This is full-on klance burger with a hefty helping of klance fries, a klance side salad, and klance for dessert with the house-special klance sauce on top. enjoy ur meal, i made it with sweat blood and tears lol

Please note: Lance's family in this fic is based off the photo from the show. If you'd like a better picture of what these characters look like and which is which, I've labelled them here: .

This is set in the indeterminate future, roughly three years after leaving Earth.

Aprovechar el Sol

As the seven humans that had traveled farther from Earth than any other looked on at their planet, the air between them buzzed like liquid light.

Lance's breath fogged the glass as he muttered under his breath. "I can't believe this," he was saying, more to himself to anyone else, "I reallyㅡI can't… This is happening. It's happening, right?"

"It's happening," Keith supplied bluntly, and turned to the swirling world of white, green, brown, and blue that hung against the glittering black backdrop of the Milky Way.

It was close enough that they couldn't see the whole planet at once from this lower-level viewing deck of the castleship where they were all currently crowded. Coran and Allura were standing respectfully at the back of the deck and exchanging excited whispers, Hunk was jumping up and down in place and shooting answers over his shoulder to Coran and Allura's whispered questions, Pidge was standing in a tightknit bunch with her father and brother by the glass with one hand stretched toward home, Shiro had his prosthetic arm folded over his natural one in deep content thought, and Lance had his entire body pressed to the window with a tear slowly trickling down the glass. The group was collectively beside themselves. Then there was Keith, who was actually standing off to the side, completely unsure how to feel about going home.

"And that's the African continent," Hunk was explaining to the two Alteans now, "which is where human life evolved in the first place, and the one above that isㅡwoah." Hunk paused and faltered as he scrunched his eyes in momentary confusion at Earth, then burst into laughter.

"What?" Allura and Coran asked as one equally confused unit.

"It's just," Hunk giggled, "we're flying at it upside-down. Sorry, okay yeah so the one below Africa is Europe, and then to the left there Europe stretches out into Asiaㅡ"

Pidge, who had just tuned in, began to laugh raucously. "There is no upside-down in space, Hunk."

"On some level," Hunk defended, "I recognize that. But the world map is like, super ingrained in my brain. It's hardwired! Cannot unsee!"

"Yeah, but think about it," Pidge went on with a shrug. "There's actually no reason at all for the world map of Earth to be oriented the way it is. What if chartmakers had drawn it the other way around? Then you'd be hardwired with that."

"Pidge," Hunk deadpanned. "Please have mercy. I still haven't digested the fact that we're actually going home, and you're breaking my very fragile brain-peace with your evil logic."

Matt Holt, not quite yet back to what Pidge often described as 'his usual nerd-messiah self' but getting there, cut into the conversation with a tentative grin. "If that's hurting your brain, don't even get her started on the pointlessness of the rose compass."

"The rose compass is a comfortable lie!" Pidge insisted. "Did you know that the poles switch places every couple thousand years?"

After that the conversation nose-dived into a mess, wherein Coran and Allura vied for answers to some of their more pressing Earth-questions and the rest of them argued over the inherent value of certain Terran schools of thought. As the rest of them moved on from geography into physics and philosophy, Keith edged over to Lance.

"Hey. You okay?" Keith asked dumbly. You'd think after three years Keith would've learned how to talk to the guy, and yet, the loudest paladin by far remained the biggest mystery. Lance sighed onto the glass and, for the first time since the castleship had exited the wormhole into the Solar System that had birthed them, tore his eyes from Earth. They slid to the left and landed on Keith, who felt faint little question marks popping in his brain like bubbles, tickling him with the possibility of answers.

"For once?" Lance said softly. "Yes."

. . * . .

"Come on, come on, shake a leg!" Pidge shouted at Matt and her father, already halfway across the hangar to her lion. "It's almost six in the morning in Denver already and we have to catch mom before she goes to work!"

"We know, KP, but the regular humans need a little more than five seconds to sprint across a mile long spaceship," Matt huffed back as he paused just inside the bay doors, with their tired father coming to a stop beside him, hands on his knees.

Passing them on the right, Hunk's lip trembled and he scrunched his face up in a vain attempt to keep the tears at bay as he gathered as many of them as he could reach into a messy hug. "I'll see you guys in a week, okay?"

Everyone nodded enthusiastically, Coran pretended not to cry, and then the group split apart toward their respective lionsㅡ

ㅡonly to come to a dead halt when Shiro cleared his throat and said, "Keith, you're with me."

For a brief moment, you could have heard an ant breathing in that hangar. Even Pidge stopped, and took a few steps back toward the group, eyes falling on Keith with sudden understanding. Keith met Shiro's eyes on instinct, because the way he gave that order was the same way he gave all other orders. Like this was just another mission. In, out. Keith, you're with me. Except this wasn't a mission. Keith clenched his jaw at the unreadable expression on Shiro's face and looked away, duly ignoring everyone else in the room as he began to stalk toward Red.

"Nope," he said glibly. "Thanks, but no."

Then the room exploded. How Pidge got across the hangar so quickly was beyond him, but suddenly there she was, standing between he and Red with the most earnest expression on her face. "Hey, come home with us," she pleaded, "I know you love the Sonoran desert but Denver's really not all that far from it, we could take a day and go visitㅡ"

"No way, my family is the smallest," Hunk complained, suddenly taking up Keith's entire field of vision as he tried to go around Pidge, "therefore I call dibs on Keith."

Pidge shoved Hunk back with her bony shoulder, earning a 'yowch.' "I called dibs first, you ham."

Keith growled. "No one gets dibs!"

"Keith," Shiro said, and Keith had to consciously fight the urge to shove the leader's hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have phrased it that way. This isn't a mission, this is our home, and you're free to go wherever you want to go this week. I was just… I thought you might... "

"Yeah, so this is great and all, but I already called dibs, like…" Everyone looked at Lance in surprise, whose voice had been wistful and emotional all day and was now back to its usual playful drawl. He counted on his fingers then finished: "...ten months ago."

"Aw," Pidge and Hunk deflated.

Keith's eyebrow twitched. "What the hell are you talking about."

For once, Lance didn't rise to the bait. "Come on, you remember. We were talking out on the balcony on Taulderin after the jailbreak, and Iㅡ"

"Okay, okay, I remember!" Keith hastened to cut him off, earning amused and curious looks from everyone else. The last thing he needed right now was Lance supplying a play-by-play of that emotionally raw conversation to the room.

"Then you'll also remember promising to meet my family," Lance grinned cheekily. Keith burned. As much as he tried not to think about it, the night on the balcony had definitely happened, and the promise to meet Lance's family was definitely the least mortifying part of it. Lance had him cornered and he knew it. "Cool!" Lance brightened. "So, see you all next week, then. Let's go, mullet!"

Keith shot a worried look over his shoulder as Lance hauled him off across the hangar toward Blue, but no one offered him any assistance. In fact, they looked somewhat pleased at his distress. Shiro waved, and the group dissolved.

. . * . .

It was true. In a moment of unbridled vulnerability, Keith had promised to meet Lance's family. But he'd done it without any real conviction. It was more of a 'you're important to me and you almost just fucking died' kind of thing than a 'this is a promise with the potential to actually be fulfilled' kind of thing. So despite the fact that yes, ten months ago he had nodded solemnly in response to Lance's plea, he had been woefully unprepared to actually follow through on it.

"Entering the atmosphere over Venezuela," Lance said, and his voice sounded strained. "God, it's so beautiful."

"What is?" Keith said from behind the pilot's seat, one hand on the back of Lance's chair as he eyed the dash. Boy was he full of dumb questions today. But the way Lance said it, it sure sounded like he was talking about something specific and not just Earth as a whole.

"The Atlantic," Lance answered, then let out a jubilant shout as the turbulation reached a tipping point and the air outside the cockpit ignited in a fireball of gaseous elements. "Activating cloak. Here we go! Blue, baby, take me home!"

The speed of the lion in juxtaposition with the geography of Earth made the planet seem so much tinier than it had been back in the days before Shiro's return. It was less than a minute after they'd entered the atmosphere over Venezuela that Lance was leaping out of his seat to point at the land mass below and proclaim it as Cuba. They slowed over a hair thin peninsula that had Lance choking up, and then passed it by.

"Um," Keith said. "I think we passed Varadero."

"What? We can't land on Varadero," Lance snorted. "Do you want to set every military in the world on red alert? This cloak only shields us from radar; it won't stop locals from seeing us with their naked eyes if we set down in the middle of the city. We'd set off every car alarm on the coast! We'll have to sail over from Cayo Mono."

That was… true. And, honestly? Keith hadn't thought of that. He was used to living in the middle of the desert, where you could walk in one direction and die of old age before you even saw another living soul.

"Wait," he said suddenly as Blue's thrusters brought them down in a precise descent, toward the northern beach on an island about a thousandth the size of Cuba. "Isn't this island uninhabited? Did you even think this through? Where on Earth are we going to get a boat?" Lance snickered at the irony of that particular turn of phrase, then rose out of the pilot's seat to shove past Keith and descend mysteriously into the lower hatch without a word. "Lance." A few metallic snaps echoed out of the open hatch door. "Lance?" The lion lurched, and Keith's eyes flicked toward the window as the lion leaned toward the surf and spat something out.

Keith was still struggling to accept the fact that Blue had just vomited a small sailboat when Lance poked his head up through the hatch with a shit-eating grin.

"Sorry," Lance crowed, "what was that you were saying about boats?"

Down on the beach, Keith tried to focus on the fresh sting of the salty air, and not the fact that Lance was apparently familiar enough with boats to have built this from scrap, and experienced enough with sailing to have confidence enough to sail it despite having been away from the Atlantic for three years. Keith didn't even know what any of these ropes were for. Why were there so many? The boat was only ten feet long, and rough and unassuming by modern standards, but still. It must have taken Lance months to build it. Now that he thought about it, Keith had definitely seen Lance spiriting away random pieces of junk from trade markets, and sneaking them aboard the castleship when he thought no one was looking. He'd always assumed that he was just messing around as usual, or on a mission for Pidge. Never in a million years would Keith have guessed about this.

Lance certainly seemed impatient to sail the rickety thing. The second they hit the sand on Cayo Mono Lance stripped out of his paladin armor, leaving it strewn in pieces behind him along with his shirt and shoes as he splashed straight into wandering surf, nevermind soaking his clothes straight through with saltwater, then launched himself up the side of the boat to get to work raising the sail.

Keith hummed and decided to rid himself of his own armor too, keeping only the bayard, which he tucked in his belt as Lance had done. It was after midday and the summer sun in Cuba was serious business. Aimlessly, he gathered up Lance's armor and deposited it back in Blue's jaws along with his own, then grabbed the two small packs they had packed for the week and slung them over his shoulder.

This one sack with a few changes of clothes and a bit of food was as far as Keith had planned for this homecoming. Lance, he'd been planning this trip since the day they left earth.

"You've really thought this through," Keith said, "haven't you?"

Lance paused with a length of rope looped over his shoulder. "Come'ere and help me, would you? This is a two-person job."

By the time they shoved off, the sun had moved an inch or two across the sky, but by the time they actually arrived at the main shore it had been a solid couple of hours. Keith was privately bored out of his mind as the wind pushed them slowly but surely across the thin slice of Atlantic that separated the little Cayo Mono and the long peninsula that was Varadero. He had no idea how Lance was just sitting there, taking it all in stride, with total control and patience. When this guy had a goal, he really had a goal. But although he was quiet, Lance glowed with life under the summer sun. Every once in awhile he would lean over the boat excitedly to point out a patch of wildlife visible in the hidden reef below: a school of colorful fish, a turtle here or there, some smooth-gliding manta rays, and once, a docile shark.

Even when a large speedboat appeared on the horizon and turned toward them, revealing itself pretty swiftly as some kind of coast guard, Lance remained patient. He got to his feet and messed with the sail until they slowed. As the other boat approached Keith reached for his bayard instinctively, but Lance snatched it and threw it into a hidden compartment along with his own before the boat drew up alongside them.

Two men in uniform leaned over the rail and barked something at them in Spanish. Something about identification, if Keith had understood it right, which meant they were completely boned.

"Shut up and let me talk," Lance hissed under his breath, then launched into a Spanish conversation that Keith couldn't possibly hope to follow with his rudimentary comprehension of the language. Keith could only stand there looking exceedingly out of place while Lance went back and forth with the officers, then pulled two little cards out of his backpack and handed them over.

The officers took a quick look at them, then their demeanor pulled a one-eighty. They smiled brightly and exchanged a bit more dialogue with Lance, who was now laughing and gesturing animatedly at the sail and the sky. The officer on the left leaned out over the waves to pass the cards back to Lance.

"Debemos aprovechar el sol mientras dura," the man grinned. "Mañana vendrá una tormenta."

"Eso es hell-of-a proverbio," Lance replied, and the two officers burst into laughter before revving their engine and speeding away.

Keith caught one of the cards as Lance flicked it at him and returned to the sail. It was an ID. A Cuban ID. With Keith's face on it.

"You've reeally thought about this," Keith realized in amazement.

Lance said nothing.

. . * . .

Varadero was objectively beautiful. Keith trailed behind Lance as they trudged up the beach into the sprawling coastal maze, taking it all in. The sapphire sky, the hot asphalt, the crying skybirds, the constant chatter of humans that passed them by on the sidewalk. Keith couldn't understand most of the passing dialogue, but they were human, and Keith hadn't seen a human beyond the other paladins (and Matt and James) in three long years. He was surprised by the amount of emotion that welled up at the sight of them all. The buildings were full of character, and Keith would have stopped every five feet to inspect them if Lance was not steadily speeding up as they went along. By the time Lance came to a grinding halt thirty minutes later, Keith was almost running to keep up, and had to jerk to a stop to avoid colliding with his back.

Catching his breath, Keith followed Lance's eyes to the top of this shallow hill. Angular houses sat tucked into the sides of it at odd angles, and trees obscured most of the road on its winding way up. Keith watched Lance's eyes follow the curve of the road, all the way to the top, where a brick red house stood out in stark contrast against the green of the trees about a hundred yards away, the windows reflecting molten gold from the sun as it sank toward the horizon.

"Is that it?" Keith asked. Again with the dumb questions, he chided himself. Of course this is it. "Well, what are you waiting for? Let's go up."

But as he pushed past Lance on the sidewalk, he finally saw Lance's broken expression. Gone was the wistful sap from the viewing deck of the castleship, gone was the triumphant goof of the pilot seat, and gone was the patient sailor with his eyes on the shore. He said he was okay this morning, and Keith, ever the socially-inept tool, had taken his word for it. But it was stupidly obvious now.

Lance was terrified.

"Keith, what if they hate me?" he breathed, and promptly launched into a flailing ramble. "What if they don't believe my story? What if they think I'm crazy, or what if the Garrison has us listed as fugitives, or what if ㅡ what if something happened to them while I was gone, and they'reㅡ they'reㅡ What if they don't even live here anymore?"

"Lance," Keith supplied helpfully, and rested a hand on one of Lance's shoulders. This seemed to calm him a little. "First of all, they're going to believe you. You have a trillion pixels of photographic evidence on an alien computer in one pocket, and a physics-defying weapon in the other. Besides, sharpshooter," he added, and Lance blinked in shock at the switch in Keith's voice from teasing to soft. "I'm pretty sure they still live here." Keith pointed up the hill as way of explanation, where just now, a little girl had opened the front door to step out onto the patio. She held her hand over her eyes as she looked down the hill at them, then let out an inhuman shriek that sounded something like 'Lance.'

Keith stumbled as Lance gripped at his shirt. "Gabi? Oh my god, Gabriela, she got so big, Keith."

The dark-haired girl (who would be about nine now, if Keith was remembering correctly) had started sprinting down the drive, but thought better of it and spun around to scream something incomprehensible back into the open doorway, whereupon several other voices joined the fray. "Go on," Keith chuckled, and gently pried Lance off his shirt and gave him a shove in the right direction. "I'll catch up." He was privately grateful that Lance had dragged him along, and privately glad he didn't have to spend the week on Earth alone, but he wasn't obtuse enough not to realize he should let Lance have some alone time with his family before intruding on their reunion.

Lance had other plans, apparently.

"Oh no you won't," he said, and just like they they were sprinting up the road. Or rather, Lance was sprinting and Keith was trying to decide whether to break Lance's grip on his wrist or just let himself be dragged along. In the end he took too long to decide, so he was right there when Gabi crashed into Lance and sent them all crashing onto the wet lawn. The rest was a blur of Spanish, and the only thing Keith caught was a confused "¿Qué es eso?" from Gabi when Lance dug the bayard out of his pocket where it'd been digging into his side.

"Mijo," someone sobbed from the doorway, and Lance rolled out from under Gabi to launch himself toward his mother and father and younger brother (Benito, Keith remembered suddenly, who was probably around eleven now). Keith rose to his feet as the family embraced and conversed in broken tear-stained Spanish. Awkwardly brushing the grass from his shirt and pants, he felt that 'out of place' feeling make a bold resurgence.

But then, like a sunray through a storm, Lance broke into bright, crisp English. "It's true," he blurted, "I'll show you! Oh man, you're gonna love this, Ben. Keith, throw me my bayard?"

The attention of Lance's family fell on Keith then like a spotlight. Waving at them awkwardly, Keith kicked the discarded blue bayard up from the grass with the toe of his boot and caught it before tossing it Lance's way, who immediately transformed it into his gun with a flash of blue light. The chaos that followed was immediate and all-encompassing. The kids clamored for a look at the gun while his mother began asking some much more frantic questions, presumably about the fact that her son was holding an alien weapon like it was a comfortable extension of his arm. His father reached around her waist and pulled her close, unable to say much of anything himself as he watched his son activate and deactivate his bayard a few times for Gabi and Ben until the 'woah' factor had abated somewhat.

"Keith, show them yours!" Lance called out once the shock of the blue bayard had worn off.

"Yeah, show us yours!" Gabi exclaimed in English, the first one to take Lance's very unsubtle hint, and she and Ben went scampering across the lawn toward the intruder.

"Uh," Keith said intelligently. "Yeah, okay." He pulled the red bayard from its holster and held it safely above the kids' heads before activating its full potential.

"Holy shit!" Ben shouted at the freshly materialized sword, and earned a halfhearted scolding from his father before the man turned back to Lance.

"Come inside, mijo," he said, and Keith felt an odd sort of warmth spreading in his stomach at the fact that everyone was suddenly speaking English. There was no reason to do that at all, save for Keith's presence. It was weird, knowing that. He didn't know what to do with the information. "It's clear we have a lot to talk about."

Keith would have waited outside if Gabi hadn't seized his hand and pulled him toward the door after the disappearing McClains. "Can I hold your sword?" Ben whispered on his other side, pointing at the weapon.

Keith immediately retracted it and tucked it away at his belt, but the 'no' got caught on the way out. "Sure," he whispered instead. "Later, I'll show you how."

The sparkle of hero-worship that flooded Ben and Gabi's eyes made his heart melt. This is thin ice you're treading, he thought to himself as Ben ran ahead to blab to Lance that Keith had just promised to teach him sword fighting. Loving Lance was one thing. As hard as it was, Keith knew he could keep it under control, could contain it indefinitely, could keep the cellar door held shut against that tornado for as long as Lance continued to let him. But it was a delicate balancing act, and it had been slowly tipping over the past year, ever since the night on Taulderin that Lance had so tactlessly mentioned this morning. Keith was barely hanging onto that balance, now, and if he let himself fall in love with Lance's family too then he didn't stand a chance in hell.

Notes:

Everyone has that one friend whose family carves a place for you at the table. That's always been my family, for all me and my sibling's friends. Now, admittedly, my family is nowhere near as healthy as Lance's. We're about as broken as they come. But, Lance's mother in this story is 100% based on my own mother. She opened her doors for anyone at everyone at all hours of the day, no matter the cost, taking in many people when they were in need over the years. It was never easy for her, but she did it. I have so much respect for her enormous heart, and owe my knowledge of unconditional love completely to her. Yeah, I know this is just fanfic, but I take all my writing really seriously.

So this story is dedicated to my mother, the neighborhood mom for all the wandering Keiths. The world could use more people like her.