3.28.19

i know it’s been ages since i’ve posted anything here and i’m so sorry! i hope i can make it up to you with this long preview of something i’ve been working on for a while on and off <3

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This is how it ends:

It’s the middle of the night. They are standing on the front porch and the oil lamp shines through the window bright enough to outline them in a golden sliver. The air is so crisp and cold that Lance feels brittle down to his lungs, like one wrong move, one breath too torrid, could snap him in half. The tips of his fingers are red and his uneven breaths burn on the way out of his throat, though that could be from the threat of tears more than the dry winter air.

“You’re leaving.”

The words are like frostbite on his tongue. He wraps his arms tight around himself and stares hard at the dark shape in front of him.

“Yeah.” The response he gets is low and solemn. It’s simply an affirmation, something that Lance already knows, but it hits him like an arrow to the heart regardless. 

“How long?”

The wind blows straight through his thin sweater.

“How long?”  he asks again, hating how his voice wavers.

“About a year.” Keith steps forward a little bit towards him, looking much warmer in his thick jacket, the hood fuzzy and soft against the sharp edge of his jaw. That gold line of light cuts across his face like a scar. “Kolivan says it’s a relatively large pocket of Galra resistance. After we settle those disputes, we’ll stay to help keep the peace and bring in supplies to rebuild, so it could be longer.”

Lance shivers and rubs his hands along his arms. His eyes prickle with heat, a stark contrast to the biting air chafing against the bare skin of his face. He can’t speak. He doesn’t know if he has the exact words to place how devastated he feels right now, but he tries.

“Then...then what are you still doing here?”

Just leave, he thinks.

Don’t go, he thinks.

Keith says, “Come with me.” His voice is slightly warmer than before, and softer. It’s a voice that belongs only to Lance. Keith doesn’t speak to anyone else that way - Keith doesn’t speak to a lot of people in general, but it still has a way of making Lance feel special, even when he knows he doesn’t deserve it. He could melt into it, if he wasn’t so mad. If he didn’t feel as if he was about to lose it. He could step forward and let that warmth slowly thaw out the ice closing over his heart. “I could use my right-hand man out there.”

Instead, Lance steps back. He hardens himself against the poorly concealed affection in Keith’s voice. “You know I can’t go,” he says, only half-shocked by the bitterness his words carry. “With Veronica at the Garrison and my dad’s health…we—we’re short on hands for the farm. I can’t—I-I can’t—My family needs me here.”

Keith frowns and even in the dark, a particular look in his eye makes him appear as if he is suddenly very far away. “Is this about Allura?”

Lance feels a tremble travel through him from the inside out, shaking him violently. Keith’s words slap him across the face and pound through his blood like a haunting little echo. His heart stutters once with phantom pain and a fierce anger, defensive and snarling, immediately rises up within him. “No,” he snaps, and the marks on his cheeks burn, responding to his ire. “Why do you always go there?”

Keith looks unapologetic, but there’s concern in his voice, too, and Lance hates it. “Because it’s always about Allura with you, Lance.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Isn’t it?

“No.”

Something terrible steals over Keith’s expression. “Your dad has been healthy for the past eight months and I know for a fact he’s been expecting you to leave again. Veronica comes home every other weekend with Acxa to help out. Marco and Rachel live on the farm with your parents and your grandparents. You know that they’re settled here. So if it’s not about Allura and it’s not about them, then what is it, Lance? Why won’t you do something that makes you happy?”

Lance scowls at him, eyes hot, throat hot. He grits his teeth against the painful truth of Keith’s words as they flay him wide open and expose his tattered heart. “What do you know about what makes me happy? You don’t know shit.”

Immediately, Keith’s softened edges sharpen, intensity returning to his expression and thrashing over him like a hurricane. “You know that’s not true,” he says, voice harsh, rubbed raw with a sudden display of undiluted emotion. The sound makes an unexpected bout of heat rush to Lance’s face but he refuses to be affected by Keith’s easy way of caring about him.

“I’m happy here,” Lance says instead, but it comes out flat and practiced. 

It’s because he says it to himself every night when he’s staring up at the fading glow-in-the-dark stars plastered to the ceiling of his bedroom. He says it when he’s in the greenhouse with the juniberry flowers, when he feels closest to Allura again. He says it when his mother asks over coffee before dawn. He says it when Veronica comes home and talks about new assignments she’s working on at the Garrison, or when Hunk and Pidge video call and fill him in on their work.

The only time it ever feels unforced or true, comes unbidden when he’s with Keith. It’s just a whisper. An idea he is afraid to give himself over to fully. I’m happy here. As quiet as it is, as familiar and secure as the thought is, it scares him to death.

“I don’t believe you,” Keith tells him.

He’s the only one.

Lance wishes he would. It would be so much easier.

“That’s not my problem,” Lance says cuttingly.

Keith sighs and runs a bare hand over his face and into his hair, pulling it back for a moment, exposing his forehead to the cold. The irritation there in his expression is born out of concern for Lance and that hurts, too, in a strange way. Keith looks younger like this, like the way he did when they were still teenagers and the war was still big and Lance’s heart was still whole. “You know I hate seeing you like this. It’s been two years—”

“I said, this isn’t about Allura.”

“Bullshit,” Keith spits out, dropping his hand to his side. Lance flinches on the inside from the severity of the word, but he remains seething as the wind continues to bluster right through his sweater. “You can lie to yourself but I know you are still hanging on and everything you do—everything is because of Allura.” He takes a deep breath. His voice cracks as it steadily grows in volume. “You’re so inside of your own head sometimes, Lance, but I see you in there. You deserve to be really happy—just, really, truly happy. She would want that for you so badly and you can’t...you can’t get that here anymore.”

Emotion makes Lance’s throat tight, pressing up against the back of his teeth like a balloon. The blue Altean marks on his cheeks feel hot. “If I can’t get that here, I can’t get that anywhere, Keith.”

The awful bluntness to Keith nearly gentles once more. “Come with me,” he says again. “Try.”

He wants it to be that easy. 

In truth, it isn’t Allura, anymore. Lance misses her desperately, still feels her sometimes in the marks she left behind, but their time together was so fleeting that there hadn’t been a lot of allowance for growth. Looking back on it now, he hadn’t loved her, not really, not the way he thought he did. She had, however, been one of his closest friends. He could always talk to her about anything and she could talk to him and...he thinks, some days, when he’s in the fields, that he can’t even remember it anymore. It makes him bitter against his own memory - if he can’t remember her, if he can’t remember what they had, then what kind of person is he?

All of their conversations - the comfort and the tiny pieces of happiness he carried around with her like loose change, giving it out when he could but having it never amounting to much. Allura deserved better; she deserved all of the universe. She’d never been happy with him the way she’d been happy with Lotor. Even at their best, Lance had observed that much. It had made him want to try harder, to force his love onto her as if that could fix them, or her, somehow. He didn’t know then that they weren’t broken—they just didn’t fit.

Despite all that, Lance can’t even mourn her properly. Plagued with guilt and a vast, aching emptiness where her friendship had laid with him, he thinks that maybe this is just the kind of karma owed to him. 

It’s not all terrible, not like it should be.

He has his family, who have never wavered in their love or support. 

The farm is quiet and familiar. He always did love animals, and the fact that he got to keep Kaltenecker has helped—she’s a great listener.

And there’s Keith.

Perhaps that’s where things get a little grey for Lance.

Every moment Lance spends with him seems too good to be true. Keith is his best friend, undoubtedly. He’s honest and gentle in a lot of very surprising ways and it didn’t take long after the war for Lance to realize that he is a soft spot for his former leader. It would seem that Keith isn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve anymore.

It’s the ease with which Keith offers himself up - not just pieces of himself, but whole and unrestrained - that pisses Lance off. That makes him distant and terrible. Keith deserves someone who can give him support in return. Someone who will try and stay, someone who won’t forget. Lance wants so badly to be that person, so  badly to be good enough, but something inside of him has been irreparable since the end of the war and he just isn’t sufficient. Not for Allura, not for Keith, not for anyone.

It doesn’t matter how he feels at this point. He won’t do to Keith what he did to Allura. If he has to break his own heart, he will.

He shuffles through a breath and wraps his arms around himself again. “Go.” His voice is quiet but steady. Keith goes still, and the gaze laid over Lance becomes heavier.

After a long, agonizing moment, Keith steps towards him again. “Lance.”

Lance swallows and looks away, eyes hot again with unshed tears. A whole year without Keith. He’s done it before, right? Every day was miserable, every day felt like dying, or at least what he thought dying was like, but he could do it again. He could. “Just go, Keith. Leave.”

“We don’t leave until tonight; will you at least think about—“

“No,” he says flatly.

Keith’s tone darkens. “What is wrong with you? Lance—“

Lance regathers his anger to keep him upright and unattached. He‘s glad for the dark, so that Keith can’t see the way his expression crumples. “Why are you still here?”

Keith is angry too, only his is more impressive than Lance’s. “I don’t want to leave like this.”

“Well, that’s a first.”

Keith takes an audibly steadying breath. “You can be such a jackass sometimes.”

“Then it’s your lucky day; you’ll never have to see me again,” Lance bites back viciously.

At that, Keith steps towards him, crowding into Lance’s space as he backs into the side of the house, heart thudding pathetically at the sudden proximity.

“Fine; I’ll leave,” Keith mutters, and the heat of his body kisses Lance just so across the very little space between them. 

“Good,” Lance snaps, and his heart snaps, too, clean in half. “Then get out of here already.”

Even though he can’t see Keith’s expression right now, he thinks he knows how it’d look: eyes flashing, mouth screwed up in a frown, his thick eyebrows pinched and severe. Handsome as ever, even through the heat of anger and frustration. Lance thinks he can see the edge of his scar just barely through the darkness, and he has to drop his leveled gaze before the doubt of his own words creep in.

“Lance,” Keith says in a low voice, like it’s the only word he knows, reverent in spite of all else. It claim’s Lance’s attention like nothing ever has. “If it makes you feel better to pretend like I hate you, then do what you have to do, but it’s a lie. It’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told yourself.”

Lance thinks, I wish it wasn’t.

He thinks, I don’t think you should care about me.

He thinks, Go, please go, just go.

He thinks, perhaps most overwhelmingly, Stay.

His voice shakes when he opens his mouth to speak, trembling with the weight of all the terrible things on his tongue, of all the words he knows will send Keith away for good. “I won’t miss you,” he says, and it sounds flat and wrong and he struggles against the vehement urge to take it back. “I-I don’t care—“

“Lance,” Keith says, again, gentle even in his frustration. The ends of Keith’s bangs brush lightly against Lance’s forehead, his breath hot on his cheek. Lance curls his hands into tight fists at his side, gripping the hem of his sweater like it might keep him from leaning forward and closing the distance between their mouths. Like it might prevent him from being a total fool and ruining everything. 

“It’s okay,” Keith says. “I’ll go.”

Somehow, it feels as if Keith doesn’t believe Lance at all. It feels like maybe he knows none of this is real, as though he knows the truth of Lance, at the heart of this terrible night. Lance can only bring himself to nod.

“I won’t call, if you don’t want me to,” Keith goes on.

Lance thinks, I want you to.

Lance says, “Good. Don’t.”

He can feel tension between them. A part of it is his own honesty, trapped behind a wall of lies that are transparent and thin. A part of it is the proximity, standing toe to toe, body heat warm and inviting and all together too close, too hot, too perfect. A part of it is Keith, how his silence hangs in the air heavily with words left unsaid like unbearable humidity, clinging to both of them, suffocating both of them.

He waits for Keith to say something, to relieve the tension, but instead, Keith just leans in and presses his mouth to Lance’s forehead. The breath catches in Lance’s throat, and he becomes an entire contradiction when he tilts his head into the contact, seeking to prolong it even as he douses the ice water of denial and distance on the rush of heat that sears through him like a flashover. His eyes flutter closed against the strength of his own desire.

“If you change your mind, we’re leaving from the Garrison’s Hanger 3 at 1900 hours tomorrow,” Keith murmurs as he pulls away, and away, and away, fading into the darkness until the shape of him against the black night has disappeared.

Lance is left standing there long after he’s gone.