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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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autisticlancemcclain · 6 months

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“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.”

They have a long journey ahead of them.

– – –

Keith jerks awake half-convinced he’s inside a rock tumbler. That’s how it sounds, anyway, with the ear-crushingly loud bangs and crashes coming from all around the pod, shaking the whole craft and sending Keith flying were it not for his tight grip on the ceiling handle.

Lance has just barely beaten him to the pilot’s chair, settling in quickly and white-knuckling the yoke.

“What’s going on?” Keith shouts over the noise.

“I woke up twelve seconds before you did,” Lance grits out, jerking the yoke to the side and sending them spinning out of the way of an asteroid the size of a small house.

“Fuck, it must be an asteroid storm, we’re gonna have to –”

“Keith, can it,” Lance barks. “Unless the next words out of your mouth are a magical solution, you need to keep them to yourself.”

Keith snaps his jaw shut. Even if he did have a magical solution, Lance can’t afford the distraction – not because he’s unskilled, but because the space in front of them is getting denser and denser, to the point where Keith can feel something wrong in the atmosphere, and asteroids are becoming unavoidable. Every second there’s a crash on the outside of the pod, shaking the whole thing and sending them careening into another atmosphere. Lance grits his teeth and tries to hold them steady, but after a point it’s impossible, and control is out of his hands.

“Strap into the crash zone!” Lance shouts. He unclips himself from the pilot’s chair, stumbling forward as an asteroid hits; Keith barely manages to dart out one arm not gripped onto the ceiling handle to catch him. “We’re not going to make it through this storm and it’s too late too –”

They’re both thrown to the side as a massive rock hurls into the pod, crushing the side concave sending the pod spinning like a top. Keith hits the ground hard, helmet bouncing off the floor so hard he sees stars, and he loses his grip on Lance as the paladin goes flying over him. The sound of crushing metal is deafening and painful, and it only compounds as more and more asteroids slam into the pod, throwing it back and forth like a rowboat in a hurricane. The pressure in the cab and all around them grows exponentially, until Keith feels like a compressed can; like his eyes are ready to pop out of his skull. He’s in so much pain he doesn’t even have the strength to be panicked.

Like a switch is turned the pressure suddenly lifts, and he’s weightless, slowly floating up in zero gravity; stomach swooping and limbs limp. The rapid change of atmosphere has him choking back vomit. Every couple of seconds the ruined pod shifts and shakes, from asteroids or gravitational forces Keith does not know, but in one particularly rough hit he’s slammed into the wall so hard his helmet cracks and for a moment everything goes dark. By the time he blinks himself awake, ears ringing and blinking slowly, sluggishly, the weightless, swoopy feeling in his stomach has returned, but not like when he’s in zero G – the same butterflies you get at the top of a rollercoaster, just as you begin to drop.

He registers the whistling sound of something falling at terminal velocity last.

The panic starts to set in, then. He scrambles to his feet, or tries to, but it’s hard; the pod is rattling every which way so there’s no solid ground to stand on, really, and he’s still dizzy and disoriented. He attempts a step forward and crashes to the ground, barely manages to catch himself. As he goes down he sees the rapidly approaching surface of something from the pod’s cracked windshield, and it’s green and grassy and flat and going to crush them to death.

“Lance?” Keith calls out, desperate and panicked. “Lance, where are you?”

He whips his head around to look for him and almost passes out again. Bile climbs up his throat and he very nearly lets it spew out, breathing sharply through his nose and clamping his teeth to keep it down. The pod is small, and crushed, and he can’t see well over the protrusion of the cratered wall, and he can’t see Lance.

“Lance! Answer me! Where are –”

The pod lurches sharply to the left without warning, throwing Keith to the ground again. This time he doesn’t bother getting back to his feet, instead grabbing one of the bent steel rods sticking out of the ruined pod wall to drag himself forward; tucked in close to the wall. FInally, to his great relief, as he crests the bend of the giant crater he sees a flash of blue armour; a cracked wrist guard shining with reflected light as Lance grips the steering yoke, back in the pilot’s seat, dragging it sharply upwards to try and lessen the impact of their crash. He’s struggling – Keith doesn’t know how far they’re falling from, or what level of gravitational force this random planet (if it even is a planet) has, but the speed they’re falling at is deadly. If they hit the ground the way they’re going, they’ll be crushed so fast they won’t even have time to realise they’re dying. At this point, Keith’s not even sure if anything can save them.

He sets his jaw. There’s no point in giving up.

As fast as he can go with the throbbing of his head, Keith half-crawls half-stumbles forward, using bent sections of wall and broken odds and ends to keep himself steady. He’s ready to throw up for the millionth time by the time he finally stands behind the pilot’s chair, hands gripping the arm rests, but he’s there and he’s conscious mostly and he’s capable enough.

“You good?” Lance grunts, barely audible over the sound of impending doom.

“Peachy,” Keith mutters back, planting his feet and leaning over to wrap both hands around Lance’s.

Without needing to say a word, they pull back at the same time, as hard as they can. The pod – or what’s left of it, Keith’s not sure they can accurately call this hunk of ruined metal a pod – creaks and groans with the effort, but with every second they hold their position with all the strength in their bodies, the nose of the craft inches up an up, getting closer and closer to parallel with the ground instead of perpendicular to it.

“Incoming,” Lance warns, as the ground gets closer. “Brace yourself.”

“Grab me in three?” Keith asks.

Lance nods. “One…”

“Two…” Keith continues.

“Three!”

Milliseconds before they collide, Keith throws himself on top of Lance, curling against him. Lance whips the seat one eighty degrees so it’s facing away from the windshield and crash site rather than towards it, wrapping his arms around Keith’s torso and gripping tightly in lieu of a seatbelt.

The crash makes Keith black out again.

When he blinks back awake his ears are ringing, and everything looks and sounds like he’s underwater. His limbs are heavy and he feels like he’s been shrunk. His body’s telling him he’s been out for hours, but he knows, vaguely, that he hasn’t, because he’s not nearly well-rested enough. He inhales deeply through his nose, eyes fluttering shut, and tells himself he has five seconds.

One.

His limbs are all still there. Arm, arm, leg, leg. All are working, at least mostly. Good.

Two.

His head throbs. Every pound of his heart amplifies in his head like a falling anvil in an ampitheatre. His body aches like it never has before.

Three.

The ringing in his ears hasn’t faded, but sound doesn’t sound so muted anymore. He thinks he can hear the groaning of buckling metal, and the roaring of engine flames.

Four.

There’s something sharp digging into his ankle. He can’t feel the pain of it yet, but he dreads the eventual fade of the adrenaline, the understanding that it is going to smart and it is going to smart badly.

One.

He exhales sharply and forces his eyes open, blinking rapidly to bring the blurry world into focus. He was right about the flames; he can see pieces of the engine strewn about the grass of the clearing, of some kind, that they’ve crashed in. The windshield is no longer a windshield so much as a gaping hole where the windshield once was. The nose of the craft is crushed into the strangely blue-ish dirt.

And Lance, under him, is unconscious.

“Lance,” Keith croaks, having intended his voice to be sharp and demanding but landing somewhere closer to weak and pleading. “Get up.”

He does not stir. Keith is comforted, somewhat, by the slight puffs of air fogging up his visor every few seconds, but Keith is pressed right against him and can’t really feel the movement of his chest. His head lolls back into the broken chair, hands resting limply on Keith’s back. There’s a trail of blood running down his temple.

With a heave of effort, Keith pushes himself upright, keeping his weight off Lance as best as he can. He presses the button on the side of his own helmet, relieved when his visor lights up with the info display. The second he gets the all-clear for breathable air, he places his hands on the base of Lance’s helmet, pulling it away from his head as gently as he can manage. It takes longer than he would like, but he’s terrified of pulling too hard and twisting Lance’s neck, especially if there’s a spinal injury. The second the helmet clears Lance’s hairline he tosses it to the side, letting it crack and clatter to the floor, and taps his cheeks rapidly.

“Lance? Lance, get up. Wake up. Get up now.” There’s not even so much as a twitch. Panic makes Keith’s breathing pick up. He’s blinking back flashes of Lance’s lax face, in the purple light of the castle, scratched to hell and neck bruised with fingerprints. He hopes to any god that is listening that it’s not that. He’s not sure the comms are working, and he sure as shit doesn’t have a pod. “Lance, it isn’t funny, get up!”

The urge to grab his shoulders and shake is overwhelming, He has to yank his hands away, forcing them under his thighs, leaning back and trying not to hyperventilate.

“Please,” he begs, voice cracking. “Please don’t leave me here by myself.”

He squeezes his eyes shut again. Okay. This is fine. Keith is going to count to five again, slower this time, and when he opens them again Lance will be awakeand smirking that fuckass smirk he does when he’s being a jackass and he knows it and is convinced he’s the funniest bitch around. He’s going to be fine. He’s breathing, anyways, so he’s alive, which means there’s nothing wrong, which means they will be fine and they’ll call the team somehow and –

“...K’th?”

Keith’s eyes fly open and he nearly cries with relief, throwing his arms around Lance’s shoulders and burying his head into his shoulder. “Oh, God, you’re alive!”

Lance goes stiff as a board. Keith stiffens, too, confused and alarmed at the strange reaction, suddenly hyperaware of his position; of the way he’s half sprawled in Lance’s lap, leaning bodily against him. He’s worried suddenly that his weight is hurting Lance and all but throws himself off in his haste put space between them. The abrupt weight on his ankle reminds rudely that hey, he just crashed into the actual ground from literal space, holy shit, and he nearly goes cross eyed with the pain.

A choked off grunt brings his attention back to Lance, who is in the process, for some dumbass reason, of standing up and crawling out of the broken window.

“Lance? What the fuck are you doing?”

Lance, of course, does not listen, because he is a mother fucker and Keith has the sudden and absurd urge to contact his brother by any means necessary to apologise. For, just. Everything.

Keith scrambles out after him, biting back a pained yell at the throbbing of his ankle. Lance is moving – fast, faster than Keith would expect, but there’s a clumsiness to the movements. Like he’s still half-out of it.

“Lance?”

Again, Lance doesn’t answer. He limps around to the side of the pod and Keith follows, at a loss.

“Lance, fucking – stop that. You’re –” Lance shakes off his hand and continues carefully pulling back the shredded inner lining of the pod, dropping pieces of cracked polymer on the ground until the hold is big enough to lean through. He comes back out with an armful of steel boxes, dented and battered, etched with Galran and Altean labels, stacking them on a section of clearing that isn’t on fire or covered in debris.

Keith makes a noise of frustration. He’s torn between dragging Lance somewhere to make sure he’s okay and screaming at him. The anger and fear swirl violently in his stomach, clawing their way up his throat, and it burns worse than the vomit.

“Fine. Fine! Ignore me. I’m calling the team. You just stack your fucking boxes, jackass.”

He stomps back into the pod, sweeping aside the broken glass and metal shards and ignoring the slight sting of his ripped gloves. He grabs his and Lance’s discarded helmets and stomps back out to the clearing, climbing a random rock and relishing in the twinge of his ankle because it feels like a fuck you, somehow, and a fuck you is what he needs right now. He mentally flings it in Lance’s direction with great relish. Lance, because he is currently a massive rat bastard, does not pick up on Keith’s rancid vibes. Keith glares at him as he mashes the buttons he has memorised on his helmet display, dialling the Voltron line.

It rings. And rings. And rings and rings and rings.

Keith frowns, some of the fury fading for confusion.

“Well, that’s not great.”

If the personal line is down, that means they’re either asleep or busy. He hopes asleep. He quickly dials up the business line, and when that doesn’t work, somewhat desperately, the distress line. It rings.

And rings.

And rings, and rings, and rings.

– – –

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