer and closer to splatting on the planet’s surface before finally yanking on the joystick as hard as he could. He felt Lance’s strength twist and tangle with his own, and together the two of them levelled the castle almost parallel with the ground, letting them glide on their own velocity until they slowed down enough to let the bottom of the craft brush against the rocky outcrop.

It was the most turbulent landing Keith has ever felt, except maybe that time he and Lance crashed blindfolded into a sand dune, and every bump on the ground gave him whiplash. When the castle finally hit the ground for good, dragging them a gauge in the ground for several miles as friction finally slowed it to a stop, the leftover inertia yanked Keith forward so roughly the buckles of his seatbelt made something crack in his ribcage. When the castle finally stopped he got slammed back into his chair so hard he was almost surprised he didn’t fall right through the impenetrable material.

It took a minute for everything to hit. His connection with Lance had been severed the second they hit the ground, too focused on being, y’know, crashed to keep holding on. After the shock of being tossed around like dice in a cup wore off, which did not take long, Keith’s body made it very clear that yeah, no, armour actually only does so much, and crash landing is one of those things that’s just bound to hurt. His skull pounded. At least one of his ribs was most definitely cracked. His wristed and knuckles ached from the strain of holding up the entire weight of the castle as he’d steered it. He was alive, obviously, but – Jesus. Being alive sucked.

“Sound off,” croaked Shiro from somewhere left of him.

“Ugh,” groaned Pidge. “Screw you, Keith, I hate it when you drive.”

“Next time I’ll be sure to let us crash,” Keith responded flatly.

“Um, you did, bozo, I asked you to land us –”

“The castle was dead! What did you expect me to –”

“Allura and I are both fine,” Hunk interrupted. Amusement lined his voice. “She’s still out, but she’s breathing fine, and I didn’t let her hit anything on impact. She should still get checked out, though.”

“Roger that,” Coran agreed. “Ease your worries, Number Two, you did well. I will have her in the MedBay as soon as our systems are up and running again.”

“Oh, whew, that’s a relief, because I didn’t want to say anything but she kinda jammed her elbow into my sternum by accident and I’m not blaming her or anything since she’s unconscious but I think my spleen may be a little dead, not a huge deal I’m sure but –”

“Everyone quiet!” barked Shiro. “That’s six accounted for! Who’s missing?”

Immediately, heart pounding, Keith whipped to his right. His stomach dropped. The Blue Lion Command Chair was empty – seatbelt torn somewhere on the shoulder, cracked helmet overturned carelessly on the seat. The crisp blue and white lines were marred by a small splash of red. Panic clawed its way up Keith’s throat, and he was out of his seat before he could register unbuckling his own straps, looking frantically around the bridge.

“He’s here somewhere,” Pidge fretted, “he couldn’t’ve just disappeared –”

Coran had a gloved hand clenched in his hair. “The windows and walls should be almost impenetrable, there is no way the crash broke them enough to let someone in –”

“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck –”

“Guys,” a soft voice interrupted, and Keith could’ve collapsed with relief. The castle has been flipped sideways during the fall, floor suddenly now 90 degrees, and standing at the side of the control board, now the very high top, was Lance. For whatever reason he had climbed it while they bickered, and now stood very still, gloved hand pressed to the glass of the windshield. Blood trickled from his temple, tracing a line down the side of his face, disappearing in the neckline of his armour. “We got company.”

Shifting gears – Keith was about to tear him a new one, when Shiro says sound off you sound off – but froze when he looked out the window, following Lance’s gaze.

Marching towards them, in numbers Keith couldn’t pretend to count, was an army.

— — —

part two

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autisticlancemcclain · 9 months

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Lance gets red around him a lot.

It’s strange.

It’s different from when they first started. (First met? Keith’s not sure. Lance is so insistent that they’ve known each other since they were twelve, but Keith thinks he’d recognise someone like Lance, someone who smiled that brightly and laughed so loud. But he doesn’t, and he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t, so he doesn’t think about it. He pretends in his head that they met saving Shiro and that’s that.) When they first started learning each other (that’s a better way to put it), Lance went red all the time, but Keith knew exactly what that was about, could read the hard set of his jaw and the anger making his dark eyes steely. Sometimes he would grin to himself and make the flush on Lance’s cheeks deepen on purpose; say something incendiary and challenging in the most casual one of voice he could manage, just to watch how furious he got, how indignance straightened his spine and squared his shoulders and made his cheeks glow.

He called Lance Rudolph, once, and he went ballistic. It was the first time he ever won a spar of theirs, and half of that was because Keith was laughing too hard to breathe. To this day no one believes Lance when he insists it happened. (Keith does feel bad about that, a little. Everyone seems to think it was just Lance who egged Keith on in the beginning, just Lance who purposely made things difficult, but Keith is grown enough now to admit that he had as much fun pissing Lance off as anyone else would. Well, grown enough to admit it in his head.)

Keith still makes Lance go red all the time, now. The issue is that he doesn’t know how he does it.

They still compete. Obviously. It’s fun and it’s easy and Keith is a fan of things that are fun and easy. That’s why he’s into demolitions. And pod racing.

But the competition no longer has that flare of genuine rage. Lance himself had admitted it, sniffing pompously after a late night spar and informing Keith that he had, apparently, “sucked all the fun out of hating by being endearing or whatever”. He also mentioned something about Keith’s “stupid fucking big round pouty eyes and depressing backstory”, but Keith doesn’t know what to make of that so he shoves it back into the recesses of his mind like many other things, including the first time someone other than his Pa said they loved him, Shiro’s safety lectures, and any and all calculus lessons he has ever sat through.

(It’s a mess back there.)

Keith, too, can admit that the animosity is gone. He no longer wakes up and hears Lance’s voice and considers drop kicking him into a black hole. Sometimes he even hears Lance’s voice and realises he’s smiling on reflex. Now he and Lance hang out. Voluntarily, and a lot. They spar. They swim. They harass Hunk. They harass Pidge. They harass Shiro. They harass all their friends, really. Sometimes Lance uses manoeuvres he’s learnt in sparring to pin Keith to the ground and force weird products onto his face and hair, dodging Keith’s attempts to bite him, preaching about their cleansing qualities or whatever. Sometimes Keith even does it without hissing and generally being a nuisance.

Sometimes Keith follows Lance quietly to the observation, late at night, and sits with him while he cries. He can’t decide how he feels about those nights. He’s not sure if he’s allowed to think about them outside of when they happen.

In all of this, though, Lance’s ruddy face has stayed pretty common. Keith can excuse it when they’re sparring, because it’s admittedly a lot of cardio, but at the same time Keith doesn’t get that red and he’s way paler than Lance is. He can almost kind of excuse it when they swim, for the same reasons.

He doesn’t get it any other times, though. He doesn’t know why Lance goes red at the most innocuous things, like when Keith tells him his hair smells good or his laugh is pretty or he’s actually really good at that nerdy math game Pidge likes, holy crow, I didn’t know you were that kind of smart. Nerd. He doesn’t understand why Lance goes red when he trips and Keith catches him, ‘cause he’s a big klutz, you’d think he’d be used to it by now (it’s not like Keith is going to let him fall. Well, usually not). He doesn’t get why Lance goes red when Keith compliments him in training, because usually when Lance gets complimented he gets a big head about it and preens for an hour.

It’s just strange.

Mostly, though, it’s not that big of a deal. Maybe Lance is just a blushy kind of person. He’s taken to teasingly calling Lance Red, because it’s better than Rudolph, and also because Lance goes scarlet every time he says it, so it’s kind of like he’s a wizard who can make Lance flush on command. Which is cool. Other than that Keith mostly just pretends it doesn’t happen. They hang out too much for Keith to bother. If he questioned it every time, he would go bananas.

“You have icing smeared on your face,” Keith comments on one such hanging out occasion. (They’re plundering the kitchen for the cupcakes Hunk made and specifically forbade them from touching. But Hunk allegedly broke into Lance’s room last week and stole the last of his toner, whatever the hell that is, so fair’s fair.)

Lance pops the last of the cupcake into his mouth then turns to face him. “Where?”

“Here,” Keith says, tapping the left side of his own chin.

Lance, like a dumbass, makes a swiping motion on the left side of his face, instead of mirroring where Keith touched. He misses the icing entirely.

“Left side,” Keith says, exasperatedly.

Lance scowls at him. “That is the left side.”

“No — the other left.”

“There is no other left! There’s only one left!”

Rolling his eyes, Keith reaches over to wipe the icing off for him. There cannot be any evidence on them, after all. When Hunk has a conniption over his missing cupcakes they must play the plausible deniability card so they can snicker about it later.

He swipes his thumb under Lance’s bottom lip, trying to scrape the icing off with his thumbnail. Lance inhales sharply.

“Sorry,” Keith murmurs, softening his grip. He must have scratched him. The icing didn’t come off, though, so he switches tactics and slides off the counter, shifting so he’s standing in between Lance’s open legs and cradling Lance’s cheek in his palm to tilt his head. He rubs his thumb much softer on the stubborn streak of whipped sugar, and that works a little better. He keeps rubbing until finally Lance’s skin is clear, all the half-dried icing now spread on the pad of Keith’s thumb. He licks it off without thinking.

It’s sweet.

Lance makes a strained whimpering noise. Keith flicks his gaze up to meet his face again and is less surprised than he should be to see a flush glowing across his cheekbones, making his freckles seem much darker than they are. His pupils are dilated so wide they nearly swallow up the brown of his irises, and Keith can’t tell if he’s looking at him or through him.

He sighs heavily. “Dude, do you have a condition?”

It takes Lance a long moment to answer. By the time he finally does, his gaze has moved firmly to his lap, neck bent so that Keith can’t really see his face. His ears are still read.

“I’ve got a fuckin’ heart condition,” he mutters.

Keith furrows his eyebrows. That’s weird. He’s seen Lance’s medical scans before — he’s in the pods a lot. You’d think that kind of thing would be on there.

“It doesn’t show up on your med scans,” Keith points out. “Is it, like, a genetic thing?”

Slowly, Lance picks his head back up, squinting at him for several long moments. Keith begins to squirm.

“You’re actually slow,” Lance says with an almost awed tone of voice. Which is mean. “Like, genuinely, actually slow. I think there are bubbles in your brain.”

“Hey,” Keith protests, pouting. “I help you commit cupcake heists, and this is how you treat me?”

Instead of answering, Lance continues to stare at him. He almost looks bewildered, which does nothing but make Keith more confused.

Eventually he lets out a long, tired sigh. It is not the first time Keith has heard that sigh. That is a sigh he hears when Shiro finds him throwing up his guts after eating a tub of ice cream out of spite. That’s the kind of sigh he hears from Allura when Keith ignores instructions and boulders through the shocks from the invisible maze to get it done faster. That’s the sigh that says I wish I had a trebuchet to strap you to it and release you into the sun. Keith is very familiar with that sigh, although he usually makes it happen on purpose, or at the very least understands how it’s warranted.

Right now he is completely lost.

“I am going to go bother Coran,” Lance says finally, pushing himself off the counter and walking towards the door. “You are not invited. I will talk to you when I want to strangle you less. Goodbye.”

“Bye,” Keith calls out, head tilted in confusion. He watches Lance go until he disappears down the hallways.

“He is so confusing,” he announces to no one, then walks out the kitchen himself.

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