#and i said oh i don't know /gen but then glanced back to my computer monitor where i was reading about the pale on the disco elysium fanwiki

[elastica1995]

i hate showing my cards at work. i don't want you people to know i have a personality. but yesterday i accidentally talked too much about kim kitsuragi.

[bosstoaster]

Gosh, I didn't even get twenty-five percent down list. Anyway, here are two prompts. 15. “I made your favorite.” for Hunk and Lance, gen, please. Or 16. “It’s okay. I couldn’t sleep anyway.” for Shiro and Lance, also gen. Obviously you don't have to do either if you don't want to. Thank you for considering!

It’s the 1000 Followers Special!  Based on these prompts.  Prompts are now closed.  Don’t want to see all 35 of these?  Block ‘1000 Followers Special’.  Can’t read on mobile?  These will slowly be posted to AO3 starting in a few days as ‘Hold Up Half the Sky’.  A huge thank you to Xagrok for the beta’ing!

(Shockingly, I picked the Shiro one)

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Lance jolted, nearly losing his balance and falling over.  Impressive, given that he was sitting, but he’d been resting all of his weight on his braced arms.  Turning, Lance saw Shiro in the doorway, one hand resting on the frame.

Shit.  Caught.

Lance shrugged elaborately, going for casual.  “I’m restless still,” he replied airily.  “Figured I’d mess around with something until I was ready for bed.  Get around all that energy from our awesome fight.”

Stepping over, Shiro nodded, not looking down at where Lance sat.  “I see.”  He glanced over the projected star map in front of Lance, depicting a very specific solar system, then looked back down.

Lance tried not to squirm.  He didn’t really manage.

(Read More Below)

“I wanted to know how much information the Alteans had on Earth,” Lance replied, still trying for that flip tone.  “Figured it’d be a good way to spend ten minutes.”

Shiro let out a slow breath, then sat down next to him.  “Lance.  It’s okay.  I couldn’t sleep either.”  He flopped out, legs stretching out ahead of him and crossed at the ankle, weight braced on his palms.  It was no doubt consciously chosen, casual to get Lance to relax.

It was working.  Slowly, Lance unwound, arms dropping into his lap and shoulders slumping.  “Yeah.”  He took a deep breath, dropping his own put on expression and instead staring at the little projection of Earth, lit up in pale blues and teals.  “Ten thousand years wrong.”

Nodding, Shiro tilted his head.  “It’s strange, sometimes, to remember that Alteans have been gone for longer than there’s been known human civilization.”  It was a strange thought, and an angle Lance hadn’t been thinking about at the moment - he’d mostly been sad he was looking at an Earth that didn’t have his family.  “I wonder if we could update it.”

“Well, we can get Pidge’s laptop,” Lance replied.  “She might have some pictures of Earth.  Or there’s probably some movies that have it.”

Shiro hummed thoughtfully.  “Well, we could do that, but I was thinking something else.  One second.”  He pushed himself up to his feet, then dug through the storage compartments near the console.  Eventually, he pulled out a couple of the headbands they used for training with Voltron, and dropped one on Lance’s head.  As he sat, he pulled on one of his own.  

Lance straightened his, rather than the crooked lean that had covered one of his ears.  “You want to share memories of it?”

“Well, yes, but not with each other.  With the computer.”  Shiro closed his eyes, brow furrowed, and a flickering image over the projection of Earth.  It looked like a floating picture rather than a hologram, with cloud cover looping over the few moments, until the image stilled like a photograph.

Brows up, Lance leaned forward.  “You remember all those details like that?”

Shiro cracked a grin.  “Of Earth in general?  Not really.  Of this moment?  Yes.”  He glanced sideways at Lance, gaze warm.  “This is what Earth looked like when we left for Kerberos.”

“You-” Lance’s mouth fell open, and he stared at the still image in new appreciation.  “Oh.”

“But it’s only part of the picture,” Shiro replied softly.  “Help me out?”

Oh.  Closing his eyes, Lance concentrated on the maps he’d studied in the past.  He’d always liked sailing, and there had been a brief period where is dreams of being a pilot had been interrupted by his dreams of being a sailor (or, okay, a pirate, but not a mean one.  Just a cool one with a badass jacket).  He’d spent those few months obsessed with maps of Earth, plotting out his courses, and with the headband on it all came to mind easily.  

Using the detail from both Shiro’s memory and their own knowledge, the computer seemed to fill in the rest.  The clouds disappeared from Shiro’s side, replaced with complete geographic information of the area below.

It was a couple of years old still, but geographically speaking, that was nothing.  Even that ten thousand year gap wasn’t much for a planet: it had just been too much for Lance.

Now it was much better.

“Good job,” Shiro told him, voice soft, and Lance grinned back.

“It doesn’t get bigger than this, though,” he said.  “Maybe if we isolated the planet and pulled it into its own program, but this is as far as it zooms.  It still has the rest of the universe loaded up and that’s too much detail.”

Shiro hummed thoughtfully.  “Mind if I try something?”  When Lance nodded, Shiro scooted closer until their shoulders were pressed together, and then he waved his hand.  Everything but the nearer clusters of stars and the Earth dimmed, including the console and the lights on the wall.  Then he tilted his head, and a shadow cast over the lower half of Earth, while the cloud cover appeared again.  Then it shrunk slightly, looking farther away.

Lance bit off a protest, though his hands twitched in his lap.  He had no idea what Shiro was trying to accomplish from making Earth harder to see, but he trusted Shiro had a plan, anyway.

“Okay, that should do it.”  Shiro nodded contentedly.  Earth sat like a marble in front of them, details visible but tiny and hard to make out, especially when half of it was in darkness.  Lance glanced at Shiro in question.  “This is the best I can do for the view from the moon.”

From the-

Oh.

“Have you been, or is this from photographs?” Lance asked, because he needed to say something while he processed this.

Shiro leaned in closer, his shoulder heavy and warm against Lance’s.  “I was there.  Just for a supply run, it was barely two hours.  I had enough time to run out to the landing site, take a picture, then head back out.  It wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be.  Most of the place is filled with those awful tourist attractions for people who are way too rich but don’t want to commit to a Mars trip.  The light pollution is getting to be a problem, too.”  He seemed to start, catching himself mid rant, and he nudged their shoulders together.  “But the moon once felt impossibly far away too, and humanity figured out how to get there and back all the time.  So maybe it’s not so far away after all.”

Closing his eyes hard, Lance nodded.  “Maybe not,” he agreed, his voice coming out strangled.  Before he could do more than wince, Shiro’s arm came around his shoulders, and he leaned into the embrace.  Lance pressed his face into Shiro’s shoulder and grabbed at his shirt.  “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Shiro replied softly.

It was much easier to cry in the quiet and the dark.  That had originally been the reason Lance left.  He didn’t want to cry.  It felt gross and he wanted to be strong.

But with Shiro there it didn’t feel quite so bad.

What felt like a moment later, Lance blinked his eyes open to the artificial light of the daily cycle.  His head still felt stuffed up, but he was laying down on top of his bed, shoes and jacket off.  The console next to his bed blinked cheerfully at him, and Lance reached over to bat at it sleepily until it projected the message.

“They’d be proud of you,” it read, in Shiro’s choppy, ugly scrawl.  He must have written it out on the console when he put Lance to bed.  “If you want to do that again another night, just knock on my door.”

Then under that, in smaller writing and quotes, there was another line.  “Consider again that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s us. [...] on a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam.  -Carl Sagan”

Covering his eyes to keep them from tearing up again, Lance managed a trembling smile.  

“You dork.”

When he repeated that to Shiro later, he only got a smile.