[season one]

"So you would." Lance whooped.

Hunk shrugged, leaning back against the rubbery vinyl of the lounge couch. "I mean, it would just be me, so no big deal, right?"

"I dunno," sighed Lance, glancing around the room. Allura was reading something in Altean on a series of constantly-rotating panels, and Pidge was in the process of demolishing Shiro and Keith in a game of what looked to be a cross between chess and poker. Lance was sure she was cheating, somehow. "You just don't seem very into it, you know?"

"Nah, I totally am! It's just, who wouldn't?"

"I can think of one person," Lance said, scanning the room. Hunk followed his gaze to Keith, who was busy pretending not to stare at Shiro as Pidge swiped a card and cackled. "Hey, Keith!" he shouted.

Hunk squeaked in surprise. Keith tilted an eyebrow in Lance's general direction, temporarily startled from his daze.

"What?"

"Would you fuck your clone?"

"What?"

"You know, get down and dirty. With a clone of yourself." Nope, no lightbulb moment there. "Sex!"

Keith's face twisted into a grimace, as if he'd spotted a particularly large and many-legged bug. Or, no, that's how Keith looked most of the time. He looked like he'd eaten a particularly large and many-legged bug, and not the sort they sold on that last planet, which were actually pretty good.

"Hey, I mean, why not?" Hunk added, taking sympathy on him before Keith's eyebrows crawled into his mullet in search of a better life. "It's just you, it wouldn't be any different than, you know-"

"No!" Allura cut in, pushing aside her screens. The shadow of a blush rose across her cheeks. "It would be like- like making love with your twin. Utterly amoral."

Oh, that hurt. That burned.

"It would not," countered Lance. "A clone, same memories, identical DNA-"

"Identical twins have identical DNA," Pidge muttered. She wiped an invisible smudge from her glasses. Did she even need glasses? Lance added it to the list of questions he would ask next time she was sick and couldn't murder him. "That's why they're called identical."

"Allura said twins, not identical twins."

Allura shook her head. "Absolutely not."

Lance frowned. He tried not to let his mind wander in some very, very appealing directions. "Okay, fine, you can have your weird clone prejudice. I, for one, think you're being ridiculous. I'd make a bunch of clones, and you'd all regret your choices." He turned to Hunk for backup and received a thumbs-up. "Keith! You didn't answer the question. Would you, or would you not, have sex with a clone of yourself?"
"No!" Keith practically shouted. "Who in their right mind would?"
"Hunk and I both would."
"He said their right mind," Pidge interjected. "Sorry, Hunk."

Fine, they were all against him. Him and Hunk, two men standing up to the universe. Or… maybe not.

"Well… what about Shiro?" Lance glanced over to Shiro, who had been uncharacteristically quiet so far. "Would you fuck your clone, Shiro?"
"Uh." Shiro cleared his throat. "That's a pretty complicated question, Lance."

"Is not! Yes or no, that's it. Simple."
"Well. I mean… what if… what if my clone is evil?"

Allura, half-hidden behind her screens again, nodded like that made sense.

"Why would your clone be evil?" Keith asked, apparently offended by the notion. "Lance said your clone was basically just you."
"Yes! Thanks for backing me up here, Keith."
"Okay, but how would you know?" Shiro argued. "What sort of situation is leading to you being cloned in the first place, and how do you know you can trust whoever is responsible?"

Lance groaned. "Dude, you're overthinking this. Let's just say that you know, one hundred percent certain, that your clone is not evil."
"Shiro." Keith looked Shiro straight in the eyes. He seemed exasperated, maybe even a little offended, "You cannot tell me there is legitimately a situation where you would- would do that with a clone of yourself."
"I mean… it's just a hypothetical, Keith."

Victory.

"So that's a yes, right?" Lance grinned. Keith winced. Shiro's face remained blank.
"Slow down now. I didn't say that."
"If it's not a no then it's a yes!"

"I think that-"

Desperate times called for desperate measures.
"Pidge. What do you think?"
"I wonder what the logistics of you having sex with a clone of yourself would be like, Lance, given that it would be physically impossible for you to both finish first."

"Pidge!" The shout came from all corners of the room - okay, the room was circular, all edges? Borders? Sides? - all the parts of the room, anyway.

Pidge readjusted her glasses. "What, so I'm old enough to enroll in a military academy and fight a space war but I can't know what sex is?"

"You lied about your age," Shiro reminded her.
"Yeah, Pidge," Keith chimed in. "And in any case, it's unethical to burn a fellow member of the team that bad."
Keith leaned in for a high-five as Pidge snickered.

Hunk snorted, and Lance eyed him balefully. Betrayal. It's the unexpected blade that cuts the deepest. Time for a change of strategy.

"C'mon, Keith, you can't tell me you're not a little into it," he wheedled. "Just, like, in general. A Shiro sandwich, for example."

Keith sputtered, his face skipping red and going straight to blotchy white and purple.

"Guys, enough." Shiro lifted his hands, signaling a ceasefire. "Everyone's allowed to have their opinions. Besides, this is just a silly hypothetical question with absolutely no real-life application."

:: :: ::

[post-season five]

Keith pressed his hands against his eyes, which were dry and gritty under swollen lids. A month. They'd had a month to readjust, to breathe, to stop waking in a cold sweat every night because how had they been so wrong.

No. Shiro was back. The- the other Shiro's tone and mannerisms had begun to develop their own tinge of color now that he was no longer being forced into a role cut for someone else's frame. He wasn't Shiro, but he wasn't not Shiro, either.

He trailed after Lance as they made their way to the observatory. It was… nice, being friends. The emptiness of space made everyone feel so small. It had a way of rounding off someone's jagged edges, forcing them to pull together in the endless void.

"Oh, sorry," Lance said, stopping in his tracks in the doorway so suddenly that Keith nearly stumbled into him. "Do you two want, uh, some alone time?"

Shiro and Ryu - that was his name, for now, and it was beginning to fit better than a third-hand coat - paused in their quiet discussion.

"Right, yeah, sure," Lance agreed, though they hadn't said anything. "Hunk's cooking something, let's go to the kitchen."

Keith frowned. It wasn't like Lance to be so… courteous.

It wasn't until several corridors away that he got an explanation.

"Gotta say, I'm a little jealous," Lance blurted. "I mean, not with the whole kidnapping and medical experiments and being trapped in another dimension, but it would be pretty cool to have a clone, you know?"

"I've never really thought about it," Keith replied absentmindedly. A nagging sense in the back of his mind prodded at him - had he thought about it? "Why?"

"Someone who understands you all the time, they know all your secrets but it's not awkward because they're their secrets too," Lance started, counting the reasons off on his fingers. "Hard to be lonely. Being able to see yourself how other people see you. And the obvious, of course." He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, and Keith laughed.

"The obvious?"

"Clone sex, duh."

Keith choked on air. "What?"

"I know, right?" Lance sighed dreamily. "Lucky bastards. I mean, not lucky, but damn."
The nagging sense intensified, and Keith's memories came rushing back. "You don't think Shiro-"

"He never said no, right?" replied Lance, shrugging. "So that's a yes. Haven't you guys talked about this? I mean, you've been together almost as long as he's been back, so…"

"He wouldn't," Keith said, more to himself than to Lance. But he might want to… "Would he?"

Lance clapped him on the shoulder. "Keith, my man, if I were in Shiro's shoes, I would be fucking my clone's brains out right now."

:: :: ::

"Hey, Takashi?"

"Yeah?" Shiro looked up from his book with a soft smile. "What's up?"

Keith bit his lip. "You remember that weird discussion we had when this all started, about clones? The one Lance brought up."

"Uh," Shiro said. He frowned slightly in thought. "No, I can't say that I do."

"About how, if you had a clone, if you'd- well, if you'd want to-" Keith contemplated bashing his head against the wall until he passed out. It might be less painful. Scratch that, it would definitely be less painful. "With them-"

"Oh, god." Shiro laughed. "About having sex with your clone?"

"Yeah," muttered Keith. "That one."

Shiro's frown returned. "Keith, you're not worried that I- that Ryu-"

He couldn't bring himself to nod, so he shrugged noncommittally instead.

"Keith," Shiro said quietly. "I promise you that the thought has never once crossed my mind. And if it had, I'd talk to you about it."

"Right. Of course." Feeling like an idiot had never been more of a relief. "So if…"

"I'm going to call Ryu so we can clear the air on this whole thing."

:: :: ::

They met in the lounge several minutes later, and Shiro went about broaching the subject with the grim air of a scandal-ridden politician, while Keith attempted to melt so far into the sofa that they became the same entity.

"It's still not ringing a bell," Ryu apologized. "That span of time… it's fuzzy. I don't have specifics."

Shiro sighed. Keith blushed. Ryu looked bewildered.

"Okay." Shiro squared his shoulders before continuing, "Essentially, the question Lance asked was, 'if you had a clone, would you want to have sex with them?'"

Keith wondered what probability Slav would give for Lance walking in at that exact moment.

Lance strolled in, waving what looked like a tiny model of Kalternecker under Coran's nose, just in time to catch the end of Shiro's sentence.

"Clone sex? Hell yeah, am I right?"

Ryu shook his head. "I'm going to need a little more detail here."

Lance grinned. "Well, the situation is…"

inspiration