#reasons to love lance | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

justaz · 9 months ago

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thinking about klance.

keith who is always left behind and abandoned, either voluntarily or not. keith who has trouble trusting people and talking to people and getting along with people and-…keith having trouble with people in general. keith who is used to fending for himself and not relying on anyone bc the two (2) times he’s done that, his parents and shiro (died, left, disappeared), didn’t end well. keith who despite finding shiro again couldn’t help the gap forming between them as his brain and heart insist that something will happen again and shiro being here isn’t permanent. keith being proven right in season 2/3 and being left alone again.

lance who is SO trusting that he comes across as a bit naive. lance who worked hard to get where he is, who studied and practiced day and night to be at the top of the class. lance who always fell short and just missed the cut and ended up a cargo pilot. lance who only excelled once keith was gone but was stuck living in his shadow. despite the fact that iverson was mean to keith, keith was his favorite student and iverson always held a grudge for lance taking his place and was downright cruel to him at times. lance who started a rivalry w keith in his head bc he was determined to prove that he could be better than keith. lance who was moved from blue to red paladin, following after keith yet again. lance who worked hard to prove that he was worthy of being red paladin but always failing bc he was never keith, he was never good enough.

klance who found what they lacked in each other. lance who was there for keith when it seemed like the universe was crumbling down around him. lance who stood by keith’s side and told him what he needed to hear, supporting him being leader and helping lead the team together. keith seeing lance as an equal and relying on him the way lance relied on him. keith who was loved and supported by someone who never left, lance who was seen for who he was and who never doubted him or his place on the team. klance who turned on each other.

keith who turned into what he hated and leaving lance behind. lance who saw keith as weak and selfish for leaving him the team behind. keith who came back to a lance who was so angry and upset, but who never left his side bc lance was just Like That. lance who was so hurt and upset, who said cruel things in the vacuum of space, but keith never saw him as less for it, who never got angry enough to hurt lance back.

at the end of everything, lance searching for keith to sit at his side as they watched the sunset bc lance will always be at keith’s side. keith who told lance how relieved he was and hopeful bc he knows what lance is capable of and how much he needs him. klance being what the other needs, holding each other’s heart in their hands but never taking the opportunities to crush each other. lance who never left keith behind, keith who never saw lance as less despite the vitriol he spat at times.

#soulmates #idk if i articulated my thought well enough #but it is what it is #i just wanted to get this down #they are exactly what the other needs #they could be each others downfall but they love each other too much to do so #lance who could prove to keith that his mind is right - that keith is doomed to be alone. that everyone will always leave him.#keith who could prove to lance that his mind is right - that lance will NEVER be good enough for anyone. that hes unworthy of veneration #klance who could utterly destroy one another and have enough reason to but never doing so #theyre on like a dangerous precipace but their love for one another is enough to keep them from falling to their doom #does this make them two sides of the same coin? kinda right?#lance mcclain #keith kogane #klance #vld #voltron #voltron legendary defender #chracter analysis #does this make sense #angst #klangst #but also not #but also yes #keith angst #lance angst

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autisticlancemcclain · 1 year ago

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The tears are the worst fucking part.

They always are. They come out when she’s angry or hurt and embarrassed, and they make her feel like a little girl, which only ever makes her feel worse. It sucks to feel like you can’t hold your ground in an argument because your eyes are burning and trails of tears are blazing hot down your cheeks.

But she didn’t even get the chance to argue.

“We’re not punishing you,” Shiro had said gently, guilt visibly lining his features as her first tear fell, which only made her snarl at him. “But your bond to your element could use some strengthening, Katie. It won’t take too long, I’m sure of it.”

Just a couple vargas, he has promised her. Gather the list of ingredients for the next few meals, and see how the exposure to a natural environment makes you feel, map out your relationship with your lion. Easy peasy.

Easy for everyone else to say. The rest of them seemed to bond with their lions like it was fuckin’ easy, snapping up their elemental control like it was second nature. Hunk was as solid as the rocks and earth he represented, and it showed in the way he was and the way he acted. Shiro felt like the awesome and incredible presence of the sky to everyone he met. Keith was the most fiery person she had ever met, probably. He acted like he was powered by a raging inferno, always moving, always flickering. Lance was —

Well. Lance was water, simple as that. Everything he did was as playful and stubborn as a running river. Even his expressions have the same practiced fluidity of them, like he grew up imitating the tide.

She supposes he did. She supposes it makes sense, that he is the one sent with her, to help guide her along, so to speak.

It still kind of stings.

“Could you stop fucking humming,” she snaps, glaring at her teammate.

He doesn’t even glance at her. “No.”

She rolls her eyes, tears making her breaths stutter, and wipes some of the wetness off her cheeks. It doesn’t really work, and mostly just smears it around, but she’s so bitter that she’s kind of beyond caring.

She hates this. She hates this stupid mission, she hates this stupid forest, she hates her stupid element, she hates that Lance will not stop fucking prancing around, and most of all she hates that she can’t figure this shit out on her own.

She hates that she has to be babied.

“Oh, hey, these are the sugarplums for the not-lamb stew.” Lance stops abruptly, gentle hand on her arm to stop her, too. She resists the urge to yank it away, desperately reminding herself that it’s not Lance’s fault she’s so angry, not his fault that humiliation burns through her, not his fault that she can’t get her shit together. She’s already snapped at him once — more than once, if she’s being honest — and he’s gracefully ignored it. If she keeps pushing, he’ll snap right back, and then they’ll both be miserable.

Plus, she doesn’t actually like snapping at Lance. He doesn’t deserve her lashing out, he’s only trying to help.

“You sure?”

Pidge looks at the small purple fruits , feeling a little helpless. She has no idea how Lance has distinguished them from the various other fruits and seeds hanging from the hundreds of other trees. She has no idea how the hell she’s supposed to memorize all of this garbage. How something as frustrating and unique and random as nature is supposed to be her element, the one thing that represents her, deep to her core.

It’s not fair.

“Yep!” Lance chirps. He crouches down, starting to pull at his laces. “The bark has more linear pattern structures, see? And the leaves are smooth, not serrated, and much darker than any other fruit trees we’ve passed. And it smells like plum jam.” To her great confusion, he pulls off his shoes as socks as he explains, only standing once his bare feet are on the backed earth and moss of the forest floor.

“You’re going to get a sharp rock to the foot,” she says, unsure as to why he’s decided to ditch his shoes in the places he probably needs them most.

He snorts, kicking his shoes to the side and turning to face her, making obnoxious kissy faces and poking at her relentlessly.

“Aw, is Pidgey worried for my health and well-being?”

She scowls, shoving him away. “Nevermind. I hope you get tetanus and lose your whole leg.”

Unfortunately, her threat only makes him grin wider. He blows her one last dramatized kiss before turning to the large tree, wrapping his sweater around the trunk, and using it to scurry up the tree almost faster than she can register. By the time it occurs to her to question him, he’s already ten feet in the air, shifting his weight to a steady enough branch.

“What the hell are you doing?” she yells.

Lance looks back down at her, raising an eyebrow. “…Getting…fruit…?”

“There’s fruit down here!” She gestures to the dozens and dozens of fallen but perfectly good plums on the ground, many of which she’s already scooped up and put in the bag Hunk gave her. “All the fruit-bearing branches are like thirty feet in the air, and the branches are way too thin! It’s too risky!”

“Well, Pidgeon,” he says, hooking his knees around a branch to hang upside down, shooting her a wink and a pair of finger guns, “that’s the fun part!”

Before she can yell at him again to get the hell back down, he’s flipped back upright, scurrying up rapidly thinning branches to reach the higher, juicier fruit.

Pidge heart pounds.

“Lance, get down here!” Her voice is reedy with panic, but he ignores her. “You’re going to get hurt, you colossal fucking dumbass!”

But no matter how loudly she cusses him out, he keeps climbing, barely even pausing to make sure a branch can hold his weight before using it to get higher. He climbs as easily as he walks, as easily as he shoots — like it’s second nature. Despite his ease, Pidge can fucking use her brain and see that as scrawny as Lance is, the branches are scrawnier, and he is going to fall and die and Pidge is going to have to watch it happen.

Just as she’s about to call backup, Lance forty feet in the fucking air and without even the distant thought of a rope, Lance ties his hoodie — filled with fruit — to his back, stands on a branch, and fucking leaps the hell off.

Pidge screams at the top of her lungs.

But instead of falling to his death, Lance lands on a branch jutting out from a neighbouring tree, maybe five feet below the branch he leapt from.

Pidge’s yell catches in her throat.

He’s fine.

He continues like that for the ten seconds it takes for him to make his way down, hopping from branch to branch like a chickadee, smiling so wide his brown eyes are nearly creased shut. He looks elated; the happiest she’s seen him in ages.

Slowly, some of her fear starts to fade.

“You fucking scared me,” she says harshly when his feet are back on the floor. Her heart is still galloping.

Lance shrugs. “I told you I’d be fine.”

“No, you told me risks were more fun, then you jumped down a fucking tree.” She accepts the fruits he hands her, replacing the less appetizing ones she already had in her bag. “Taller than your lion.”

“Yeah, because I’ve done it before.” He places the last sugarplum in the bag and then ties it shut, securing it to his back and then throwing an arm over Pidge’s shoulders. He starts walking in a random direction, and Pidge struggles to keep up with his wide strides.

“…Oh.” She supposes that makes sense. He looked comfortable as he climbed.

They walk for the next several minutes in silence. Pidge notices that the tear tracks on her face have dried, and the terror she felt for Lance earlier has replaced her anger, her embarrassment.

She wonders if that was the point.

“Hey, look at that.” He points to a small, budding yellow flower dotting the base of a tree. “That’s hairflower. They grow at the bases of confler trees, because the confler trees always host sodiko birds, which are their biggest pollinators. Cool, huh?”

“How do you know all this stuff?” she blurts, barely letting him finish his sentence. Some of her earlier frustration bleeds into her voice, but luckily it doesn’t sound too accusatory. “I don’t — we’re not even on Earth, but somehow you recognise all the random wildlife. Nature is supposed to be my element. I don’t — I don’t know why I’m struggling so bad when you have it so easy.”

Lance trips over his feet, slightly, stumbling. He removes his arm from her shoulders, stuffing his hands in his pockets. His shoulders hike up somewhere near his ears, hunching his posture.

Guilt churns in her stomach.

“Lance, I didn’t mean —”

Did she?

What did she mean?

“I’m not dumb,” he says quietly.

She swallows. “I know.”

“It’s — I’m not good at the classroom shit. I have to try really hard to understand what a textbook is telling me, and I never understand instructions that aren’t explained to me three times in four different ways. I can’t even begin to understand all the fancy shmancy engineer stuff you and Hunk do. I will not pretend to understand how Altean alchemy and magic works.” He looks at her finally, and hurt clouds his eyes, but his voice is steady, firm. Practiced even, like it’s not the first time he’s had to explain this. “But I’m not dumb.”

“I know,” Pidge repeats, quieter. She doesn’t know how to take back her words, to say them better. How to fix how she feels, honestly. Because it was a lie, her backtracking — she did mean what she said. It was a mean thing to say, a mean thing to think and believe, and she had allowed herself to think it, to feel it, to say it and believe it.

That’s not fair to Lance. That’s not fair to her friend.

It isn’t even true.

“I know,” she repeats again, firmer this time. “I’m sorry. I forgot. But I know you’re not dumb.”

He hesitates for a second, but then nods, accepting her apology. He puts his arm back around her shoulder.

“I’ve always been better at learning things I can do, physically, or things that I can see have a purpose. Like dance, or shooting, or learning the names of cool things like plants and rocks. I’ve always been good with names and faces. And piloting, too, I hope I’m good at that.”

She hates the doubt there, and hates more that she might be part of the reason. “You are. Good at piloting, I mean.”

He grins at her. “Thanks. You are too, you know. Even though all this element shit is a learning curve.”

She snorts despite herself. “Not to you. You’re the living embodiment of water, basically, you naiad.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I spend time in it. I go to the pool, like, every day. I don’t even play mermaids all the time. I do boring meditative shit, because apparently that’s what Blue needs.”

She looks at him in shock. She hadn’t considered that anyone other than Shiro really meditated, or that anyone else had to work towards working with their elements. Especially not Lance. “Really?”

He nods excitedly. “Yeah, man! I thought I was good, but when Hunk unlocked his earth weapon thingie, I asked Blue what was up and she said I just needed more practice letting elemental quintessence flow through me, whatever the hell that means. Apparently it’s easy to summon when you’re panicked, but if you want to do it on a more regular basis you have to learn how to recognise it, so you can call it.”

That makes sense, she supposes. But she still feels like she’s missing something.

“How the hell am I supposed to frolic around a forest between missions? There’s not exactly one in the castle.”

Lance shrugs. “I don’t know, genius. You figured out how to turn a magical lion invisible, can’t you puzzle out how to grow a garden in space or something? Aren’t you a science nerd?”

Pidge stills.

Oh, duh.

It’s such a simple solution — plant a garden. She used to have a garden, back home, that she and her mom worked on regularly. Her mom would show her how she genetically modified plant seeds, and then they’d monitor the new plants and plant traits together.

Suddenly she understands why Green is the lion of curiosity and science as well as nature — the two are linked, everywhere, even in her. She belongs in the forest as much as she belongs in the workshop.

She can do so many weirdo experiments. Isn’t that what science is, basically?

“I owe you one,” she tells Lance, walking again beside him.

He chuckles, adjusting the bag of fruit on his shoulder and nudging her with his elbow. “You owe me twenty. Now, come on, we have lots more stuff to gather. I’ll show you how to identify it.”

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