Ski Lifts and Arguments
"And Keith totally just stole the answer to that question! I was right about to say it and he just had to not raise his hand and blurt it out like the asshat he is and still get all the credit," Lance complained to a bored Pidge and semi-interested Hunk as he slammed the car door behind him. "I mean seriously, when I do that, professor Alfor gets all pissy but oh so special Keith –"
"Lance, can you shut up about your boyfriend for one moment? I have a goddamn migraine from you talking about him for fourty-five minutes straight," Pidge groaned and rubbed their forehead. They stepped around Lance to the trunk to grab their skis and hand Lance and Hunk their own, leaving small footsteps in the snow behind them.
"He is not my boyfriend!" Lance squeaked as Pidge gave him a glare for continuing to open his mouth in their presence. Hunk rolled his eyes at their argument and swung his skis over his shoulder.
"Yeah, and Hunk doesn't make the best food like ever," Pidge said flatly, eying the lunch bag that Hunk held in his right hand.
Hunk was in an elite culinary school about two miles east of where Pidge and Lance went to college and brought class projects back to their apartment almost every day.
"We're not even friends, we're rivals!"
"Dude, he's literally at our apartment like every night studying with you or watching some movie while you guys glance at each other while the other's not looking," Hunk piped in.
Lance groaned; he had heard this argument one to many times before.
"Too much unresolved sexual tension," Pidge nodded agreeingly.
"I – what – no, no, no. You guys have it all wrong," Lance argues. "We only study together cause we're rivals. I don't like Keith."
"You, a raging bisexual, don't like the guy who – in your own words here, Lance – has 'hella fine abs' and 'too pretty hair for his own good,'" Pidge winked at him and Lance screamed in annoyance.
"Just because he's pretty doesn't mean I like him!"
"You guys wouldn't text so much if you didn't like him. You guys wouldn't watch movies or go to dinner and the beach and pretty ice skating rinks ("It was just one time!" Lance protested) if you were just rivals," Hunk sighed. "We've been over and over this sooooo many times, Lance."
"Yeah, I'm done, let's go ski," Pidge ran fingers through their hair to get out some of the already resting snow.
They started to walk away while Lance stood against the roof of Hunk's car with a severe dislike for all emotions ever.
"Hey guys, wait up!"
"HELLLLLL YEAH!" Keith shouted as he snowboarded down the advanced run. He spun his board and jumped over a tree stump, smiling when he looked over his shoulder to his older brother Shiro.
Keith grinned when he saw a tree with a branch roughly the width of his wrist hanging directly over his path, then a six foot drop next to it. The clear path to the end of the run was to his right, but he aimed directly for the branch. He went under, gripping two gloves (he ditched his fingerless gloves today for this, thank you very much) around the branch and using his forward momentum to dive upwards off the drop, shifting his hand to the front of his board as he flipped once, twice, three times and landed hard into three feet of untouched snow and a bush.
He came up from the snow laughing, his deep laugh that was almost like a man-giggle. Keith heard Shiro slide to a steady stop off the normal path.
"Keith! Are you okay?!" Shiro shouted as he quickly unlatched himself from his snowboard and ran to Keith's side.
"What do you think?! That was fucking fun!" Keith continues to dissolve into a pile of laughter, staring up through his mask at an angry Shiro.
"That was too far and you know it," Shiro glared at him through his own mask and abandoned him in the snow to walk back to his snowboard and pick it up. Keith unlatched himself still laughing from his own board and got up.
"Oh come on, live a little," he grinned.
Shiro, obviously having slightly gotten over the initial shock of Keith's recklessness, fake sighed, "You know Lance wouldn't want you to get yourself injured."
Keith turned a brilliant shade of scarlet, "Well, um, uh, according to Lance, we're 'bitter enemies.'"
"That's adorable, but he says 'rivals' every other word and that's a big difference," Shiro winked at him. "You guys have been getting a lot closer the past couple months."
If possible, Keith turned redder.
"We should get going," Keith muttered, changing the subject. There was no use in denying his closeness to Lance. He had spent many nights ranting to his poor brother over skype about how Lance looked that day or the lingering touch/glance they had shared while hanging out that day. Lance was his favorite topic of conversation with Shiro other than mothman conspiracy theories, space, and teasing Shiro about his relationship with Allura, in that order.
Shiro laughed deeply, an entire tone lower than his usual voice.
There were two separate lines for the lift back up the mountain. They weren't visible to each other; one went out and around the lodge and the other out by where the easier runs came out. Keith and Shiro stepped into the line nearest the easy runs; Keith propped his board up against his side with his helmet in hand, running gloved fingers through his snow-dusted hair.
"Can we do a mid-level run now, Keith? I'm kinda hit," Shiro asked Keith as he set his own board down.
"I mean – " Keith started when he noticed a certain white-haired beauty and her savvy uncle. "Allura?!"
Allura and Coran turned around and Allura's eyes lit up like fireworks.
"Shiro! Keith! I didn't know you two were going to the slopes today," she smiled and gave Shiro a hug. The duo had been dating ever since they met back in her junior and his sophomore year of college and found out that they both frequented the Altean Ski Slopes.
While Allura and Shiro were doing their usual forty-five second hug, Coran gave Keith a bear hug, crushing Keith's poor bones.
"Come on!" Lance bolted through the snow. "Can we just get to the line already? You guys are sooooo slow."
He was laughing like a maniac, at least four hundred feet ahead of Pidge and Hunk as they angrily ran after him (or rather Pidge was angry and Hunk was just amused).
"It's not – huff – my fault – huff – that you do goddamn track, Lance!" Pidge screamed after him as they chased him holding their skis like a pitchfork. They quickly turned around and urged Hunk to do the same.
"If you weren't on the computer all day mayyyybe you'd be faster, Pidgeot!" Lance shouted back and slid into line, almost crashing into a very alarmed family.
Pidge sped up and prepared to make like a battering ram into Lance's gangly frame, "It's not my fault I'm a computer science major!"
"Actually it is – " he was cut off when Pidge slammed him into the ground like a football quarterback. The alarmed family became even more alarmed as Hunk dogpiled on top of the other two.
"Ouch, ouch, ouch," Lance whined under the crushing weight of the other two, "I get it, now get off me."
"Not until you say you'll never run again," Pidge bargained.
"But I do track!" he protested.
"You heard him, he does track," Hunk agreed.
"Whose side are you on?"
"Okay, fine, I won't," Lance grumbled and said Spanish swearwords under his breath as Pidge and Hunk got off him.
They were in the line closer to the parking lots, and unknown to them they were exactly as many groups back as Allura, Coran, Shiro, and Keith.
Keith was tired of Allura and Shiro's couple-ly bullshit and even Coran's surprisingly lit stories by the time he reached the front of the line where the other line was finally visible. He audibly groaned, headache hurting like hell. That's when his headache got a little bit worse.
At the apex of the other line was freaking Lance McClain of all people, standing there and staring back at him in all his blue-eyed glory. Even covered in layers after layers of snow gear, he was absolutely gorgeous: tanned cheeks pink from the cold, icy blue eyes piercing him and seeing right through him and his stupid crush, and brown hair covered in snow and scruffy like Keith liked it.
"KEITH! I'd recognize your mullet anywhere," Lance all but leapt towards him and Keith gravitated in his direction. "Are you stalking me?"
Behind him, Pidge and Hunk rolled their eyes but fist bumped.
Lance almost looked like he was grinning, pleased to find him here, but Keith knew otherwise.
"Who would ever stalk you?" Keith shot back.
"Plenty of people stalk me," Lance whined. "You would too if you weren't such a stuck-up pretty boy."
Keith suddenly remembered the amount of time he had spent staring at Lance's Instagram and didn't notice the 'pretty boy' comment.
"I don't stalk you!" he squawked.
"I never said that you did…" Lance said, confused.
Shiro whispered to Allura under his breath, "We should just get on the lift with Coran and leave those two to work out their crushes on the lift."
Allura broke into a grin and carried the message to Coran, who immediately texted Pidge and Hunk to get on a lift without Lance. His phone pinged back with an excited message from Pidge.
" – all because you didn't raise your hand!" Lance exclaimed, pointing his right hard right at Keith.
"Oh please, you didn't actually know the answer," Keith laughed.
"We literally studied that the night before! I remember because that's when you wore the red sweatshirt – "
"Who's the stalker now?! You literally remember what I was wearing."
Allura, Shiro, and Coran all snuck right by to the attendant and got on the lift; Shiro and Allura piled their snowboarders on top of each other and to the side.
"That's cause that's the sweatshirt that makes your forearms – " Lance cut himself off blushing.
Pidge and Hunk winked at the overwhelmed attendant as they hopped on the next lift, passing them a twenty dollar bill and whispering to her to force the arguing boys on the next lift.
"That makes my forearms what, Lance?" a bewildered Keith asks.
"Uhh…" Lance looked around, "Look terrible!"
"That doesn't even make sense."
"Well, neither do your answers to the physics homework!" Lance shot back.
"That's because they're right and yours are wrong!" Keith easily slipped back into the argument.
The attendant coughed loudly, "Hey, your friends left, sooooo," she gestured to the waiting lift. "We have a line here."
"Wait, what, where the fuck did they go?" Lance looked around.
"Language!" a random mother shouted at him, covering her kid's ears.
"They got on the lifts while you two were, uhm, chatting," the attendant said flatly. "So get on the goddamn lift."
Grumbling half-hearted protests, Keith and Lance got on the lift.
"I can't believe they just abandoned us like this," Lance groaned and ran a hand through his hair, shuffling out some obnoxious snowflakes. Keith was highkey shell-shocked by how pretty his face was framed by the snowflakes.
"I bet it was Shiro, probably Allura too," Keith sighed. "Shiro likes to mess with me like this."
"Pidge and Hunk too though, they just love sticking me alone with you," Lance smiled and bopped him on the nose. "It's really annoying."
Lance suddenly realized what he just did and mentally smacked himself on the head.
"Then why did you just – "
"We're rivals!" Lance suddenly felt like he was lying.
The smooth lift started to screech and scratch nosily.
"Lance, I just – "
The lift scratched to a halt.
"Attention skiers and snowboarders, the lift has been temporarily halted and will be fixed shortly. Please keep all belongings including yourself inside the lift," the intercom announced in a routine manner.
Lance sighed, defeated, "You've got to be kidding me."
"I don't think they're kidding," Keith responded and ran his fingers through his hair to take it out of its ponytail, his hair falling down on his neck in a waterfall of black.
"Holy shit," Lance said under his breath.
"What?" Keith asked as he put his hair back up, slender pale fingers mesmerizing Lance as they wrapped around the hair tie. Keith suddenly shivered, goosebumps forming on his pasty skin.
"Hey, Keith, you look cold, want to use me as a blanket?" Lance's pickup line and finger guns slipped out without even trying.
Keith's expression went blank. Shit, shit, shit was repeating like a satanic chant in Lance's mind. Then Keith's face broke into a dazzling grin that kind of made Lance feel like he was dying. Just a little bit.
"Only you could warm up my cold heart 'cause you're so hot," Keith smiled back at him and Lance promptly almost fell out of the ski lift.
When Lance came back up from his unfortunate fall, Keith was a lovely shade of crimson, his violet eyes looking at him almost calculating what he was going to say next. Lance had no idea why that was so attractive.
That's when Lance Lanced up the situation.
"Skiing is better than snowboarding!" he blurted and Keith did the annoying eyebrow thing where he, like, raised them and looked intrigued and again, why was Keith so hot?
Keith looked confused out of his mind, but he quickly got over it.
"Oh please, snowboarding is the best form of snow sport. Period."
"Says you," Lance didn't know where he was going with that.
"Yes," Keith looked confused as usual, "says me."
"Anyway! Skiing is hard to master and I am obviously a master!" Lance started.
"Yeah, yeah, but do you have any idea how hard it is to even learn to snowboard?" Keith explained.
"Yeah, I tried it and thought it was hella lame," Lance shot back.
"Snowboarding is not lame!" Keith bellowed and glared intensely at Lance.
Lance suddenly noticed how close to Keith he was. Three inches away, at most. He could see past the usual violet in Keith's eyes to see the streaks of light gray and lavenders that made the boy so damn pretty. Lance felt Keith's frozen-over shiver, letting out a hot puff of air that came to rest against Lance's lips and oh, now Lance was looking at Keith's lips. They looked so soft and so red from the cold that Lance could just lean down and – wait, was Keith leaning in?
Lance shot back like a torpedo away from a confused and hurt Keith, back slamming into the side of lift and rocking it back and forth like an earthquake.
"Shit!" Keith shrieked as the lift came back from its rocking and slammed into an also screaming Lance.
When the lift rocked back the other way, Lance fell on top of him in the small seat and by the time the lift stopped rocking they were a tangle of bones and limbs.
"I fucking hate you," Keith broke into a fit of laughter.
"Hey! I've found that hatred is a very unattractive emotion," Lance started giggling with him as he pried himself off Keith and back into his seat.
"Please, you couldn't find any of my emotions unattractive," Keith said flatly, making eye contact with Lance and keeping a straight face until he broke into wheezing laughter exactly six seconds later.
Lance was understandably flustered; his face a brilliant shade of red as he watched the adorkable Keith giggle his head off.
"I – uhm – challenge you to a race on the expert course! Snowboarding versus skiing!" Lance sprouted to change the subject off pickup lines. He couldn't handle any more of this.
Keith stopped laughing, "What?"
Keith was confused. He had been expecting Lance, in proper Lance fashion, to fire back another pickup line, not change the subject altogether.
"Race! You, me, the beautiful fluffy world of ice out there. Winner makes the other buy them cocoa," Lance said excited, finally getting some red out of his cheeks.
"Um – "
"The lift will begin moving again shortly," the intercom stated.
On cue, it started again and Lance and Keith sighed in relief.
"By the way," Lance remarked smugly with a regained composure, "that challenge wasn't a question, it's a demand."
Keith didn't even think about how quickly Lance recovered and nodded, stunned.
The pair sat in an awkward silence until they were near the top of the mountain. Lance and Keith kept looking over at each other and making eye contact, then immediately breaking it again.
Out of the blue, Lance said, "Mullet."
"What, Lance? Also stop fucking calling me that," Keith complained.
"I'm going to rock your ass so hard on this course that you'll never be able to think of me again without thinking of how I absolutely crushed you," Lance started talking and just didn't stop, obviously having been going somewhere about how he was going to beat him but just lacing it with too much innuendo.
Keith had died and gone to heaven about halfway though Lance's sentence and his only comprehensible other than the screaming inside his head was "uh…"
Lance was crimson and rapidly turning more and more scarlet, "Oh no, no, no, I didn't mean it like that I mean like I kinda do but you don't need to know that fuck just oh my god stop talking Lance I AM GOING TO BEAT YOU."
He was shaking Keith by the shoulders by the end of that statement and Keith's internal screaming got louder.
"What the fuck," the attendant broke their exchange and Lance stared at them, mortified.
"I am so sorry – "
"Just, just get off the lift," the attendant shook their head in quiet laughter. "Your friends said you guys would either be fighting or making out and I guess this is a happy in between?"
"I'm going to kill Shiro," said Keith at the same time Lance said he was going to murder Pidge.
Keith chose to ignore the attendant's "aww" as he stumbled, dazed, out of the lift followed by an equally dazed Lance. He tried not to think about the pale remains of a pink blush on Lance's cheeks and the fact that his feelings might be reciprocated.
"I will beat you and you will lose!" Lance screamed at the top of his lungs as he rocketed down the mountain, shrieking as he stumbled over a rougher patch of ice.
"No way!" Keith yelled back and spun around a tree, leaning forward slightly and letting his bangs blow out of his face on their own, eyebrows scrunching in concentration.
Lance was to Keith's far left, noticeably coming closer to the edge of the marked run. Keith steered his board to bring him closer to Lance, essentially chasing after him as Lance skied further and further away from Keith and farther and farther off the path. That's when Keith saw the edge of the sheer drop coming up to the side of Lance.
Keith knew that when people died, they always saw their life flash before their eyes. He knew because he had almost died three times in his life: when he was ten and his foster father gave him the three inch scar on his collarbone, when he was fourteen and jumped off that bridge and was one of the few people to have ever survived attempting suicide off the 306 Interstate, and when he was seventeen in a car crash with his new foster brother Shiro and he knew he had something to hold onto for once in his life.
Now felt like one of those times. It felt like Keith was right there with Lance, time ticking ever so slowly as they came closer and closer to the edge of sweet oblivion and Keith saw every single second that he had ever spent with Lance.
Something clicked.
"LANCE! CLIFF!" Keith's desperate cry shattered the slow-moving time and Lance stumbled when he saw the cliff, steering sharply towards Keith as the snow that he had just been on crumbles away into the ravine.
"Holy," Lance visibly exhales and keeps skiing quickly back towards the normal path, cutting off Keith in a zip as he gestured for him to come on.
Keith breathed outwards and chased after Lance, letting his fury take over and run his mouth into the ground, "Lance, I swear to god if you ever do that again I will fucking kill you if you ever try to die again before I get to makeout with your golden face."
"What," Lance clearly heard him as he intelligently stumbles over a bush and rolls over his skis onto the normal path and conveniently off the run's finish.
Keith didn't even care at this point before Lance was alive. He slid off the run and to his knees on the snow bed nearby, almost in tears. Keith glanced over at Lance, who was currently ripping off his skis like a madman and tearing off his helmet like he had something to prove. Stomping, Lance ran in his direction as Keith unbuckled his helmet and stared at him, bewildered beyond belief.
"Lance, what – oh my god."
Keith was cut off by Lance literally tackling him to the snow, pinning him down with his chest and legs as he roughly pressed his mouth to Keith's.
Kissing Lance, Keith soon realized, was like standing directly under a waterfall and taking the full force of several thousand gallons of water. It was intense, feeling how much damn emotion Lance had bottled up.
Keith's right arm came up from its position in the snow and wrapped itself around Lance's waist, pulling their bodies closer as Keith grinned at the warmth. His other hand came to the back of Lance's head, adjusting the angle of their mouths to a new, better one. Lance made a soft noise and Keith pressed further at his mouth, kissing harder and harder and never wanting to stop until –
"Well, that was eventful," Shiro's voice sounded like he was grinning his head off.
Lance's mouth broke away from Keith's as Keith squirmed under him in an attempt to get out from under him, but he was no match for Lance's surprisingly strong arm that came to pin his chest further into the snow.
"Really, Lance?" Keith commented in response to Lance's wink.
"You, quiet," he smirked at Keith and turned back to their smiling group of friends. "C'mon guys, I was getting lucky."
"At the bottom of a snow hill?!" said Hunk the same time that Shiro spoke.
"Do you even know what getting lucky means, Lance?"
"He has no reason to seeing as he's probably never gotten any his life," Pidge elbowed Hunk and grinned.
"Oh, you little – "
"Lance," Shiro scolded and Lance sighed, getting off a scarlet Keith still blushing over the "getting lucky" comment.
"Anyways, we were just about to go partake in the hot chocolate if you would like to join us," Allura informed the pair.
"Sounds good," Keith regained his senses and took an expectant Lance's hand to get to his feet.
The group walked back to the lodge; Keith and Lance holding hands all the while.