#this is the first voltron I've written I'm still learning the ropes hello it's 7.5k

[ravenvsfox]

Prompt: When they get to earth, lance wants to stay.

You were the first in line, so you get prompt numero uno!!

Outside the cabin of the shuttle, pebble stars are tossed out into the dense, black lake of open space, so dark that Lance’s eyes start teasing out imaginary colours. It’s always so still out in the yawning nothingness. If he didn’t know how a bucking shuttle felt beneath him it might be hard to tell that they were moving at all.

Inside, the glow of tech is cool and purple, and if he squints at the light and not the Altean characters, its almost like the Garrison simulators, or the speedometer of the only car on the road at night.

Pidge is punching in coordinates next to him, and she twists her fingers over the frame of her glasses like she’s trying to make them zoom. For all he knows, she might have engineered binoculars into her glasses just like she tucks lifts into her shoes, making modifications to herself just like she does to everything else she can get her hands on.

He squirms, digging his toes down into the unyielding bottom of his boots, wanting to feel something real and movable, something not so claustrophobic. His hands shake on the controls, and he clenches his fists until they can’t.

They’d left the lions on the nearest neutral planet, defences up, Romelle and Krolia at a nearby base. Coran was on patrol duty, winding between their massive paws and craning his neck to speak earnestly up at them. It’s comforting to think of the lions as as they left them, a circle of statues and their sentinel.

It’s the weirdest thing, but sometimes Lance thinks that the way the lions talk to him is the way Gods talk to prophets, and everyone else in the cosmos just has to trust his blind, bruising faith.

He pushes a hand into his hair and just holds it there, steering left-handed and feeling his pulse push anxiously against his fingers.

“Uh oh, are we getting introspective?”

Lance’s hand jerks back to the controls. “Oh—uh. Sorry. We’re just,” he taps their trajectory on the luminous map between them. “So close.” He hadn’t realized how close until he’d checked, but his chest had been getting more and more crowded, like all of Earth’s radio waves and clutter was close enough to hear.

“Less than a light-year,” Pidge agrees quietly. The look in her eyes is so terribly far from home. The part of her that riffled through the desks of authorities and cut all her hair off is still with her brother in the guts of the resistance.

“Then why doesn’t it feel like we’re going home, huh?” Lance asks, smiling through the weirdness in his head. “Where’s the fanfare? Where’s the galaxy-wide fireworks display?” Pidge smiles tightly back at him.

“I didn’t think we’d get to go home until our mission was done, and, well, I don’t know. Maybe we don’t deserve all of that yet.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Lance corrects. The shaking’s only getting worse. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen when they touch down and it’s making his hair stand on end and his teeth chatter. “I’ve deserved it since day one.”

“Oh yeah?” she says, laughing. “All that winking at instructors and seeing how many peanut butter m&m’s you can fit in your mouth paying off for you?”

“Only in every way possible,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention but I’m a galactic superstar. Seriously.”

“Seriously,” Pidge echoes. They lapse into silence, and Lance’s body kicks up a fight when he sees the luminescent blue shape of the Earth drifting into view like a tossed frisbee.

“Jesus,” he breathes. He eases up on the speed, and they spend a suspended minute floating, watching, breathless. “Is she beautiful or what?”

“Usually I don’t trust your taste, but this time—“ she chokes up suddenly, surprising herself, and she tries to shield her face from view. Lance crows at her, his own vision blurring.

“Pidgey,” he says joyfully “We’re home.”

“Shut up.”

“Pidge,” he croons. She looks at him, eyes bright and wet, and neither of them can keep from grinning.

“We were born right down there,” Lance informs her. “The doctors wept with joy when they saw me.”

“They probably didn’t think your big head was gonna come out.”

Lance ignores her, feeling the jitters get brighter, harder to fight. “One moon, seven seas. It rains the kind of water that’s safe to drink. There’s barbecue pizza down there, Pidge.”

“I know,” she says.

“I can’t believe this. My mom’s right there.”

They’re still knee-deep in a revolution. They’ve been hurtling through space at warp speed in close quarters for weeks, and the only home they’ve ever known out in the black was blasted out of the sky, but the idea of setting foot on Earth without crawling into his mother’s arms is unthinkable.

The shuttle comms crackle, and Hunk’s voice comes through, “you guys seeing this?”

“Oh yeah,” Lance says. “You feelin’ as misty as we are, buddy?”

“He’s been crying since we passed pluto,” Keith says flatly.

“Oh yeah, that was an emotional gut-punch,” Hunk says.

“Paladins,” Allura interrupts smoothly, “I trust you’re happy to be home. I know it might be hard to believe considering my situation, but I’m happy for you as well. Pidge, can you set a course for where your father has taken those schematics? It’s of the utmost importance that we not waste any time.”

His heart sinks. “Funny, that feels like all we’ve been doing. A lot of autopilot and Altean uno and drinking whatever was in that funky bottle under the console.”

“Lance,” Allura says disapprovingly. The empty air hums and someone breathes out quickly.

“Princess, you’re not saying that we won’t be able to visit our homes, are you? Our families?” Hunk asks.

“I wish you could,” she says, sighing. “But we’re still fighting a war. I don’t think it’s practical—or safe—“

“No,” Lance says, aborted. “I mean—no.”

“Lance,” Keith says quietly.

“I’m not talking to you,” Lance seethes. “Pidge, put in the coordinates 23° 8′ 22″ N, 81° 17′ 10″ W, will you? I’ve got a couple of errands to run.”

“We’re not splitting up,” Allura says firmly. “I’m so sorry Lance, but the team is more important than—“

“Than my family?” he says, disbelieving. “Sorry, no, absolutely not, agree to disagree. I know that I’m supposed to save the universe or whatever, but I promised my mom—“ he chews his lip savagely, watching the whole world rush up to meet them and feeling helpless want thrash in his stomach. “I won’t be any help at the Holt’s. No one needs a guy with a rifle when you’re trying to put together a whole new teladuv, right? You don’t need me.”

“Yes we do,” Shiro says firmly, and Lance closes his eyes, fleeting. He’s having trouble focusing with his dearest wish and his nightmare both grabbing for a half of his brain.

“How about I go with Lance to Cuba and keep things on schedule,” Hunk offers. “I’d love to see his mom again. She always brings us empanadas.”

“We need your brain,” Shiro says regretfully. “We can’t do anything without your eyes on this.”

There’s a long silence, and Lance eases the thrusters to a more manageable intensity, muscle memory.

“I’ll go,” Keith says finally.

“What?” Lance asks at the same time that Allura says “pardon me?”

“I’ll go,” he repeats, stronger this time. “I’m also a fighter, not a scientist. I don’t have a home to go to, but I can take Lance.”

Lance flushes, not really understanding why. The way Keith said “also a fighter” like they’re cut from the same reversible cloth, red and blue. Sometimes the hot and cold of the two of them gives him whiplash.

“Is that… I mean, Lance,” Allura addresses him directly. He wishes he could see her expression, the wide eyes, the forehead that never really creases no matter how elastic her reactions are. “Is that what you want?”

He doesn’t even care that it’s Keith. He’s staring down the barrel of a mission where he’s fixed permanently in the background, tethered to the earth an eight-hour plane ride from the only place he’s ever felt consistently needed. “Definitely. Keith and I can stay in touch with you guys, and we basically have a super fast private jet if you need us.”

“Sorry, did you just say ‘Keith and I’ without bursting into flames?” Pidge asks, and Lance gives her a sidelong look.

“Right now, Keith is the only one of you who isn’t on my shit list. If Cubans are away from their families for too long, they drop dead. Do you want me to die?”

“Kind of a little at all times,” Pidge says, and he shoves her so hard that she would topple if it weren’t for the harness holding her to her seat.

“Alright,” Allura says definitively. “We’ll touch base at the Holt’s, but really… if I saw Altea again, no one could dream of keeping me from it.”

“Thank you princess,” Lance says gratefully, his chest aching, sweat cooling on his upper lip, hands finally still. “You won’t even notice I’m gone.”

______

Careening through the atmosphere is so surreal that Lance holds his breath all the way down. The clouds swarm the windows like eager fans, and it’s better than any welcoming procession he could have dreamt up. When they sink through the last of the low-slung wisps of water vapour, the burst of smoke-blue sky and human-made buildings stretched out below makes his steering stutter. Pidge laughs brightly at him.

They touch down on earth with the sunset crying out to be noticed, submerging everything in easygoing orange light.

The first step he takes on Earth in a year, and he falls to his knees.

His suit crunches against the dirt, and he takes his gloves off so that he can fist the grass and muck and smell the tang of it in the air. The oxygen is perfectly tuned for his lungs, and even though his body is off-kilter in the gravity, the ache matches the one inside of him. The breeze ruffles his hair, and he feels perfectly understood.

“You gonna kiss it, too?”

He looks up and sees Keith towering over him, looking imposing and amused at once. The rest of the team is staggered behind him, stretching their legs out and moving crates of supplies.

“That’s between me and her,” he sniffs.

Keith rolls his eyes. “Oh, because even the Earth is a girl to you, right?”

“Ge,” Lance says.

Keith blinks. “Uhh…”

“As in, the goddess?” Keith shakes his head. “Man, the amount of time we spend up between constellations and you don’t even know your mythology? She’s Earth? Mother of the Titans? Whatever dude, Ge is a hot goddess and I missed her sweet curves.”

Keith raises an eyebrow. Lance spreads his hand in the dirt and watches the way little buds of weeds and grass fold under his fingers.

“We haven’t even been here five full minutes and you’re already being gross,” Pidge calls.

“This is the prime time to be gross,” Lance calls. “Let me have my sloppy reunion, please and thank you.” His armour sighs as he eases himself down fully onto the Holt’s front lawn, heavy with gravity. He hears a rustle and looks up to find Keith sitting cross-legged a few feet away. He’s tearing out handfuls of grass with both hands, gaze tangled up in something Lance doesn’t think he’d be able to see even if he looked.

Lance watches him over one of his outstretched arms, but Keith catches him.

“What?” he asks.

“Two years,” Lance murmurs, and Keith’s face shifts dramatically. “That’s a long time away from home.”

“I haven’t been back to Earth in three years,” Keith corrects, annoyingly patient, completely obtuse.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Keith, Lance,” Allura calls. Her hair is pulled back tightly, and she’s still wearing her flight suit. “Stay for a briefing, and then choose whichever shuttle you wish. Pidge assures me that there are supplies inside, and an extra—what was it? cellular phone? If you don’t want to wear your helmets for continuous correspondence, you can instantly message us from this device.”

Lance grins. “Yeah, I’m familiar. Can’t say the same for Keithy boy here. Body of a buff twenty year old, mind of a confused old man.”

“I know what a cellphone is,” Keith says impatiently.

“Good,” Allura says quickly, before they can devolve into bickering. “Use it. Stay safe, stay smart. Do not forget why we’re here.”

“I think the background threat of annihilation should keep us on our toes,” Lance assures her, and Keith snorts. Lance smiles slyly at him.

The briefing is swift and painless.

Watching Pidge reunite with her parents is bittersweet, and he keeps imagining the way his own mother is going to swear and slap him and kiss him. He’ll apologize over and over to her for how he’s made her worry and how he’s going to make her worry. 

He’ll call his abuelita, surprise Marco and Luis in their shared bedroom by doing the secret knock on the doorframe, and bring Veronica the shard of sea glass he found on a planet called Luvesh (the sea was literally made of glass, and when you walked out onto its glittering surface, it spidered like ice. He bent down and picked a piece like a flower).

After the initial business, they change into street clothes and eat homemade lasagna, and Lance almost cries when the tang of tomato and basil hits his tongue. He winds the perfect stretch of real cheese around his fork and raises it in toast: to the only planet that does pasta right.

He and Keith carry fresh supplies between them in a cleaned out cooler, and they climb up into the cockpit of the smallest, fastest shuttle. They squabble briefly about who’s going to pilot until he reminds Keith that he’s the only one who knows where they’re going. 

They wave goodbye to their team, and cruise somewhere between commercial jet speed and the full thrust of an alien vessel, watching the clusters of cities below slither away, like a sheet being continuously pulled out from under them.

_______

The sun is nearly below the horizon in Varadero, but Lance knows every gnarl in every road and every stupid resort, and he knows the way everything intersects at his family home, the beating heart of it all.

Gliding low over the jewel-blue stretch of the ocean is so overwhelming that he’s worked himself up halfway to tears before he remembers that Keith’s with him, that Keith’s seeing the best place in the world for the first time while it’s drooping to sleep for the night.

He starts pointing things out, identifying distant shapes with even more distant memories attached to them. 

That’s the street market where I tried to haggle a boombox down to three dollars. Those are the beaches that the tourists swarm during the day. Most of them are too scared to swim in the ocean at night, so that’s when we always used to go. Somewhere in that block is the gelato place where I broke my tooth on a waffle cone. 

That’s the little theatre where Veronica used to dance. I used to go to all her practices, and I said it was to look at the pretty girls, but it was also to watch my sister out-dance everyone else on stage. We had chickens when I was nine, and we bought them at that farm down there, the one with the hook-shaped driveway? I was obsessed with Celia Cruz and Britney Spears so we called one of the chickens Miss Celia and one of them Brit.

It’s starting to hurt to talk about it. Everything out of his dreams is tangible again, and even though it’s hugged by darkness and silky quiet — not raucous and sunny like it always is in his memories — it’s so close that voltron seems like the dream.

“I didn’t know you could be this genuine for this long,” Keith says honestly, and Lance doesn’t look at him.

“You haven’t really met me until you’ve met me here,” Lance says slowly.

“Well…” Keith starts awkwardly. “Nice to meet you?”

He does look at him this time, incredulous, and when he smiles, so does Keith.

______

As soon as they step foot on his property, he starts crying for real. He’s been tightrope walking over an absence so large that he wouldn’t even look at it. Every time he overcompensated for his grief and did something stupid like fell in love with a complete stranger, he felt like he was lurching over that chasm, trying to find his balance.

It’s impossible to describe the feeling of reaching down to graze your knuckles against the sand outside your favourite place in the world, and feeling the heat from the day baked into it, spotting little footprints tracked up to the rickety staircase.

Keith walks a stride and a half behind him, quiet, pretending he can’t hear the sounds that Lance is making out of the deepest place in his chest.

“Keith, you can’t look at me right now.”

“Why not?”

“Because vulnerability is ugly.” He brushes his fingers over where his own name is written on the mailbox. His bike is propped up against the deck. Luis is probably using it, the bastard.

“I don’t think it’s ugly,” Keith whispers.

He doesn’t know what to say, so he pretends he didn’t hear. He can hear the waves unrolling on the shore like messy, misshapen carpets, the hiss of them wrapping themselves back into the surf. The air has that salt and citrus smell that lived in all his clothes before they were sterilized by months in the gasping, impersonal corners of space.

He walks up the front stoop, and he had really imagined this in the daytime, with the sun at his back, instead of the moonlight and Keith, both of them lonely but constant.

The door is unlocked, and he lets himself in, not breathing.

“Should I wait outside?” Keith asks, and it’s uncharacteristic of him to be so delicate about something.

“I need this,” Lance says quickly, grabbing Keith’s wrist impulsively. “I want— I need someone to back me up if… if they don’t believe me.”

Keith’s brow is an entire storm, thunderclouds and twisters of confusion and fear and discomfort, but his fingers curl to touch the hand Lance has around his wrist, and he nods.

The little clock on their front table ticks merrily, and there are lanyards strewn over the side of the little ceramic meant for keys, messy like his mom hates. His own face is ghostly in the Garrison cadet portraits lining the hallway, and he can see Keith peering at them out of the corner of his eye.

He reaches the place where the hall opens up into the living room, and stops. His mom is curled up in the recliner, asleep, and the home phone is clutched in her hand. He holds his own face in his hands, shoulders shaking, and all the gravity on his head feels like way too much. His knees give out, and Keith steadies him at the last second.

“I really don’t know if I should be here,” he hisses. His arm is around Lance’s waist, and there’s a weird dissonance to it, like he never left home or the castle of lions, or he’s not sure that they’re really that different. 

He feels weirdly like Keith belongs here, that he’s still an arm and Lance is still a leg on one cohesive person, and they could move giants together.

“Then who would’ve caught me just now?” Lance counters. His gaze finds his mom again, another kind of gravity, and he creeps closer, seeing the oven clock and the drawn blinds and feeling familiarity so acute that it’s like deja vu.

He stands over his mother, hand to his lips, ribcage quaking, and reaches down to shake her awake.

“Mamá,” he says hoarsely.

She doesn’t wake up immediately, and the longer he looks down into her lovely, worried face, the more his own face crumples. He can’t help the wounded sound that leaves the back of his throat, and she wakes at the noise, her face dazed and concerned.

“Mijo, what’s wrong?” she asks, her hand halfway up to his face before it hitches and drops.

There’s a beat of disbelieving silence, and then she surges upright, pulling the string on the lamp and squinting hopefully through the flood of light. When her eyes find Lance again, she gives this wavering gasp, her lower lip sucking inwards like it does right before you start sobbing.

“Lance?” She holds him by both his arms, shaking him, and he sinks through her grip to his knees. “Oh darling. My baby,” she says in Spanish. “How could you?”

“I’m sorry mamá,” Lance says, head bowed. “I’m so sorry.” She pulls his face up and smooths both thumbs across his brow.

“Don’t be sorry, mijo, just tell me where you’ve been. We’ve been looking for you. Searching the whole desert. All the stupid Garrison would tell us is that you were missing, presumed—“ she cuts herself off and shakes her head, jaw tight.

“I mean, you’re not going to believe this, mom.”

“My ghost son is sitting before me,” she says, hands in his hair, “more beautiful than ever. I dare you to shock me.”

Lance nods quickly, looking down at his own hands, trying to find a loose thread that will unravel a year’s worth of stories. “There’s… there’s a war.”

“There are many wars,” she replies gently. “Always.”

“No, there’s—do you remember the Kerberos mission, the crew that went missing?”

“It was in the news,” she says distractedly, combing fingers through his choppy bangs. “The boy you like, right? Takashi?”

“Yes,” Lance says, swallowing, hyper-aware of Keith in the doorway. “They didn’t die, they got caught up in a—in a war.”

“I don’t understand.” She’s looking at him with such open concern, and he wishes desperately that he could make thing simpler.

“Your son and I are soldiers,” Keith says from the doorway, and she startles hard, holding a hand to her chest and cursing in Spanish.

“Who—“

“Keith Kogane, former Garrison pilot, current paladin of Voltron.” He frowns. “I think.”

“He’s a friend,” Lance says simply.

“And?”

“And,” he takes a deep breath. “We’ve been fighting pretty much an evil empire in space, and we each pilot these sort of ancient, um, sentient cats, with the help of this princess we found in cryogenic stasis—“

“Ay, lance. Slow down, start again.”

“Mamá,” he says, exasperated.

“You should probably explain again,” Keith says helpfully.

“Thanks Keith,” he says hotly. “So we’ve been fighting in an intergalactic war, right? I’m sort of the unofficial red pilot, and my bayard is a rifle but one time it was kind of a sword which was—“

“Lance,” she interrupts, flicking the back of his head.

“Okay, okay, lo siento, I’ll go slow.”

It takes a long time to lay everything out properly, but his mom is never apprehensive or lost, she just wants to hear the facts, concisely, from different angles, until she finds some sort of solution. She’s always been good at peeling fact from fiction and plucking compromise out of thin air.

At some point, Keith gravitates over to the loveseat and makes himself comfortable, knife glinting from the holster around his thigh so noticeably that his mother purses her lips.

Sometime after midnight, Luis drifts down the stairs wearing boxers and a bathrobe, and when he sees Lance he trips down to the main floor and picks him up off the floor into a crushing hug. They stumble in an awkward square, shaking with euphoric laughter that might as well be crying, until Lance pokes him hard in the side, and they collapse apart, grinning.

Marco must hear the ruckus because he comes skittering down the stairs a minute later, already crying, and he tucks his head in Lance’s shoulder when he hugs him. By the time Veronica comes upstairs, her hair in a long loose braid and her face nearly unrecognizably gaunt, Lance can’t even speak. He nods jerkily and opens his arms, but she shoves him in the chest.

“Nothing to say, little brother?”

“Veronica,” their mother warns.

“They said you were dead,” she hisses.

“They also said I had an attitude problem, which we both know can’t be true,” he jokes. She shakes her head until a tear runs down her cheek and she has to rub it away.

“You are a problem child. I told mamá to stop having children after me, and if she’d listened we could’ve avoided so much mess.”

“But who would’ve gone to see you dance?” and he means it as a joke, but the idea of no one seeing her twisting like a rose towards the sun makes his throat close up.

She holds him by the neck, and then by the back of the head. “Bobo,” she scolds. “Don’t do that again.” She hugs him so carefully, and he screws his eyes shut, thinking about picking up to leave again, sailing back up into the stars and never coming back.

He’d forgotten what it felt like to be warm and safe and missed.

“I should probably leave you to it,” Keith says, rising abruptly, looking so uncomfortable that Lance feels a surge of fondness like flash rain, quick, heavy, and gone.

“No,” his mother informs him, getting to her feet and squeezing Lance’s face tenderly on her way by. “You brought my son home. I’m making you something to eat.”

_______

No one every warned him how intimate it would be to show someone your childhood bedroom. It’s the same feeling you get when you dig up a time capsule, uncomfortable awareness of what you thought was crucial when you were a whole different version of yourself.

Everything that he mentioned in passing in the trenches of the war is suddenly up close, scrutable, and Keith is taking it in like a museum patron, skirting the edge of the old messes, leaning politely in to look at portraits of friends and family.

“You have a picture of me in your room,” Keith points out, and Lance’s shoulders tense until he sees what he’s gesturing towards.

“A class photo, Keith. It’s not exactly a shrine.” He spreads out on the blue plaid bedspread and holds his hands to the pills of the fabric, worn exactly how he remembers.

Keith looks guilty. “No, I know, I just. I don’t know. It’s kind of… nice. To think that I’m this tiny part of your room. It’s stupid.” Lance looks at him blankly. “Forget it,” Keith says forcefully, crossing his arms and scowling.

Lance shrugs, uncomfortable. There are polaroids of him slung between Hunk and Pidge, lopsided from the extreme difference in the heights of their shoulders. He has peace thrown up around their shoulders, and he’s laughing.

He has a cutout about the Kerberos mission on his desk, and the Shiro with dark hair and young eyes stares up at the ceiling. He has the X-Files “I want to Believe’ poster above his bead, which covers Allura and Coran, so the only person who doesn’t really have a spot is Keith. Except one tiny pointed chin and bad haircut in a sea of young, pouty faces.

“Hey,” he says softly. He scoops his polaroid camera off of the desk and fiddles with the buttons, ears burning, heart turning over with the aching slowness of the wounded. “Come here.”

______

He gets up when the first fingers of sun peel back the horizon, red and orange like fire. He leaves Keith in his bed, his chest bare and his face young and pink in the sunrise. He still doesn’t understand anything.

He meets his mother in the kitchen, and she hold him an arm’s length away from her body to trace his features with her fingers. She passes him the perfect café cubano, and he makes a big show of getting on his knees to thank her.

Orange, filtered light comes in through the half-drawn shutters in distorted stripes. His mother recounts her phone conversation with Lance’s father using sound effects and tripping Spanish slang, and something vital inside of him detaches and spills blood-hot feeling everywhere.

He leaves his mother to wander down to the beach. His skin responds to the sun, hair standing on end. His whole body has been like a limb that’s been trapped in a cast, shrunken and pale, and the air and light against it is a terrible relief.

He lets his fingers brush the tall, feathery grass on either side of the path as he walks.

The feeling in his chest is the same one he got when he walked up to the stocky outline of the Galaxy Garrison, or when he settled into Blue’s cockpit for the first time, a sense of rightness so acute that he doesn’t have a name for it.

He scuffs off his flip-flops and sprints down to meet the surf, laughing when the spray gets his shorts wet and spritzes up to his neck. The chunky shells underfoot and the chill on his sleep-sensitive skin is background noise. He wades thigh deep and watches the red of the sky echoed by the churning mosh pit of the waves. He closes his eyes and lets the breeze paw at his hair and clothes, holding his arms out so that his loose buttoned shirt billows out behind him.

He’s out there for a long time, dawn turning into early morning, pale, with spectacular clouds. Red skies always promise wicked storms.

He settles down into the sand, enjoying the little discomforts, the sand tucked just under the hem of his shorts where his skin is clammy wet, the breeze getting a little too forceful with his hair and forcing it in the wrong direction. His house just a little too far away at his back, everything he cares about a few minutes out of reach.

He’s been to so many galaxies and he’s never seen anything like a sunrise over the ocean.

He thinks, I am the best version of myself, right here.

He knows he’s been a liability for the team. He shows up and makes noise and tries to look cool so that it won’t feel so much like the losing battle he’s fighting is coming to a sad, inevitable end. 

He’s the extra pilot that they cycle through the roster and try to find a place for, but he’s not the red paladin. And he’s never going to belong to Blue like Allura does, like her family always will.

Being at home like this makes it really clear that he hasn’t fit anywhere in a very long time. There are so many ugly things twisting and shooting out in space, and he’s seen so many people suffer. He shoots galra sentries dead and he follows his gut instincts to the wrong places and he dreams about home.

It’s so stupid that he thought he could be some sort of soldier. Like he would ever be the guy that saved something instead of ruining it.

He puts his hand out in front of him and watches sun creep between his fingers. Nothing feels real in space. It’s easier to lie to yourself, somehow.

“Hey,” says a voice behind him. When he glances back, Keith is staring at him with the saddest expression he’s ever seen on his face, and only then does Lance realize that he’s crying.

“What are you doing here?”

Keith ignores him. “You’re crying again.” He really sounds like it’s bothering him.

“No I’m not.”

“Your face is wet,” he says matter-of-factly, sitting down close to him in the sand, blotting out the sun.

“I was in the sea, Keith.”

He pauses, then breathes out all at once. “I hate seeing you like this.”

“Well I’m not so fond of looking at you either,” Lance snaps.

“I think we should go back tonight. I texted Allura and she said has a mission for us while the rest of the team is working. Some recon, I think.”

“The rest of the team,” Lance repeats hollowly.

“Yeah,” Keith says. “I mean. We can still be useful. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like sitting still for too long.”

“I do, actually,” he lies. “Harder to break things if you’re not moving around so much.”“What?” Keith looks confused, his eyes darting all over Lance’s face.

“I’m not going back with you.”

He jerks back like he’s been slapped. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I quit,” Lance announces. “I quit voltron, I quit galaxy-saving and jumping in front of laser fire and putting on a fucking— show all the time, I quit killing people because they’re wearing the galra uniform.” Keith flinches. “I quit you. Okay?”

Keith sits, stunned, across from him, and when his head dips, the sun gets into Lance’s eyes, sharp. He looks away.

“Not okay,” Keith says firmly. “Really not— really not okay, Lance, what the fuck? How did you think I was just going to, what, hop on a shuttle without you?”

Lance shakes his head at the ground. “I thought you’d be psyched. You won’t have to deal with me anymore. The red lion is yours. She always has been, actually, she was basically trying to eject me like a disease the whole time.” He looks up at Keith and finds him looking down furiously at him.

“We already talked about this,” Keith says impatiently. “I don’t care how many lions there are, we’ll figure it out. You’re part of the team.”“Only technically though, right?” he says bitterly. “I’ve always been more of a sidekick. Look, you don’t have to pretend to want me here just so you can tell them you tried when you show up empty handed, alright?”

Keith is looking more agitated by the minute, and Lance isn’t used to seeing him in natural light, without his gloves or his jacket or tense, self-assured energy. “I do want you,” he starts, and then he kind of bares his teeth and snaps his head away, fighting through something that Lance can’t see or understand. “You’re a paladin of voltron,” he struggles to say, like it explains everything.

“I tried to be a paladin,” Lance says. “I’m no good at it, okay? Can we stop rubbing it in. I’m being very real with you and you’re being very weird.”

“But you’re our sharpshooter,” Keith says, defiant like a kid. “No one fights like you.” That pulls Lance up short, and he’s shaking again, hands and chattering teeth, and the patches of water on his clothes are suddenly much too cold. Keith’s face is wide open in the plain light, and Lance realizes that he’s not lying, that he’s never been very good at that at all.

All the drawers in his chest shake out over everything, and he’s losing all his reasoning in the mess. He keeps looking back at the horizon and thinking about waking up in his room every day to the smell of coffee, but the image keeps getting confused with the image of Keith, roseate, rolled in his blue comforter.

“I can’t go back,” he whispers. “I won’t survive, and then my family will fall apart.”

“Lance, If anyone’s going to survive, it’s you, do you understand me?”

“No,” Lance says, frustrated. “I don’t know what’s happening right now, at all, actually.”

“You’re smart, and you’re selfless. Do you know how deadly those qualities are in a war? Your plans are low casualty, fast and brilliant, and they save lives. There are entire colonies, entire species that would have died without you.” Lance shakes his head, trying to keep from crying again and embarrassing himself. “None of us would’ve made it this far without you, idiot.”

“My family needs me,” he argues. “You saw them, you know, you know—“ He thinks of his mother trying to memorize him with both hands, his little brother crying softly against his neck.

“Anyone would feel that way if they knew you and lost you, Lance. You can’t honestly think that we wouldn’t be just as messed up without you,” he says incredulously.

“Keith,” Lance says lowly. There’s an epiphany tottering in his chest, and he can’t quite get a grip on it before it slips and bobs away.

“You can’t stay here,” Keith says, and he’s on his knees, reaching for both of Lance’s wrists, eyes wide, almost purple in the sun. “Who’s gonna keep me in line?”

“You—you need to keep yourself in line, dude, you can’t just expect—“

“I know you can’t stay here when the action’s out there. People like us can never sit out on fights.”

“Why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?” Keith asks, bewildered, hands tight on Lance’s forearms.

“Acting like we’re the same!”

“How are we different?” Keith demands. The wind ruffles his hair so that a piece gets caught in his mouth, and Lance looks distractedly at it.

“We’re opposites,” he says. “That’s like our whole thing.”

“I’m tired of pretending like we don’t like each other,” Keith sighs.

“I don’t understand,” Lance says quietly, except that he does, all at once, looking at Keith’s hands still squeezing his wrists, his blocky knuckles and uneven fingernails. “Why did you volunteer to take me home, Keith.”

“Honestly?”

“Yes please.”

“I love you,” Keith tells him miserably.

Lance turns his face towards the tree line meandering off to the edge of the coast, feeling every system in his body light up simultaneously. “Keith.”

He lifts his wrists and Keith’s hands follow them up. He shuffles closer on his knees, brow furrowed, mouth turned down, desperate.

“So you can’t expect me to leave you here,” Keith says, “I know that I’m asking you to walk away from your home. But you’re asking me to walk away from mine.”

“Keith,” Lance repeats, choked up. “I don’t know—“

“You don’t have to know, god, you don’t have to know anything, you just have to get on that shuttle with me tonight.” 

He looks up at Keith, wild hair, broad shoulders, eyes like swatches of deep space. He remembers seeing him sitting alone at the Garrison and wondering what it would be like to be made for piloting like that, to have that sort of magic in your hands.

Those hands are still steadying him, gripping the tender insides of his arms like he’s trying to steer him in the right direction.

After his first mission with Red, he sat in the hangar, breathing hard, picturing Keith’s battle-flushed face and missing him badly.

“Don’t do it for me,” Keith says hastily. “I know you like to make people happy, and this isn’t like that. I think staying here would be a mistake. I think you’ll see us leaving the atmosphere and you’ll regret everything. You won’t be able to sit still when you know we’re out there fighting. You’ll be here with your family but you won’t really be here.”

“You’ve really got me figured out, hey,” Lance says ruefully.

“I try to pay attention,” Keith says. “When it matters.”

“I’m trying to do this for you,” Lance tells him, shaking his head, annoyed at his full head and watery voice, the way the force of the ocean has infected him. “You belong with Red, doing your blade gymnastics routines, holding a knife in your mouth or whatever, winning obnoxiously all the time.”

“Then you belong next to me,” Keith counters viciously. “It doesn’t have to be either or. We’re a team.”

The sun punches out from behind a low-hanging cloud. Lance’s vision clears.

“I think we’re probably more than that,” he says.

Keith falters, and his grip slides down an inch, so he’s holding the bottom of Lance’s hands. “You don’t have to—“

“Do you know what I thought when I saw you in my bed this morning?” he asks. Keith’s hands are clammy but fixed, and he has this sweet little mole on the side of his nose, and Lance can’t believe he’s been so stupid. “I thought — it’s not fair that he looks like that when I’m trying to leave. Like, how rude is that.”

Keith’s face does something hopeful and twitchy, a lifting chin and anxious brow. “You’re one to talk.”

“You had all this sunrise in your hair, like, all the places where the light hits you were red. It was so you. I mean, I must’ve been sleep-deprived, because I really thought I was attracted to a mullet for a sec.”

Keith smiles slowly.

“And I was already feeling all mushy from the way you held onto my mom so tightly when she hugged you. It really didn’t look like you were hugging someone’s mom who you’d never met, Keith. You weren’t even uncomfortable in a stranger’s house, do you know how rare that is? It was like you just belonged in my breakfast nook eating pastelitos. God, and the taking me home and listening to my stories. Do you know— in that stupid picture we took? I’m not even looking at the camera. I’m looking at you.”

“Come back with me,” Keith says, pulling Lance’s hands around his neck, hoisting him into his space. “I’m never going to leave you behind now.”

“Kiss me, and I’ll go,” Lance says, bold from the way Keith is all over him like he’s never been touched before.

He cups Lance’s face in both hands. He hasn’t had this much focus on just him for months, and his face goes hot as he reaches up for Keith’s wrists.

When he kisses him, his rushing blood matches the tossing ocean, and nothing else has any sound at all. It’s fatal, the way Keith kisses him like he’s trying to pin the two of them together for good.

They’re both on their knees, and Keith’s hands slide down to grab him closer around the waist, gathering the loose fabric into his fists. His tongue is searing, and his breath is sweet like over-sugared coffee.

All of his suppressed feeling flies up to meet him, double-sided anger and want, rivalry and respect. He finds himself bobbing towards the glow of Keith’s body, chest full and light as a balloon.

He breaks away gasping. “Why have we been fighting?”

“I don’t know,” Keith whines, and Lance can feel the spread of his fingers flexing against his waist. “You started it.”

“I think I wanted you to notice me,” he says, like he can’t believe it.

“I did,” Keith grumbles.

Lance kisses his lax mouth, enjoying the instinctive flicker of his tongue, the scorch of embarrassed desire in his cheeks. “Oh man, If I die in space, you’re going to feel so bad.”

“You’re not gonna die,” Keith says. He pushes their foreheads together with the insistence of a labrador, and lance sighs.

“It’s a war, dude,” he points out.

“I’m not letting you die,” Keith insists. “I’m going to bring you home again, after we’ve destroyed the galra empire and freed everyone. I’m going to bring you back to this beach.”

“Well I’m not letting you die either,” Lance says defensively. He puts a hand against Keith’s chest and feels his heartbeat buck, almost too fast to be human. “Two-way street, buddy. We continue the mission. We’re a little less reckless. I hang that picture of us in my lion. We fight back to back and make out with explosions behind us, I don’t know, I’ve still gotta iron out the details. You keep loving me, I keep loving you.” His voice wobbles. “Everyone wins.”

Keith lowers him all the way back into the sand to kiss him, and the warmth on all sides is almost as disorienting as the weight of Keith’s body, the give of his mouth. Keith breaks away to say, “I can do that.” He swipes a thumb over Lance’s cheekbone and smiles.

A raindrop flattens a piece of Keith’s hair on its way down to Lance’s face, and then another two find his cheeks and parted lips. Keith rears back, propped up on both hands above him like a shield, and rain winds up and starts pouring down, whole torrential sheets of it. Lance lets his head loll back when he laughs, giddy. He twists his hands in the hair at Keith’s neck.

“Isn’t this a bad omen?” Keith asks, voice raised through the chaos of the downpour.

“No,” Lance says, thinking of red mornings and storms blowing in off the coast. “I love the rain.”