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autisticlancemcclain · 1 year ago

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Keith clenches the flower crown in his hand, breathing heavy. The delicate petals of the not-daises crumple and crush in his fists, blue pollen smearing on the leather of his gloves. Half of the crown sits perfect, intact, unblemished and unbroken. The other half is miserable and unfixable, destroyed by something bigger than itself. He stares at it, hard, at what it is and what it represents, until his eyes sting from the dryness and begin to blur.

“Lance, I —” His voice comes out raspy, crinkled as the flowers. He swallows. “I’m never really going to — to love you. You know that, right?”

Lance’s quiet humming never stops, never hesitates. He continues to carefully poke the not-daisies onto their stem-string, building another crown, a new one, just as beautiful. “I know.”

Keith frowns. “You…know?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why do you…” He glances down at the crushed flowers again. Suddenly he wants to straighten them, desperately, fix their bleeding creases, their crumpled pieces. He tries, a little. He takes a broad petal from the biggest of the delicate flowers and smooths it against his thumb, again and again, trying to fix the brokenness. The crease disappears, but the petal lays flat against his skin; translucent, soaked with its own oils, bending to the shape of the pad of his thumb. It droops when he peels it off, worse than before. He feels something gentle touch on his head, a barely-there weight around the crown of his skull, and he smells something floral, aside from the flowers, like shampoo. Lance settles again beside him, second flower crown gone from his hands, now searching for a long enough not-daisy stem to start a new one. There’s a lump in Keith’s throat.

“Then why do this? Why —” He sweeps his hand out, broadly, gesturing the the not-daisy field before them, gesturing to the picnic blanket and the basket of food, gesturing to the castle in the distance, to the room they’ve shared more often than not lately, to their lions, to them, to them, to them. “Why do you hang out —” his voice cracks on the term, the blasé-ness of it, the fib, the hiding from the truth, the softer word to replace the truth — “with me like this? Why do you spend so much of your time with me? Alone? Why do we do what we —” He stops for a moment, finding himself short of breath suddenly, more feeling than the situation calls for crashing down on him at once, crushing his windpipe, making it hard for him to breathe, harder to speak. “Why do you stay with me like this, if you know?”

“Well, because I love you.”

He does not hesitate to say it. He does not swallow harshly as if the words are acid in his throat, as if they are too heavy to be spoken aloud. He says it easily, steadily, wondrously, as if it’s painless. As if Keith had said it first, and he’s simply responding. As if it’s something he says often. As if the words were not hard to find, were already heavy on his tongue, as if it was easier to say them then to lock them behind his teeth, choke them down. Maybe they are, for him.

Lance picks his head up from where it was hunched over the not-daisies, tying off the chain and lifting it, resting the crown gently on his own head. Coronating himself, with soft flowers, with the strength of a thousand men. He flicks his gaze to Keith, then, brown eyes wide and soft and glassy, slightly, shimmering in the orange sunlight, dark despite it, heavy and light alike. His expression is open, earnest. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

Keith doesn’t understand him. He knows Lance, knows how things eat at him, how small rejections build and build from the centre of his chest down his spine and wrap around each of his nerves, lighting him up inside. He’s seen how the doubt shapes his words, reshapes his sentences, clouds his thoughts. He’s seen how Lance pulls away from people before they can pull away from him. He’s seen the same ache in the Blue-turned-Red Paladin that he has, the same black hole in his own chest; the pain of the one left behind.

How is it so easy, then, for him, to say — it?

Keith holds his gaze, heart pounding, breathing short and shallow, as long as he can, as long as he can bear. He is the one to look away, in the end, and Lance soon after, looking for yet another long-stemmed daisy. It is only then that Keith realises that his second crown is crushed, too, in his other hand, stained with oil.

“Reason enough,” he echoes.

Lance hums affirmatively, absentmindedly lifting his legs and placing them on top of Keith’s, casual. Keith can’t tell if the move is deliberate or not, if Lance is genuinely oblivious to the intent of Keith’s sentiment or if he’s choosing to ignore it.

Either way it doesn’t matter. Lance slowly works his way through a good chunk of the flowers surrounding them, cheekily ordering Keith around the field, instructing him on what flowers to pick, how many, how often. Lance claims he just doesn’t want to move, but Keith is sure he just likes bossing him around. He organizes them in small piles by size as Keith gathers them, favouring the wider and fluffier ones, working with his tongue out in concentration as he carefully makes one, two, three, four, five more crowns than the two he’s already made, not including the two Keith destroyed. (Those were carefully scooped up from where Keith had discarded them, placed gently in the bottom of the picnic basket. Lance hadn’t said anything nor had he made any particular face, except that there was determination in his eyes as he held the crumpled flowers, defiance, almost, as he lovingly placed them among their used dishware and leftovers.)

Once he finishes the last knot — one crown for each team member, plus one to hang on Shiro’s doorknob — he swings his legs off Keith’s lap, sighing as he gets to his feet. Keith sees a sliver of brown skin as he stretches, a flash of his hip as his shirt lifts with his raised hands. It is the same temptation it always is, although it makes Keith more nauseous than usual.

“C’mon, you lump,” Lance says, holding out a hand. “I call dibs on not carrying anything back to the castle.”

Keith stares at his offered hand for a moment. He gets the same feeling in his belly that he used to get before walking into his final exams. Like he is being tested, like he is unprepared, like he is going to fail.

He stands on his own, quickly busying himself with gathering up their blanket and basket.

He follows just behind Lance as they walk through the field, back to the castle. They take their time — no one else will be back yet — and Lance stops every three seconds to coo at a beetle, take a picture of a plant, draw a heart in the dirt. Keith finds himself smiling without permission, struggling to school his face when he realises.

Keith has never met someone who is so unapologetically himself. He knows Lance has struggles, knows he doubts himself more than anyone on the team, probably. But so much of him is just a blatant adoration for the world around him; an obsession with the stars, an affinity for speed, an ataraxia in water, a blatant delight for any critter. He loves so much so often he bleeds with it. Keith has no idea how he survives, how he protects himself. It terrifies him. How is he supposed to protect Lance if Lance refuses to wear any armour? If he flays himself open and trusts everything and anyone? It’s as if he hasn’t yet learned to be wary, even though he has been hurt. Keith cannot fathom how he’s like this, how he’s survived like this.

Later, that night, he lies awake and counts Lance’s breaths as he thinks.

This wasn’t meant to last.

He doesn’t mean that they’re doomed to fail. They are, probably, the same way most things are (his mouth twitches on reflex as he hears Lance calling him emo in his head), but he hadn’t meant to start anything, with Lance. He doesn’t think Lance meant to start with him, either. He certainly never anticipated Lance, head pillowed on Keith’s chest, drool gathering on his ribcage, leg flopped over his and hand twitching in his face and hair. He never anticipated hearing his name muttered in Lance’s sleep, or watching him shoot up from a nightmare, wide-eyed and terrified, only to relax immediately back into sleep when he sees that it’s Keith who’s holding him. He never anticipated his own hands combing through Lance’s hair, his squeezing of Lance’s feet in between his thighs to keep them warm, his boots at the end of the bed, gloves on the nightstand. He never anticipated the way the smell of Lance’s shampoo would help him breathe again when he shoots straight up in terror and forgets where he is. He never anticipated the softness, the quiet smiles, the feel of his nails on his back, the press of his lips to his neck, the taste of his sweat on his skin, the breathiness of his hitched throat in his ear.

It started with a fight.

Of course it did, really. Why they were alone in the training room, Keith cannot recall, and why they turned to sparring with each other rather than staying at separate corners of the room he is at a loss. (Well, he does know. He knows he watched the litheness of Lance’s body as he bent and and contorted it and felt the swoop of his belly at his smug grin every time he landed a shot. He knows he watched sweat bead up on his forehead and drip down his face, burning a trail down his long neck. He knows he watched Lance bend over to set up shots, stretch, anything. He knows all that. But he thought he had restraint.)

He knows at one point they were snarling at each other, arguing over who had cost them a match with the gladiator, and then he knows that Lance had brazenly challenged him to a fight, and Keith had laughed in his face. He knows that they lunged at each other. He knows that he intended to give it to the smug asshole who had refused to leave him the fuck alone for even one fucking second since they got stuck in space. He knows he had Lance pinned to the ground, because Lance may insist that they’re neck and neck but Keith sure as shit had the upper hand in hand to hand.

What he doesn’t know is who kissed who. He doesn’t know who bit whose lip or who gasped or who shoved whose hand under whose shirt. He doesn’t know. He knows it escalated, he knows he felt fucking drunk on the taste of Lance’s skin, knows he felt like devouring every sound that came from that smart fucking mouth. He knows they didn’t even bother moving from the training mat on the floor.

He does know that he was the one who knocked on Lance’s door first, the next day. But when they fell into bed again Lance was the one who was prepped and ready, who opened the door within half a second and yanked him in by the collar, smirking.

Lance shifts slightly, muttering something as he turns his head. Keith freezes, barely daring to breathe lest he wake him up, waiting until after Lance has settled again, after he’s gone heavy on Keith’s chest.

In the beginning he’d convinced himself it was physical. Lance is objectively fucking hot, anyone with eyes can see that, and it’s not like Keith has any other fucking options here. But tonight, after everyone had split off after dinner and they’d landed in Keith’s room, again (is it really even Keith’s room, anymore? Lance’s hand is keyed to the lock. His products line the bathroom counter. His clothes are intermixed among Keith’s. He can’t remember the last time either of them had been in Lance’s room, let alone Lance by himself), as they always do. They’d gotten ready for bed without even talking, slipping in pyjamas and brushing teeth and running through a ninety four step skincare routine. They’d laid next to each other on the bed, Keith working through a random novel he found in the library and Lance breezing through some kind of math game on his tablet, before Lance had sighed some time before midnight, kissed him gently on the mouth, whispered “I don’t feel like doing anything tonight,” and then flopped on top of Keith’s person, wiggling until he was comfortable, passing out as soon as he was.

Keith’s hand curls around the curve of Lance’s shoulder.

Physical, physical, physical, he chants to himself. You have ruined every single person you have ever loved.

Lance groans slightly again, clicking his jaw.

“Keith,” he murmurs, accent heavy in his sleep. His lips twitch up in a smile.

Keith’s stomach turns.

———

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