Um this is the scott pilgrim au no one asked for but i delivered. Was posted on AO3 first.
Not so long ago,
In the mysterious land of San Angelo, Texas,
Keith Kogane was dating a high schooler.
"Are we really supposed to be surprised about this?" Pidge asks Keith over her coffee cup. Keith grunts in her direction.
"Not bad, my friend." Matt praises him.
"It is bad, he's like, thirty; he's dating a child."
"I'm twenty two, and you're a hypocrite." Keith scowls over his own cup. Unlike Pidge, who drinks Sunny D religiously, Keith actually has black coffee in his, one scoop of sugar, extra hot.
"How am I the hypocrite?"
Keith takes a seat at the kitchen table. Every Saturday at noon and every other day at eight, Keith and Pidge meet up at Hunk and Matt's house to have band practice. The band sucks, and mostly consists of yelling, grunting and doing weak covers of other bands songs, but they have a decent enough number of followers to keep them performing at the local club. It's currently 11:53, on a Saturday in November, and Keith has had enough of Pidge's snarky bullshit.
"Shiro, senior year." He raises his eyebrows in her direction.
"I was a freshman, it lasted a month, we were both underage."
"Really? That's why you were at our place last week?"
"Shut up. Tell us about your fake high school girlfriend."
Katie 'Pidge' Holt: Twenty one. A spiteful redhead who overuses the word fuck and plays the drums for possibly the world's worst indie band, Form Voltron. The better twin.
Matthew Holt: Twenty one. Is not in the band, he just lives here. Cried the first time he died in the Legend of Zelda. Twin brother to Katie Holt.
"Is she hot, at least?" Hunk calls from the front room. "And what's her name?"
Keith opens his mouth to explain more, but a knock on the front door cuts him off. Hunk stops him just before he can open it, a large hand pressed against the wood.
"Do we have to stop swearing around her?" Hunk eyes the door for a quick second.
Keith shakes his head no.
"Is she gonna, y'know? Is she gonna gig?"
Hunk Garret: Twenty two. Unlikely lead singer of the band Form Voltron. Is too nice to act angry on stage but makes the band not suck as much. Very large, very Hawaiian.
"Oh yeah, she's gonna gig. Don't worry about it. She'll gig."
Hunk swings the door open as a silent approval. A mess of brown curly hair leaps forward towards Keith, gripping him into a hug. He pulls her back, his mouth drawn into a long awkward smile.
"I'm glad you're here. This is Hunk, Pidge and Matt are in the kitchen. Have a seat." Keith gestures somewhere near the couch, then scrambles to grab his guitar.
Matt and Pidge take their sweet time making their way to the front room, arguing about how to pronounce milk or something stupid like that. They never shut up about anything ever, but Keith is at least thankful that they're making him look like the logical one for once and not a complete idiot, like the last time he was trying to impress someone and they had a heated discussion about quantum physics. The guy at the coffee shop had eyed the three of them and decided to give Matt his number instead.
Matt plops next to Keith's girlfriend on the couch, while Pidge takes her place behind a set of green drums.
"Is Pidge a nickname or something?" Keith's girlfriend asks.
Keith's Girlfriend: Seventeen. Goes to a Catholic school. Love's Keith's shitty band. Doesn't know she's a rebound girlfriend.
Pidge looks her dead in the eye.
"'Sup. It's short for Main Pigeon Bitch."
Keith's girlfriend mouths an oh.
"Ignore her." Matt starts. "What did you say your name was?"
As she tells him Pidge screams from her drum set,
"It's time to Form Voltron! One, two, three, four!"
With a hit of her drumsticks to a cymbal, Hunk starts singing; a set of deep throaty Yeah yeah's that no one ever expects to come out of someone so soft and gentle. Then again, Hunk can do a perfect impression of a pissed Gordon Ramsey and once hit a guy in high school so hard he broke his nose and jaw. Keith is too much of an emotion-lacking loser to tell Hunk that he's the only reason the band is decent, and that he appreciates him sticking around.
They bang around to something loud and incoherent while Matt plays a level of Candy Crush and Keith's girlfriend watches in awe. The silence after they finish is tense. Hunk glances back to Keith to see if his girlfriend is going to do anything besides look at them with her eyebrows quirked up. Keith shrugs as the attention goes back to her.
"You guys," She says slowly. "Are so amazing."
Keith walks through the early winter snow to the cramped apartment he shares with Shiro. Halfway through shaking the ice off his shoes he alerts Shiro,
"Before Pidge tells you, yes I'm dating a high schooler."
"Oh? What did she have to say about that?" Shiro looks up from the magazine he's looking through. Something about golf and heart health, a weird guilty pleasure of his. Keith doesn't understand how Shiro finds any entertainment in knowing how to control diabetes at sixty.
"She gave me the talk."
"Well, I could've done that. Use protection Keith."
Takashi Shirogane: Twenty five. Lives with Keith. Thinks he is the dad friend, is really the asshole friend.
Keith huffs out an icy breath of air and slams the door shut.
"Not that talk. The I'd-punch-you-in-the-face talk."
"I don't blame her. You're fake high school girlfriend is just a shitty way for you to get over your ex. It's been how long since A-"
"We don't say that word in my apartment." Keith snaps at him.
Technically, the apartment is Shiro's, along with everything in it. TV? Shiro's. Bed? Shiro's. Alphabet fridge magnets? Shiro's. Both he and Keith choose to ignore the fact that Keith owns next to nothing, because Shiro is a good friend, and because Keith hasn't had a steady job in the last three years. That is to say, ever.
"Just, whatever you do, don't tell my sister." Keith pleads him.
"Why would I do that?" Shiro asks while making his way to the bathroom, his cell phone already screeching a dial tone.
Keith's own cell rings half a second later, the caller ID showing a string of obscure emojis. He swipes the call button over, preparing for the shit storm he's about to get.
"Why are you dating a highschooler?"
Keith's sister: Eighteen. Went to a Form Voltron show once three months ago and hasn't seen Keith since due to secondhand embarrassment.
"Who told you?" Keith already knows the answer.
"Shiro, duh." His sister slews out the beginning of a lecture, and Keith tries his hardest to ignore her.
Keith spends every other afternoon with his high school girlfriend, and every other other afternoon, ignoring Pidge and Shiro's judgmental glares. They go to the arcade and burger shops and second hand stores, Keith always trailing back a step while his girlfriend talks about lacrosse and algebra homework. He grows bored quickly.
They're in an old CD store one day when Keith's girlfriend asks the attendant for help finding an album. Pidge turns around to them, her hair thrown up in a bun and a set of glasses donning her face. Keith's girlfriend doesn't seem to recognize her, or she just doesn't care, even though the girls have seen each other every Tuesday and Thursday at Hunks house. A shit eating grin stretches across Pidge's face as she directs her to the right aisle.
"Are you still coming to my party tomorrow, or will you be babysitting?"
Pidge is having a housewarming party to celebrate moving into her new place, and half of San Angelo is invited. Keith tries to ignore her while shuffling though the plastic cases but eventually her gaze is too powerful against his weak emo moping and he's forced to face her.
"I don't know. I mean yeah, I guess." He doesn't commit to anything even though they both know his girlfriend isn't allowed out after dark (forcing them to move band practice up to five to allow her to go watch them), and he'll most definitely be at Pidge's party. He glances down to the album his girlfriend is holding and proceeds to toss it out of her hands. "Don't listen to them, they're sell outs."
He stares at the album for a split second before leaving the CD store with his girlfriend, the image of his ex girlfriend standing on the cover flashing in his head.
Keith finds himself standing in the desert still in his winter puffy coat. He doesn't know how he got there or why but he feels so alone and empty while standing in the heat.
"I'm so alone." He groans out, and the sound of something scratching against the dirt comes out faintly from behind him. It takes Keith a moment to realize that the noise is from fucking roller skates. He hasn't skated since he was thirteen and broke his wrist when Shiro tripped him on accident. He spins around to see a boy skating towards him at an alarming speed. He wants to tell him to slow down or something, but is too taken aback by how absolutely gorgeous this guy is. Tall and tanned with a slice of hair dyed bright pink, jesus christ he's beautiful.
"You're not alone." Pink boy skates pasts him, skidding to a stop. "You're just having some stupid dream. And you need a haircut, who even has a mullet these days?"
Before he can ask him what his name is and what the hell he thinks he's doing insulting his hair in his own damn dream, Keith bolts up in bed, wide awake.
"What's going on Keith?" Shiro groggily asks him from the other side of the bed.
"Nothing. Just a dream, but…"
"But what?"
"There was this boy."
"Mmm sounds fascinating. Weren't you supposed to take your fake high school girlfriend to the library an hour ago?
"Oh shit."
Fifteen minutes later, Keith is holding a stack of books taller than him while his girlfriend tells him about her final project for the semester. He's overly tired and terribly uncomfortable in the library, but he holds back his sighs to keep her happy. The library makes him feel like a child again, except more of in a sad nostalgic way than a hopeful way. They remind him of a time where he had more ambitions and goals and liked to read and play soccer and wasn't stuck living with his best friend and virtually poor as fuck. His mom would drive him to the public library every Saturday and he could read to his heart's desire. He picks a dusty book about space off the shelf, opening it up with one hand and smelling the pages. Not so much in a creepy way but enough to make his girlfriend look back and laugh at him.
"Can you check this one out for me?" Pidge might like it for the two weeks he's allowed to borrow it.
"Sure! I was about to check out all these anyway."
They make small talk (as always, there's nothing else to talk about with a seventeen year old) while Keith struggles down the stairs with the stack of books to the check out desk. There's the unmistakable scratch of a roller skate gliding across the carpet and Keith snaps his head up.
Leaning over the desk is the most beautiful strip of pink hair Keith has ever seen. Keith stops on the bottom step to stare at the boy because holy fuck- it's the guy in his dream, he's real. His girlfriend says something in slow motion that sounds kind of like Doo yoouu knowww himmm? But he's too busy gawking like the idiot he is to notice. Pink boy turns to him, scratch-skating his way to the stairs. He bends down to pick something up, and holds it out to Keith.
"You dropped this." Pink places a book on the top of the stack, gives Keith a raised eyebrow and scratch-skates out of the library. Keith snaps out of his daze as soon as the bell on top of the door rings, and looks down to see the book. The space book for Pidge. That Pink boy touched. Pidge is never getting the book, and neither is the library.
"Keith!"
"What?" Keith turns his head to Hunk, who's staring at him like he ran over his dog.
"You didn't play a single note. We're going over that again."
Keith nods his head but asks anyway,
"Wait, what are we doing?"
"I told you, we're going to Pidge's party."
Keith kicks at a piece of dirty ice on the edge of the sidewalk. Matt trails behind him, humming the X-Files theme song. When did they get here? Weren't they just practicing the latest crappy cover of whatever new band is popular right now? Time no longer exists for Keith, it seems.
"It's gonna suck, man. I can already feel it. Like twin telepathy." He whispers to Keith.
"Yeah well, it's Pidge, and Pidge has connections and anyone under thirty is going to be there." Hunk walks backwards to get his point across clearer to them. They can both see the irritation across Hunk's face from not being listened to. "There could be a label or something. We could be seen!"
"It's Pidge, Hunk. You guys are going to talk about how fun it is to disassemble iPhones and then make out in her room."
"Wait!" Keith stops walking, forcing the other two to stop and huddle around him. "I thought she was making out with Shiro. Y'know to piss y'all's parents off."
Hunk places a hand softly on Keith's shoulder,
"You will learn, my sweet summer child, that no one has such singular, hetero relationships as you do."
Keith raises an eyebrow confused because one: Keith is anything but heterosexual and two: he's just not catching any of Hunk's drift.
Matt sighs and Hunk and he share a look across Keith.
"Everyone is dating everyone else." Matt tells him. "And Shiro's talking to that guy who looks just like him right now. The one with the scar and the weird yellow contacts."
Keith blows out a puff of air and storms past them towards Pidge's house. Life is confusing and awful and now he's stuck going to some terrible party where everyone is getting cold sores from making out with too many people.
"God, this sucks!" Keith yells over the music to Matt.
"I told you! It's my sister, for fucks sake, what did you expect?"
Keith shrugs half heartedly and tells Matt he's going to the bathroom.
"Why don't you look for your dream boy while you're here?" Matt suggests.
Keith squints and asks him how he knows about Pink boy. Matt copies his shrug but the look on his face tells him otherwise.
Fuck Shiro and his gossipy ways Keith thinks, stomping to the bathroom. At the end of the hallway an old friend from high school stops him.
"Hey Keith, how you been?" Ulaz grabs him by the wrist.
Ulaz: Probably twenty two, no one really knows. Dated Keith for all of three days his freshman year. It's awkward. We don't talk about it.
"Fine. I have to pee." Ultimately, Keith would like to forget absolutely everything from the time he was born to his eighteenth birthday, especially his friendship with Ulaz. The guy is every type of sleazy and was the only person in his senior class who chose to be bald. A total turnoff for Keith in terms of both friendship and relationships.
"Whoa, I think it can wait for a second. I haven't seen you in years!"
"Let's keep it that way."
"Have you been drinking?" Ulaz peeks over Keith's cup. "You seem tense."
"No I don't drink; it's just Pidge's Sunny D." An idea strikes Keith for a second, something that doesn't happen often-not good one's at least- and he grabs onto it. "Actually, you know everyone right?"
"Absolutely. Everyone from here to Mexico."
"Do you know a boy who looks like this?" Keith shows him a crudely draw picture on his cup. It's mostly just a large scribble of pink.
"Oh yeah, that's Lance McClain. I heard he was here already."
"Where?"
Keith is already gone before Ulaz can elaborate. He searches the cramped rooms, looking out for anyone with any type of resemblance to Lance. Lance. What a dumb name. But it goes along with his perfect, dumb, gorgeous face, so Keith doesn't complain. He finds Lance standing against a wall, bobbing his head to the music. Slowly he tries to inch to him, sliding across the wall until they're standing next to each other. Keith can feel his heart rate speed up until it feels like his chest is going to explode.
"Did you know that uh," Keith clears his throat and thinks to what Lance said to him in his dream. "Mullets have been documented as being like, 1,400 years old so…"
Lance glances over to him, the same look on his face as when he handed Keith his book. Something between confused and amused.
"By who?" Lance asks.
Oh god, Keith can't handle this. Lance has said all of two words to him and his mouth is already dry and his brain can't seem to stay on the right track. What was he saying again?
"By the Romans. Well actually the Huns started it, but the Romans copied it and made mullets popular."
Keith waits for Lance to respond, but he just stares instead.
"My hair isn't stupid." He declares. Lance doesn't hesitate to tell him,
"Yes it is."
"I'll leave you alone forever now."
"Okay."
Keith slinks off in the opposite direction avoiding eye contact from anyone that might have seen the stupidity he just pulled off. Mullets? Really? He is such an idiot. Still, his embarrassment doesn't stop him from stalking Lance the whole night until he leaves the party.
He searches for Matt as soon as Lance leaves.
"He's totally real."
"Your dream boy?!" Matt is elated for him. "What's his name?"
"Lance McClain."
Matt winces at his name and leads him back to Ulaz.
"I'll let you two talk about him. I don't want to be the one to break your heart." Matt pats him on the shoulder before walking off, leaving Keith and Ulaz alone.
"He's from Cuba," Ulaz starts. "But he's been here for a few years."
Ulaz directs him to a pair of girls to get more facts about Lance, who lead him to another guy and another guy. The rest of the night he spends getting information about Lance.
"He has a shitty boyfriend up north"
"He kicks ass. Total ass."
"He got accepted to like, Yale to be an astronaut but he works for Amazon instead."
"What about Lance McClain?" Pidge is up in his face, the tips of her toes barely touching the floor. Keith doesn't remember getting through so many people that he trailed back to his friends, but he knows he's made a terrible choice. This was none of Pidge's business.
"Oh yeah, didn't he like, just get out of this totally messy relationship?" Hunk shimmies through to break their conversation and throws a wink Keith's way. "He's really single right now."
Pidge rolls her eyes and elbows Hunk in the gut,
"Yeah, but I didn't want Keith to know that, okay?"
"Why?" Keith questions. There's nothing absolutely terrible about Keith that keeps him from having a chance with a totally kickass guy like Lance. Okay so there's the already established mullet thing, but he can overlook that for now.
"I forbid you from hitting on Lance! Even if you haven't had a real relationship in over a year."
"I'm wounded Pidge."
"Good, this is your mourning period and you have no business getting involved with someone like Lance. Let's be real, you're not even good at dating."
"Prove it."
"That time with Swirn? That time with Ulaz?"
"Ew. Don't talk about him."
"That time with me?""
"Hey, we're all goo-"
"Forget it; he's out of your league. Matt would be better with him, and that says something about both of you."
Keith catches himself late that night telling his Lance story to a half drunk half asleep Shiro. He grunts through the good parts, and snores through the boring ones. Keith doesn't pay attention to the way Shiro mutters snarky comments under his breath, until he whispers to him,
"You need to break up with your fake high school girlfriend."
"What?"
"I said, you need to break up with your fake high-" Shiro breaks off mid sentence with a snore. Two seconds later, his phone rings. His sister. He answers reluctantly.
"Don't even think of hitting on Lance until you break up with your fake high school girlfriend."
"How do you know these things?"
"It doesn't matter. Don't' even think about it."
Promptly she hangs up. Keith lets out a groan and tucks into bed.
"What are you ordering?"
"I don't know, something cheap." Keith sits in front of his laptop, the web page opened to . If he orders something now and charged it to express one day shipping, he should have Lance knocking on his door in less than twenty hours. Nineteen if he was lucky. He goes to click on the check out button when his phone dings with an email. Instead of checking his phone, he opens up an extra tab and checks his email there on his computer. The subject header is a series of exes along with the skull emoji. Keith should feel threatened. Opening it, he reads the message out loud to Shiro.
"Dear Mr. Kogane, it appears to me that we will be fighting in the near future. My name is," Keith mutters the words out. "You know what, this is boring."
He hits delete without reading the rest of it, then starts to wait in front of the door until tomorrow morning. The door bell rings, making him jump. Lance wasn't supposed to be there for another eighteen hours. He swings the door open to see his girlfriend standing in front of him. He had forgotten he even had one.
"I called you earlier," Keith checks his phone. Two missed calls. "We were supposed to go out."
"Let's go then." Keith fakes it over, pulling on his puffy coat.
This time around, going to their usual date spots in extra boring and Keith can't stop trying to bail on his girlfriend. He can only take listening to her talk about her best friend and her dog and her homework for so long before he feels like he's suffocating. Before he met Lance, her stories were entertaining and funny and now all he can think about is what his girlfriend would look like with pink bangs. Fuck Lance; fuck him for ruining his life overnight.
That evening Hunk announces that he got them a slot to play at the IBB.
"The International Battle of the Bands? Oh my god!" Keith's girlfriend squeals from her place on the couch. "What's the prize for winning?"
"Only a record deal from Lotor."
"Who's that?" Matt asks.
"Only the hottest record deal man out there right now. Look, if we win, it won't just be Keith's girlfriend wearing our shirts," Hunk throws a hand out across her, as if he's a magician and he's presenting his lovely assistant. "It'll be the cool kids too."
"Oh my god!" She repeats. "This is so amazing! You guys have to win!"
She gets up to lean down in front of Keith, where he sits in a beat up chair Hunk found at a local Goodwill before they closed down.
"And I'll be there for every one of your shows, okay?"
Keith looks at her and says,
"I have to pee."
Keith opens the door to the bathroom to walk into not the toilet, but his old high school. He knows it's his and not some random sitcom high school hallway prop because the locker to his left has the words Keith sucks dick scratched into the front. It's not completely untrue, but still not the nicest thing to be said about him during his high school career. The administration had tried to paint over it numerous times, but it was etched in so deep that the dark maroon paint slapped over the top just made it more prominent. Eventually, Keith scratched off the paint himself and made the silvery metal message clear to the whole world on his own terms. Keith Kogane could have a million girlfriends, but at the end of the day he was still a dick sucking faggot.
He doesn't have to turn or even hear his roller skates to know that Lance is in the hallway with him. Instead of stopping to talk to him though, Lance skates by, turning around the corner. Keith follows, running after him. Around the corner is Pidge and Matt's lockers, each with equally rude phrases scratched into them. High school was a rough time for everyone. At the end of the hall is the door to Keith's apartment, Lance's hand hovering over the doorbell.
Keith barely has time to register what's happening before he's bolting out of bed and across the floor to open the door for Lance. The bell rings at the same time.
"Delivery for Mullet Boy."
"Do you want to go out? The only reason I bought something off of that stupid website is so you'd deliver it and I could ask you out."
"Um," Lance rolls back an inch. Keith's face burns as soon as he realizes what he's said. Goddamn why couldn't he have stayed the same emo fuck he was in high school. Why did he have to get great friends and become all bubbly and talkative? This was not how Keith planned things would go. He decides it can't get any worse really, and continues.
"I've been seeing you in my dreams. Is that weird?"
"Not at all. I use the subspace highway sometimes because it's quicker and the coffee's cheaper at the gas stations than it is in reality. Do you not have that in Texas?"
"I've never used it. So if I sign for my package and never order anything ever again, will you hang out with me or something? We can just talk or whatever."
"Yeah sure." Lance, to Keith's surprise, looks more than happy to agree.
"Okay. Okay."
"Okay."
Keith wasn't planning on getting this far.
"Okay, tonight at eight?"
"Cool. I would've hung out with you even if you didn't promise to never order again and leave me alone for the rest of my life. Your mullet story was pretty cool."
Keith's mouth drops open as Lance turns and skates away back down the street.
Keith shows up less than five minutes late to their meet up spot but Lance is already in his face, shaming him.
"I thought you'd never show up! You shouldn't leave people hanging like that; I could've been murdered out here alone."
Keith spits out a string of apologies before Lance punches him in the arm.
"Dude, I'm only kidding."
Keith doesn't know how to properly smile in front of Lance. This was much easier rehearsing in his head.
They walk around the streets and downtown, and past every place that Keith and his fake high school girlfriend go, until Lance suggests going to the park and settling on the swings.
"So,"
"So."
"What brought you to Texas? It's really lame here, to be honest."
Lance shrugs and looks away,
"I guess I just needed something new. I was going to a university up north but then things got messy and I decided to get away from everything. Get away from Lotor."
Keith's heard that name before, but he can't remember where or when. It nags at him, like he should know, and he should be concerned but he ignores it instead.
"Is Lotor your boyfriend, or?"
"Let's not go there." Lance looks up to the sky. Tiny snowflakes fall onto Keith and his faces. Keith has lived in Texas his whole life and has learned a few things from it. One being that small snowflakes always turn into huge snowflakes and if they don't leave now, they'll be stuck in the snowstorm on the century.
"We should get going, it'll storm soon."
Lance follows him through the snow, his feet falling into Keith's tracks.
"This was fun." Lance is a shiny thing, Keith notices. His roller skates are a shiny blue, and they contrast his shiny conditioned pink hair, and he always has a bright shiny smile on his face, once you crack through the cool kickass exterior. He looks happier than the time Matt got the Star Trek complete box set of movies signed by William Shatner. The picture of him holding up the movies in front of the Christmas tree was printed and framed in both Hunk and Pidge's homes. You can't really compete on happiness with that. And yet something about Lance's smile makes Keith want to call his girlfriend right now and break up with her.
"There's something over there." Lance points through the snow.
"We should really head home." Still, Keith squints to see what's out there. "What is it?"
"A door. C'mon." Lance holds out his hand for Keith to take. Keith grabs it, and they walk into total darkness. Together.
"Would you like something to drink? I have tea." Lance stands in front of his kitchen cabinets, while Keith watches him from the table. Somehow they made it back to Lance's place, just before the storm hit full force on them. It'll probably be a few hours before Keith can go back home safely, and Lance was more than willing to let him sleep on his couch for the night.
"What kind?"
"What kind do you want?"
"Um," Keith has to think about it. He's been living off of black coffee and Sunny D for the last four years and doesn't really know what tea tastes like. Is it healthy? Should he put sugar in it? "Do you have oolong?"
Lance throws him a box of oolong along with a smile.
"I'll get your water ready. And a blanket, it's kind of cold in here."
Keith lets out a small thanks and Lance disappears to another room in the house.
Five minutes pass and Lance still hasn't returned with a blanket or Keith's water. He heard the cup of water beep in the microwave but isn't sure if it would be rude to grab it and start making his tea without him. Instead he gets up to find Lance and see where a blanket is on his own. The door to Lance's room is cracked open and Keith pushes it open more to see if he's in there. In front of his closet, Lance stands in nothing but his boxers, picking a sweater off of a hanger.
"Oh shit." Keith promptly covers his eyes, making him see nothing. "I'll leave."
Lance laughs from the closet.
"Dude it's alright. You act like you've never seen a guy tit. Here. You can wear this."
Slowly Lance removes Keith's fingers from his eyes and presses something soft into his hands. Keith looks down at a sweater, red, looking like something you'd wear in the 90's to a sleepover. He slips it on over his head and Lance compliments it.
"Red looks good on you." Keith is hyperaware of how close their bodies are and the fact that Lance is still in only his boxers.
"Thanks." Is all he says before him and Lance are kissing. Keith has to step up on his toes to reach him fully but Lance's lips are soft and taste like sweet tea-the good kind, like how his mom used to make- so he's willing to put in a little effort to make sure he's kissing him properly.
Lance walks him back to his apartment the next morning, skating two steps ahead of him and teasing Keith for not keeping up.
"So, is this going to be a onetime thing only or?"
"Do you want it to be?" Lance skates a circle around him, kicking up melted snow.
"Not really."
"So what's part two?"
"Well," Keith thinks for a second before bringing up possibly the shittiest idea ever. "There's this battle of the bands thing going on and I'm competing. My band. We're competing."
"You have a band?"
"…Yeah."
"Okay, I'll be there. Do you want my number?"
They stand on the sidewalk in front of Keith's door, while Lance writes his number out on an old receipt. When he's done, he puts it in Keith's front pocket himself before giving him a kiss on the cheek and skating away. He's too fast for Keith to say anything to him before he's gone.
Keith runs a hot shower, pulling the receipt out of his coat pocket while stripping off the rest of his clothes. He stares at it and repeats Lance's number over and over until he can say it by memory. When he's in the shower he writes it through the steam on the glass door, his finger tracing through the seven exes placed below Lance's number.
Two days until the Battle of the Bands. Two days until he see's Lance again.
Lance McClain: Twenty three. Has seven evil people who love him very much. The love of Keith's life. He doesn't know this yet.