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Lance had wormed his way from being unremarkable and forgettable, to being the first thought on Keith’s mind. At first, it was just an annoyance, like a persistent fly on the wall that wouldn’t die, no matter how many shoes he threw. He’d groan about Lance, blabbering on jokes that didn’t quite hit, and Lance, blustering himself into this faux-rivalry.
Then, Keith found, he didn’t really minded thinking about Lance. He could be obnoxious, but he also had the widest smile, and weirdest laugh, and Keith could chew on those thoughts all day and come to the same conclusion. He really, really didn’t mind thinking about Lance. He probably even liked to.
He probably even liked Lance.
As soon as he recognized that, he’d set off to tackle that problem with the same determination he tackled everything. Direct, with no plan, but tenacity to make up for it.
He’d found Lance in the common area, lounged across the couch and fiddling with his own foot. Investigating further, Lance was toying with a sock halfway off his foot. He’d pulled it up, but barely reached over his heels.
“Keith, hey Keith!” Lance said, pulling at his sock again. “I was looking through the castle ship- there’s so many rooms- did you know Alteans had ankle socks?”
His stride broken, and Keith stared down at Lance’s feet. “Why would I know that?”
Apparently, Lance had no comeback, but wasn’t as bothered as normal by it. Instead, he pulled the sock up again, as far as it would go. “Aren’t ankles supposed to be like, scandalous? In whatever, ye olden times, I bet ankle socks were like-” Lance paused. He shimmied the sock down a bit. “I bet they made people go wild.”
“They’re socks,” Keith said.
“C’mon, at least give me a wolf whistle or something.” Lance stretched his arm along the arm of the couch, then tried to poke Keith with his toes. He nearly made it, but Keith moved a good foot back and away.
Keith looked at Lance’s ankle, then back up to Lance. “You have very boney ankles,” Keith said. “No one’d go wild for those.”
“You’re no fun, I bet-” Lance said. He couldn’t decide on his position of attack, and had brought his foot back to the couch. “I bet you can’t even wolf whistle.”
“I don’t need to prove that to you.”
“You can’t! That’s like, an admission-” Lance started, and Keith cut him off with the best wolf whistle he could manage. It echoed in the room, and its presence stayed long after the noise ended.
Lance posed, leg now sticking back out and staying there. The sock was off his heel. Lance was halfway off the couch, too, just far enough off for his toe to bump into Keith’s leg. He gave a double finger-guns, for good measure.
“You’re… you’re the absolute worst,” Keith said. His mission, while still in the back of his mind, wasn’t relevant anymore. As much as he wanted to run into this as fast as he could, the momentum had died.
The two of them had taken to training together, in the afternoons. Keith always trained by himself in the mornings, and Lance always slept in, and by the afternoons Keith was tired enough to be cajoled into Lance’s theatrics.
The first duel they had- if Keith even wanted to call it that, which he didn’t- ended with Lance asking for a rematch. Then, he’d ask for another rematch, and another, until he won or at least nearly did. After that, he’d declare the war won, even if he’d lost all the battles along the way.
Lance always chose his own disadvantage, during these duels. Keith wasn’t unaware that Lance could be talented, his talent just spread thin across a menagerie of skills. And when Lance challenged Keith, constantly, to sword duels, he just couldn’t win.
This time came close. Keith had woken up earlier than normal, to train on his own, so his muscles ached and his reflexes fell because of it. He didn’t want to admit not being at his best, but while Lance could be as perceptive as a rock, he was much too aware of when he had a leg up on Keith.
Both of them lay on the ground, practice swords discarded next to them. Keith listened to his own breathing, in and out moving fast and erratic until it slowed to a steady pace. He listened to Lance’s, too, uneven but not exhausted.
“I got you, that time,” Lance said, even though he hadn’t. “I got really- that was the last round, by the way.”
Of course it was. Keith tried not to, but he laughed anyway.
“Hey! Don’t- you lost, you shouldn’t be laughing at me,” Lance said. “I should get the last word.”
“Like you’ve ever gotten in the last word,” said Keith.
“I totally- I totally have!” Lance said. He paused, to find an example. “Really.”
Keith hummed a mock agreement, and a calm silence settled between them.
Before Keith even wanted to leave the ground, Lance pulled himself up to a sitting position.
“You weren’t,” he trailed off, voice quiet. “You weren’t at your best, were you?”
Keith looked up at Lance, whose eyebrows pinched in frustration. Making the effort, Keith pulled himself off the ground, and moved straight from laying down to standing. He stretched, as Lance clambered up after him.
“Are you going to like, make me play twenty questions?” Lance asked. He stretched his arms back, unbalanced himself, and nearly fell over. “What advantage did I have.”
“You get three guesses,” Keith said. He doubted Lance would go for the mundane bad night’s sleep answer, at least if Keith limited him. “If you lose, next time I get to chose the… practice method. We’re not sword-fighting.”
“And if I win? ” Lance said, stressing the final word.
Keith paused, to match Lance’s dramatics. “If you win, I’ll tell you three ways to beat me.”
Lance nearly fell over again, catching his balance with an enormous effort. “Deal!” he said, reaching out to shake Keith’s hand, but taking the hand away before Keith could.
Despite his earlier bluster, Lance seemed to quiet, sticking his tongue out as he thought. Keith shifted his weight from foot to foot; he’d wanted the amusement, but didn’t think Lance would throw himself so hard at this. He seemed morose in his contemplation, eyeing Keith every now and then with a frown.
Finally, Lance seemed to come to a conclusion. He smirked, and cracked his neck. “You- you’re a werewolf. We’re not close to any moons, and you’re like, about to die from exhaustion.”
Keith balked. “What?”
“Is that a no?”
“Of course it’s a no,” Keith said, “Why would you-”
“Next question,” Lance said, waving Keith off and returning to think. He looked uncertain, eyes darting from Keith and away. Then, he grinned like a cat. Or, well, he tried to. The grin crumbled into a grimace every now and then, caught between a toothy smirk and an open-mouthed frown. The grin won, in the end, spreading from one ear to the other, flash of teeth bright and sinister.
“Oh man, you’re totally in love with me, aren’t you,” Lance said. He draped himself over Keith dramatically, arm across the back of Keith’s neck. Lance huffed a breath of air, and it hit Keith’s ear. Keith froze, eyeing Lance with a heavy suspicion. He’d managed to propel himself from dead wrong to maybe just a bit right in one, lengthy stride.
“Like, smitten, head over heels, irrevocably in love with me,” Lance said. “Gives me a great battle advantage, here.”
Keith shoved Lance’s arm off him quickly, rolling his eyes then meeting Lance’s gaze.
“You like like me,” Lance said. He crossed his arms across his chest, puffing himself up like a bird. “That’s it, I’ve got it.”
“Lance,” Keith said. His voice strained, but he kept his gaze level. “I- why are you asking me this?”
Both of them stared at each other, for a long moment. Lance seemed to realize something, and stared at Keith with wide saucer eyes. Lance broke eye contact, grin fading into something of a wince, and he tapped his foot on the floor.
“I don’t- I don’t have any- you asked!” Lance squaked. “I’m trying to see- see why you’re off your game.”
Keith watched, as Lance pulled several expressions in a row, then stuck his tongue out at Keith. He didn’t quite meet Keith’s eyes, Keith could tell, but he was trying.
“So you’re not a werewolf,” Lance said. He tapped his foot on the floor, and tried again to make eye contact with Keith. “And you don’t like me.”
“You’re like- an enemy spy, like, you’re an enemy plant on Earth, and Pidge is on to you-”
Keith stared, mouth gaped. “Are you trying to give the worst possible reasons-”
“Of course I am!” Lance said. He fluttered around, eyes rolling and arms waving. “I don’t- I’m not a cheater. I’m going to beat you, fair and square.”
Keith didn’t know why him liking Lance seemed to rank just as high as being a werewolf, and an enemy spy. There was a point where he stopped questioning Lance’s theatrics, and he’d reached that long ago in this conversation.
“You lost the guessing game,” Keith said. “I beat you at that, fair and square.”
Lance finally stopped moving, only to stare at Keith, and groan like a kicked puppy.
After that, comm chatter became much more of a nuisance for everyone involved.
Keith had no idea what Lance was trying to prove. Most of the time, Keith waved off Lance’s more confusing decisions to some kind of random number generator in the back of Lance’s mind. If Lance needed a thought, he’d select one from a set at random and roll with it.
Unfortunately, that theory didn’t make sense. Not when Lance made the same decision, again and again and again, for the same nonsense reason. That was just statistically improbable, Lance had to derive all his decisions from something other than pure randomness, and that terrified Keith.
“Keith, dear, would you move your lion’s butt a bit to the right,” Lance said. With a sharp tilt of his controls, Keith moved to the left.
“Other right-” Lance said. Keith took a swift curve to left again, hovering to the side a bit, before turning back to match exactly where he knew Lance needed him.
“Come on! I’m giving the orders, you could try to like, I don’t know, follow them-”
“Don’t call me dear,” Keith said. He could feel his lion laughing at him, and Keith gripped the controls in a heavy fist.
Keith sucked in a long breath. “We’re in position,” Keith said, hoping the rest of the team got the message.
Their lions both stalled, and Keith thrummed his fingers against the dashboard.
“I need some variety in my life,” Lance said. “I can’t just call you buddy all the time, dude.”
“Dude’s fine,” Keith said. “Dude works. Keith works.”
“Dude’s also off the table, you- I can’t call you dude.”
Keith didn’t have the time for this. He closed his eyes, and let out a long breath.“You just did. Two seconds ago.”
Lance at least seemed to consider this. “I changed my mind,” Lance said. “I’m- I’m testing the waters.”
“Testing the waters,” Keith repeated.
The comm’s static reverberated through the lion, as Lance chewed on an answer. Keith thrummed on the lion’s dashboard again.
“You see, uh, darling-” Lance started, and Keith rammed his lion straight into Blue.
If Keith was going to tell Lance earlier, with the teasing, he just started to stubbornly hold off until anything about this made a lick of sense.
On their next actual mission together, they’d only brought Red down to the planet. While the place wasn’t a desert, it had sand sinks and cactus. Sure, the cactus spread across the sand like a forest, reaching to the sky like no cactus should have the right too, but other than that, desert was a close way to describe it.
It seemed, though, that the only way Keith could describe the place, was by how it wasn’t like a desert. The nights were too warm, the cactus hid too much of the sun, the valleys of sand seemed confining rather than endless. He scuffed his boot through the sand. That and the heat were the only things that made this place like a desert at all.
“I can’t believe you liked living in the desert,” Lance said next to him. He’d found an unprickly cactus to lay against, shaded against the hot sun above. “This is awful.”
Keith sighed. “I told you, this isn’t really a desert, it’s like a- a rainforest.”
“There’s no rain,” Lance said. “I bet there hasn’t been rain in like, centuries, since Allura took her nap-”
Before Lance could continue that inevitably long line of thought, Keith cut him off. “Then a forest… desert. A desert forest.”
“It’s still kind of a desert, then,” Lance said.
Keith, finally, sat down across from Lance, against a spikeless cactus.
“It’s a desert forest,” Keith said.
Lance picked at the cactus, scraping at it with his fingernail. The both of them had taken off their armor at their lions, vying to find the base for recon and return unscathed. Shiro had sent Keith, since he thought this was somehow remotely similar to the desert he was used to, and Lance, to make sure he played recon correctly.
“It’s different,” Keith said. “There’s… nothing’s open, here. And it doesn’t even cool down at night.”
“What, you didn’t have air conditioning in your shack?”
Keith rolled his eyes, “I had a fan.”
Lance huffed, and stretched his feet out. “I can’t believe you lived on your own in the desert,” Lance said. “That’s so- who does that? At like, seventeen years old, lives in a desert.”
When Keith didn’t dignify that with a response, Lance continued. “You had a shack all to yourself,” he said. “Did you ever, ” Lance paused. He looked at Keith, then waggled his eyebrows.
Keith bit the inside of his cheek. This wasn’t a line of conversation he wanted to venture on with Lance, not with Lance- throwing himself closer and closer to the truth Keith hadn’t shared. “I don’t know what you’re implying,” Keith said.
“Oh come on, you totally do, and you lived in a shack in the middle of nowhere. Did you invite anyone out there? Not even for- stuff,” Lance said. Keith didn’t respond, and Lance frowned. “It had to get lonely there.”
It did, but only in retrospect did it feel lonely. He’d liked it, when he was there- the expanse of sand without end, the dust in his hair as he took his speeder out for a run to town, the rolling of the wind around his shack in the worst of sandstorms. And other than feeling purposeless, he hadn’t really known he was missing anything.
“I guess,” Keith said. “I don’t miss that. Not as much as I thought I would.”
Lance looked at Keith, expression unreadable, then scuffed his boot against the ground.
“Huh,” Lance said.
The conversation seemed pleasantly dead, but Lance unburied it. “I can’t believe you wasted such a perfect opportunity,” he said. “Like- listen. I lived in a house with like, a lot of people, then the Garrison, I’ve never had a room of my own. And you just wasted a perfectly fine desert shack, with no one in it.”
Lance seemed to be directing this conversation, where he wanted it to go.
“You have your own room now,” Keith offered.
Keith wanted a flustered response, or another eyebrow waggle, but instead, Lance drew his knees closer to his chest.
“I guess,” said Lance.
It wasn’t the flirty nonsense Keith expected at all. The conversation couldn’t return to anything resembling what Keith expected, as soon after, the comms rang alive, and the two sprang up to follow Pidge’s new lead on their recon mission.
It only started to make sense, the countless missions after, where Lance would find a new alien to flirt and fail with.
It wasn’t that Lance hadn’t flirted with aliens before. No, he’d done plenty of that, on their journey throughout the galaxy. It was that he seemed much less focused on the alien, and much more focused on watching Keith’s reaction.
Keith only knew this, since he’d been watching Lance the whole time. It wasn’t his proudest moment, and he couldn’t decide who was behaving worse.
Lance placed a deft hand on the recent alien’s shoulder, laughing high and light. Then, when the alien closed his eyes to laugh, too, Lance searched back for Keith. Not finding Keith’s cover in the crowd, he only turned back to the alien when he tapped Lance on the shoulder.
Definitely Lance.
Keith sighed, glaring at anyone who passed by. He’d tried to make the first move, and Lance had shoved an unsocked ankle at him. If Lance wanted to play this- this game at him, he could play it as long as he wanted. Keith wasn’t about to give in to this nonsensical, beat-around-the-bush flirting.
It was only the two of them, on the balcony. Voltron’s recent escapades lead them to a diplomatic mission on a planet with rings of moons and asteroid dust. It made for a stunning sky, the setting sun illuminating the several moons in warm pinks and oranges. Close-by stars peaked through the dawn, as the pinks faded to purples.
For once, Lance hadn’t said anything. Keith found the balcony first, away from the noise and the chatter of the diplomatic party below. Lance had followed, steps loud and clambering along the stone floor, until he reached the balcony himself.
Keith spared a glance to Lance, and away from the setting sun, every now and then. Mostly, because he could feel Lance watching him, but whenever Keith checked Lance would pretend as if he wasn’t. He’d look back to the sunset, and look to Keith, as if he’d been the second one to stare.
Huffing, Keith thrummed his fingers on the railing and looked back off the balcony. Gesturing aimlessly to the sky, he said, “It’s a nice view.”
Lance stretched his arms forward, then settling them behind his head. “Yeah, it’s nice to share,” Lance said. He smiled, lopsided and quick, but the smile faded fast. “It’s kind of…”
“Kind of?”
“Romantic,” Lance said. He gave the same half distant smile, and stared back to the sunset. Keith waited a beat, and a beat or two more. Lance said nothing else, just sighed every now and then. He’d try to look over at Keith, find him still staring, and focus on new stars in the sky.
“Oh come on, you, you dense-” Keith started, but couldn’t think of the proper word. Instead, he grabbed the back of Lance’s neck, pulled him forward, and kissed him sideways on the mouth.
Lance had a faster reaction, than Keith would’ve anticipated. He didn’t even freeze up, just gripped Keith’s shoulder, and tilted his face to make it a proper kiss. Keith blinked, eyes open, and he was even smiling.
This wasn’t the look of some forlorn, tragic, one-sided romantic, who just realized he wasn’t a tragic, one-sided romantic. Not at all.
Pulling away, Keith kept his hand on the back of Lance’s neck, but gave him a good solid glare.
“You knew the whole time,” he said. “That it wasn’t- that I was-”
Lance’s smile turned lopsided, and Keith should’ve recognized the earlier one not as sad, but as dastardly. “Oh not- not knew knew, I kind of knew. I had a hunch,” Lance said. Keith could feel the warmth of his hands on his shoulders. “After the, uh, first few hints. I kind of knew.”
“You didn’t say anything,” Keith said. His voice cracked, and he let out a short, frustrated breath through his nose. “You acted so sad and- pining.”
At least, Lance looked embarrassed, eyes flirting away to the sunset. “I mean, I was still... pining.”
Not good enough. Keith moved the hand on Lance’s neck to the back of his head, fingers caught in Lance’s hair. “But you kept..”
“Egging you on?” Lance pipped in. His voice seemed strained, now, less gleefully chipper. Keith eyed him, suspicious, but he just seemed a bit pink.
“Yes!”
“I’m surprised it took you so long to fall for the bait,” Lance said. He seemed to be talking for the sake of talking, eyes darting from Keith, to the sunset, to his own two feet. Keith kept his gaze straight-on, which made Lance talk more. “I mean, I hoped- I knew- you’d fall for me in the end, but…”
Keith experimentally ran his thumb, slowly, up the base of Lance’s neck. Lance flushed fully, eyes now fully focused on his feet.
“I can’t believe you,” Keith said. Lance laughed, sheepish, and Keith cut it off with another kiss.