All the Way Down

by speaks

Coran was right; to call this thing a 'carnival' was a supreme understatement. Noq r'Nai was a city. Lance spoke in a fit of awe. "It's like Disneyland and the Olympics had a baby and then left it alone in the wilderness to be raised by wolves." (In which Lance and Keith are terrible influences on each other, and an out of control space festival becomes an accidental date.)

This is officially the longest one-shot I've ever written and also the longest story I've ever written that takes place all within 24 hours. Buckle in bois, there is a LOT of stuff jammed into this fic.

Oh, and this is canon-divergent. Pretty much everything with everyone in their original lions is canon divergent nowadays haha. I do like where canon is going, it's just really fun to explore the original dynamic. So, yeah. Have this feel-good romp! This has long been a place of comfort for me through some hard months. Hope it brings you as much joy as it has me.

---

All the Way Down

---

Once everyone was gathered in the entrance hall of the castle, Allura raised her hand to the keypad by the doors and shot them all one final warning look. "Don't forget, we must be on our absolute best behavior for the duration of this festival," she reminded them for the third time. "Once the parade is over you'll be free to participate as you please, so as you

go about the festival, please demonstrate proud examples to our newest allies of what we are capable of as a team. I believe in you all."

The paladins exchanged a few sibling-like glances with each other, and Pidge shrugged at Lance when he raised an eyebrow at her. "You make it sound like we're going into battle," Hunk laughed worriedly on Lance's other side. "I thought this was like, some kind of carnival."

A chortle bubbled of out Coran's throat as he slapped his side in amusement. "Some kind of carnival, he says! What an understatement! Allura, I think it's high time to show the paladins precisely how and where we're going to be spending the next three days. After you, Princess."

A happy, childlike grin rapidly overtook Allura's regal professionalism, and then a brilliant chink of light shone into the castle hall as she opened the front doors to the mountain they'd landed on twenty minutes ago.

Lance went slack-jawed as his eyes adjusted to the white-blue light of Krossin's distant neutron star, and he almost stumbled as he and the other paladins followed Allura and Coran out onto the grass to take in the view laid out before them.

This place was a utopia.

He vaguely remembered Coran mentioning that the Noq r'Nai festival (Wonders of Life―Coran had translated happily from the invitation) took place on the summit of a large dormant volcano called Rona, but hadn't really registered what that meant. This summit was an enormous valley, miles across, bigger than any mountain top he'd ever walked on. It was hard to even process that this whole place was the top of a single volcano. The castle had come down on the northernmost ridge, at one of the highest points. Below them extended the valley, and all around them extended the ridges of the volcano, a veil of mountain ridges stretching the perimeter, tapering into the valley below. If this was merely the top of the volcano, it was dizzying to consider what the other edge of the dropoff would look like, down the long sloping side of Rona―which was bigger than Olympus Mons, according to Shiro. But the scale of this place wasn't even the half of it.

The others were letting out whistles and hums of appreciation around him, and Lance wholeheartedly agreed. In every direction was something to be in awe of. Above them, hot air balloons and bi-planes and tiny unmanned drones. Down below, a winding river and criss-crossing tram tracks and small dirt roads connecting fields of flowers and rocky ravines with miles of colorful tents. A sapphire lake sparkled in the very center of it all, its surface decorated with dozens of tiny sailboats. The volley of festivities seemed to burst outward from the central lake like an eruption, painting every crevice of the valley with detail and life. Rides stretched out in every direction as well, squeezed in the spaces between vendors, casting thick shadows over streets filled with moving specks―people, Lance realized with wonder, and again he was reeling at the sheer scope of this place.

Coran was right; to call this thing a 'carnival' was a supreme understatement. Noq r'Nai was a city.

Lance spoke in a fit of awe. "It's like Disneyland and the Olympics had a baby and then left it alone in the wilderness to be raised by wolves."

Hunk snorted on his left, and Allura turned around to cross her arms at him from up ahead at the head of a dirt trail. "I feel like I should disagree with that on principle, but I'm unsure who any of those people are."

"Actually," Shiro said, "that was pretty spot on."

.

.

Their ride arrived shortly thereafter, and it was nothing fancier than the Krossi equivalent of a minivan. It took them down a switchbacking dirt road all the way into the valley, into the wild hustle and bustle that was this festival-city. Lance hung his head out the window for the duration of the ride, hair flapping in the wind, greedily soaking in the sights and sounds and fresh mountain air. When they arrived at a large municipal-type building Pidge immediately dubbed it Town Hall, and they were ushered inside to be briefed about the parade by one of the Commander in Chief's assistants, one of the natives to Krossin, which resembled tall and fuzzy mythical fauns in various colors. (Enough so that Hunk leaned over to whisper a pun about it in Lance's ear, whereafter Lance had to cover his snort by pretending to cough.)

Amidst all the chaos, the red-furred assistant (who had his own assistant as well, to Lance's eternal amusement) made sure they were each given a small chip, not unlike a USB drive. Pidge held hers close to her eye to inspect it and almost dropped it when the assistant's assistant cleared his throat and said, "The money vouchers are infinite, of course."

Infinite?

Lance shared another silent exchange with Pidge, who had now given up trying to pop her chip open to look inside it in favor of cradling it as though it contained the soul of a human baby.

Distracted, they had to hurry after the assistants to catch up, who were now trying to lead them into another room. As they fell back in line Shiro shot them all a deadpan look over his shoulder from beside the two Krossi. Don't abuse it, he mouthed.

They all did their best to look offended at the implication, except Keith, who was pretending to be extremely interested in the woven tapestry lining the hall.

.

.

For all the world-saving they'd done so far in their time on Team Voltron, they'd gotten their fair share of celebrations. They'd gotten parades, even, which Lance had relished in and milked for all they were worth, certain each time that it was as good as his life was ever gonna get.

But this. This. This was a demonstration in excess the likes of which Lance had never seen―had never even imagined.

The procession started just after 9am Castle-Time, and lasted two whole vargas as it made its way down the main avenue through the center of the festival-city. Lance was in continual awe at the scale of everything. There must have been well over a hundred thousand people here, maybe even two or three or four, and the festival-goers came of all different races. A lot of them were familiar, but many more belonged to species he'd never even seen before. He waved at them all as they went by, no matter how tired his arm got from holding up the weight of his paladin armor or how often his gem-encrusted medal clinked against his chest plate. As they went along fireworks exploded far above them between the hot air balloons and planes, and miniature versions of their lions flew around their float, buzzing and roaring and occasionally shooting off sparklers from their mouths, which had the kids in the crowd all screaming with delight.

All the while, there was a projected video playing out on the steepest cliff face of the valley perimeter in the south. The projection must have been hundreds of feet high for them to see it so clearly from so far away. It replayed moments of triumph from the final battle that liberated Krossin from its Galran chokehold, each one inciting a cheer from the crowd as the float carried the paladins by.

Lance basked in the applause when they replayed his finest moment. He'd taken a string of fighter jets on a wild goose chase through a southern canyon to save Hunk near the end of the battle, taking the jets out one, by one, by one. The audience roared with every defeat on the projection, and Lance was grinning so wide he felt his cheeks might split. This was absolutely worth the blood, sweat, and tears. These people were worth it.

Then, of course, of course, the video played on, and Red swooped in to save Blue at the last second from one final jet that Lance hadn't seen in time to dodge. The crowd rioted at that. The cheer for Keith saving his ass was noticeably louder than any other they'd gotten so far. Lance shot an irritated glance to his left at Keith, who didn't notice. He didn't seem to notice he was getting the loudest cheer, either, which was even more irritating for some reason. Lance wanted to flick the stony stoicism right off his face.

"Dude," he hissed. They'd been standing in their armor on this float in the chilly mountain breeze for almost a full varga now and Keith had just stood there, aloof and disengaged, the entire time. It was too much.

The purple iris of Keith's left eye twitched toward him―the only indication he'd been heard.

Don't you side-eye me, Kogane. "All these people are here for us," he snapped. "You could at least acknowledge them. Would it kill you to participate?"

That got his attention. "What are you talking about? I am participating," he replied incredulously, as though he thought just showing up and standing here was enough in any universe. "What else am I supposed to be doing? Jumping around like an idiot, like you?"

Lance glared even as he continued waving to the crowd with one hand. Duh. Rolling his eyes, he pointed beyond Keith's other shoulder, past Shiro and Pidge and Hunk where the video projection played on across the cliff face in the distance. It had changed now to a real-time feed of the paladins standing on their float, and it was incredibly obvious what Lance was getting at just from looking. Everyone was smiling and waving and generally participating, all except Keith, who was standing stock-still like a statue and looking like he'd rather be anywhere else.

Lance looked back at Keith pointedly, who was now biting his lip and refusing to meet Lance's eyes. He turned away. But after a moment more of worrying at his lip, he lifted a hand and gave the cam-drone floating above them a tentative wave followed by a genuine smile―one that was displayed in full close-up on the projection for the entire festival to see. The cheer that went up was immediate and deafening.

A little startled, Shiro glanced at the projection, then at Keith, then leaned behind Keith to shoot Lance a look that was half-appreciation and half-amusement. Lance replied with a smirk and a thumbs up, feeling oddly smug about what just happened. He shot Keith one more furtive look (he hasn't even lowered his hand yet, amazing), trying to smother the sudden surge of pride with the much safer irritation he'd been feeling before. But he couldn't seem to find it.

That shield was growing thinner and thinner every day, and someday soon Lance knew it was going to break.

.

.

"Okay, remember what I said about setting an example, paladins!" Allura said brightly.

The parade was over and they'd all shed their armor for warmer Altean day-clothes that were more suitable for the brisk mountain air, and were now preparing to split up and hit the festival as patrons rather than stars.

Allura was practically vibrating in place with excitement. Lance was sure he'd never seen her wear this gold-threaded dress before, which meant she'd pulled it out of some special secret place for just this occasion. It didn't surprise him; Allura had been talking about nothing else for days, ever since they got the invitation. Noq r'Nai had apparently existed way back when Allura was a child, before the war. Every seven years, she'd explained as she danced around the monitor where the invite was displayed, the Krossi threw a party at the tallest peak on their planet to celebrate the fleeting and marvelous wonders of life. Apparently they hadn't had a single one since the Galra occupation began, so this was the first in almost two hundred decaphoebs. Lance knew she and Coran would probably be doing a lot of sentimental reminiscing about their time here with their families when they were young, so it made sense that they were planning to go off alone together for the festival. Still, he mourned the chance to see Allura's roller coaster hair.

"But most importantly," she added as she and Coran prepared to split off, "have fun, everyone!"

As soon as they'd disappeared into the crowd, Shiro cleared his throat. "If it's fine by you guys, Coran said there was a hot springs near the east rim…"

"Say no more," Hunk said. "Don't forget to remove your arm, though. I know it's sort of waterproof, but still."

Shooting Hunk two thumbs up, Shiro grinned. "You got it, Scotty." Pidge rolled her eyes. "I'll see you guys at Town Hall at seven o'clock CT to catch the van back to the ship."

Pidge hummed as Shiro left them, and closed the gap in the circle with a wry grin. "Guess that means you're with the cool kids for the day, Keith."

Keith looked somewhat surprised by this and took a small step back out of the circle. "Oh. Uh.. Actually, I was gonna…" He pointed a thumb vaguely over his shoulder, as though he actually hadn't decided how he was going to finish that sentence yet.

Lance bristled.

"Um, no," he complained, "you can't do amusement parks in groups of three! We need an even number or else one of us is gonna be alone on, like, every ride!"

Keith glared at him disparagingly. "Gee, thanks," he deadpanned. "I really feel the love."

Hunk laughed, and shoved Lance out of the way to place himself in front of Keith instead. "Ignore Lance. Seriously, though, you can't spend the day alone in a place like this, unless you're Shiro and you're gonna spend the whole day sleeping. Which, let's be honest, he deserves that."

This didn't seem to land with Keith. "Why not?"

Hunk glanced at Lance, then back at Keith. "Have you ever been to an amusement park before? Or like, a carnival, or a fair, or anything?"

Keith immediately shut down and looked away, inspecting a nearby food cart with sudden interest. "No."

Lance furrowed his eyebrows and festered on that intensely for a moment, as he always did when Keith let something slip about his Tragic Backstory. He was about to say something―hopefully something brilliant and profound and awesome―but Pidge recovered first.

"Well then you need us to show you how it's done, son. C'mon, we're doing the Deadly Drift first." With that she waved them along and set off into the crowded street.

"Oh, FUCK yes!" Lance crowed. He remembered seeing that monster of a ride as the parade passed it, and he was so down for it that it wasn't even funny.

Keith fell in beside Pidge to ask what kind of ride it was, and Hunk started groaning as soon as she explained it. He didn't stop the whole way there, or through the line as they were ushered to the front, or even once they had climbed inside the four-person carriage and been strapped into their seats by the passing attendant. Hunk looked up through the bars at the three-layered figure-eight shaped behemoth above them, hands clutching at the shoulder restraints.

"Whyyy am I here," Hunk groaned. "Why do I always let you talk me into rides like this, Lance? We could be doing something fun."

"I didn't even say anything!" Lance defended. "It was Pidge doing all the talking! And this is the epitome of fun." With that he put Hunk and Pidge on the backburner to shoot a smirk at Keith, who was positioned directly across from him. "I hope you're prepared to have your mullet blown clean off."

Keith looked for all the world like they were on the seat of a bus, about to go on a boring little drive to the store. Lance couldn't wait to see the look on his face when he realized what kind of ride this was, and that being thrown around a giant rickety fair ride was nothing like flying a fighter plane―or a lion, for that matter.

"Right," he deadpanned. "How long till this thing starts?"

On cue, the attendant flipped a switch and sent them careening into motion.

It quickly became apparent that this ride was on a level unheard of on Earth; it zigzagged in ways Lance had never seen, and had them constantly jerking in unexpected directions. Lance cackled as Hunk and Pidge's yells filled their carriage. Out of nowhere they veered a sharp left, and the carriage rocked steeply on its anchor point. It was then that Lance glanced above them and saw one of the other carriages flip a complete three-sixty turn.

He narrowed his eyes.

"Oh no," Hunk blurted, seeing it too, "Lance, no!"

"Lance yes," he parroted back, and promptly started throwing his weight around in his seat to try and send their carriage into a spin. It wasn't enough on his own, though, and soon he was turning on Pidge, who was sitting to his right, with puppy-eyes. "Pidge, help!"

"Excuse you," she shouted, loose hair whipping in her face despite the fact that she'd pulled most of it into a ponytail, "I weigh like six pounds, make Keith do your dirty work!"

Lance turned to Keith, then, who was sitting in the spot directly across from him. Comprehension dawned on Keith visibly, swiftly, and then a dangerous look crossed his face. A quirk of the eyebrow, a twitch to the lip, not unlike the look he donned when he was about to pull some crazy aerial stunt in response to Lance's endless challenges. Yes! Fun Keith lives! Lance smirked back, and promptly resumed throwing his weight around. Keith responded in kind, throwing his weight in the opposite direction at opposite intervals, which sent their carriage flying clear around its axis in no time at all, spinning them so out of control that they were soon pressed to their seats and stripped of all movement by centrifugal force. Hunk was hollering, Pidge's cropped hair was almost entirely out of its ponytail, Lance was half-laughing, half-screaming, and Keith was definitely, definitely laughing.

By the time they wobbled off the ride, they all looked as though they'd been through a hurricane.

Hunk glared at Lance with faux-hatred, then sniffed at Keith with real, sincere betrayal. Keith didn't even flinch. Groaning, Hunk dismissed them and stumbled over to the nearest trash can to empty his breakfast into it. "I seriously hate you guys," he grumbled.

As they made their way to the next ride, Keith walked with an extra bounce in his step that wasn't usually there. "I had no idea it was like that," he hummed in wonder, still grinning ear to ear. Lance didn't think he'd ever seen a smile last so long on Keith's face before, and it was doing something questionable to his stomach. He walked on ahead so he didn't have to see it.

They had to take the tram to get to their next stop (Lance had a feeling they were going to have to take the tram every time they wanted to to get anywhere today), so they took their time, stopping for water for Hunk on the way. Once they'd gotten off, the roller coaster loomed overhead like some kind of metal monster. It cast a long shadow even this close to midday.

And Keith was still smiling as they made their way to the base of the coaster. What was up with that?!

Once again they were ushered straight through to the front of the line, despite Hunk's insistence that they could wait their turn like everyone else. But as they arrived at the gate, the attendant there placed a hand on Pidge's shoulder. "My apologies Miss Green Paladin, but could you step up to the line please?"

They all leaned around the attendant to spy what he was pointing at, and saw the painted outline of a Krossi on the wall with a bold black line drawn above its head.

"Oh hell no," Pidge muttered, and stiffly marched over to stand beneath the line.

It was true! Pidge was too short to ride, and for a second Lance thought she was going to straight up murder the attendant. The lithe faun-esque Krossi were taller than humans by nature, so it really wasn't a surprise, but still.

"It's okay!" Hunk soothed as she geared up to start stamping her feet. "We can just go ride something else, Pidge."

At that point Keith's smile fell off so fast that Lance almost heard it hit the ground. As Keith deflated, Lance set his jaw. "No fair," he whined. "It took like ten minutes to get all the way to the top of this hill. Can't you just wait for us, Pidgey?" He did feel bad that Pidge couldn't go, but… come on, Keith had never ridden a roller coaster before and he was obviously dying to.

"I didn't mean all of us should go," Hunk clarified, "I meant me and Pidge. No offense, but―okay full offense, sorry, I don't want to ride this evil thing with you two psychopaths."

Keith and Lance glanced at each other, then Keith crossed his arms, his disappointment morphing into a nearly-contrite smirk. Nearly. "That's fair."

"Okay…" Lance said slowly, searching Keith's face for any sign of objection, and finding none. They were holding up the line now and they needed to come to a decision. "Keith and I will meet up with you guys after?"

"Yeah, text us," Hunk grinned, and Pidge rolled her eyes at the adopted slang for their pocket comms.

Silence fell between Keith and Lance as Pidge and Hunk split off and left them to board the coaster. ("The last seat is the fastest," Lance insisted, and although Keith insisted right back, "That doesn't make any sense," he still followed Lance to the last row). It was funny how familiar the tedium was of waiting for the ride to start, for the attendant to come by and click the bar down and remind them to keep their arms inside the car. It was so much like it was on Earth that for a second it hurt him keenly. It was a sharp twisting pain that sometimes struck him out of nowhere, without warning, even when he was having fun. For a second he couldn't breathe.

But then the ride started and Lance snapped out of it.

It was amazing. It was insane. It was a bone-crushing, face-melting, jaw-dropping masterpiece, and Hunk would have absolutely hated it. Lance spent the whole thing openly cackling at the way Keith alternated between laughing and yelling depending on whether they were careening upward or downward, how his body couldn't seem to decide which one was appropriate. They were about to go over the biggest drop-off when Lance said, "Don't hang on! Put your hands up!"

"Why?"

"Because it's fuuUUAHHH!"

They rocketed down the slope and he glanced at Keith just in time to see him let go and throw his hands in the air, his black hair whipping the seat behind him, happiness shining in his eyes. An intense wave of fondness hit Lance then, hard in the stomach. But he didn't allow himself to look too closely at it before immediately classifying it as gratitude. He was just glad that he wasn't riding this alone. Right?

Except the drop bottomed out and the tracks went flat and the car pulled to a gentle stop in the station, and yet, somehow, the butterflies remained in his stomach.

Five minutes later, Lance leaned against a gate down the street from the roller coaster to pull out his comm. It was probably too soon for Pidge and Hunk to have ridden anything yet, but in all honesty, he just needed a distraction from the fluttering feeling in his stomach that still hadn't quite gone away. Keith had been babbling non-stop since they exited the ride, and god help Lance, it was fucking cute. When was the last time Keith had gushed to Lance about anything? Decidedly never.

"That was so much fun," Keith said for like the fifth time. "I'm so glad we stayed and went on it. I doubt any ride here could top that one."

Lance snorted. "Easy praise from someone who's only been on two rides in his whole life so far."

"Shut up," Keith snapped, but he couldn't stop grinning long enough to say it, so it came out more fond than anything else.

"Looks like Pidge and Hunk are gonna get food right now instead of going on a ride," Lance said, flashing the convo on his comm screen to Keith. "Are you hungry yet?"

Keith leaned heavily against the fence beside Lance, scuffing the toe of his left boot on the grass. "Not really," he said slowly, and looked up at the small kiddie coaster across the way as the car sailed over a drop-off, filling the air with shrill, happy screams. "I kinda wanna ride more of the rides that Hunk hates, if I'm being honest."

"Oh thank god," Lance blurted, "me too." He was so glad Keith came out and said it because he'd been agonizing over how to propose that exact idea for the last few minutes. "Maybe just a few more?"

He needn't have worried at all, apparently; Keith was already nodding along in earnest, relief coloring his face and settling his shoulders. "Yeah, yeah, definitely." Lance was relieved too; he'd been expecting Keith to duck out at any moment, to be quite frank. He couldn't even remember the last time they'd spent an extended amount of recreational time together like this on their own, just them two. It just... didn't happen. "They won't mind, right?" Keith added, frowning at Lance's hands as he texted Hunk back on their private channel.

[we'll meet up with you guys in a bit, we're gonna ride a few more], Lance wrote. "Are you kidding?" he scoffed aloud. "They'll be relieved that we're not making them come with."

Hunk's reply came almost immediately, appearing on the screen in real-time as Hunk typed it out, pausing every other word and backspacing as he fixed his typos. He was so cute. [Sounds like a plan! Text us whenever you want to meet, we're gonna hit the arcade over on the west side of the valley after we eat. THEY HAVE A HOLODECK HERE! Okay well it's not called a holodeck but it might as well be. It has preprogrammed adventures!]

A pinch of jealousy tickled his gut, but it ebbed quickly. As interested as he was in the idea of a Star Trek style holographic adventure, right now all he wanted was to go on another roller coaster with Keith. [kk], he typed back, [have fun u nerdlord 3].

But and Keith had only just started to decide which ride to hit next when his comm beeped with one more message. This time it came in on his and Pidge's private channel. He blinked at it. All it said was: [Hmmm.]

[hmmm what?]

She typed out her response unnecessarily slow. He could practically see the trouble-making look on her face. [Just, hmmm . ]

[oookay], he wrote back, [i can see u stroking ur nonexistent beard and i do wanna know what youre on about, BUT, i have another Tall People Only ride to catch, so ill pester you later, love u ttyl]

[Ew, gross.]

[... :'( ouch]

[Oh boo hoo, you can't insult my reasonable and tactically advantageous size and then tell me you love me in the same sentence.]

[i'm sorry, i cant hear you over the sound of my heart breaking]

[SIGHHH GOD okay fine jeez they can probably see ur puppy eyes from SPACE I love you too, are you happy now?]

[YEAH ya do!]

[Don't push it.]

"Jeez, how long does it take to tell them we're going to hang out a little while longer?" Keith muttered bemusedly, and Lance almost tripped when Keith grabbed his coat and yanked him to the side. He'd been staring at his comm as they walked and had nearly walked headlong into a family. Keith lifted one eyebrow at him and tapped the outside of his left wrist, even though he wasn't wearing a watch. "Are we doing this? We're wasting daylight here, McClain."

"Yeah yeah, we're doing this," he huffed.

They fell into step beside each other, Keith with his hands shoved into his gold-threaded maroon winter coat and Lance with his hands laced behind his head, the tail of his own indigo coat flapping behind him in the breeze as they walked. The vast majority of Krossin was dusty desert, but they were at the most elevated point on the planet, thousands and thousands of feet above sea level. They were so high up in the atmosphere that there were oxygen generators placed every hundred feet everywhere they went, pumping extra oxygen into the air.

(Lucky that the Krossi shared their love of oxygen. Somehow, riding amusement park rides with their flight suits and helmets on didn't sound like a good time.)

Any mountain peak this high in altitude on Earth would have been covered in snow and absent of vegetation. But here on Krossin it was a Goldilocks Zone. Every which way they looked there were fluffy trees, patches of flowers, small winged creatures that called out to each other like broken bells, and little ground lizards plated with hard outer shells that weren't afraid of being stepped on or touched.

There was so much around them to look at. So many wondrous displays and loud noises and laughing children and sparkling lights. So much history in these buildings, each older than the last. The architecture here was reminiscent of both Greek and Mexican styles in equal measures. All thick ridged columns and layered steps, the bricks predominantly pink and white while the mortar that held everything together was almost always a flashy metallic gold. It gave the whole city a surreal, El Dorado vibe, and had Lance's eyes constantly darting around trying to take it all in at once.

And yet, no matter where he looked he consistently found his eyes gravitating to his left. To Keith. More than once Keith paused to pick up one of the plated lizards, turning it over in his hands and letting it crawl up his arm for a block or so before releasing it into the bushes.

When they arrived at the tram, Keith pulled a scrap of string and set about tying his messy hair up. (Seriously, a scrap. Like, cut from some piece of cloth or something. Lance needed to team up with Allura and send Keith to Fashion Jail once and for all.) Despite his annoyance, Lance's gaze automatically slipped to the bare skin that revealed itself as he pulled his hair into a ponytail near the base of his slender neck.

"What?"

His eyes snapped up to Keith's. Oh shit. "What? Sorry, I zoned out. What?"

Amusement twinkled in Keith's eyes. Lance could never tell whether the guy was laughing with him or at him and it was infuriating, especially now when he'd just been caught staring at his freaking neck, of all things.

The light above the tram station switched from orange to blue with the sound of a bell, signaling the doors to open and everyone at the station to board. Latching onto the distraction, Lance hopped on and led the way to the end of the car to take a seat. If they were still standing when this thing launched they would go sprawling onto their asses (it went about eighty miles per hour, and they learned that the hard way the first time they rode this). Soon the festival was whizzing by outside the windows.

As the tram sped through the city Keith slouched into the seat across from him, one ankle crossed on his knee, people-watching the other festival-goers that shared the tram with them.

And as Keith watched others, Lance watched him. The way he slumped readily into the seat had given Lance a sudden vision of Keith on a subway, and it wouldn't go away. Instead of an Altean winter coat he'd probably be wearing some kind of hoodie―Keith seemed like a hoodie kind of guy. It'd be red as well though, with some kind of indie design on it, or a band name. Yeah, definitely a band name. Holes on his jeans, and combat boots, and a pair of headphones so that no one would talk to him. Some kind of mysterious messenger bag to put on the seat next to him so no one would sit in it. Mulling over this vivid image, Lance couldn't help but wonder. He wondered if they'd grown up in another reality and one day that Lance saw that Keith on a subway, if he'd ever have been able to work up the courage to talk to him. If maybe Keith would move his bag and free the seat beside him. If maybe he'd offer up one of his earbuds.

Or...

Or if Lance would just keep quiet forever. If Keith would never even notice him sitting there across the way. If he'd just get off at his stop and not look back and that would be the ending, and Lance would be left there alone imagining things that would never, ever happen between them, not in a million years, Lance―

"Will you stop staring at me?"

Lance crashed back into reality at light speed, flinching so hard out of his reverie that the stranger beside Keith―some kind of foreign jellyfish-esque creature―started laughing. Lance ignored them.

"What is your deal?" Keith wondered, either not noticing the stranger's laughter or not caring. "Do I have something on my face?" He sounded like he was joking, but he brought one hand to his face anyway to feel around, as if he half-expected to find some kind of alien bug there.

"Sorry," Lance covered terribly, brushing it off. "Zoned out again. I was just thinking, I've never had anyone that actually wanted to go with me on rides like this. It's just... nice," he finished lamely. "Not to feel like I'm dragging someone somewhere they don't wanna be, for once. Y'know?" Ugh, he could have said literally anything to deflect attention from the fact that he was gawking at Keith like a stalker; did he really have to choose that? Jeez.

Taken aback by what Lance had said, Keith pushed his bangs out of his face and fumbled his reply. "Uh… yeah," he said, after having opened and closed his mouth a few times without making any sound. "It is ni—woah. "

In the chaos of the train screeching to a halt and the subsequent excitement of seeing the corkscrew-twister of a roller coaster that they'd come to ride, Lance managed to kick the moment on the tram to the very back of his brain with the rest of the moments he wasn't quite ready to address. The pile teetered and threatened to fall, but as always, Lance turned his back to it. Out of sight, out of mind, right? If he didn't focus on it too hard then it didn't exist.

Still, as he followed Keith up the steps toward their second roller coaster, he couldn't help but feel like a child playing hide and seek by standing in the middle of a room with their hands over their eyes.

. . * . .

After the third ride, they started to protest being ushered to the front of every line. It was nice and all, but it felt wrong passing up all the friends and families that stood waiting in the Disneyland-sized lines at the base of each ride. But everyone insisted, even those waiting in line, and Lance and Keith could only protest so much, y'know? The result was that they rode almost twenty rides in the first varga and a half after the parade. They even rode one particularly dizzying one three times in a row, and by the third time when they finally got off they could scarcely walk straight. Lance almost fell down the steps at the exit gate.

Keith laughed so hard about it that he actually did fall down the steps. Dammit, Hunk was never going to believe Lance without photographic evidence.

As much fun as he was having, when they hit ride number twenty Lance started to feel like they were officially ditching Hunk and Pidge. Keith hummed in reluctant agreement when he voiced this fear and nominated Lance to message them to see if they were ready to meet back up. But after ten minutes of waiting for a response, neither Hunk nor Pidge had answered yet, and Keith was starting to get antsy. Lance could sympathize. There was so much to do here it felt like a crime to stand still in one place for so long.

"Hunk did say they were gonna check out some kind of virtual reality thing at an arcade," Lance reasoned. "They might not hear the beeping. They might not even have their comms on them at the moment."

Humming in thought at this, Keith shoved off the crumbling brick wall of the shop where he'd been leaning, never taking his hands out of his coat pockets.

As the sun rose in the sky and the day grew less chilly they'd unbuttoned their coats. In Lance's case it revealed an intricately embroidered Altean shirt that hung low on the shoulders and cinched high around the waist, leaving a small gap between the shirt and his jeans (at least, they looked like jeans, but they were much softer and the buttons were fancy). Alteans—now they understood fashion. Once they knew for sure they'd be able to attend Noq r'Nai, Allura had insisted that they all dress to match and reflect the color of their lions. For the outward appearance of total unity, she had pushed when Pidge started grumbling about it, but Lance knew better. He knew that they looked fucking awesome when they coordinated their party outfits, and he knew that Allura was the only other person on the team besides himself that wasn't a total fashion disaster, so he'd happily elected himself Allura's Number Two and gone along into the castle's storage vault to help her pick out clothes for the rest of their lovable but fashionably-inept teammates. (Both Pidge and Keith would have flat out refused to participate in the clothing coordination had they not had their clothes laid out for them.)

Eyeing Keith's loose white shirt and the crimson belt that flashed from beneath it on every third or fourth flutter of the wind, Lance had to wonder whether Keith knew that Lance himself had picked these clothes out specifically for him. He really hoped not, especially since they looked good. White was a stark difference on Keith from the dark colors he usually tended toward. It brightened all his features: made his hair stand out, highlighted the red of his coat, contrasted his naturally purple eyes and brought out the flecks of white at the back of his irises that Lance had never had more than a moment to look at, lest he have to explain why he was staring deeply into Keith Kogane's stupid eyeholes.

But those eyes were appraising him now as Keith shifted from foot to foot, and it gave him an excuse to look.

Lance had known him long enough to know when Keith was excited about something, and when he was uncertain. It was all in the eyes. Everything else Keith knew how to mask, but not his eyes. "More rides?" Keith posed, tentatively. Hopefully.

Maybe it shouldn't have made Lance this happy that Keith wasn't dying to get away from him after two vargas of quality time. That he wanted to be here of his own free will. Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising, either, because they were a long way from the bitter rivals they once had been. They were friends, now, even if it was a bizarre breed of combative and cautious and unspoken friendship that Lance had never had with anyone else in his life. And yet, it did make him happy, and it was surprising, and Lance was hoping to drag this out as long as he possibly could.

"Actually," Lance replied slowly, "I've been thinking about that one." He turned and pointed into the distance, all the way across to the other side of the valley, near the steep cliff face where the projector had been displaying advertisements since the end of the parade. Right now it showed a video of a boat flying down a river, and flashed the words (in both Krossi and Altean) Noq r'Nai River Race. Entry fee: 90 gacs.

Keith squinted at the distant cliff. "The race?"

"No no no. Well, yes," he corrected, "eventually. But I don't think it starts for awhile. I was actually talking about that ."

Keith stiffened as Lance leaned in closer—which he had to concentrate hard on not being offended by—in order to point again from Keith's point of view, just a little farther past the cliff.

Keith's eyes widened as he finally understood what Lance was pointing at. As they watched, five figures leapt from the highest point of the cliff, nothing more than black specks against the pixelated projection from this far off until they spread their limbs and revealed a web-like material between them, not unlike wings. The base-jumpers sailed in a wide parabola, down past the screen and out of sight beyond the buildings across the street from Lance and Keith.

"Oh fuck yes," Keith said.

.

.

Twelve minutes later they'd ridden the tram all the way to the top of the cliff and gotten a brief spiel on the 'wings' of the base-jumping suits and how they worked. They were also given a legal safety disclaimer speech, at which point Keith fixed the Krossi instructor with a very 'done' gaze and said, "This is not the first time I've jumped into a volcano."

The instructor blinked at Keith, then looked to Lance in bewilderment. But Lance was fighting hard to keep his laughter in check, and could only eke out a stilted, "It's really not."

As they approached the edge of the cliff a smirk lingered on the corner of Keith's mouth, just barely there. Like he knew he just made the Joke of the Day. It was infuriating. It should have been illegal.

Just behind them they could see a hint of the endless descent down the outside of the volcano, but it was mostly obscured by other ridges and low-hanging clouds. Together they turned toward the valley they would be jumping back into. As Lance's toe brushed the edge a few small rocks fell away to their doom, casting pinprick shadows on the projected image below them.

"You ready?" came Keith's teasing voice.

Lance shot upright; he'd been leaning over the edge to eye the projection, adjusting the flight goggles the instructor had given them haughtily as he went. "I'm always―HEY!" he screeched as Keith jumped without him. Oh you son of a bitch.

Lance threw himself off the cliff without so much as a 3, 2, 1.

Then, wind.

It was mostly wind, whipping his hair and roaring in his ears.

The Krossin sky was a cauldron of midday glory above, a smattering of blues and greens and neutron white and half-assed cloud wisps that couldn't decide where to gather or whether to gather at all. The city rocketed up from below as the cliff eased into a slope rich with deciduous forest, the river catching rays of light at every turn where it descended from some hidden crevice on the west side of the valley, all the way into the center of the city where it filled the shimmering lake. It was breathtaking, and Lance felt alive.

In this ethereal place (this in-between, this world-in-motion), the only stable thing was Keith.

It had pretty much always been like that. Right from the very beginning, when they were first years at the Garrison and they made their beds at four-thirty in the morning so they could hit the quarter-mile track on time with the rest of the cadets, before the Sonoran sun baked the dirt and dried the grass, before classes began, before the world around Lance even seemed real. Even at five in the morning when the cicadas were still sleeping and the last stars hung on, even then, Keith was the constant. Still ahead of Lance. Ahead of everyone. He would break away from the other cadets in the very beginning and he would stay ahead, never turning, never looking back, no matter how close Lance came to overtaking him.

Here Lance was, unfathomably far from those desert sunrises, and somehow Keith was still the constant. The marker. Still ahead of Lance, like always.

Except... Except this time, when Lance neared him, Keith did look back.

Just in time to almost run head-on into a grove of pine-y trees.

"TREE!" Lance screamed, and Keith snapped back to attention, veering wildly off course in his attempt to hastily correct his trajectory.

That was all Lance needed to catch up, and a few moments later they were landing at the base of the incline, Lance whooping triumphantly as Keith skidded to a stop beside him, even though he really wasn't sure which one of them had won. They may have landed at the same time, actually. Not like Lance would ever admit that. Keith looked flushed and windswept as all hell, but still protested vehemently when Lance loudly proclaimed himself the winner. "Look who's the master of volcanoes now!" he crowed. "In your face, Keith!"

Keith scowled. "What the hell are you on about?"

"Ooo, someone's a sore loser. Better luck next time," Lance replied, pushing his goggles up and out of the way to wink as salaciously as possible.

"I don't think so. My feet touched the ground first," Keith objected, "which you'd know if you'd pulled your head out of your ass for half a second to look―"

"Perdón?" Lance screeched, freezing halfway out of his flightsuit.

"―and besides, it wasn't a race."

"We were totally racing and you know it, or you wouldn't have jumped first," Lance fumed. "Siempre tienes que ser el primero, ¿verdad? Cada maldito tiempo."

"God, you know I hate that!" Keith protested; he didn't speak Spanish and was clearly approaching his breaking point. As usual, Lance happily pushed him toward it.

"Y odio cuando actúas como si estuvieras mucho mejor que yo. A veces solo quiero golpearte la cara." Lance knew it was petty and low, insulting Keith in a language he didn't understand, but sometimes he just needed to or else he would lose it and say something he regretted.

Glaring, Keith ripped his flight goggles off and started stripping out of the flight suit with irritated abandon, shoving each piece into the waiting attendant's arm as he went. "Are you done?"

"¡No! ¡Nunca se hará! Chico estúpido con tu complejo de superioridad estúpido con tu pelo hermoso estúpido. ¿Quién el ata el pelo con basura? ¡Quien te crió! ¡Quiero hablar con ellos!"

"You know what? Fuck you, Lance. You won't be gloating after I beat you again in the boat race."

"Are you kidding me right now? What in the unholy quiznaking quiznak makes you think you can beat me on my home field? " He almost tripped as he dove for their folded coats (which had been sent down from the top via tram) and threw Keith's unceremoniously at his face. "Come on, mullet, let's go! You and me! Fight to the death!"

"Pardon me."

They both turned to the Krossi attendant, who instantly recoiled as the force of both their scowls refocused firmly in her direction.

"I couldn't help but hear that you were interested in the river race, and I thought you should know that it starts in twenty dobashes. Over at the mouth of the river," she said, and pointed to the west. "You'd better hurry if you want to make it."

"Twenty―? Dude, we gotta run!" Keith didn't even protest as Lance seized his arm and set off sprinting toward the tram.

.

.

In their haste to make it all the way across the valley in time, they forgot all about checking their comms to see if Hunk and Pidge had replied yet. They made it to the starting line just in time to see all the participants climbing into their boats, two by two.Uh-oh. They shared a brief look as an organizer stopped by to register them, barely containing her excitement that two of the paladins would be racing today, and shared a second look as the organizer informed them that they had to enter as a pair if they were going to participate.

Okay, so, they wouldn't get to race each other. That was okay. He'd been kind of looking forward to kicking Keith's ass, but… they would still get to race and that was what mattered, right? They were here to have fun, anyway, not to one-up each other. This would be fun.

.

.

Lance paused in his adjustment of the sail on the boat they'd been lent, eyeing Keith over his shoulder. He'd taken his coat off and tossed it behind the seat for the duration of the race as soon as Lance had done the same, and oddly, that simple action stirred a vote of confidence in Lance's gut. Have you ever sailed in your life? Lance had muttered as Keith first adjusted to the bobbing of the boat, getting his balance. No, Keith had muttered back.

Looking around, the vast majority of the participants seemed to know what they were doing as they flit around on their boats making last minute preparations. Lance should probably have felt doomed, seeing as he'd been stuck with a partner that had never set foot on a boat before. And yet, he felt overwhelmingly at ease. He'd gotten his sea legs before he could even walk, and he was confident that he had it in him to win this thing-and besides, he had something all these other fools didn't.

Loathe as he was to admit it aloud, Lance knew full well that he and Keith made a good team. They'd taken down a entire squadron together, once, back to back without their Lions. A simple boat race? Piece of cake in comparison.

"Sailors at the ready," a voice boomed over unseen loudspeakers. "Race will start in ten ticks."

Lance straightened, closing his eyes for a moment as he assessed the wind direction one last time. They snapped back open as the announcer said, "Five ticks. Four..."

"Just follow my lead," he said to Keith, "and we'll win."

A small smile broke the tension on Keith's face, and he gave Lance a lazy two-fingered salute as the announcer hit two.

"Aye aye, captain."

.

.

Well, they won.

.

.

It was touch and go for the majority of the race, as they and the other boats shot through rapids and over small waterfalls and around sharp bends down the river into the valley. But near the end of the race when the boats were on the open stretch of lake, they finally pulled ahead. Lance was sure he could hear people cheering on the shore of the lake but he was so focused that for once he didn't care. When they passed beneath the bridge that marked the finish line, a roar went up from the crowd on the bridge and the edges of the lake, from the dock nearby.

"Oh my god, we actually won," Keith said a little breathlessly. "I can't believe we won."

"Of course we won," Lance shouted happily, jumping up and down as he waved to the passing crowd, "we're fucking awesome! Come on Keith, gloat with me!" He grabbed Keith's hand and raised it, fist pumping into the air with the other one.

"Oh jeez," Keith said as they arrived at the dock where they were supposed to be disembarking. The dock was positively crawling with people, all holding cameras and clamoring for attention. There were so many that it was a wonder none of them had fallen into the water yet. Lance leaned into Keith as they got off the boat and were immediately assaulted.

"I think maybe this race was a big deal or something," Lance whispered.

"Uh… yeah," Keith whispered back. "I'm starting to suspect that." He pointed into the distance, and Lance followed it to once again be met with the sight of himself projected on the canyon wall. It was showing Lance and Keith now, real-time as they exited the boat and tried to fight their way through the crowd toward the small stage where they were being ushered to accept their award. Below their zoomed-in faces flashed the words:

Noq r'Nai River Race Winners (40,229)

/ Keith Kogane ― Earth /

/ Lance McClain ― Earth /

As Lance watched, the words dissolved into an animation of fire and ice that shot up and around the frame, encircling their bodies as they climbed the steps to the stage. He had to admit, they looked like some kind of dynamic duo up there, the way they were playing up their Voltron elements. Whoever did that bit with the fire/ice animation on the fly deserved a raise.

The crowd quieted as they were each bestowed with a prize―a golden pin that the Chief himself pinned to the lapels of their coats as he beamed at them. Keith side-eyed Lance as the crowd grew stiller and stiller, fidgeting uncomfortably beside him. "What do we do?" he whispered. "Are we supposed to say something?"

It did seem like everyone was waiting on something, and Lance was about to open his mouth to vomit out some kind of cheesy acceptance speech when he had a sudden, much better and much more flamboyant idea. "Hey, do the thing with your bayard," he whispered back to Keith. "You know, the fire thing."

Keith blinked. "Why?"

"Just trust me," Lance said, and reached into his jacket to pull his own bayard out. He angled himself so he was slightly back-to-back with Keith and waited to make sure Keith had drawn his bayard too before whispering out of the corner of his mouth, "On three. One, two―"

On three they both activated their bayards with a brilliant flash of light, a burst of searing flame from Keith and a blinding explosion of ice from Lance, leaving behind their bayards and them in their dashing poses. He looked to the projector just in time to catch the smoke still billowing above them, the sparks flitting high into the air, the white fog pooling low around their ankles and spilling off the stage. Lance could not deny that they looked fucking awesome up there together. The crowd agreed; they went absolutely wild the second Lance and Keith pulled their little trick, and Lance couldn't have contained his smile if his life depended on it. Not only that, but the entire festival seemed to flare with noise for a few moments.

It was at that point that Lance finally registered the fact that the projection was visible to the entire festival.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh… shit.

He didn't realize he'd muttered that aloud until Keith was lowering his sword and eyeing him. "What?"

"Hunk and Pidge," he groaned, and guilt and embarrassment swept over Keith's face like a flash flood. Hunk and Pidge and everyone else in the universe, for that matter.

"Whoops," Keith said.

Whoops indeed. When they finally escaped the crowd and the lake and slipped back into the festival, Lance and Keith pulled their comms out to a million new messages from their friends. The longer Lance looked, the redder he got.

[CONGRATULATIONS!] read Allura's message in all caps. [How wonderful, I always dreamt of winning the boat race when I was a little girl! My father and mother themselves won as a team one year! Oh, I could cry. You two are setting such a wonderful example, thank you so much.] Hers had arrived almost immediately after they'd won―she must have started typing it before they even crossed the finish line. That thought put a stupid, silly grin on Lance's face.

[BRAVO, boys!] read Coran's congratulations. [You really gave them a show worth watching! Why, when I was a boy―]

At that point Lance scrolled down and saw that it went on for six paragraphs, and knew it was gonna contain some important Altean Exposition, so he decided to read it later when he had time to actually absorb it properly. Next.

He was surprised to see a message from Shiro as well, but he must have been able to see the screen even from the hot springs. [That was one impressive show] , he'd written. [You and Keith make a great team! And… nice little flair at the end there, Lance. I know that was your idea. I can't believe you got Keith to do that. Seems like you two are having a lot of fun here. I'm glad. God knows you both deserve it.]

At that Lance went all soft and his eyes started to sting; even two years after they'd saved Shiro and left Earth behind, it was still a little unreal to receive direct praise from someone who used to be a face on TV. He reread the message two more times before replying. [Thank you, Shiro. That really means a lot.]

Then, it was onto the hard part. There was a sizeable backlog of messages from Hunk asking him where he and Keith were that suddenly stopped around the time the race began. Then: [Oh man, that was freaking AWESOME, you guyyyyysss, you do know they were streaming the whole race on the projector right? The part where you finally pulled ahead, ohhh my god, I was dying. You guys are like― I just don't get it. You guys should ALWAYS be a team. Why don't you team up more?!]

It was at this point that Lance felt his face heating up, and angled himself away from Keith as he fought to subdue it. [good question. i think i might need to sleep on that one.]

Hunk must have been holding his comm in his hand and waiting for Lance to reply, because he started typing back the second Lance was done. [Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Idk man it looked to me like you had it all figured out…]

[had WHAT all figured out?]

[Haha nvm, forget I said anything.]

Okay, Pidge's messages couldn't possibly be worse than this.

Or, maybe they could. He didn't even know why he expected anything different.

[HMMM], she'd written, the timestamp indicating that it came through right when they'd won the race. [i see why you didnt answer us now. you were busy playing with fire.]

Lance glared at his phone, trying to figure out what the hell Pidge meant by that. What was she suggesting?! One glance told him Keith was staring at his comm too. "I think everyone saw the race," Keith mused. Lance gaped. Was he blushing? Why? Unable to stay his curiosity, he tried to get a peek at Keith's screen, but Keith started and flinched away, tilting it out of view.

[Anyway], Hunk began typing to Lance again, [we're going on a few rides now, but they're probably not the kind you'd wanna go on. Is it ok if we put off meeting up a little while longer? I mean, maybe it's just me, but you seem like you're having fun.]

Lance saw this, and knew right away that it was heartfelt and genuine. Where Pidge was making fun of him openly, Hunk was offering him an out. Hunk knew his... history with Keith a little more intimately. The big lovable softie been his patient rock during a thousand late nights of angry suffering, and he was offering to be that rock again right now. To be the buffer between he and Keith.

But for once, Lance didn't want that buffer. Sure, Pidge was right, and he was seriously playing with fire here, but… he'd never had so much fun with Keith before. It was too good to let go of.

[actually], he replied, [i am having fun. im having a lot of fun, hunk. so yeah its fine, text us when youre done.] He was about to stow his comm when a thought struck him. Hastily he added, [and dont tell pidge i said that!]

[Sorry man, she already saw, and she says to tell you 'hmmm' haha. She insisted that I spell it with three m's specifically and said you'd know what I meant.]

[tell that goblin i dont know what shes talking about!]

[Hmmm… okay. But uh, for the record, I think I know what she's talking about though.]

[god, not you too]

[Haha. Just relax, Lance, okay? And keep on having fun.]

With that Lance shoved his comm back in his coat pocket and turned to Keith, who was doing the same and pointedly avoiding Lance's gaze. "They won't be able to meet up for awhile longer," Lance told him. He carefully noted that Keith didn't look the slightest bit put out by the news.

"Okay. So, what do you wanna do then?"

"Hmm. Well, I dunno about you, but I'm feeling pretty lucky after that race, and I'm pretty sure there's a Vegas Strip sized street full of carnival games here."

"Huh," Keith said, and stopped his nervous tapping on his arm to meet Lance's eyes again. Deadpan and expressionless. "You gonna win me a stuffed animal?"

Lance spluttered like an idiot as Keith walked away, until he spotted the barest smirk ghosting its way across Keith's face. What was that? Was he joking? What kind of joke was that!

"Maybe I will!" Lance huffed back, and his stalking past Keith toward the tram turned into an impromptu footrace that ended when Keith knocked over a little kid and they had to buy him a balloon so he would stop crying.

.

.

They played some kind of bowling game first, which they both sucked at hilariously because the balls were all different sizes and weights and so were the pins, and every once in awhile the pins would rapidly switch places in the middle of a turn without warning. Soon they were laughing so hard they had to bow out of the game, much to the mirth of the other players. They also sucked at luck games, which hurt Lance's pride severely, and Keith had to physically drag him away from one of the booths. At least, until Keith pointed out the shooting range up ahead. Then it was Keith being dragged by Lance.

When they got to the front of the booth Keith tugged on Lance's sleeve and pointed behind the attendant at the wall of prizes, at the biggest and ugliest stuffed animal. Probably the ugliest stuffed animal Lance had ever seen. A bark of laughter escaped him. "Really, that one? It looks like someone frankensteined Sailor Moon into a mosquito. Are you joking?"

As Lance stepped up to plate, Keith sat down beside him on the short wall that separated the line of people from the wide open field that led up to another steep cliff. (The shooting range was at the very back of the Vegas Strip, for obvious reasons.) He fixed Lance with a blank stare, leaning forward on one hand. "Does this look like the face of someone who knows what a joke is?"

Lance literally could not tell if he was joking or not. It was infuriating.

"Okay then, mullet," he fumed quietly, "I'm winning you that magical girl mosquito. Prepare to be amazed."

The attendant sidled up excitedly to hand him one of the rifles. There were four cannons and four rifles, but everyone else whose turn it was had stopped to watch the Blue Paladin take his turn. Basking in the attention, Lance turned down the rifle and whipped out his own bayard instead, spinning it twice around his thumb before activating it in a flash of light. A chorus of oohs and ahhs filled the air behind him.

In his perch atop the wall, Keith looked more bored than anything else. "Don't miss," he goaded.

Lance scoffed. "I never miss."

"Okay, hotshot." To his great annoyance, Keith laughed at that casually, as though Lance were merely kidding around. He was not joking! Lance McClain did not miss.

Setting his jaw, he vowed to blow Keith's socks off. When did he ever have Keith's full attention like this, anyway? He'd had it up to here with Keith not taking him seriously; he was going to show Keith once and for all that he didn't call himself the sharpshooter for nothing.

The attendant loaded up the cannon with ten little baseball-sized targets, then lit the fuse. They shot out all at once. Lance squeezed the trigger in response, releasing the plasma in a wide arc, each target exploding on contact with a cloud of colored powder that rained slowly toward the ground. The trick was not to try and shoot every target, but instead to connect them with a single release, like a paint-stroke on a page. It was over in seconds. After everyone had registered the fact that it was over and he'd done it, a delighted cheer went up in the small crowd.

Feeling overwhelmingly smug about the whole thing, Lance tipped his head at Keith and winked. "Told you I never miss."

But Keith didn't look impressed, or annoyed, or anything like that. There was a funny look on his face, in fact―like he'd been forced to swallow an entire egg. "Do that again," he blurted out.

Um. What?

"Keith," he giggled with surprise, "there's other people in line."

But the small crowd behind him immediately latched onto the idea. Yeah, do it again, echoed from all around them. The Krossi attendant fed off the crowd's excitement, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Do you wanna try two cannons at once?"

Lance lit up. "I can do that?! Heck yeah! Load 'em up, boiii!"

The attendant wasted no time loading the targets in, this time spreading twenty of them out between Lance's cannon and the cannon to its right. He shot them off and Lance did it again―it was a little tougher this time but it was still a walk in the park compared to shooting at moving soldiers from a mile away that were also shooting back. The crowd was growing unruly now; the line had dissolved and those who'd been waiting for their turns were now crowded around Lance and Keith instead, pressing in and jabbering excitedly. They were clamoring for him to try three, now.

"Can you do three?" Keith asked in total disbelief.

Lance furrowed his eyebrows and raised his bayard one last time. "Load all four," he announced.

The attendant shot them off, and Lance hit them all.

...Except…

Through the rain of colored powder, Lance saw a single target hit the ground.

His stomach dropped out.

Damn it.

His one chance to finally impress Keith and he had to go and- His thoughts were derailed as the crowd closed in, cheering and cheering and apparently not realizing that he'd screwed it all up. He tried to say so but no one seemed to be listening. The attendant, when he came back over, looked positively shaken.

"I guess that's," he paused to count on his fingers, "seven big prizes?" He looked over at the prize wall thoughtfully.

"No, just one is fine," Lance said, feeling like he didn't really deserve even that after fudging up the last shot so spectacularly. He pointed at the hideous stuffed animal that Keith had requested, and shoved the thing directly into Keith's arms the second the attendant had handed it to him.

Keith looked simultaneously thrilled, mortified, and flabbergasted at this development. Belatedly, Lance decided that Keith had been joking when he requested it after all. Who knew Keith was secretly such a joker? Lance... liked it. He liked it a lot.

Too much.

"I'm gonna have to carry this around all day now," Keith said defeatedly, holding the toy at arm's length and looking at it sadly. It was so funny Lance wanted to cry.

"Oh my god," he said, "no you won't, just give the ugly thing away."

"Really? To who?"

Lance rolled his eyes and started pushing his way out of the crowd. "Pick someone, idiot."

He turned back to make sure Keith was following him just in time to see Keith holding out the stuffed animal to a kid of an unfamiliar species that didn't seem to belong to any family nearby. The kid gasped and latched onto it, looking up at Keith with wide, watery eyes. Keith patted his head awkwardly and hastened away from the booth to catch up with Lance.

The brief amusement had faded again now, leaving behind that low thrum of self hatred and disappointment. Lance shoved his hands in his coat pockets as they rounded the corner at the end of the street and came into a sprawling food court. "You have no idea how much these people love you," he grumbled, "do you?"

Slowing down a bit, Keith narrowed his eyes at him. "What's your deal? Shouldn't you be gloating?"

Lance dragged his feet, throwing his head back. He knew it wasn't fair to take his self-esteem issues out on Keith, but Keith was the one who kept luring those issues out of the dark closet he kept them in and dragging them into the light. Whether he meant to, or not. "Why would I be gloating?" Lance snapped. "I freaking missed one."

Keith came to a full stop, then, forcing Lance to stop too lest he leave Keith totally in the dust. "Are you kidding me? " Keith spluttered. " That's why you're pouting?"

"Um, yeah," Lance countered stupidly. "I freaking missed one!"

Keith just gaped at him, his face slowly passing through the familiar phases of irritation and exasperation. "On that last round alone you got thirty nine targets in the―what," he ground out, "―five seconds they were in the air, and you're kicking yourself for missing one? Do―do you―" Keith sputtered out, growling and grabbing his hair and shifting his weight about angrily. "Do you even realize how insane that was?" Vexed to all hell, Keith threw his hands up. "I've never seen anything like it in my life! Like, I knew you could shoot, Lance, but that? That was―fucking―just what? Who cares if you missed one. Do you think I could have gotten even half of those that quickly? I doubt even Shiro―"

"I care," Lance said, but he felt thoroughly derailed. The anger and jealousy were fading, now; slowly being pushed out by some other much scarier emotion. He chased after the anger, trying to catch it before it was completely gone. "If those targets had been soldiers, that was one soldier that got away!"

Keith stilled. He dropped his hands and his whole face softened, until he was looking at Lance with something a lot more like empathy than exasperation. Comprehension teased at the corners of his mouth, easing his frown away. "That's why you work on a team, idiot."

Lance gawked at him. Seriously? That was rich coming from the Lone Wolf himself.

Keith must have read the incredulousness on Lance's face because he suddenly grew bashful and refused to look Lance in the eye. But he didn't back down from his point. "I was right there, Lance. If that was a real battle then I would have covered your miss. Just like I did in the canyon last week."

Then Keith was walking away, further into the food court, leaving Lance to collect the shattered pieces of his anger.

Ah. Okay then.

The guy had seen right through him to the ugly heart of the problem. When the hell did Keith start to understand him so well? Man, Lance hadn't even realized that that was what he was actually sore about. But it was, wasn't it? Because in the battle last week he'd missed one fighter jet, just one, and the mistake had almost cost him his life. But then Keith, freaking Keith had come to his rescue at the very last second, shooting the jet right out of his blind spot and flashing him a smirk over the video feed. And Lance, instead of thanking him on his hands and knees like he probably should have, had been so caught up in the feeling of utter failure that he'd taken it out on Keith.

Again.

Like he always did…

Now, face to face with him and unable to shove it on the back burner for later or cover it up with a shoddy joke, Lance couldn't help but feel that he'd done wrong by him.

When he finally steeled himself and caught up with Keith at the counter of a small food cart, he tugged at the tail of Keith's maroon coat. "Hey." Since when did his voice sound so fragile and small? "Uh... thanks, man."

Better late than never, right?

Keith's answer came in the form of a small but sincere smile. "What do you want?" he asked, gesturing to the foreign menu. Sweet-smelling smoke billowed up from a grill in the back of the food cart, and the cashier leaned over the counter toward them. Keith looked at Lance expectantly.

So Lance pulled out his comm and turned on the translator, holding it up to the Krossi menu so they could try and decipher the alphabet. Unfortunately none of the menu items were familiar anyway, so they ended up just picking their food at random and hoping it worked out. At best, they'd get lucky. At worst, it'd be hilarious. When it came time to pay, Lance didn't get a chance to pull his money voucher out of his pocket before Keith was already sticking his into the slot.

Right away Lance opened his mouth to complain about it, but ended up snapping it shut again at the look on Keith's face. He was doing that thing where he avoided Lance's eyes on purpose as he grabbed utensils and napkins from the side of the food cart, like something had surfaced in his eyes that he didn't want Lance to see. It shouldn't have really mattered anyway, because it was free money they were using and their vouchers were both infinite.

But for some reason, it did.

It did matter.

. . * . .

After they overstuffed themselves on questionable (but free) alien food, they wandered the shopping district for a bit, letting themselves get a little lost as they ogled all the incomprehensible tourist trinkets and joked about which pointless and tacky souvenirs to get for their friends. But despite his open mocking of souvenirs as a concept, when Keith was distracted by a man engaged in glassblowing at a storefront, Lance slipped away to the booth next door where they were selling little glass versions of those adventurous lizards and bought a few before sidling back over to Keith, who was still gaping at the glassblower with his mouth left open in an 'o' shape. To be fair, Lance couldn't blame him. The glassblower was working magic right in front of them. It was like witchcraft, seriously. Breaking his gaze, Lance eyed a few of the finished pieces on the table to the left: it seemed the specialty was to trap tiny trinkets within the glass baubles. Lance leaned in close to eye one in particular, a tiny coin that hovered impossibly in the center of it's glass sphere. How did it work, lance wondered? The whole thing pulsed green when he poked it, but he backed up when he caught the glassblower's stink eye.

"Sorry," he squeaked. Keith didn't even notice the exchange, so caught up was he in the movements of the glassblower's hands.

Lance laughed at Keith's total lack of chill in the face of things he found intriguing, and tucked the small paper bag in the pocket on the inner lining of his coat before Keith could see it and ask what Lance had bought. There were already three wooden boxes full of useless shit like this sitting in the back of a closet at the castle, dusty and cold as Lance awaited the day he could hand them over to his family. The third one was sort of overflowing these days. He might have to start a fourth if he bought anything else for them during Noq r'Nai.

Maybe it was stupid, and pointless too, and borderline pathetic when he really let himself dwell on it. But it helped him cope and he wasn't going to stop anytime soon.

After he'd found his souvenirs for his family, Lance swiftly grew tired of looking at chintzy knick knacks. Soon he was dragging Keith down a classier high-end street lined with clothing and accessory stores under golden domed rooftops, alien-shaped mannequins standing behind glass windows, and bright neon titles and ads all competing for the attention of the passersby.

Keith did not like this development.

"O-kay," Lance complained as Keith grumbled with disinterest at the fifth consecutive store that Lance tried to pull him into, "okay, I see what's happening here. You're just mad because you don't understand Fashion."

Digging his heels into the grass, Keith fixed Lance with a pout. "Um, yeah." There was a (wordless, but clear) exasperated 'duh' tacked on at the end there, and it caught Lance completely by surprise.

"...Dude," he deadpanned. "Dude."

Keith flushed. "Shut up."

"No hang on," Lance said, and resumed his tugging on Keith's elbow to try and goad him into the shop they were currently clogging the entrance to. "C'mere, the first lesson is free." He tried to sound as serious as possible, and not condescending, but judging from the look on Keith's face it wasn't working all that well. Yet despite his misgivings, Keith allowed himself to be pulled into the store so that a family that was waiting for them to move could get inside. Lance took full advantage of it while he had Keith where he wanted him. "First of all: this?" he said. "This has been bothering me all damn day."

With that he pulled the terrible hair tie right out of Keith's hair, earning a sharp look of reproach.

"Hey!"

"This," Lance continued, pinching it with two fingers between them like it was some kind of venomous bug to be feared and burned, "is a travesty. You can't put garbage in hair like this," he complained, and gestured at the unfairly lustrous hair in question.

Keith touched the tips of his hair self-consciously, red blossoming on the crest of his cheeks. "That is the meanest compliment I've ever gotten."

Lance was on such a roll now that he didn't even stop to vehemently deny the fact that it was a compliment; he simply moved on, eager to accomplish the impossible before Keith escaped. He grabbed Keith's elbow again and led him past a rack of glasses toward the side wall, which was completely lined in ribbons and headbands and other odd accessories that may or may not have also been for hair. "See, you gotta do it in two parts," he said professionally. "First you put it up with a band." He pulled a little card off the wall and slipped a stretchy hair band off it, turning around and scanning for a cashier to find that she was watching them intently and giggling behind her hands. "I'm gonna pay for this!" he promised, then passed it off to Keith and motioned for him to put it on.

Keith made a show of rolling his eyes first, but ultimately complied.

"Then," Lance said, "you put something pretty on top of it. The band alone is boring, y'know? You gotta spice it up." Lance steered him farther down the wall to the section of ribbon, which stretched from floor to ceiling and offered a range of several hundred patterns and colors.

"Ribbon?" Keith deadpanned. "Seriously? I…" He side-eyed Lance, crossing his arms over his chest. "I can't tell if you're making fun of me or not, Lance. If you are, it's not funny."

The hurt in his voice took Lance pretty far aback, and he had to bristle at the implication. "I'm not making fun of you. Why, is there something wrong with putting ribbon in your hair?"

"No," Keith replied at length. "I just don't think I could have gotten away with that, where I'm from."

...Right.

Lance took a step, moving himself a little further into Keith's view, trying to decipher the indecipherable look on his face. It was impossible. "Keith, we are like four bazillion light years from Texas right now. You know that, right?"

While Keith glowered a bit at Lance's tone, he considered it nonetheless. Lance could feel the clock ticking away as Keith thought, and thought some more. Without betraying any of those thoughts aloud Keith slowly raked his eyes over the wall of ribbon, pressing his lips into a tight line as he surveyed each one skeptically. He started to wander down the aisle, considering them silently, and Lance followed after with poorly disguised curiosity, wondering if Keith was going to actually do it. A little flutter went up in his chest when Keith stopped suddenly and plucked one off the wall with total confidence.

A… a rainbow colored one.

As Keith closed his fist around it he eyed Lance, almost like he was gauging Lance's reaction. But there's no way he knows what rainbows represent on Earth, Lance thought, Keith doesn't know social cues, he probably just likes it. It's Keith. He doesn't know.

But still, Lance's heart was hammering up a storm as he gave Keith a thumbs up and bought it for him, and it got even worse as he pulled the ribbon off its plastic hook and tied it around Keith's ponytail in a small, compact bow.

Great. He looked lovely. Wonderful. Lance was going to have to look at this all fucking day now. What was he thinking? AHHH―

"You coming?" Keith called from the open doorway.

Lance whimpered to himself and followed.

.

.

After they had raided a candy store up the road, they started passing up the kitschy shops in favor of the fancier, more expensive storefronts. Soon they turned a corner and ended up on a tech strip so shiny and overwhelming and chrome that it had Lance letting out a low, impressed whistle. "Fuutuure," he droned, doing a mock pull-up hand-motion as they pushed into the crowded marketspace.

Keith, who'd been craning his head toward a panel where an Olkarian salesman was trying to pitch scuba gear to a handful of loud Krossi teenagers, squinted back at Lance like he'd lost his mind. "What?"

"Oh come on," Lance complained. "Please tell me you've heard of Spongebob."

"I'm sorry, did you just say sponge-bob? What the hell is a sponge-bob?"

Lance gaped over at him. "Sometimes," he deadpanned, "I question if you're really from Earth or not."

Keith rolled his eyes and pressed on around another corner on the strip. "You're so weird."

The sudden turn led them into a wide open indoor area. Or was it outdoors still? It was hard to tell, actually. The building was nothing more than a big helping of solar panels stretched as a roof across fifty-foot high ridged columns, but there were no walls, only platforms and platforms and more layered platforms, all lined with different types of transportation. Everything from sports gear to ground vehicles to fully realized one-man spaceships.

"Holy shit," Keith eked out, and Lance immediately followed Keith's yearning gaze across the sales floor to a row of what were essentially motorcycles. "It would be kinda nice not to have to take the tram," Keith said rationally, but his voice sounded a little too strangled for true rationality.

Simultaneously amused and exasperated, Lance tried to be the voice of reason. "This stuff is really expensive though," he said. "I know our vouchers are infinite, but I feel like they weren't expecting us to buy jetpacks with them."

"Yeah," Keith sighed, tearing his eyes from the slick row of bikes. "Yeah, you're right. Maybe we should just go?"

Lance nodded forlornly, casting one last look around at the incredible selection of technology. It was too tempting.

They had just turned around to steer themselves back out of the showroom when suddenly Lance stopped dead in his tracks. "Oh my god. Oh my god, Keith, oh my god , OH MY GOD―" He was already halfway across the sunlit warehouse by then, tripping in his haste to get to the product he'd spotted from across the room, a display table covered in a silken white cloth with a black board hovering above it, no larger than a skateboard.

Hovering above it.

Hovering.

When Keith caught up, Lance was swishing his hand underneath the board, back and forth, in total disbelief that he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

"Hoverboard," he screeched at Keith as soon as he heard footsteps approaching beside him. "I knew these had to exist somewhere! Keith, they've accomplished what humans have dreamed of for a hundred years―!"

"Are you gonna buy it?"

Lance froze with his hand halfway under the hoverboard still, and screwed his face up at it in pained concentration. "No, I… I can't―"

"Buy it. Just buy it, Lance. It's no big deal, just buy it."

"Oh my god," Lance shrieked, "you're a terrible influence! Why are you trying to goad me into buying this? What is your angle?" The second he looked up at Keith he trailed off, taking note of the dreamy look in Keith's eyes; he was staring off at something in the distance. Distracted from the hoverboard, Lance followed the look, all the way to a fancy ass speeder on the opposite end of the platform. It reminded him of the one Keith had ridden way back in the Sonoran Desert, except much more sleek and compact and overall more technologically advanced. And to top it off, as if the universe was just teasing them, it was painted a bright, candy apple red.

When Keith caught Lance's eye he adopted a desperate, pleading expression.

Lance held up his hands in surrender. "Don't look at me," he blanched, "I'm not the Shiro of you."

Keith blinked. "The― what?"

"Okay if you're buying the speeder," Lance reasoned (very logically thank you), "I'm definitely buying the hoverboard. There's no way Shiro will yell at me when you bought an entire freaking speeder. And… it will be a lot faster. We'll be able to get around the festival on our own without relying on the stupid tram."

"...Wait," Keith said, his face falling a little, "you'll never be able to keep up with my speeder on your hoverboard."

A mischievous grin was already spreading across Lance's face. "Allow me to prove you wrong."

He seized the hoverboard and promptly began to march with it tucked under his arm up the disjointed platforms toward the service desk, with Keith following after him like a lost dog. He rang the bell for assistance despite the fact that the cashier was standing not three feet away. As the cashier turned around to see what he and Keith wanted his grin widened into something downright shit-eating. "Yes, hi, we'll take this hoverboard," Lance said, "along with the slick-ass red speeder over yonder, and do you know where a guy might be able to buy some rope around here?"

The cashier looked at Lance like he had seven heads, then slowly started to ring them up with the extra arm growing out of his side. As he typed away at his computer, Lance leaned one elbow on the counter and winked smugly at Keith, who looked more pleased than Lance had ever seen him.

.

.

Ten minutes later they were cruising through the shopping district, Keith on his new speeder with a rope tied to the back of it, and Lance on his hoverboard hanging onto the other end of the rope for dear life, laughing his heart out as they weaved in between tourists and food carts alike. Lance wasn't even sure where they were going at this point, and he didn't think Keith knew either. It's not like either of them had a map of this place.

All Lance knew was: HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO MUCH FUN!

They flew along faster and faster, and the sound of Keith's laughter was borne back with the wind to Lance's ears, filling his head with cotton and his veins with fire. It became a silent competition. Keith would glance over his shoulder with that signature smirk: Too fast for you? And, not to be outdone by Keith freaking Kogane, Lance would shout over the roaring wind. "Faster, grandpa!" And Keith would kick it up and Lance would laugh some more, and Keith would laugh some more, and then it would start all over again and they'd go even faster, and pretty soon they were in a completely unfamiliar part of the valley and a carriage was pulling out in front of them. Keith swerved at the last second but it was too late for Lance. He hit it full on.

The world tilted askew and exploded.

Lance rolled and tumbled as his skin scraped wood and grass until he finally landed in a heap on top of a broken wheel, feeling like he'd just bailed from Blue's lower hatch a mile above the ground. "Owwww," he groaned, just in time for Keith's terrified face to suddenly apparate above him.

"Oh my god, Lance, are you okay?" There were hands on his face now, turning it side to side. Was he dreaming? "Talk to me! Jesus.."

A quick stock check of all his bones told Lance he hadn't broken anything, just bruised himself up a bit. Nothing he hadn't already fought through on a battlefield a hundred times over. "My life just flashed before my eyes," he groaned, drinking in Keith's undisguised concern like it was worth more than gold. 'Cause it kinda was. "And now I know. My life would make a great action movie."

Keith blinked.

Once, twice, and then his face screwed up against his will and he burst into the most raucous laughter Lance had ever witnessed from him. It caught Lance so off guard that he had to laugh too, and it was only when the carriage driver marched over to scream bloody murder at them that they grew contrite about what had happened. In the end the carriage driver shooed them away, turning down their offer to help with the cleanup, and they decided to just get out of there with their dignity while they still could. So they stowed Lance's hoverboard under the seat and Lance climbed onto the speeder behind Keith, and they took off, leaving the scene of the crime far, far behind.

Lance held on as loosely as he could, closing his eyes to the festival as it whipped past on both sides, and tried not to wonder why it was so much more gratifying to make Keith laugh than it had ever been to make him angry.

It turned out Keith was taking him to some kind of infirmary, and even though Lance complained that he felt fine the whole time as Keith practically dragged him into the lobby, he let the Krossi doctor inject him with something anyway. In the end he was glad he did because it was like being infused with ten cups of coffee at once. It set him on a rampage for more rides and snacks and carnival games, at an energy level Keith could hardly keep up with over the next few hours.

He'd only just started to come down from the mega-caffeine-high when they found the coliseum.

Or at least, that's what Lance was calling it until they stepped inside and actually saw what the tournament looked like, at which point Lance immediately switched over to calling the place The Jedi Arena. It was a testament to the nickname's accuracy that Keith didn't utter a word of mockery. They caught the tail end of some kind of duel as they walked in, and hung back at the top of the circle of stone bleachers to watch the two Krossi opponents wave what were inarguably lightsabers at each other. After an intense back and forth that lasted ten minutes, there was finally a victory. The crowd went wild and not long after a voice on the loudspeaker was announcing sign-ups for the next tournament round, to start in ten minutes. Lance turned to Keith to suggest they enter, but found the space where he'd been standing empty.

Keith was already halfway down the bleachers.

.

.

Lance tried not to zone out as he was taken into a featureless room and fitted with a series of sensors: one on each foot and calf and thigh, one on each hand and forearm and bicep, a complicated patchwork vest of them, one around the neck, and one around the head like a tiara. Something about the sensors interacting with the lightsabers, simulating injuries, blah blah blah...

"Got it," he parroted when the Krossi finished locking the head-sensor in place, too eager to actually receive his very own lightsaber to pay proper attention to the rehearsed speech.

He understood that they were literally just that―light―but who the hell cared? It was heavy in his hands, and he activated it the second the Krossi left him alone, just to test it out.

When the blade shot out blue (had the Krossi chosen this color for him on purpose?), it was with a sound so distinctly similar to the one from Star Wars that Lance reeled. His eyes watered. He stared and went cold and his throat went dry as he tried to swallow the echoing ghost of Laura's voice replicating that sound effect as they fought each other with cheap plastic knock offs in their shared bedroom. The DVD menu screen of A New Hope playing on at five in the morning when Benito stayed up with him on the seventh night of Mononucleosis month. The Last Jedi fading into the background at the retro oldies movie theatre on his first sort-of 'date' at the proud age of thirteen, when he'd missed the girl's hand and knocked over her Pepsi. Marco and Gabi had picked him up later on and they'd laughed about it, together, drinking homemade papaya smoothies in the shade of the crooked palm tree out back.

Latching onto the tranquility that came with that last memory, Lance took a deep breath and pulled it all back in, resolving to buy one of these light-swords somewhere before they left the festival so he could show it to his brothers and sisters someday.

At that point Lance was ushered into a room full of contestants, and had just found Keith in the crowd when a giant screen on the wall lit up with matched pairs for the first round of duels.

He faced a white-furred Krossi first; a boy named Chella who seemed close to his own age.

As soon as they stepped into the ring and the boy saw who he'd be dueling first, he lit up, but then almost immediately deflated. Lance frowned as they met in the middle to tap the sides of their sabers together ceremoniously, the way they'd been instructed. (They weren't actually called lightsabers, okay, but how was Lance supposed to think of anything else when he looked at them? Honestly.)

"Can't believe the Blue Paladin is my first opponent. I, uh, I might as well just forfeit now," Chella laughed, but behind it was a mote of sincerity.

"Hey man," Lance laughed, "I promise you, I have no clue what I'm doing out here. I'm a sniper. I've never even used one of these before. So let's just have fun, yeah?"

A tentative smile tugged at his face. "Okay. Yeah."

A bell rang out, and they launched into action.

It was strange, getting used to the swish of the sword. The beams of light clanged off each other as if they were solid, but passed straight through everything else like the corporeal plasma light rays they were. Lance got his first good hit in after a minute or two of dodging. His saber passed through Chella's left arm, activating the sensor there with a blaring beep and a flash of orange light. The arm went heavy and responseless, and not long after that Lance was standing victorious over a totally motionless body.

Lance's name flashed in a gaudy font on the ceiling above, and another bell sounded to end the match. The orange lights on Chella's body sensors flashed blue and then went dark. Chella breathed out a sigh of relief when he could move again, released from the sensor's dead weight where Lance had slashed through with his saber, then grinned and allowed Lance to help him back to his feet.

"Good fight," Lance cheered. "Maybe I'll see you around the festival sometime."

"Yeah," Chella smiled back, still a bit out of breath from the duel, and a little bit starry-eyed as well. Lance tried not to let it get to his head, but he didn't try very hard. Okay, he didn't try at all. Sue him. "Good luck with the rest of the tournament. I, uh, I hope you win."

"Oh, I'll win," Lance assured him cockily.

But that cockiness evaporated when ten minutes later he watched Keith wipe the floor with his first opponent in three seconds flat. Something stirred in the pit of his stomach, and Lance desperately stamped on it. Now wasn't the time for that.

Lance won his next four matches, but that's when his luck ran out. The tournament was narrowed down to twelve contestants now, down from almost eighty, and Lance had been constantly wondering if and when he would be matched up with Keith. They must have been trying to save it for the end of the tournament, for some kind of grand spectacle a la The Hunger Games. But Lance's last two matches had been close. Really close. In the last one he'd barely scraped out at the very end with one dead leg and one dead arm and a partially activated sensor on his chest; wounds which in real life would have probably killed him. The fact that Lance was now paired with Keith for the next match meant the tournament organizers must have decided Lance wouldn't make it to the last round. Which stung. It stung, okay?

So Lance marched out onto the arena with the intention to slay Keith where he stood. No banter. No mercy.

No whatever-the-hell feeling this burning shit in my stomach came from. Whatever it is, plug the leak. Turn it off. Show him what you're made of.

Keith, however, did not seem to share his single-minded bloodlust. "This is familiar," he said slyly as he held his red saber out between them. Yeah, they totally did the color-coding on purpose. "Lance and Keith, neck and neck."

Lance abso-lute-ly remembered saying that to him on the day they ""met"" when they saved Shiro, and he felt distinctly mocked for it. It didn't settle well with him in his heightened state of anxiety and aggression. His lip curled and he activated his own saber too, bringing it out to perform the traditional pre-duel sword touch―but then pulling back at the very last second before the beams of light could spark against each other.

A chorus of low ooo's rippled through the audience.

The announcer went crazy overhead, but Lance wasn't listening. He knew he must have done something culturally significant just now, but all he could focus on was the way Keith's face fell as he realized what Lance had just done. How it hardened afterward, and Keith slipped visibly into the emotionless fugue-state he sometimes went into when he trained too hard for too long or tried to take on too many enemies at once.

The bell sounded, and Keith went loose.

From the get-go, Lance was immediately overwhelmed. His other matches had been against amateurs and hobbyists, and that was the only reason he'd won consistently when he'd never had any real practice with a sword before, he realized that now. Going against Keith with a sword was like challenging Usain Bolt to a footrace. They'd trained together before, of course, but never like this. Never like this. Keith hit a sensor within the first ten seconds, the one on Lance's left forearm, and from there it was all downhill. Lance pushed back and fought, but it was like fighting a tornado. All he could do was try not to die as he steadily lost ground, and thank god wildly that Keith was on their side of the war because holy mother of fuck this was so scary―and then Keith feinted left and slipped under Lance's defense to strike his leg.

The sensor flashed and then turned to dead weight, dragging Lance down to one knee as he dodged under the backswing and desperately struck back, hitting his first sensor since the match began. Keith's right arm failed him then, but the red saber was in his left before Lance had even registered Keith spinning to catch it mid-air, and then suddenly Lance's own saber was ten feet away, struck by Keith as he completed the wild turn, stray locks of hair coming loose from their ribbon and white shirt billowing on artificial wind. The force of the hit sent Lance falling sideways and backwards, flat on his back. A moment later Keith was on top of him, breathing hard, his bangs obscuring his face but not nearly enough to hide the uncertainty there, which took Lance so far aback that he could have come out on the other side of Krossin and not been surprised. There was no triumph on Keith's face. Not yet.

Meanwhile, Lance was breathless. Speechless. He still felt like he was falling despite the dirt digging into his back, and Keith's distinct lack of gloating was not helping. Panting, he glanced down at the tip of the red saber where it hovered just over his chest, right above the sensor placed strategically over his heart. No wonder the end-bell hadn't sounded yet. Keith hadn't actually struck the deadly blow. He was just hovering there. Waiting. For what, Lance didn't know. The crowd had gone deathly silent too. They didn't seem to know either. Even the announcer was quiet as everyone waited to see what was going to happen next between the Red and Blue Paladins.

There was a part of Lance that wanted desperately to be angry that he'd lost to Keith again. A tireless runner in his heart that chased after the age-old rivalry, the jealousy and the irritation and the competitiveness and the anger, because it was the safety net he had crafted for himself years ago over the bottomless pit that was Keith Kogane, and it had always kept him from falling too far too fast. But where he usually struck it and bounced back, he was met with nothing. The net was gone. Between one moment and the next―there―then gone.

And when Lance finally fell, he fell all the way down.

Though it felt like an eon, he'd only been pinned for a few seconds when he caught his breath enough to gasp, "Holy shit, Keith," in the most awestruck voice he'd ever heard come out his own mouth.

The effect was immediate. A tentative smile lit Keith's face, swiftly burning away the uncertainty and leaving behind something blinding. "Looks like I won," Keith whispered back, and tapped the tip of the sword to the sensor over Lance's heart.

Yeah you did, Lance thought hopelessly as the sensor lit up and turned into dead weight that pressed him even flatter to the dirt. He was still falling, even now, still swept through and through with the wild flutters of rapid altitude loss. It was scarier than the first time he'd leapt from an airplane at the Garrison, when he'd watched the curvature of the earth morphing back into miles of desert until his eyes finally found the red-painted landing zone north of the base, where he would either touchdown or die. You really, really did.

Even as Keith helped him to his feet Lance still felt like he was falling. Keith Kogane flashed in bold red font down at Lance from the screen on the ceiling and those lining the walls. Keith Kogane, Keith Kogane, Keith Kogane. It was dizzying. The disoriented wobble in Lance's step followed him from the ring all the way to the back, as if in a dream, where he was stripped of his sensors and rewarded with a small silver shirt pin embossed in Krossi lettering that he couldn't read. There Keith found him a few minutes later, looking unsure of how to act again until Lance strong-armed his way through his spiralling internal disaster enough to roll his eyes and shove his blue lightsaber into Keith's hands, snatching the red away one in exchange. He couldn't evenlook at Keith right now. Instead he kept his eyes locked firmly to the left, attempting through sheer force of will to control the rate of blood flow between his heart and his face. To his knowledge, it didn't work.

"Avenge me," he demanded, sounding way more pissed off than he meant to in his attempt to cover up the fact that he was still more flustered than he'd ever been in his life. That he wasn't sure he'd ever be un-flustered again.

With that he left Keith to find his name on the updated roster, picking up pace as he went and ignoring Keith's shouted reply of, "Does it even count as avenging you if I'm the one who killed you in the first place?"

.

.

Lance burst out of a featureless back door into an empty alleyway like a hot drunk mess into a bathroom.

"FUCK!" he screamed as the door ricocheted off the wall and slammed closed again behind him. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! "

The words echoed down the dirty alley as he raked his hands through his hair and completed his descent into hell. There would be no more denial. No more bargaining or leveraging or running away, no more dressing the emotions up as something they weren't, or tirelessly dissecting them to find other feelings inside that were smaller and less terrifying. Nope. Couldn't do it anymore. Lance McClain was a lot of stupid things, but he wasn't stupid , and there was literally no possible way to reinvent this desperate thumping in his chest as anything other than the reality it was. There weren't any hideaways left in his heart that were big enough to hide it. The words sounded in his head like raindrops on a window pane, again and again, overlapping into a deluge of white static that he knew in his heart would never go quiet again. Six words, one truth, I am in love with him.

"Fuck," he whimpered one more time, and turned around to kick the wall, only to find Chella leaning there on one hoof by the door, looking rather worried.

"Are you alright?" Chella wondered haltingly. Then, after a moment of Lance staring at him slack-jawed, he added with concern: "You're upset about the way the match went?"

Lance blinked, and realized with horror that there were tears brimming in his eyes. "No, I― Well, yes, but― Look, I don't care about the tournament!" he huffed. "That's not why I'm― It's just that I―and he―he just―!" Here he cut himself off with a desperate, frustrated growl, and buried his face in his hands so he didn't have to see the look of concern festering into something even more disturbed on Chella's face. This wasn't about losing at some dumb tournament. It was about losing at life, because Lance just had to go and fall in love with the one person in the universe who was least likely to love him back. Fuck!

Chella's concern softened into something like tentative understanding. "...He? You mean the Red Paladin? Kogane, right?"

With his face still in his hands Lance sucked in a deep, prolonged, and shuddering breath, opened his mouth to hiss 'no' in the most offended voice he could muster, and then burst into tears instead.

"Oh my―! Hang on, don't go anywhere, I'll be right back," Chella blurted too fast for Lance to comprehend, and then vanished back into the coliseum.

Lance was immediately heartbroken by this. He'd never been the type to cry much because he hated how ugly and pathetic it made him look, and the things it made him say to people that he'd never say under normal circumstances. But crying alone was even worse than crying in front of a stranger, so he set about kicking himself to Man Up. That somehow made it even worse. The worst. By the time Chella reappeared Lance was sitting on the ground leaning against the door and Chella had to squeeze around his body to get outside. He'd brought back tissues and some kind of pink and yellow Krossi candy, both of which he promptly offered up to Lance as he sat down beside him, stretching his long fuzzy legs out and crossing them. Mortified, but grateful, Lance accepted the tissues.

They sat silently for almost fifteen minutes while Lance cried himself out and slowly got it under control. When he felt like maybe he was ready to be done, he placed one hand on his chest and concentrated on steadying his breathing. As soon as he did, he pricked himself on something sharp. Oh no. Gingerly he opened his coat and pulled the paper bag out, the one with the little lizard figures he'd bought for his family. He could tell without even opening the bag that they were toast, juts by the powdery tinkling sound coming from inside. Of course. Defeatedly he tossed the bag aside.

"So, do you, uh, do you wanna talk about it?" Chella finally prompted.

Lance groaned. He wanted to shout from the highest point on this volcano about it until the sun burned out or he lost his voice. Whichever came first. "Can you keep a secret?"

Chella blinked. "...Yes?"

Lance probably would have blurted it out even if the answer was 'hell to the no' and a raised megaphone. "I'm in love with him," he whimpered. "I'm in love with him." And he knew as he finally said it aloud that it was true. It was so true it hurt. It was agony, knowing it, and knowing what it meant. How did this happen? When? "I don't even know how long it's been," he reeled, "like, I'm trying to think when it happened and I just? Can't? Like I go back to this morning and I think about how excited he was to come to this place and how much butterflies it gave me, and yeah, I definitely loved him then too. This isn't new." Lance ran a hand over his face in despair, pushing back farther and farther, tracing every important moment they'd lived through together. The farther he traveled back in the timeline, the more despondent he grew. Every single memory was stained with this feeling. It was everywhere. He'd been in love with Keith since the very goddamn beginning!

Groaning louder than ever, Lance threw his head back against the wall. "There is no before," he whimpered, "is there? It's just.. turtles all the way down."

"Sorry, what?"

Lance slid his eyes to the side, registering the carefully blank look on Chella's face. "Right. Idioms. Cultures. Uh… It's a human phrase," Lance explained, closing his eyes and trying to remember where that saying had even come from. "It's turtles all the way down.' Comes from an old mythological idea. A fable of sorts. It goes that the whole world rests on the back of a giant turtle―which is an animal. So someone says, well then what about the turtle? What's the turtle resting on? Well, on the back of another turtle, of course. And that turtle is resting on the back of another turtle, and so on."

Chella looked on the verge of laughter. "An infinite recursion of... turtles?"

Lance allowed himself to smile. "Yeah. Kinda silly, I know."

"Or, in this case…"

"Don't say it," he moaned, and set about stretching his arms and legs, which had really begun to ache ever since he sat down. Maybe that high-speed hoverboard crash was finally catching up with him now that the medicine he'd been injected with had run its course. Or maybe it was being tackled to the ground by the love of his life that did it.

"Okay. Okay, do you, uh, d'you want some candy?"

"Yes. God, yes. Please." He accepted a piece gratefully, and spoke around it with a great deal of shame. "Jeez, this must be such a horrible first impression of Voltron. Sorry you had to see me like this."

Chella gave a relaxed shrug and popped the pinkest of the candies into his mouth. "I dunno. It's actually kind of inspiring to know you guys deal with the same stuff the rest of us do on top of uh, saving the universe and all that. The mundane, regular, everyday stuff."

Lance glared, pressing a hand to his chest in exaggerated offense. "Excuse me? Nothing about this feels like any of those things."

Chella only smiled, albeit a little ruefully, and pulled a small black sphere from his pocket to check it for the time. "We're actually coming up on the end of the tournament pretty soon here," he noted. "If your friend made it to the end, we can probably still catch his last duel. That is, uh, if you want to."

"Oh, he made it," Lance said firmly. "And yeah," he sighed after a moment of skirting around it. "Yeah, I do want to." Here he'd been wallowing in self pity about unrequited love, and he might have missed seeing his friend win an awesome competition. The guilt about the selfishness of his impromptu pity party and the sudden, all-encompassing desire to Support Keith was enough to propel him back to his feet and back into the coliseum.

They found seats in the second row, squeezing in between two families. In the center of the coliseum stood a tall, muscled Krossi on the dirt, waving his white saber around and impatiently glancing side to side. The crowd murmured discontentedly, and as soon as Lance and Chella found their seats, the announcer's voice boomed overhead from the loudspeakers.

"This is the fifth and final call for Keith Kogane," he said. "Final call for Keith Kogane. If you don't take the field within the next dobash, the match will be forfeited and the title of the tournament given to Lorem Adelai by default."

"What?" Lance blurted, jumping out of his seat to look around in vain. "Where is he?" What the hell, did he bail? Just like that? Digging his comm out of his pocket, he scrolled to Keith's name, sharing a confused glance with Chella until Keith picked up.

"Hello?" Keith said, but it was barely audible through the howl of wind that carried through the receiver.

"Where the eff are you, mullet? You have like thirty seconds left before they award the jedi crown to some loser!"

"I'm almost back!" As if on cue, the wind cut out, revealing the sputter of a dying engine.

Wait, was he on the speeder? Where…? Why? A flurry of questions marks exploded behind Lance's eyes as he pressed his fingers to his closed eyelids. Did he even want to know what the hell Keith was up to?

Lance jumped up onto his seat as the loudspeaker crackled, cutting the announcer off before he could speak. "He's coming!" Lance hollered in the general direction of the soundbooth. "Just wait a few more ticks!"

True to Lance's word, not five ticks later Keith burst into the coliseum at the top of the stairs, drawing the eyes of the crowd and eliciting ecstatic cheers from everyone, including the announcer. He is so goddamn extra, Lance thought fondly as Keith bounded down the steps three at a time with the blue lightsaber in hand and a delighted smirk plastered on his face.

Watching Keith at his finest directly after accepting how desperately in love with him Lance was may have been the worst possible thing he could have done to treat the symptoms. Every graceful and calculated move Keith made was another layer of dirt, encasing Lance in his own tomb. Grass was already growing over the top of it. Flowers too and Lance was dead, dead, dead, especially when Lorem Adelai dropped at the one dobash mark and Keith turned immediately to Lance with a toothy grin, as if to say, How's that for avenging you?

Scratch it all; Lance wasn't dead, he was living.

A thrill shot through his veins at the look on Keith's face and stirred something deep in his stomach, heavy and molten. It was the same feeling he'd felt a thousand times before except now it had a name, and with the speaking of that name (instead of burying it) came unimaginable freedom. How delicious it was to relinquish the reins.

"I think he's smiling at me!"

The girlish voice yanked Lance out of his own head, drawing his attention to the two Krossi girls sitting directly in front of him and Chella, one of which was now swooning onto her friend.

"He's coming over!" her red-furred friend whispered excitedly, and one glance up told Lance that Keith was, in fact, coming this way. "Are you gonna give him the other necklace after all?"

"I dunno," the brown-furred girl murmured, and Lance noticed that she was cradling two small circlets in her hands. "You really think I should?"

Oh hell no. No no no no, "Sorry to break it to you, ladies," he said in a manner that suggested he was not at all sorry, "but the gentleman is smiling at me."

The two girls looked up at him in surprise as he deftly stepped between them over the last row of bleachers and vaulted the rail to meet Keith for a victory fist-bump. He was so caught up in showing them what was what that he didn't even feel bad-that is, until he glanced back and saw how disappointed the brown-furred girl looked, clutching the matching necklaces to her chest. Chella was gone too, vanished into the crowd, and Lance felt a second stab of guilt at impulsively abandoning his new friend without saying goodbye. Why did Lance even do that just now? What was the point? It's not like Keith would have even been interested in that girl. Keith wasn't interested in anybody, ever, especially Lance, so who was he to get all jealous and possessive? Jeez, what was wrong with him?

Keith leaned into him subconsciously as the crowd pressed around them to ask Keith for autographs, and Lance's stomach drained into his boots. The rainbow ribbon in Keith's hair tickled Lance's cheek, mocking him with loud and colorful irony. Ah, yes. Of course. That's what was wrong with him.

Before long they were announcing the next tournament, and Keith and Lance decided to make their way out of the coliseum. But when they got to the outer lobby, Lance felt someone tugging at the sleeve of his coat. He turned, and saw with a mix of surprise and embarrassment that it was none other than the brown-furred girl from the front row that he'd so rudely shut down.

Lance was considering just bolting when she smiled warmly, as if she could read his mind and thought it was the cutest thing she'd ever seen. "I have something for you two," she hummed, and produced the two circlets from a pocket on the side of her flowy dress. She pressed one into Lance's hands first, then handed the second to Keith. Lance stared at his uncomprehendingly. It was a metallic circle of blank unadorned silver, lightweight and cold to the touch. He watched with increasing confusion as the girl giggled her way over to Keith and helped him put his around his neck and then pressed a button which caused the new necklace to flare to life. All at once it became a circlet of pure glowing white, and shrunk into place around Keith's neck, becoming a minimalist choker made of light. Lance was so taken aback by how beautiful it was on him that he didn't even notice the girl slipping Lance's on too until he felt the cool metal shrink into place around his own neck with a hushed zhrip.

He poked at it tentatively with one finger as the girl leaned in to whisper in his ear, quietly enough so that no one else could possibly have heard. "I didn't mean to step on your toes," she said. "Good luck."

Lance felt the blood drain out of his face.

Oh god. Oh god, these were some kind of culture-specific love-necklaces weren't they? He felt like he'd seen people wearing lighted necklaces like these elsewhere at the festival, but he wasn't sure…

Yep. Yeah. As they walked out into the milling post-tournament crowd and Lance glanced furtively around, he saw a few couples wearing necklaces like this. A few couples. A few couples holding hands, and some of them with kids, and two of them were freaking quiznacking kissing, oh god, what have I done.

Sneakily he glanced back at Keith, who was toying with the necklace as he walked, pulling it away from his skin and then letting it shrink back again. Clearly he didn't have the slightest clue what these necklaces were. And it's not like Lance could tell him, because then he'd have to hear Keith's total disgust at the idea of sharing such a thing with Lance, and he'd have to pretend to be equally disgusted, and he was simply not equipped to handle any of that. Not yet. Luckily, Keith was terrible at picking up on subtler social cues like this. Maybe he could just pray Keith didn't figure it out and then steal the necklace later while he was sleeping and burn it. Right? Sure, why not. This was fine. He could do this.

"Lance!" Pidge yelled. "Keith!"

Oh god. He couldn't do this.

Pidge was barreling toward them from a ways up the path, and not far behind her was Hunk.

"Hunk, look who's here!"

"I see them," Hunk laughed, and Pidge plowed into Keith so hard that she almost took down Keith and Lance. "Cool necklaces," Hunk noted as soon as he'd caught up, and Lance prayed to whatever faun-deity these Krossi people worshipped that Hunk was just being the cute friend he was and didn't know what these necklaces actually were.

Meanwhile, Pidge was apparently hell bent on murdering Keith. "This is perfect, you guys are just in time!" she was hollering. "We're gonna do lightsaber gladiators next!"

Ah, so she was trying to push him back toward the coliseum. That's what that was. She was just.. bad at it. Or, Keith was strong. Probably that one. "We were actually just leaving," Lance butt in, grabbing Pidge by the collar like the misbehaving puppy she was to pull her off Keith, who looked a tad overstimulated.

Pidge shot Lance a pouty look.

"Actually yeah," Keith backed him up, "we just finished. I beat Lance."

"C'mon, just stay awhile," Pidge whined, ignoring Lance's blushy outburst of rage, "I wanna have a lightsaber battle with Keith! It'll be like fighting a sith! "

"Yes," Lance whined right back, "it was exactly like that, betrayal and all, but we just did lightsaber gladiators! We wanna go spelunking! There's a giant crystal cavern below this whole place, did you know that?"

"You guys can come with us if you want," Keith offered, and Lance tried his best not to visibly pout about it.

"Sorry," Hunk said, raising one hand in solemnity. "I mean, that sounds great and all, but I am not passing up the chance to swing around a real live lightsaber."

"Keith please," Pidge begged, and seized his arm to try her hand at dragging him toward the coliseum instead of pushing. "How many times are we gonna get to stab each other with no consequences? Just this once, probably!"

"No way!" Lance grabbed Keith's coat in retaliation, keeping Pidge from actually pulling him anywhere. "We already made plans, Pidge!"

"Oh my god," Hunk was laughing somewhere behind Lance, and he might have heard the click of a camera.

"Dude, you guys have been hanging out all day!" Pidge staunchly refused to let go; if anything she doubled down her efforts to pull on Keith, who was now pleading with Hunk for assistance and getting only laughter. "Share him, you hog."

"Sorry, not happening." In one smooth motion he broke Pidge's grip and picked Keith up, throwing him over one shoulder.

"HEY!" Keith hollered, but his feet were already off the ground by the time he reacted, and by then it was too late to do anything about it besides flail and fling expletives while Lance smugly walked away from their friends with his prize-which was way better than some stupid tournament medal if you asked him, so who was the real winner here? That's right. Lance.

"Cheater!" Pidge shouted after him, but it didn't sound like she was giving chase. She may have been, but Lance didn't check. Cool guys never checked if people were giving chase.

"Have fun spelunking!" Hunk shouted from even farther away.

"We will!" Lance shouted back, and Keith gave up his flailing.

"I hate you," he said flatly.

"Hate you too, buddy," Lance hummed back, but with the cadence one would normally use with 'I love you' instead.

Keith went quiet for a short second, and then set off squirming again. "Okay, jeez, you can put me down now, I think you made your point."

"Nope, I already committed to it," Lance reasoned. "Gotta follow through."

But it was at that point that Lance saw Chella waving from farther on in the grassy lot where the crowd was dispersing to their various vehicles and the tram station, and he became intensely aware of himself all at once. He walked a few more feet down the lane until he realized he didn't know where Keith had re-parked the speeder after his mysterious field trip anyway (note to self: ask him about that), and he decided now was as good a time as ever to give up. Playing up the drama, he sunk to his knees on the grass, spilling Keith onto his side before throwing himself backward onto the grass beside him.

"Ugh, you are so freaking heavy," he complained, which was hella true, but mostly just an excuse so he could lay here for a minute and scream internally over what the hell had possessed him just now.

"Oh, whatever," Keith snapped, sitting upright to adjust his coat and retighten his ponytail, "no one asked you to throw me over your shoulder like a rag doll. Besides, that was nothing. You only walked like fifty feet! I carried your heavy ass all the way from the engine room to the med bay once!"

Lance choked on his own spit. "What? No you didn't. When the hell was that?"

From above, Keith gave him a squinty-eyed, calculating look. But the expression slowly softened as Lance's confusion grew even more pronounced, until it was far more sad than suspicious. "You really don't remember it, do you? I thought… I guess I always thought you were messing with me. Or just being a jerk. Or.. I don't know."

It hit Lance then, what Keith was referring to. "Oh. You're talking about Arus, right? With the bomb, and Sendak, and all that." He took a moment to really register how hurt Keith looked right now, and cleared his throat as he sat up, determined to finally take their supposed 'bonding moment' seriously instead of sprinting from it in the other direction. "I wasn't messing with you, Keith. I really don't remember much of anything from that day." Keith looked up in surprise. "At least, not after the bomb went off. I do have a few brief flashes of memory―colors and noises and voices and stuff. And a, uh, a weird dream from while I was sleeping. But nothing coherent until I came out of that pod days later."

The sadness tugging at Keith's mouth evaporated as Lance spoke, until a strange new expression emerged in its place. Something oddly akin to hope. Like Lance pretending not to remember was some great offense, but Lance really not remembering was… was what, exactly?

"Yeah, I know," Keith sighed, and the expression intensified. "You were just so… You did something," he finally huffed, "that made me think things were gonna change after that. Between us." Then Keith blinked at him levelly, his face evening out again into the standard mask once more. "But they didn't." With that Keith rolled to his feet and set off down the parking lane, dodging around a pair of Krossi on a departing speeder, leaving Lance on the grass with his jaw hanging open.

Wait a minute, what the hell did I do?

It was a good twenty seconds before Lance was able to close his jaw and run after Keith. Keith had gone silent and stoic now, and Lance wasn't sure what to do with it. They'd fallen into such a comfortable familiarity today that this distance felt wrong, like Lance had unwittingly taken them two steps backward. So he broke the tension the only way he knew how. With a joke.

"Sooo," he said, shoving his hands into his coat pockets and turning around to walk backwards so he could quirk one eyebrow at Keith. "Didja carry me, like, fireman style, or bridal style?" Keith stared on ahead, not acknowledging him. "Piggy back style?" Lance ventured. "Koala style?" He wriggled his eyebrows suggestively and Keith's mouth twitched into a grin against his will. Success! Lance was so busy gloating that his butt struck their speeder and he almost toppled backwards over it.

Keith rolled his eyes and hopped on. "Bridal style," he said, and revved the engine impatiently.

Damn. Maybe it was for the best that Lance slept through it.

Although…

Although, he did have that dream, and it went a little something like that. Except much, much better.

With a warm face Lance climbed on behind Keith as per their arrangement over the last several hours, but this time Keith didn't take off at light speed the second Lance locked his arms around Keith's chest. It left them sitting there, awkwardly touching, or was it just Lance feeling awkward? Maybe it was because he couldn't get that old dream out of his head, which was super inappropriate all things considered. Keith is your friend and your teammate. Nothing else. You need to fuck off with this before it gets any worse. What would he think if he knew what was going through your head right now? What would he think if he knew what you dreamt about him that day?

It was right as Lance was starting to panic and was about to withdraw his arms that Keith swiveled slightly in his seat, just enough to peer over his shoulder at Lance. "I know we were planning to go spelunking next," he said, "but the sun's gonna be going down in the next hour, and.. I kinda don't wanna miss the sunset. With the dusty atmosphere here, I suspect it'll look a lot like the desert sunsets on Earth."

Lance swallowed. It was hard to hear anything Keith was saying when they were sitting like this, honestly. "Did you have something else in mind?"

"Actually, yeah," Keith said, and looked up to the nearest rim of the volcano, where the skyline stretched around the entire perimeter. The nearest gondola was just close enough to make out the shape of a few people sitting inside, looking out over the rest of Krossin that lay hidden beyond the horizon.

"Well, it would be nice to sit down for awhile," Lance admitted, and tried to think about literally anything else besides the weight of Keith in his arms as they left the coliseum and sped up the mountainside.

. . * . .

Lance gawked at his comm screen, which had just translated the sign inside the tiny station where they'd parked their speeder and would soon be boarding the skyline. "Two and a half vargas long?" That was like, over three hours. "Keith, are you sure you wanna go on this thing?" When he turned to Keith, he saw the briefest flash of disappointment flicker across his face before dulling back into the carefully practiced mask―the one that was becoming more and more transparent to Lance by the minute. "I mean, I'm cool with it," Lance backtracked clumsily, throwing his hands up in surrender. "I'm just surprised you'd volunteer to sit still for more than five minutes, that's all."

Keith frowned, and stepped up to the snack bar counter. "To be honest, I feel kinda bad for kicking your ass right after that hoverboard accident. Spelunking didn't sound a like a good idea." He leaned one elbow on the counter as he shot Lance a calculative look. "You're limping. Did you know that?"

"What? No I'm not," Lance defended, and immediately froze in the middle of the station until Keith looked away again. Since when the hell was Keith so observant?

"Whatever. Just tell me what you want."

"I can buy my own food," Lance sniffed, still mortified over the whole 'limping' thing, and proceeded to start a fight at the cash register when Keith tried to pay for the native snacks and drinks they'd picked out. It was only when the cashier cleared his throat loudly that they stopped trying to shove each other away from the chip reader and looked up.

"Just take it," the cashier smiled. "Consider it my thanks for freeing us from tyranny. This festival wouldn't even be happening right now if not for your presence here, so… please," he finished, pushing the pile of snacks toward the paladins, "just take it. It's the absolute least I can do to repay you."

"Uhm.. okay," Keith said, releasing his chokehold on Lance and reaching for the food. "Thank you."

Lance grabbed his half of the pile and echoed Keith's thanks, then followed Keith out the back door, where a gaggle of festival-goers were queued up under a ramada. The fat metal cord from which the gondolas hung dipped down under the ramada, and here an attendant would usher a group onto it and quickly shut the gate on the side before the gondola was pulled out of reach by the steadily moving cord. Even with some of the gondolas being already occupied, it was a fast process. In no time at all Lance and Keith were being herded through the open door of their very own gondola. The attendant barely had time to point out that the seat opened up to reveal a cooler to keep their snacks safe before the ground disappeared below them.

As the skyline station receded into the distance, Keith settled onto the other side of the gondola, facing Lance. They both spent a quiet minute inspecting the thing that carried them. In the middle of this technological wonderland of a festival-city, the gondola had a distinctly different feel to it. It sparkled with old-timey fairytale qualities, like something Lance would've expected to find chugging down Main Street at Disneyland. The seats were upholstered with cracked white leather, the floor with red velvet, and the outer sides carved with intricate geometric patterns that looked like they might once have been painted very vivid in color, but were now soft and weathered and cracked and pastel. The gondola itself seemed safe, but was simultaneously a little terrifying. The sides were short and rather open, and the whole thing was only connected to the roof with a few fat columns. When Lance looked to the gondola ahead of them, he immediately regretted it. Upon seeing the teeny tiny hook that kept the thing attached to the line, a short wave of nausea rose up in his throat.

They weren't too far above the ground, though, so the nausea passed when he pointedly turned away from that hook. Give or take, the distance between them and the 'ground' fluctuated between twenty and fifty feet, depending on the natural roll of the volcano rim below them. But, the rim itself sat right smack at the top of the world. Looking to their left side (or, Lance's left and Keith's right, they could see the whole of Noq r'Nai laid out in the valley. While it was dizzying from this height, it was absolutely nothing compared to the view when they looked out the right side of the gondola.

Standing in the Noq r'Nai valley surrounded by 'mountains' it was easy to forget they were actually at the summit of one mind-bogglingly enormous mountain. But looking off the right side gave them their very first view of the outside of Rona, where the rest of Krossin lay in bold desert glory at its base countless miles away, beyond the tapered ends of the towering canyon-riddled foothills. The world outside this mountaintop oasis was painted red with sand and redder mountains, and cities sprawling out for hundreds of miles, easily visible from this unfathomable altitude. They were so high above it all that Lance swore he could see the curvature of the planet. It was breathtaking. And Keith was right; the neutron sun was starting to descend toward the horizon now, and the dust in the air behaved much the same way it had in the Sonoran Desert back on Earth. Already the wispy clouds were beginning to bleed with pink and purple and gold. Already it was setting off a wave of desperate nostalgia for the Garrison days, when Lance used to sneak up to the roof to watch the sky change color.

Everything was so much simpler when the only sky Lance had ever known was Earth's.

"This place is like a sci-fi novel cover," Lance said when he'd deemed the silence officially too long. "I can't believe we're, like… here." Enchanted, he leaned on his elbow on the right side of the gondola, watching a patch of city lights emerge from behind a rocky plateau that jutted from a deep slope on the side of the volcano. The true scope of what he was seeing was almost impossible to decipher. The plateau could have been the size of Pico Turquiño or the size of Mt. Everest, and Lance wouldn't have been surprised either way. "Sometimes it's just so unreal. All this alien stuff. Isn't it?"

"Actually," Keith said, "no. Everything's felt a lot more real for me since coming to space. It's the memories of Earth that feel unreal."

When Lance looked up it was to find Keith leaning on his elbow on the sidewall too, mirroring Lance and staring off into horizon. There it was again; yet another tantalizing glimpse into Keith's past. In that moment it struck Lance afresh how very little he knew of Keith, and how very, very desperate he was to rectify that.

How astonishing it was that he had ever managed to convince himself that he hated Keith while wanting him this badly.

Lance was at a crossroads, here, and he knew it. See, he had always been the kind of guy to pursue the things he wanted―often to a fault. When he wanted to take dance classes when he was nine, he did, even though everyone told him dancing was for girls and called him gay. When he wanted to keep an online correspondence with the Samoan friend he'd made at space camp when he was twelve, he did, even though everyone told him it was pointless because long distance friendships never lasted. When he wanted to go to space when he was fourteen, he got his grades up and made it into the American Galaxy Garrison program, even though everyone told him he wasn't smart enough or strong enough or American enough. When he wanted to make it into the fighter pilot class when he was sixteen, he fucking did, even though everyone told him he'd never be as good as the pilot he was replacing. Even though Lance knew with a sharp searing certainty that, this time, it was true.

And that was the catch, wasn't it? That was the catch.

Sometimes, when Lance began to slip his guard around Keith, he could hear Commander Iverson's voice echoing in the cavernous hangar following Lance's first test flight for replacing the fighter class dropout. For replacing Keith. It didn't matter how far away the Garrison was, or how long ago. Lance still heard those words as loudly as they'd first been bellowed in his face, every time he looked into Keith's eyes. You'll never be as good as him.

He heard it now.

And yet... old habits were hard to break.

"Where did you go?" he wondered, unable to stop himself pursuing the question marks surrounding Keith like bubbles. If he could pop even one then maybe he'd be happy. At the sound of Lance's voice, Keith came out of his reverie with a curious glance. "At the coliseum," Lance clarified, "before your final match. What the heck was so urgent that you almost missed it?"

To his surprise, Keith's cheeks pinkened a bit. "N-nothing," he said. "I mean―nowhere."

"Oookay," Lance needled, "because that's not suspicious at all. Now I'm never going to let it go until you tell me."

"It's not important. I just had to do something, okay?"

"Keith, spill!"

"Look, if I promise to tell you later, will you drop it?"

Lance rapped his fingers on the sidewall impatiently. "Mmm, fine. But I'm holding you to it, Kogane, so don't you dare start to think I've forgotten."

Keith rolled his eyes. "Trust me, I won't. It takes a near death experience to make you forget a grudge."

Lance had no idea whether that was supposed to be a joke or was said in genuine offense, but he couldn't help laughing either way. At any rate, Keith looked pleased about Lance's reaction. The sight of Keith's smile was like a shot of adrenaline to the heart-and the fact that Lance had been the one to put it there? Ambrosia. This was a deadly game, sure, but Lance loved games and he'd faced death before.

"How big do you think that plateau is?" he blurted clumsily before Keith could slip back into his reverie. Anything to keep Keith's attention. "Over there."

Keith followed the direction Lance was pointing and surveyed the distant plateau with vague interest. They'd been riding along for a good ten minutes now and the plateau in question hadn't budged all that much in the distance, which made it hard to tell how far it was or how tall. "No clue," Keith shrugged.

"I'm thinking it's enormous, since Shiro said this volcano is almost as big as Olympus Mons. How far away do you think that city behind it is?"

Keith shrugged. "No clue," he parroted impatiently, but then when Lance pouted at him he sighed and amended his answer. "Well, since Olympus Mons is practically the size of Arizona, I'd say that city could be as far away from us as Phoenix is from Tucson."

"What, really?" Lance said, staring at the city with wonder as it shone brighter and brighter in the dying light of day. He gave a low, approving whistle. "I bet Mt. Everest would look like a little bitch next to this volcano."

Keith rolled his eyes and offered no reply, so they lapsed into silence again.

Frowning―not wanting to irritate Keith by talking his head off―Lance relented to Keith's need for silence for awhile. Fine. Let him have his emo introspection or whatever. He took out his comm instead and snapped pictures of the world below them until the last fleck of light had disappeared beyond the horizon and cast them into a deep, indigo night. Even then he kept going.

It was nearly a full varga before Keith broke the silence, and when it happened it was so surprising that Lance almost dropped his comm over the edge.

"Did you know," Keith said, "that Mt. Everest isn't actually the tallest mountain on Earth?"

Fumbling his comm and pulling it protectively to his chest, Lance turned to Keith with one eyebrow raised. Was this guy seriously continuing a conversation they'd been having one full varga ago as if they never dropped it?

Also, what?

"What?" he said aloud, barely resisting the urge to dig his finger in his ear sarcastically.

"It's only counted as the tallest because its summit is the highest elevation on Earth," Keith explained. "But the base starts out at something like fifteen thousand feet already."

"...Wait. Isn't that, like, cheating or something?"

Something sparkled in Keith's eyes. "Yeah. At least, I think so. The actual tallest mountain, base to peak, is Denali."

"Hmm. That's somewhere in Alaska, right?"

"Yeah."

Lance scooted forward to the edge of his seat, trying to decipher the odd mix of emotions that had come over Keith's face during the last minute. "You ever been there?"

There was a pause as Keith's eyes slid to the right and he angled himself away from Lance, crossing his arms. "No. My dad was gonna take me one day, but he…" Keith closed his eyes. "He never got around to it."

Something sputtered and went cold in Lance's chest. The question marks flared to life again, like a rock had dropped into a pond and wakened thousands of tadpoles, circling Keith, teasing Lance and mocking him like look how much you still don't know about his life. What a great friend you are. As the questions veered off the rails Keith opened his mouth as if to say something, closed it, opened it again, then closed it for good and turned away, folding in on himself a bit more.

Lance was busy folding too, but in the opposite direction. His mind was stumbling backwards to the way Keith had stood on the parade float this morning, with no clue he was supposed to be waving, and how readily he had tried it out when confronted with the option. It was amazing that Lance had never made the connection before-how Keith had never been uncertain of anything except people.

Halfway through their first year at the Garrison, Lance had tried to congratulate Keith when he touched down on the runway from his fortieth hour of flight-time―or, the official FAA minimum to receive a pilot's license, which they would all be completing sometime that day. Lance had been watching Keith with bated breath for months at that point, a little enviously and a little doggedly, but mostly with an inexplicable desire to be friends and an equal fear of rejection. He'd never felt like that about anyone before―at least, not any guy. The decision to finally reach out and talk to him was huge for Lance. So when Keith looked at Lance's outstretched hand blankly as he walked straight past him toward Shiro, it was the worst kind of rejection Lance had ever experienced. It still was, looking back.

But now, Lance was starting to suspect that all the time Lance spent angry that Keith never gave him a chance, in actuality, Keith just didn't know how.

The fact was that Keith was a good friend and a good person. He always had been, and Lance had wasted too much time over these last few years, with his own stupid inferiority complex getting all mixed up with scary romantic feelings and a sexuality crisis. All that time spent keeping Keith at arm's length could have been spent getting to know him better. Now that he'd finally owned up to himself about how deep this crush went, maybe he could finally start getting over it. Maybe he could finally be the friend Keith deserved. Because really, this sharp-edged hothead loner was nothing at all like that on the inside, and Lance was a fool for ever thinking it. It was all smoke and mirrors. Underneath the exterior was a lonely boy who'd never really learned how to make friends or what to do with them once he had them, but would die without hesitation for the few that he'd found. Lance was one of those few. Lance was one of those few. How incredible was that? And how horrible that he had squandered such a thing?

As if on cue, as if to accompany the thunder in Lance's brain with a flash of irrefutable lightning, Keith opened his eyes and looked at Lance. Nothing was clear, there. Keith had never been easy to read. But it was clear that Keith wanted to say something right now. He bit his lip, hard, eyes roaming Lance's face in search of something. For what, Lance didn't know, but he looked almost fearful. And Keith wasn't fearful of anything.

Except people, of course.

Except Lance.

As he drank in what was so obviously fear now that he'd recognized it (it'd always been fear, he'd just been too caught up trying to paint Keith as an aloof jerk for his own sanity to see it), something horrid and ugly awoke in Lance's gut. It tasted like regret, and burned like shame. It screamed wasted time. Once it had emerged, the feeling swiftly raged out of control, burning him down from the inside out.

"Okay, I'll say it," he blurted, so loudly it actually startled Keith and made him jump. "I'll say it! Today was fucking awesome. I've had so much fun hanging out with you―maybe the most fun I've ever had―and it seems like you did too. Right? We make a good team, Keith, and I don't mean Voltron stuff. I mean people stuff. Friend stuff. Messing around and eating weird food and getting up to shenanigans and―and our whole rivalry thing seems just idiotic in retrospect, with all we've been through together. I don't want to be your stupid rival anymore!"

"Wh-what?" Keith stammered, shrinking back into his seat and growing redder by the second. The evening must have reached max-capacity darkness, because a string of yellow fairy lights sparked to life on the roof of the gondola above them at that moment. Neither of them really noticed. "What are you saying, Lance?"

Lance was sure he was much redder than Keith, but he was a man unleashed, and he wouldn't be swayed from his newfound goal even for the end of the world. "Let's be best friends!"

If Lance wasn't mistaken, Keith's face fell a fraction of an inch. "O-oh. Oh." But then he relaxed a bit, despite the fact that his confusion hadn't dissipated. "I thought Hunk was your best friend? Or, wait. Is it Pidge?"

"...Dude," Lance deadpanned. Keith was so fucking adorable, it wasn't even fair. "You can have more than one best friend."

"Oh," Keith repeated again, even raspier than before. "Really?" His face had reached a shade of red hitherto unwitnessed by Lance on another human being, and he was pointedly looking anywhere else in the universe besides at Lance. "For the record, I never wanted to be your rival in the first place."

Lance frowned. "I know," he said, and he didn't mean for it to come out bitter, but old habits really do die hard. "You never wanted to be my anything."

With the sharp shadows cast by the fairy lights above, it was a pronounced change when Keith furrowed his eyebrows in concentration. "Are you talking about the Garrison, or.."

Shit, he was going to talk himself into a tight corner if he wasn't more careful with his word choice.

"Yeah," he lied, "of course I'm talking about the Garrison."

To his surprise, Keith grew fidgety at Lance's response, mulling over his own response with a series of rapid-fire wrinkle-nosed micro-expressions until finally coming out with it. "Oh my god, I remember you from the Garrison, okay? I knew who you were when you crashed my rescue mission for Shiro. It just took a second 'cause I'm really bad with faces and names!"

Lance felt his face pull into an ugly mess of shock. "Wait, what? You were just―just messing with me this whole time?"

"No," Keith huffed, "no, I was just too busy being worried sick about Shiro to deal with your theatrics once I did realize who you were. And I'm really bad with faces and names, okay? I need context to remember people. So of course I recognized you as soon as you opened your mouth and started sassing me."

"Why didn't you say anything later, though?! It's been a year since then, Keith! I've given you so much shit over that!"

"I didn't know how! You made such a huge deal out of it that I didn't even know how to approach the subject without you jumping down my throat and by the time we were actually friends it had been way too long to― Stop laughing!"

Tears had sprung in Lance's eyes now. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't have stopped laughing even if he wanted to. They were both so stupid.

By the time Lance caught his breath and wiped at his wet eyes, Keith was leaning forward with both elbows on his knees, staring at him with a mixture of concern, exasperation, and fondness. It perfectly reflected what Lance himself was feeling in that moment, and it cemented in place his certainty that he had done the right thing. Fuck his romantic feelings. Fuck them in half, even. He wouldn't let them get in the way of being the best best-friend Keith had ever had. Not anymore.

"So," Keith hummed slyly when he was sure Lance had finished laugh-crying. "Best friends, huh?"

"Yeah," Lance grinned. "If you want."

"What does it entail, exactly?"

Lance recognized the playful challenge in Keith's tone, and while part of him barked in response to it like Pavlov's proverbial dog, he wanted to make sure Keith knew how serious he was about this. Therefore he straightened up and hit Keith with a level gaze and a solemn voice. "It means every day is like today."

Keith tilted his head so that his face was half obscured beneath his messy bangs. "Okay," he said slowly. "Okay, yeah. I'd like that."

A grin so big it hurt broke over Lance's face then. "Shake on it?" he prompted, but then realized the seats were a little too far apart for that, so he got up and switched to Keith's side of the gondola, re-settling beside him to offer up his hand.

Keith hesitated, eyes flitting from Lance's face to his hand to his face again, but right as Lance was starting to worry Keith would refuse he felt Keith's hand sliding into place in his.

Except he didn't shake it, like a normal human being. Of course he didn't. This was Keith.

Instead of shaking Lance's hand, Keith grabbed his hand the other way. The tight-gripped, sporty, 'bro' way that was sometimes followed by a friendly pat on the back. Except Keith did it slowly and purposefully, staring straight into Lance's eyes all the while, a small, warm smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as his fingers curled around the back of Lance's hand. The déjà vu, when it struck Lance, was so vivid and raw that it stole the breath from his lungs. But he didn't have nearly enough time to dwell on the overwhelming sense that he'd lived this moment once already before Keith relented and pulled his hand away.

.

.

The stars were out in droves, now, despite the light pollution that surrounded them. They shone down in patches between the wispy clouds, painting the billowing arms of the nebula Krossin belonged to across the sky in broken waves of silver. The night was growing colder now too, and Lance and Keith both refastened their jackets as the skyline trekked on in its circumnavigation of Noq r'Nai, shoving their hands deep in their pockets and muttering shared complaints of how chilly it was up here in the open air. That is, until Lance stumbled upon a control panel full of buttons when he went for their stash of snacks inside the seat. Keith groaned appreciatively when a grid of soft orange light flickered to life on the ceiling above them and began to warm their stinging cheeks.

"Thank god," Lance said, echoing Keith's relief. "It's only been one and a half vargas. I don't think I'd have lasted two and a half with the wind picking up like this. I'm from Cuba."

"Same," Keith hummed, holding his hands high above his head toward the orange grid and rotating them like marshmellows over a fire. "I'm a desert boy, through and through."

"And yet you wanted to climb Denali," Lance said before he could stop himself.

Keith brought his hands to his face to breathe on them before eyeing Lance. "The only way to grow is to step outside your comfort zone."

Lance breathed a silent sigh of relief that Keith hadn't been offended by the offhand comment. "Is that another Shiro-ism?" he joked.

Keith leaned over Lance to grab one of the Krossi snacks Lance had fetched from the seat-pocket, focusing harder on opening it than was probably necessary before answering. "No. My dad told me that, actually."

Lance had to mentally tackle the urge to follow that up with four hundred questions. He knew Keith's mom was almost certainly Galran, because Keith had said so when he came out to the team with his heritage after that day at the Blade base. But never once had Keith ever mentioned his father―or any other family for that matter―and now Keith had mentioned him twice in one night. It was unprecedented. It was―

Lance didn't know what it was, exactly, but he did know one thing. They were friends, now. Real friends, with no bullshit left getting in the way.

So he should be happy, right? This was what he wanted. It was what he'd wanted from the first time he'd seen Keith fly and Hunk had to wave his hand in front of Lance's face to get his attention again because he was just that floored. He should be happy, because this was as close to the star that was Keith as he was ever going to get without burning up.

And yet he wasn't happy.

He still wanted to burn, and he hated himself for it.

By the halfway mark Keith was starting to nod off against the sidewall. He'd been leaning on his hand as he watched a small city go by at the foot of the volcano, but the next time Lance looked his head had slipped out of his hand and come to rest on his forearm. At that moment a strong gust of wind rocked the gondola, and Keith slid down a few inches toward the side. Panic had Lance lunging for Keith to seize his arm and keep him slipping any farther. The gondola hadn't rocked nearly enough to cause Keith to actually fall out, but still, Lance couldn't control the automatic reaction.

Keith startled awake, looking around for a moment like he had no idea where he was. Then his eyes fell on Lance accusatively.

"You're freaking me out!" Lance defended. "You can't sleep against the edge like that. We're not wearing seatbelts or anything. You're gonna fall out, you moron."

Keith rolled his eyes. "I'm not gonna fall. I'm tired, Lance, you made me ride like eighty rides in a row after that doctor shot you up with steroids or whatever. Let me have this."

"Fine," Lance relented, "but you're not sleeping against the edge. You have to come over here so I can make sure you don't fall out when the wind picks up." He patted his shoulder invitingly, and Keith blanched. When Keith still said nothing Lance beckoned him again. Then a third time, insistently.

"...Really?" Keith finally said.

Lance refused to look at him. "Really. Come on," he said, as casually as he could possibly manage, "don't make it weird, it's something best friends do. Hunk and Pidge and I sleep on each other all the time."

Keith hummed in acceptance at the truth of that, and Lance knew he'd won. Still, he wasn't at all prepared for Keith sliding across the seat and settling tentatively into his side. It's not like it was the first time they'd touched, or anything, and it wasn't even the first time they'd touched since Lance made peace with how stupidly in love he was. But this was different. It wasn't the same as helping each other up or fist bumping or sharing a speeder or fighting over who was going to pay, or even shaking hands. This was intimate.

Lance spoke up after a few minutes, when Keith's breathing still hadn't evened back out. He knew he was still awake. "Hey, can I ask you something?"

Keith mumbled. "I told you to drop it. I'll tell you later."

"Wh― oh, no," Lance laughed, "not about your secret mission at the coliseum. I was gonna ask…" Keith shifted in place as Lance's tone changed to something more serious, stiffening, almost like he wanted to move so they weren't touching anymore. But he didn't. "What happened to your dad?" A few ticks of silence had Lance second-guessing the wisdom of asking such a thing, but he couldn't take it back now. It was already out there. "I've known you for years now," he sighed. "I really feel like I should know this already."

"Don't sound so guilty about it," Keith replied at length. "I wouldn't have answered you even if you'd asked."

"Oh."

"He overdosed," Keith dropped casually, completely contradicting his previous statement and catching Lance so off guard his jaw dropped.

"...Oh."

The way Keith had spoken of him, Lance had been expecting something totally different. Cancer? Car accident? Tragic space explosion? Whatever he'd expected, it wasn't this.

"It's fine," Keith defended belatedly, stiffening against Lance's side again, "I mean, I'm fine, it's been six years, so… he was just… I loved him, but he was an idiot," he sighed. "Sorry, that was too much, wasn't it?"

"What? No. No, I'm the one who asked. This is all part of the best friend package, Keith, don't apologize for honesty. God." Lance was no longer watching the distant cities of Krossin or the flashing festival rides inside the volcano or the silver stars twinkling. It was impossible to focus on anything besides Keith's left hand, which was resting just so on top of his leg. So close to Lance's. Inches away. It would be so easy to just grab it, wouldn't it? To entwine their fingers, to brush his thumb over Keith's knuckles, to rest his head on top of Keith's and bury his nose into his hair and tell him that it could never be too much.

Wait, six years?

"Hang on, so was that why you joined up with the Garrison?"

"Yeah." Keith's hand twitched, opening a little more. For the life of him Lance could not stop staring. "And what about you? Why'd you join?"

"Actually, I joined because of my dad too," Lance said, still staring at Keith's hand. "He is―was, by now―involved with that coral reef restoration program. His whole career was built around it, y'know? So when the UN voted to shut it down in 2046―"

"Oh. Oh shit."

"Yeah. My mom has an okay job but it was never enough to feed a whole family. So I thought if maybe I got a decent job in a growing industry―"

"I thought you wanted to be a pilot!"

"Not for the US military," Lance scoffed. "Are you kidding? I wanted to be an explorer, Keith. I wanted to be an astronaut."

There was a long moment of silence. Then: "Me too. At least we both got one of our wishes, huh?"

Keith's knuckles brushed Lance's―just for a second―and for the span of a single breath Lance had almost convinced himself that Keith wanted him to take his hand. But the moment passed when Keith sighed and shifted positions, crossing his arms tightly over his chest.

"Sure," Lance agreed. "I guess that's enough." Because maybe it was tempting fate to still want more when you'd already been given something this good.

. . * . .

"Keith. Hey Keith. Wake up, buddy."

"Nnn. No."

Pfft. As usual, Sleepy Keith was Best Keith. Loathe to wake him but aware of the steadily approaching station, Lance wriggled his shoulder until Keith sat up, who then glared at Lance in offense as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

"Ride's over," Lance announced. "We gotta jump off in a minute." He pointed ahead to the station which was slowly emerging from the darkness, where they would soon be disembarking. By the lights embedded along the path, the shape of their speeder was almost discernible in the small meadow below the station.

"Ugh, what time is it?" Keith groaned.

"Rona time?" That was virtually useless in context with their circadian rhythms considering they'd only touched down on Krossin this morning. "Or CT?" Even then, none of them had ever quite gotten used to the ridiculously long day/night cycles that the castleship ran on, and they'd taken to setting up their own system, despite the pesterences of Coran and Allura for teamwide unity. Instead of responding, Keith only grumbled under his breath as he reluctantly let Lance herd him off the gondola. "Or did you mean Earth time?" Lance continued as they waved goodnight to the same cashier who'd been there three vargas ago and headed out into the crisp night air again. "Because if our circadian rhythms haven't been disrupted too much―which I'm pretty sure they have, but for the sake of argument let's ignore that―I'd say in Arizona (that's Mountain Standard Time, right?) it's probably just past midnight. Judging by how tired I am. In Cuba , though―or, wait, did you mean Texas? You are half asleep. I bet you meant Texas."

Keith drooped over in the middle of the path, dragging both hands down his face. "Oh my god, will you shut up, why are you like this? "

Being the nice guy that he was, Lance obliged. But mostly just because he was pretty sure Keith didn't even remember what question he'd originally asked.

And mayyybe because Lance wanted a turn at driving. He'd waited all day, dammit!

Lance cleared his throat when they arrived at the place where Keith had parked the thing, and tugged Keith away from the driver's seat by the tail of his coat. "I'll drive, yeah?"

For a second it seemed like Keith was going to argue on reflex at the idea of Lance so much as touching the controls on his favorite new toy. But then he rolled his shoulders and stepped out of the way. "Yeah," he agreed easily, to Lance's great surprise. "Why not." With sleepy hesitance he clambered on after Lance had taken the front end. "If you crash my new speeder, though, I'll feed you to Red before we hit the ground. Best friend or not."

Lance opened his mouth to snap back with something sassy, but felt his mouth go dry when Keith's hands slid around his waist and locked in place.

This whole 'letting go of his romantic feelings in order to become the friend Keith deserved' thing was going to be the hardest thing he'd ever done. Maybe he should just feed himself to Red and have done with it.

.

.

The ride back to the castle was long. The skyline station was at the opposite end of the valley, and Lance had only driven low-riding land speeders a handful of times before, so he flew it slowly and deliberately through the neon streets. The celebrations were still going strong, but where the daytime festival had exuded life and vibrance, now there was a soft, hushed atmosphere as they flew through the city. As Lance went off-road to pass over the central lake, cutting a smooth wake into the reflection of the stars on the black glassy water, Keith laid his head on the space between Lance's shoulder blades.

He didn't remove it until they arrived at the castle doorstep fifteen minutes later.

They hopped off as soon as Lance cut the engine, and Keith shot Lance a furtive, almost contrite look before shoving the speeder off the dirt path toward a thick grove of bushes. Good thinking. Lance gave him a guilty thumbs up. They'd missed the scheduled shuttle ride back to the castle from City Hall almost two vargas ago, so they were probably already in trouble with Shiro and Allura. Only break one law at a time, his mama always said. Although she was usually talking about speeding past the coast guard in no-sailing zones.

Lance found himself waiting by the keypad for Keith to finish hiding the speeder, not quite ready to punch in the code yet, for some reason he couldn't quite place. And then Keith wandered over into the soft blue light from the closed archway, and he placed it―with wistful longing and a pinch of sadness.

What would this moment would be like if they were back on Earth, he wondered? If this was one of their houses instead of an alien spaceship. If instead of ethereal blue light it was the soft yellow glow of a porchlight, dimmed and dampened by years of caked dust, moths fluttering about, floorboards of a patio creaking below their feet. He couldn't help thinking that it was the kind of situation where you wouldn't end the night until you'd kissed.

But they weren't on Earth.

And this wasn't a date.

Yet, as soon as Lance managed to shake it off and reached for the keypad, he found Keith slipping in to lean on it, propping one leg behind him nonchalantly and pushing a stray bit of hair behind his ear even more nonchalantly. Lance almost fell over backwards when he realized how close the move had brought them. In the end he held his ground, but it should have been illegal.

"I'm not sleepy anymore," Keith said. Cryptically. So freaking cryptic, like always. "The ride back woke me up. You just had to take that shortcut over the lake, didn't you?"

Lance spluttered, but refused to step away. This felt like a challenge and he was never one to back down, especially when it came to Keith. "Yes, I did," he huffed, "and it was beautiful. You're welcome."

"So I'm supposed to thank you for soaking my boots through with lakewater?"

"Just lay them out next to your sense of humor overnight. That'll dry them up nicely."

Keith blinked. His face fell and Lance swore he could see the little 'computing' sign twirling in circles at the back of Keith's eyes. Then, all at once, they lit up.

When Keith laughed―like really laughed―it was the most riotous, out of control, un-self-conscious thing Lance had ever seen. Right now he was really laughing, so hard in fact that he had to place a hand on Lance's chest to keep himself from falling over, and jesus Lance was in love. It roused a flutter of stupid decisions that all fought for control of Lance's body at once (grab his hand, grab his face, shout 'I LOVE YOU,' whatever you do don't let the night end) until one of them claimed victory and Lance blurted out: "Have you ever been to the roof of the castle before?"

.

.

A few minutes later they were sneaking through the castle, trying not to be seen since they weren't ready to be lectured quite yet.

They ended up running into Allura anyway, halfway down the main corridor on the fourth floor. The absolute first thing she did was eye their necklaces, which had Lance tugging at his self-consciously and desperately hoping Allura didn't know what they were. Those hopes were obliterated when her eyes slid up to meet Lance's oh-so mischievously. Okay, new hope: please don't say anything about it or you'll have to find a new pilot for Blue, because I'll have spontaneously combusted.

Allura seemed to read some of the existential terror on Lance's face, and though she seemed confused by it, she opted not to mention the necklaces.

Instead she returned her attention to the bag she was carrying. It was a huge bag, not unlike your stereotypical Santa sack. She raised it cheerily aloft and said, "Hello boys. I was starting to worry. But you're just in time to release a traditional lantern with the rest of us. It's part of the festival," she explained further when Keith and Lance shared a blank look. "Each of the three nights, we release lanterns to celebrate the dead and the lost. I'll be releasing one for my people, of course."

Keith and Lance shared another look, at that, this one full of rich unspoken sadness. Really, Allura would have to release four billion lanterns to equal the loss of Altea.

But Allura recovered quickly. "I've procured one for each of you to release as well," she said with a soft smile. "Will you join us? Or…" Here she glanced at Lance again, who was aware that he was practically vibrating in place with the need to keep moving. "Perhaps you have already made plans for the evening?"

Relief washed over him. "Yeah," he admitted. "We, uh.. actually kinda had plans." He knew he had no real excuse to refuse Allura's offer or to skip out on such a clearly important tradition besides wanting to be alone with Keith, so he found he couldn't really meet Allura's eye as he spoke. Miraculously, Keith made no move to accept her offer either.

Allura turned her smile on Keith. "That's fine," she said genuinely. "I'll just give you your lanterns now then, shall I?" With that she pulled two little devices out of the bag and showed the boys how they worked, then slung the bag back over her shoulder, winking at them as she did. "Have fun, boys."

They trekked on, stopping by a supply closet to steal a few blankets and fluffy pillows upon Lance's insistence, although Keith seemed embarrassed about it for some unfathomable reason. "No one will even know they're gone," Lance insisted, and took the lead again as they plowed ahead toward the north tower airlock two floors above.

Here, Keith took the lead back from him. He shoved his share of the blankets and pillows into Lance's arms so he could key in the code to unlock the hatch, then the safety override code as well. When the doors swished open, a wave of liquid ice went trickling down every inch of Lance's skin, raising goosebumps as it went and culminating in a harsh shiver that was impossible to hide since the entire pile of bedding in his arms shivered with him.

Keith paused in the middle of the airlock, looking back at Lance. "What's wrong?"

Shit. This was so embarrassing.

"Nothing." Lance managed to say it casually, somehow, but the unimpressed tilt to Keith's stance dragged the rest of it out anyway. "It just freaks me out to be in here without my flightsuit on. Even if we're not in space." Looking to assuage his own fears, he looked over Keith's shoulder hoping to see foliage and mountainside through the glass on the other side. But they were too high in the tower, and all Lance could see was stars. He shivered again. "Ever since… you know."

"Hmm," Keith said. "You wanna turn back?"

Lance's attention snapped from the outer glass back to Keith. There was a time―maybe years ago, maybe as recently as this morning―when he would've assumed Keith was mocking him. But now he didn't think so.

"Nah," he laughed, and crossed the threshold into the airlock without any further hesitance. "I think I'll be okay."

After all, who had saved him from dying in the vacuum of space that day? He wondered, as Keith punched the code to close the interior hatch and open the exterior one, if Keith was remembering that too.

.

.

"That's Cantl Minor," Keith said, pointing to a bright red star in the east, hung in a particularly webbed region of the sky-wide nebula.

"Where we had to rescue Pidge and Shiro from that arms dealer? You sure? I don't remember it being so red."

They were laying side by side on their backs, Lance with his hands interlocked behind his head, Keith with his folded over his chest for warmth. He'd taken his hair tie out and now wore it as a bracelet while he fidgeted with the ribbon, twirling it back and forth between his fingers.

"Yeah, I'm sure of it," Keith said, "it just looks redder because of the dust in the air here. See the sharp cluster of stars below it? That's the rest of the Cantl system. "

Lance went on tapping his right foot rhythmically where it was crossed over his other ankle. "Hmm, I think you're right," he admitted. They'd been going back and forth for almost an hour trying to see who could name the most stars in this unfamiliar night sky. "The system looks so different from this end of the galaxy, I didn't even recognize it. Oh, oh, I've got one! That's Antegara over there, like six thumbs above the ridge where we went base jumping."

In the corner of his eye, Lance saw Keith hold his thumb out above him to measure the distance. Below the ridge, the cliffside projection had gone dark for the first time all day, and the whole city was a shade darker without it. "Have we been there?"

"No," Lance said. "They tell a lot of stories about it on Olkarion, though. They say it's one of the oldest galaxies in the universe."

There was a lull in the conversation that followed, but Lance had begun to grow a lot more comfortable with the silences. They didn't make him quite as nervous as they had at the beginning of the day, and he didn't feel quite so desperate to fill them. As it turned out, the more he relented to the natural silences, the more Keith talked. It was something he wished he'd figured out a long time ago.

Sure enough, Keith was the next to speak a few minutes later.

"This is great," he sighed. "Hanging out on the rooftop, I mean… I kinda wish we'd done this before."

The sentiment caught Lance was so completely off guard that he had no chance to filter his reply before it slipped out. "This isn't the first time we've done this," he blurted like an idiot.

As soon as the words were out there, Lance immediately regretted it. If it was possible and it would make Keith forget, he would have snatched them out of the air and physically ingested them.

But Keith had heard. Lance knew there was no going back when he pushed himself up onto his elbows so he could squint down at Lance from above. "What do you mean?"

Why couldn't Lance just control his stupid mouth? He knew it'd get him in trouble someday, and here he was. "Well, uh…" he squeaked, and had to clear his throat before going on. Get a grip. It's no big deal, just tell him. "Back at the Garrison I used to sneak up to the roof at night all the time," he explained. "To clear my head and stuff. And when we got the news about the Kerberos mission it really messed with my head. Shiro was my hero, and my first flight instructor too. I know I couldn't have felt as bad as you did but I was devastated when they made the annnouncement―and not just that, but then they blamed the mission failure on him too? Messed up. So I needed some fresh air. Some time with the stars, unrelated to the military. But, uh…" He had to swallow again. Keith was looking at Lance very oddly now, his eyebrows furrowed into deep canyons on his face. "When I snuck up there, that time, you were kind of already there."

The memory of the shock that had swept through him when he slipped onto the roof and saw Keith curled up at the very edge of the four story building, arms around his knees, was as vivid and raw as the day it happened. Keith's sobs had echoed in the black-red wasteland around them like those of a ghost. Despite feeling like he was probably the last person on Earth Keith wanted to see, Lance had been helpless to do anything but cross the rooftop and sit down on the edge beside him, first clearing his throat to announce his presence so Keith wouldn't be startled. When Keith made no move to acknowledge his appearance, either to welcome him or bark him away, he'd tentatively settled a hand on Keith's back. Even back then―before they really knew each other―in that moment, Lance would have done anything for him.

But Keith hadn't looked up from his knees even once the entire time they were out there. Not even when Lance stood three hours later just as silently as he'd sat down, reaching into his pocket and leaving Keith with everything he had on him at the moment: a ticket to a sci-fi rerun in the nearest town which he'd been planning to sneak out to that Friday, an unopened pack of M&M's, and a small Lion's Paw seashell he'd brought with him from home. He felt stupid for doing that (then, forever after, and especially now) but it was the only thing he could think to do at the time.

On this rooftop so many unfathomable light-years away from that other one, Keith's eyes glistened. He didn't look like he thought it was stupid at all. He whispered―with awe, with childlike wonder― "That was you? "

Lance sat up too, then. He felt like he had to. Like an earthquake was on its way and he had to brace himself for it. "Uh… yeah, man."

As soon as Lance spoke, Keith's demeanor changed. The shocked amazement dripped off his face all at once to be replaced by something intense. He set his jaw, shoulders straightening, eyebrows dipping with the smoking hot determination that usually preceded either (A) one of the craziest aerial maneuvers Lance had ever seen, or (B) a display of creative swordsmanship that had Lance pushing his jaw back up manually and thanking the powers that be that he wasn't on the wrong end of that Look.

Except this time he was, and he was terrified.

"Why are you looking at me like you're about to do something reckless and insane?" Lance squeaked.

The Look intensified, and Keith edged forward across the blanket until he was all the way inside Lance's personal bubble. He was facing Lance still but now they were hip to hip, their folded knees facing opposite directions, and their faces mere inches apart. Lance's breath caught in his throat, and then caught again even harder when something touched his cheek and his brain stopped functioning. Hand?

Keith's hand?

"Because maybe I am," Keith said, fingertips ice cold and calloused and the leather of his gloves cold too against Lance's already cold cheek. Yet somehow Lance felt enough heat to rival a sun sprouting from the points where skin met skin. Holy shit. Holy shit. They were so close that there was no distinction between their individual clouds of condensating breath. Every time Keith breathed Lance could feel it, and when Lance's breath did the same to him Lance saw that too in his eyes. Wide and dark and determined, and for once, as enigmatic as the rest of him.

"W-what," Lance stammered, right as Keith's nose touched the tip of his, "the hap― is the―what is happening right now?" Because what seemed like it was happening was almost certainly not actually happening, because that was completely one hundred percent impossible in every conceivable universe, right? But when Keith pulled sharply away, snatching his hand off Lance's face like it had cut him, Lance felt the roof drop out from below him.

Oh shit.

He drank in the dawning look of horror on Keith's face and decided that maybe what had seemed to be happening had in fact been happening and that Lance was officially the world's biggest idiot.

"Oh my god," Keith breathed, "I'm sorry. I should have asked―I just―I thought you were flirting with me today, fuck, I've been reading this completely wrong, haven't I?" He fled backwards even farther, throwing his face into his hands and sucking in a huge, panicked breath. "Fuck!" That was the fastest Lance had ever heard Keith speak before, and by far the most worked up over anything Lance had ever done. For once, Lance was the one who was lost for words. He opened his mouth to try and say something, anything really, but Keith yelled over him. "I thought you knew what these were!" he shouted, tugging at his glowing necklace and letting it snap back into place.

"Dude, shut up for a sec," Lance reeled, "you just startled me, that's all. I'm just…" Succumbing to the distress, Lance ran one hand through his hair, desperately trying to figure out what he wanted to say. He was floored by this turn of events. He'd just spent the whole day coming to terms with how stupid-in-love he was and dealing with the fact that his feelings would never be returned, only for it all to be flipped on its head. "I'm processing this," he said helplessly.

Keith's panic simmered to a manageable size, but he looked hurt now, and confused. "What is there to process, exactly?"

"Wha―? Everything ," Lance blurted, picking up Keith's leftover panic. "Like, it's just so out of nowhere! I've never seen you show interest in anyone before! Especially not in me! "

Keith didn't react to this like Lance expected. Not at all. His expression slid from something defensive into something downright offended. Aghast. Infuriated, even. He threw his hands out in front of him palm-up, tears pricking at his eyes as he heaved out a protracted, frustrated growl, eye twitching in incredulous disbelief.

Lance gaped as deja vu swept through him for the second time that night. He'd seen Keith make a face like this, once. It was… It was on Arus, he realized with a jolt, the night he'd emerged from the healing pod.

We had a bonding moment. I cradled you in my arms!

"No way," Lance breathed. "No way. Seriously?"

Keith snapped his mouth shut, eyes wetter than ever, and moved to stand.

"Hang on, wait," Lance pleaded, "don't make that face. Keith, stop."

"It's fine," Keith seethed through clenched teeth. "I get it, okay, I get it. No need to rub it in."

"That's not it," Lance argued back, latching tight onto Keith's arm to keep him from rising. "Can you please just hold still for a second? Don't cry, please, oh my god, I didn't― This is just so surprising. I didn't even know you liked guys, okay! I didn't know this was an option! How the hell long has this been a thing?"

Keith glared. "It's not exactly a secret," he fumed. "I thought everyone knew. I thought you knew. I bought this stupid ribbon right in front of you! For the love of- You kissed me, Lance, I thought you knew! All day I thought you were trying to― ughhh, I let you hold me on that stupid skyline―and―and on the way back here when I― Why did you do all this date shit with me if you're not even interested!" With that, Keith wrenched his arm from Lance's grasp and launched the nearest pillow in Lance's general direction before dropping his face into his hands. The pillow bounced off Lance's face. "I am so stupid," Keith groaned into his hands.

Maybe Lance should have been busy refuting the wild and backwards conclusion Keith was reaching, but his mouth had a mind of his own and it was stuck on one itsy bitsy part of what Keith just said.

"I kissed you?" he echoed numbly.

The way Keith had dropped such an enormous thing so casually, so nonchalantly, like it was just a fact of life or a piece of their history and always had been, was making Lance doubt his entire existence. No, there's no way that happened. He wracked his brain. He would remember that, right? Or… or would he? That old hazy dream clamored in the back of his brain like a dog on a chain, desperate to be released. "When?" he asked quietly, even though he gravely suspected that he already knew the answer.

Keith groaned, and looked up, pouting over his response for a long moment before giving it up. "It was on―"

"―Arus," Lance finished for him. "Arus, right?" And the hurt confusion on Keith's face confirmed it. "Wow, okay. I definitely thought that was a dream."

Keith glared, his jaw set. "Well, surprise. It wasn't."

"I remember it, then," Lance admitted quietly. "Kind of."

It was split into fractured, pain-riddled pieces in his memory, saturated in too-bright colors and too-loud sounds, but it was there. Long blurred hallways that bled at the edges, and all throughout them a pair of strong, steady arms. A cold table and a sharp poke in his bicep. The icy fear of death. The icier fear of leaving things unsaid. The nuclear desire to make the angel who'd just carried him out of hell the last person he ever kissed, if he was gonna have to go back again for good. He'd long regarded it as the best dream he'd ever had, even though it had started as a nightmare. But it was real .

The wrinkle between Keith's eyes deepened. "As soon as I set you down on the table so Coran could inject you with the cryo serum, you just―just grabbed my face and―" Keith's skin had darkened now to a shade of red Lance hadn't even known was humanly possible. He clenched his fists and swore incomprehensibly before going on. "I knew you were concussed and that's why I never said anything. But it made me think that somewhere, down the line, maybe it could happen. That… that we could happen. But I guess―"

"Um, no, I'm gonna go ahead and stop you right there." This had gone on long enough. "Keith, look at me. I am so into you it's not even funny. I've always been into you, like, literally since the day we met. You just surprised me, man. That's all."

The fight went out of Keith then like a candle by a freshly opened window. His whole demeanor softened; Lance hadn't even realized how tense and walled up he'd gotten until the walls came back down again. Suddenly he seemed as open as he had been when he'd fallen asleep on the skyline. It gave Lance the courage to close the gap between them again.

"You are so far out of my league," he mumbled, feeling like an absolute imbecile for missing every single hint. In his defense, Keith was even worse at dropping them than Lance apparently was at picking them up. "How was I supposed to know I had a chance in hell with you?"

Tentatively, Lance brought his hand up to touch Keith's collar.

Keith's reaction was to dart his eyes to Lance's mouth and back up again. He bit his lip, stubbornly keeping his hands in his lap and refusing to move or say anything. The reckless bravado that had driven him to try and kiss Lance was gone, and what was left behind was a boy just as afraid of rejection as Lance had always been. As Keith had always been. It was so blindingly obvious that Keith liked him, now that Lance was no longer squeezing his eyes shut in fear. It was like all the lights had finally turned on in a dark house he'd been stumbling through for years. Everything made sense, and he couldn't unsee it.

"I've never felt like this about anyone but you," he confessed. Might as well get it all out there, right? It came out in an embarrassing breathless whisper that fluttered Keith's bangs, but Keith didn't seem to mind.

"I, uh―" Keith fumbled his words, trying to split his attention between his own voice box and Lance's hand on his collar and the fact that Lance was scooting even closer, bringing them hip to hip as they were before when Keith first tried to kiss him. "M-me too."

Abandoning patience, Lance inched even further into Keith's space, moving his hand from Keith's collar to his bangs so he could move a piece that the mountain wind had blown across his nose. He hadn't even really finished tucking the bangs out of the way when their foreheads touched. "Can we try that again?" Lance breathed.

Keith didn't give a straight answer. Instead, he blinked slowly, leaving his eyes half-lidded when he opened them again, the way a cat did when it was learning to trust you. Then, he closed them.

And that was good enough. Moving his hand to the back of Keith's neck, Lance leaned down and kissed him.

The kiss was as soft and light and delicate as he could make it, because Keith was still stiff. Still full of hesitance and lingering trepidation, like he thought Lance was going to throw him off at any moment and take it all back. Which was just absurd, because if Lance had it his way he'd keep on kissing Keith for the rest of his life and never do anything else ever again.

Some of that must have communicated. Because after a few long moments of a kiss so light it almost wasn't there, Keith softened and opened up. Figuratively and literally.

Lance hummed in the back of his throat when Keith's warm breath began to mingle with his, and two hands found their way to his coat to pull him closer. They explored each other with steadily increasing bravery. Every movement of Keith's egged Lance on. When Lance slid his tongue along Keith's lower lip, Keith bit his in response, which gave Lance enough courage to finally push his tongue between Keith's teeth―an action which had Keith's nails digging into the side of his neck.

So that's what Keith's tongue tasted like. Noted. Filed away with the rest of the best things to ever happen to him. Right along with―

"Wait," he said, pulling back to speak in shock, and Keith blinked up at him with hazy eyes. "No no no, wait a minute, did you just imply that when I kissed you on Arus it was right in front of Coran? "

The haze cleared. "Um... yes."

"Oh my god," Lance whined, "no, please no. You can't be serious. Tell me it isn't so."

"It isn't so?"

Lance whined even louder. "Okay nevermind, it doesn't help if I know you're lying. I cannot believe Coran has just been waltzing around knowing about my secret crush on you since day one."

If anything, Keith looked as embarrassed about it as Lance. "If it helps," he said, "he's known about mine since then too. I mean, you kinda killed me, Lance. I may have unloaded on him a bit after you went into the pod."

"Unbelievable. Wait, is that why he's always sending us on stupidly long supply missions together?!"

Severe annoyance scrunched up Keith's cute face. "Pretty sure, yeah."

"Oh my god," Lance laughed. Okay, nevermind, this just got super fucking funny. "Wait, wait. Does he do the dad thing to you? Oh my god. This is important, Keith, does he do the dad thing?"

"Dad thing?" Keith echoed blankly.

"You know," Lance said, and put on his best impression of his own father. "How was your day kiddo? Do you have any homework tonight? Did you confess to your true love yet?"

Keith glared. "Then yes. Yes, he does do the dad thing."

Lance threw his head back and cackled.

"I'm glad you think this is so funny," Keith fumed, though he refused to release his hold on Lance's coat so Lance knew he wasn't really angry.

"It's hilarious," Lance managed to say once he'd tamed his laughter. "It makes me feel so much better about all the years I spent thinking this was one-sided."

The anger slipped off Keith's face instantly. It was with a solemn determination that he took Lance's jaw firmly in one hand and fought with himself internally over something Lance couldn't begin to guess, eyebrows furrowed and lips stretched into a taut, serious line. He didn't have to guess though, because Keith made up his mind quickly. Moving his hands to Lance's shoulders to brace himself, Keith climbed onto his lap.

Oh, holy shit.

Lance's hands flew to Keith's hips automatically as he settled there, heavy and warm and his eyes full of certainty. "Guess we have a lot of time to make up for, huh."

"Yeah we do," Lance purred, and they'd almost connected again when an explosion rent through the evening.

The reaction was instant, ingrained into Lance by years of battle. He twisted and dropped, flattening Keith to the rooftop and covering him before the explosion had even finished echoing in the valley below. By the time the sound faded and Lance lifted his head Keith was fumbling for his bayard in the pile of pillows. But when Lance craned his neck to look at the sky, he burst out laughing.

"Oh," he said, and Keith released his bayard, seeing now what Lance was seeing. A little embarrassed at his reaction, Lance rolled off of Keith with one hand over his face. "Wow, we have such a messed up life, you know that? When my mom finds out what my instinctual reaction to fireworks is now she's gonna have a fit."

Up from the valley, thousands of little lights had been released and were slowly crawling their way up into the sky, like a field of fireflies that knew no wordly limitations. As Lance found the smoke and fading sparks from the first one, another of the lanterns exploded with a colorful spray of fire, setting off a chain reaction that took one, two, three more with it. Sparks rained down and a few distant, spread out cheers rained up from below in reply. The wind carried the lanterns east as they rose, toward the cloudless, starry sky.

They watched the procession of lights in rapt silence for awhile. Lance pulled one of Keith's hands out of his lap, blushing like mad but nonetheless insistent about it, even though Keith didn't understand what he was doing at first. After a bit of tugging he got the message though, and relented as Lance threaded their fingers together. The night was growing cold and Lance's fingers were growing numb, but it was totally worth it for the wistful look that came over Keith when he finally realized that Lance was just trying to hold his hand.

"Maybe I don't know your mom," Keith said, turning back to the sky, "but… I think she'd be proud of your instinctual reaction to fireworks."

What? "Nah, she's gonna be pissed that I have soldier instincts. She'll hate it."

Keith looked at him then like he'd lost his mind. "Lance, soldier instincts are 'duck and cover.' That's not what you did. That's never what you do, honestly."

Lance raised an eyebrow. He wasn't following.

"Do you seriously not even realize? You thought there was an explosion and you covered me instead of taking cover. During the battle last week you drew those jets away from Hunk like you had a death wish! You're always doing that, always putting everyone else's lives above your own. I know.. I know that you only got injured on Arus because you shoved Coran out of the way. You'd only known him for a week at that point and you threw yourself in front of a bomb for him."

Lance blinked in surprise. He didn't think anyone knew about that except Coran―which was fine, it wasn't the type of thing he would ever brag about.

"He told me while we were taking you to the medbay," Keith explained. "And I… I hate that about you, you know, that you value everyone else's lives over your own. But.. it's also part of the reason I.. that I'm…" His hand brushed on the glowing necklace self-consciously as he desperately sought the words that Lance himself had only just come to terms with today.

Lance was a little shocked that Keith was trying so hard to say 'I love you' ―and a lot smitten. A smile tugged at his lips. "Yeah?" he said, a little breathlessly.

Relief washed over Keith when he realized that Lance already understood. He smiled back. "Yeah."

Lance was smiling so wide now that it was starting to hurt. "Oh," he remembered, "we should probably light ours too, huh?" Many of the lanterns had risen so high now that they were impossible to distinguish from the stars. Once a minute or so one of them would explode, with just enough variation for it to remain captivating every time. "We have a holiday sorta like this in Cuba," he said as Keith dug the lanterns Allura had gifted them from their pile of stuff, and the lighter. The lanterns were an odd mix of the old and the new: wood and paper and paint on top, and on the bottom a computerized base with a mic for recording messages.

"Dia de los Muertos, right? They celebrate that in the southwest US too."

Lance blinked, accepting the lighter as Keith handed it over. "Yeah, exactly. I usually honor my grandparents, ever since they died, but… Allura said you could light it for the dead and the lost." Lance brought his lantern into his lap, flicking the lighter to life and reaching into the cavity with the little flame, transferring it to the string there. Once it was lit he had to keep a tight hold on it so it didn't float away. Then he pressed the 'record' button as Allura had showed them to leave his message. "This one is for my family," he said reverently. "Mama, Papa, Marco, Jessica, Laura, Gabriela, Benito... Everyone. Though I guess, if you think about it, I'm the one who's lost," he laughed sadly. "I'll see you guys again someday." He released the button and passed off the lighter to Keith.

"For my dad then," he said, looking away as he recorded his own message. "I wish I could have saved you from yourself. And… and for my mom. Wherever you are."

Without any fanfare Keith released his lantern into the air. But Lance snatched it before it got away, and handed his own lantern to Keith in its place.

"What are you doing?"

"Meeting your parents," Lance reasoned, "duh." He pressed 'record' on Keith's and spoke into it the same way he'd done with his own. "Sucks that I'll never get to meet you, Keith's dad-"

"David."

Lance almost faltered, but didn't. "...David, he corrected. "I bet you were a great guy. As for you, mystery mom, we meet a LOT of Galra so I'm thinking it's only a matter of time. Looking forward to it," he said, but finished internally, looking forward to asking what the fuck is wrong with you. "Okay your turn!"

Keith blanched. He held Lance's lantern at arm's length like it was a dog that kept trying to lick him. "Oh come on Lance, don't put me on the spot like this. I don't know what to say."

"Well it's not like you're being graded," Lance laughed. "This is just for us, Keith. If you could send one message to my family, what would it be?"

Keith thought about it, eyed the flame in Lance's lantern, and eventually pressed the button. "He's not lost. None of us are."

As they sent the lanterns on their way, Lance latched back onto Keith's hand. Their two lights grew smaller and smaller, circling each other as they drifted on the wind to an unknowable future. "Do you think the point here is for your lantern to escape the atmosphere," Lance wondered, "or for it to burst on the way up?"

"I think," Keith hummed, "that the point is to release it into the hands of fate."

Lance looked at him sidelong until Keith finally looked down from their lanterns, and as soon as he did Lance dragged him into another kiss. A desperate kiss.

It got out of control fast this time. Keith threw his arms around Lance's neck as Lance's arms snuck around his back. Lance responded a little too enthusiastically to that and so Keith almost fell over backwards, the blankets sliding beneath them, knees knocking together. The only thing stopping him from falling all the way were his arms around Lance's neck. As Lance struggled to keep their balance without letting him go, they looked at each other. Shyly.

Lance tested the waters.

Placed one hand on the ground for leverage, and gently lowered him down with the other.

Keith's eyes went wide, but he still didn't release him. In fact he pulled Lance's neck even closer so that he had to crawl on top of Keith as his back made friends with the rooftop, legs tangling as they found their way together on this brand new terrain. Their boots knocked together as they kissed again and somewhere above them two more lanterns met their ends. Might have been theirs, might not have been theirs. Didn't matter. Lance didn't care. He was sooo busy, leave a message after the beep, get back to you when he didn't have a squirming Keith grabbing his hair and shivering beneath him. The guy really could not hold still, even for a second, which was just so utterly Keith that it made parts of Lance's heart ache that he didn't even know existed until now. Or maybe they didn't exist until now. Maybe Keith had fucking karate chopped them into existence like the flawless fucking space ninja that he was― Fuck, this was it. This was the end. Lance was finally losing his mind over Keith.

Luckily he didn't need his brain to kiss. His mouth had a mind of its own, thank you, and it kept right on going, all the way down the side of Keith's neck, at which point Keith sucked in a breath that sounded something like Lance's name.

Then Lance pulled back, pushing himself up onto his forearm to look down at Keith from above. Keith was breathing heavily when he opened his eyes halfway. "What?"

Lance's stomach churned like the open sea. "Nothing," he lied. "It's just…" I just.. can't believe it took me so long to admit I was in love with you. Before he'd gathered the courage to actually say the words, Keith shivered again. This time it was obvious; a full body shiver that ended in chattering teeth and a poorly-hidden grimace. Only then did it occur to Lance how damn freezing it had gotten up here over the last hour. The wind had died but in its place was a cold that, for a boy from the tropics and a boy from the desert, was biting and relentless. "It's gotten really cold, huh? Maybe we should head inside."

There was no mistaking it; Keith pouted in response to that. "Don't really want to."

Lance sighed. "Yeah, me neither. I have an idea." With that he rolled off to lay beside Keith instead, and Keith voiced his amusement as Lance very ungracefully grabbed the corners of the blanket pile they were laying on and brought them up and over from both sides, ending with a complete human burrito that did wonders to block out the frigid evening. "That better?" Lance asked as he curled closer to Keith inside the makeshift sleeping bag.

In the dark, the only light was that which shone from their matching necklaces. It lit Keith's face up around the edges in the lightest silver crescents, somehow sharp and soft at the same time. Kinda like him.

"Yeah," he agreed, then seemed to fight with himself internally for a moment before his face evened out again. "Hey, Lance?"

Lance curled even closer. "Yeah?"

"You'd better not fucking forget about kissing me again."

Lance had to laugh at the naked threat in Keith's voice, the verbal knife-to-the-throat. It was either that or cower in terror. "Are you kidding? I do not have a death wish."

Keith laughed too, but it quickly petered out. "But seriously though," he said, his fingers tangling with Lance's in the dark. "Are we… Is this..."

"Is this what?" Lance prompted (mayyybe a little teasingly) when the silence stretched on, and Keith huffed in frustration, although whether it was at himself for not being able to find the words or at Lance for making him search for them was a beyond Lance.

"Is this how things are gonna be now?" he finally blurted. "Like, when we wake up. Between us. Is this how we're gonna be?"

Lance grinned like an idiot. "God I hope so."

Keith smiled, and tried to hide it by tucking his face into Lance's shoulder for warmth. But Lance saw. "I don't think I've ever seen you smile so much in one day before," he prodded fondly. "It's a good look on you, Kogane."

"Yeah, well, it's been a good day," Keith mumbled.

"Sure has. 'Night, Keith." His heart fluttered when Keith kissed his neck sleepily.

Damn it had been a good day.

. . * . .

Wake up, Lance! And Lance woke hard. Someone was shaking him. Rough hands pulled him gasping from the white hot oblivion that he had been easing back into, gun clattering from his hands to the ground. Up, up, up. Down through a corridor a thousand miles long. Lance watched Keith's face as blue emergency lights flickered past and decided that if he was going to die today then he'd like to kiss this boy before he went. The medbay table where Keith laid him down was hard and cold, and when he reached for Keith he felt pain radiating out from his back into every fiber of every limb.

But still he reached.

He reached and reached until there were stars all around them. Glow stars on the ceiling as old as Lance was, pulsing far above as Keith relented to the tugging and climbed into bed with him. Legs tangled under NASA print sheets. A radio sang a slow latin song in some other room filled with some other voices, muffled and far but close all the same, the sounds as familiar and beloved as the scents of sea salt and sage, of the lavender fabric softener Lance's parents had sworn by since before he was born, of the juniberry shampoo Keith refused to admit he used. Lance got a face-full of juniberry as Keith nestled close, breath hot between them as he spoke. Wake up, he urged, and Lance squeezed his eyes shut and yanked Keith in the rest of the way, earning a yelp of surprise.

"Don't wanna," he complained in Keith's ear.

"Too bad," Keith grumbled, "it's time, you big baby. Sun's up and I'm hungry and Shiro's gonna murder us for never coming home last night."

Lance's eyes snapped open. "Oh no."

"Yeah, oh no," Keith yawned, sitting up and taking half the blanket burrito with him, leaving Lance shivering as the mountain air filled the void Keith had left behind.

Whimpering, Lance sat up―quickly at first, but then very gingerly. "Owww, my back," he wheezed. It popped twice as he twisted in place.

"I know," Keith grumbled. "Remind me why we slept up here?"

"Because we're extremely bad influences on each other." Keith laughed at that as they helped each other up, and Lance glanced down at the mess they'd made of the rooftop. Blankets, pillows, leftover snacks… "Motion to leave this stuff up here for now?"

When he turned to gauge Keith's reaction he found Keith already halfway to the ladder. "Motion passed," Keith called without turning.

It was only once they'd descended the ladder and re-entered through the airlock that Lance got Keith to slow down a bit. He caught up at the inner hatch before Keith could input the code, sliding in to lean on it with a shit-eating grin, mimicking what Keith had done outside the front hall the night before. Which, looking back, wow, he'd totally wanted Lance to kiss him! The shit-eating grin grew as Lance realized this, and before Keith could complain about it he reached up to brush a more tangled piece of bedhead away from Keith's face, relishing the way his cheeks colored. This was still so surreal.

"You wanna eat here?" Lance wondered. "Or head out into the festival for breakfast?"

Keith blinked. "Oh. Uh… I wouldn't mind going out. The food on this planet is amazing."

"Cool. It's a date then," Lance winked.

.

.

They headed down to the dining hall anyway after stopping by their wing of the castle to shower and change. By now it was mid-morning, so it would be sweet if they conveniently missed everyone and could just send Shiro a "whoops, our bad" text and not have to explain where they were. But when they arrived at the door, they could hear just about everyone's voices inside. There went that. This was gonna be painful if yesterday's texts were anything to go by.

They tried to give each other reassuring smiles, but it just came out as pained grimaces and Lance immediately gave up. This was gonna be very painful and they both knew it. Might as well get it over with, right?

But then before either of them could hit the button and enter the dining hall, the doors hissed open to reveal Hunk standing there.

"Guys!" he shrieked, and almost dropped his comm before wheeling around to face Shiro, Pidge, and Allura, where the two girls sat on either side of him. "Hey, I found them!" Hunk shouted, and the three craned their heads to where Keith and Lance were now waving sheepishly and mumbling their hellos.

Shiro got one good look at them and immediately choked on his breakfast.

"You okay?" Keith wondered, half-concerned and half-amused as Pidge abandoned her laptop to pat Shiro on the back while he struggled to breathe. He was looking at Keith and Lance as though they'd cartwheeled into the room stark naked.

Allura, on the other hand, was wiggling in her seat with both glee and smugness. "I told you," she sang at Shiro.

Lance glanced from person to person, feeling his face heat up. "Told him what?"

Pidge, satisfied that Shiro wasn't going to die, reached for her mug and leered over the brim at Lance and Keith without actually sipping from it yet. "Oh nothing," she hummed. "Only that you guys came home last night wearing soulmate necklaces and then disappeared again to god knows where and never came back…"

Lance and Keith looked to each other in panic, both stuttering. This was marginally worse than expected. In the wake of all that'd happened since then and now, Lance had utterly forgotten about the Allura factor in all this. Abort, abort. Keith touched his own necklace, flushing and then finally blurting out, "Someone gave them to us. We didn't know what they were."

But Keith had always been a terrible liar (save by omission). And Lance didn't like the way everyone was looking at them, or how uncomfortable Keith looked because of it, but he didn't have a better lie to cover this. He didn't really want to even try to think of one, to be honest. Wouldn't it be so much easier to finally just let it all go?

Hunk, meanwhile, was hovering right over the two of them and trying to hold himself together. He had both hands clasped in front of him like it was all he could manage not to fling them around Lance and Keith and pull them in for a crushing group hug. "So are you gonna take them off then? Or…"

Keith opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out and he met Lance's eyes instead, waiting on him to give the final verdict. Come to think of it, he'd always been waiting on Lance, hadn't he?

"Well?" Pidge pressed. "Are you?"

Keith searched Lance's face for an answer, clearly trying not to look too hopeful but failing so hard, and in light of that Lance felt the last of his fear literally sprinting away from him.

"No," Lance said with utmost confidence, and everyone lost it at once.

"I KNEW IT," Pidge bellowed, leaping out of her chair and sending her mug splattering across the table. "I FUCKING QUIZNAKING KNEW IT!"

"Language," Shiro sighed, holding Pidge's laptop above the fresh spill while Allura, bless her, pulled off her shawl and used it to mop up the bulk of the liquid before it could drip onto Shiro's lap. Shiro wouldn't have noticed the impending danger until it was too late; he was busy grinning at Keith like a proud mom.

"I'm so glad you guys finally figured it out," Hunk sniffed happily, giving in to the group hug urge. "I could cry right now. Yep, here come the waterworks."

"I must say," Allura giggled, "your candidness is a relief, boys. I thought we were going to have a civil war on our hands when you finally looked at the Noq R'Nai news boards."

"Why's that," Keith managed, though it was muffled by Hunk's bicep. Lance giggled too as he gently pried Hunk off them. It was such a relief to have this open and out there, especially since pretty much everyone already knew about it apparently. It was intoxicating. Lance suddenly wanted to gush to Hunk about every little thing that had happened yesterday.

Speaking of which, Pidge had pulled up the newsboard on her laptop now. Everyone crowded around it.

"I'll give you one guess how the reporters are spinning your adventures yesterday," Allura giggled.

Lance felt his stomach drop out as Pidge flicked through the pictures. There were a few of Shiro relaxing at the hot springs, some of Allura and Coran on roller coasters, and a bunch of Hunk and Pidge chasing each other with hologear on. But after that, it was all Lance and Keith.

"Oh my god." Keith took one look and then moved behind Lance to lay his forehead on the center of his back, effectively removing the screen from his line of sight. "Is this a news board or a tabloid?"

"Where did you guys get the hoverboard and the speeder?" Hunk wondered, and Allura gasped at the small interview from the Krossi whose cart they'd crashed into.

"Rented them," Lance lied, and leaned over Pidge to scroll past the article about the crash before anyone could mention it. He stopped scrolling when he got to the gondola. The picture was taken from the air (they all were, by those cam-drones he'd been ignoring all day presumably) from maybe a hundred or so feet away, right around sunset when the Krossi sky had burned brightest. Their gondola sat silhouetted in dark shades against the golden twilight, and you could juuust make out Lance and Keith's silhouettes inside, leaning toward each other from the two opposite sides of the gondola. Looking at it, Lance could almost hear the pitch to Keith's voice as he spoke about Denali. "Hey Pidge, d'you think you could you save these?"

There was a mixed up chorus of both awwing and hooting at that from the others, and Pidge agreed but not before ribbing them mercilessly.

"Oookay," Keith snapped, "and that's enough of that. Can we go get breakfast already? Please? "

The ribbing tripled as they tried to extract themselves from it, and they'd barely escaped it back into the corridor when they ran into Coran on his way to the dining hall.

"Oh, boys!" he trilled. "It was a pity we missed you last night for the― Hold on. What's all this, now? I see someone's given you a pair of elsinam necklaces."

For what felt like the fiftieth time today, Lance and Keith's gazes briefly met before they flushed and turned away from each other.

Coran hummed knowingly. "Do you boys know what these necklaces represent?"

"Coran," Keith hissed, and Lance was reminded with a jolt that Coran had known about both their crushes on each other since day one. He couldn't even imagine what that had been like for Keith Anti-Emotions Kogane. Holy shit.

"Yeah, well, no one told us but we sorta figured it out," Lance told their overbearing adopted space uncle, who was now beaming at them with all the pride of blood-related family. "We sorta figured out a lot of things yesterday." Smiling back at Coran, he snaked one arm around Keith's waist and pulled him a little closer. Keith responded by dragging his hand down his face in embarrassment.

Coran's face lit up. "Fantastic!" he crowed. "You know, I think there was never a more fitting pair to wear the elsinam necklaces than you two. Elsinam translates roughly to divine balance , and as I'm sure you've realized by now, the red and blue lions were created as foils for each other. I suppose you boys finally struck your balance yesterday, did you?"

Keith relaxed a bit. "Yeah," he said. "I think we did."

To Lance's surprise, Coran seemed to be tearing up. "Alright, alright," he relented, "I know I'm holding you up. You two have a fun day at the festival, okey dokey? Give 'em hell!"

"Give 'em hell," Lance chuckled a few minutes later when they emerged into the morning sunlight. They basked in the glorious sight of the festival-city for a long moment, and Lance had to laugh again at Coran's words. "Coran and Allura talk about this place like it's an active warzone. I love it."

"Well, we did technically go to battle," Keith shrugged, stepping off the path to pull their speeder from its hiding spot deep behind the bushes, which took some exertion since it wasn't turned on. "And you got - banged up - pretty bad from that crash." Keith heaved one last breath once the speeder was in the middle of the path and then looked up at Lance unimpressedly. For a second Lance thought he was gonna make a jab at Lance for not helping move the speeder. But then, "You're still limping," he accused. "You know that, right?"

Lance glared back. "Am not," he said.

"Are you sure you don't want to―"

Lance interrupted him. "If your next words are 'go into a pod' I am going to physically attack you."

Keith's bark of laughter caught him off guard. Fuck, it was like a physical high, being the one to bring mirth into Keith's eyes and music into his voice. If Lance knew it'd be this easy he'd have moved all his effort from taunting Keith into teasing him, like, ninety-seven years ago. Lance was so caught off-guard by it that Keith's next move nearly knocked him on his ass.

"Fine," Keith said, but when Lance moved in to climb onto the seat, Keith blocked the way with an outstretched arm. It was a surprisingly intimate gesture. Not a 'don't you dare' kind of block, but rather, a 'hold up' kind of block. An unspoken 'stay, for just a moment.' Lance blinked down at Keith's arm, the surrealness of all of this washing over him afresh. The newness. When he looked up into Keith's eyes, he saw a froth of emotion there. Vulnerability and confidence in equal measure. Fighting each other. Confidence won, and Keith slipped an inch closer and spoke quietly. "You remember yesterday, when I disappeared from the coliseum?"

Lance would never admit how hard his heart was hammering. He barely even heard what Keith had said. He was so fucking close Lance could feel his warm breath cutting through the chilly mountain air. How was this fair? They'd made out for like an hour last night, how could he still be so nerve-wracked at something so simple and small?

A smile flickered across Keith's face, almost like he knew what Lance was thinking. He continued anyway, despite Lance's definitive lack of response.

"Well, I promised I'd tell you where I went. Went to buy something, actually. A souvenir. Could you―"

Lance jump-started to life, glancing back down at Keith's arm, which was now moving even farther past Lance, toward the hidden compartment behind the seat where the snacks and hoverboard were stuffed. He watched in confusion as Keith lifted the lid and extracted a little black box from underneath all the leftover snacks. He watched even more confusedly as Keith reached into the box to withdraw its contents, the vulnerability finally winning over the confidence in his eyes. By the time he drew the souvenir out, he was biting his lip and shifting on his feet, almost like he was itching to run.

And then, Lance saw what was in Keith's hands.

He saw.

"I should have looked up," Keith mumbled as Lance reached forward in total disbelief toward the hollow glass pendant.

Impossible! Lance paused before touching it, completely unable to reconcile what his eyes were seeing with what he knew to be real life.

"I should've… I didn't know it was yours," Keith blurted, "obviously. If I'd known I would've given it back a long time ago, Lance."

That was not why Lance was caught speechless. Finally he gave in and accepted the pendant Keith was pushing toward him, eyes locked onto the orange seashell hovering inside it. The sphere flashed green as it switched hands and the shell twirled in place before settling again face up. There were a few more chips on the rounded side than he remembered, and a crack near the base that suggested it'd been glued back on at some point. But the stripes were the same. The color was the same. The shape was the same. The seashell was the same as it was on the last day he'd ever woken up in his bed in Cuba and snuck down to the beach before his family awoke, plucking this little guy from the surf with his pants rolled up to his knees and salt in his nose, tucking it deep in his pocket so he could carry a piece of home away with him to America. The same as the last time he'd ever seen it, when he'd upturned his pockets in a desperate attempt to ease Keith's suffering by the tiniest degree. Lance never thought he'd see it again after that. Yet here it was, on the planet Krossin, eighty-seven million light years from the Garrison rooftop where he'd left it.

He felt like crying. He felt like doing a lot of really embarrassing things, actually, and his voice sounded like it belonged to someone else when he tried to use it. "Why did you keep it?"

Because he was having a hard time believing what he was now holding in his hand. The fact that Keith had kept such a gift from a perceived stranger, the fact that he'd happened to have it on him when they went to space, that it had survived this long in the war unbroken, that it was even here at all. This piece of the ocean, this sliver of home. It was pure, unadulterated magic.

"You were the only person that cared," Keith reasoned. "I… Dammit, Lance, I should have just looked up."

Who knew something as simple as a Terran seashell would ever take away his ability to breathe? It was hard to speak, but he managed it. "And I should have just said something."

Keith retracted his hands when Lance made to hand the pendant back, shaking his head. "It's from Cuba, right?" Keith asked gently. "Must be."

"Keith, you've kept it for so long," Lance said, "I can't take this back."

"I was planning on giving it to you anyway," Keith answered easily, "before you dropped that bomb on me last night on the roof. That's why I disappeared yesterday, to go back to that glassblower. I mean, I've thought about giving it to you pretty much ever since the first time I heard you talk about Cuba. I just.. I was so attached to it."

Lance raised an eyebrow. "So what was so special about yesterday then?" he teased. "You really went that far out of your way to get this thing made for me before you even knew I was the one who gave it to you back then?" Before you knew I was desperately, madly, hopelessly in love with you?

To Lance's pleasure, Keith blushed as though he'd heard that last bit in Lance's tone. "I heard those glass lizards you bought for your family break while we were in the ring," Keith admitted. "It was my fault. Shouldn't have tackled you that hard after your crash. I was just caught up, and- and I thought this was a better souvenir anyway."

Lance's jaw dropped as the words washed over him. Jesus, Keith was way more observant than Lance had ever given him credit for.

"And…"

Lance took a little step forward without thinking, eyes on Keith's mouth. "And what?"

Keith took a deep breath, like he was weighing his words carefully. "Before Shiro left for Kerberos," he said, "he promised to take me on a trip when he got back. We hadn't really decided where yet, but he had his heart set on California. I told him I'd never been to the beach and he took it as a personal affront, I guess."

Lance blanched. "What do you mean you've never― sorry, still listening."

Keith sighed, smiling a little at Lance's outburst. "So that night when I was crying on the roof, when you found me, when you left this for me, it just felt…"

Lance closed the gap a little more, his hand settling tentatively on Keith's hip.

"It felt right ," Keith decided, looking directly up into Lance's eyes as he said it. "It was the exact right thing, like the universe was trying to tell me something. Shiro was really the only family I had left at that point and I had just lost him forever. I'm not.. I wasn't planning on jumping," he said hurriedly, "but the thought was there, you know? How much easier it would be to just not feel like that anymore. To not be so alone anymore."

"Keith…"

"But then you came, and when you left, you left me this. And it felt like a sign. Like maybe I wouldn't get to go to the beach with Shiro, but someday, somewhere, maybe.. maybe there would be someone else to go to the beach with. Like there was still a chance for me to find a family." Keith's voice finally broke at the end, and Lance moved in without even thinking, throwing his arms around Keith with abandon and reeling him in. Keith groaned in his arms, clearly mortified at the display of emotion. "I told myself I wouldn't cry," he complained, more to himself than to Lance. "I'm not sad , Lance, it's fine―"

"Yeah," Lance hummed, understanding exactly what Keith was trying to tell him, "I know. It is fine, isn't it? You are going to love Varadero Beach, Keith. I'll show you exactly where I found this thing. There's a little alcove that you can only get to at low tide, it's always empty because the tourists don't know it's there. I don't even think many locals know about it." He was gushing now and he knew it, but he couldn't stop. Keith had basically just called Lance his family. He was going to cradle that close to his heart for the rest of his life. "Jeez, what am I gonna get you for your birthday?" he laughed, picking Keith clear off his feet with sheer adrenaline. "I'll never be able to top this." Keith smiled like a dork, and tried to hide it by tucking his face into Lance's shoulder. But Lance saw. Lance saw everything, now, and he'd never be able to look past any of it ever again.

"We've got time," Keith laughed, "I'm sure you'll think of something. Now put me down."

"Alright, jeez," Lance laughed, "spoilsport."

The second he dropped Keith back onto his feet, it was like a switch had flipped. Shooting Lance a wry grin, he wheeled around and leapt onto the speeder's seat with all the grace of a cat. God help Lance, it was the hottest thing he'd ever seen. He was screwed, wasn't he? For the rest of his life he was screwed. Keith shot an even bigger smirk over his shoulder like he knew exactly what he was doing. "Get a move on," he teased. "I wanna see that underground cavern sometime this year."

Smirking back, Lance tucked the pendant safely in his pocket before climbing on behind Keith. The speeder roared to life and Lance tucked himself closer, wrapping his arms around Keith from behind. As it revved again and began to move, Lance leaned down a pressed a kiss onto the side of Keith's neck, right below the elsinam necklace, fainter in the daylight but still noticeably glowing. Or, on second thought, maybe it was Keith that was glowing.

Or, you know what? Maybe it was everything. Lance looked up to sky as the wind kicked up around them, whipping their hair, raising his chin toward the neutron star so far away.

Yeah.

There were clouds rolling in the valley today, but... somehow, everything was brighter than yesterday.

---

.

.

HERE COME THE NOTES!

Me Lance during that one scene where Lance is staring at Keith's hand: HE WANTS U TO FUCKING HOLD IT HES JUST AFRAID OF REJECTION YOU IDIOT AAAAAAAAAA

Me Keith during the entire story: lance is right you are so extra and i know that and i love you

About the others! Originally, this fic was actually gonna be more of an ensemble thing, and Keith and Lance getting over their rivalry to become besties would've been one of the 5 plots. We would've also seen Allura and Coran bonding over their shared memories (me dreamworks: allow coran and allura to properly grieve you fucking cowards). I also started this story back before s4 came out, so the Hunk and Pidge subplot was going to be the second one right behind Lance and Keith. The part where Lance is being a little shit to Pidge over text was gonna lead into Pidge having a sort of 'wow he is just like Matt sometimes, fuck my brother is still missing what am I doing at a carnival' kind of meltdown, followed up by some solid Hunk and Pidge bonding where he helps her see she can still allow herself be happy even if her family isn't found yet. Basically this fic was gonna be FRIENDSHIP CENTRAL.

Oh, and between all of these main plotlines, there were going to be small Shiro-interludes where we just see him snoozing the day away in the hot springs. Attendants debate whether or not to wake him.

Someone: "is he dead?" (pokes him with a long stick)

Shiro (not moving even an inch): "this is the best day of my life"

Lmao.

Anyway, so I suppose I'm getting addicted to the whole 'long one-shot' thing. This story has been in the works since my fiance and I rode a skyline at a seaside amusement park last year, so yeah, I'm stoked as fuck to finally post it. Hope you guys enjoyed reading. :) love ya

As always, feel free to hmu on tumblr speakswords