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Altean juniberry are everywhere, a purple field of memories with the rustling of delicate petals from the past. So innocent, so timid, but they fill the whole of space and Keith Kogane's lungs with them.
Keith doesn't like them, they are soaked with regret, mistakes and memory, but wherever one looks — altean juniberry have been there all along.
Too much past, too much pain and Voltron on Earth, and it's not that Keith wants to forget it all. Kogane still wakes up in the middle of the night to the sounds of sirens and scraping metal that fade away as soon as he throws off the blanket and grabs the blade. Auditory hallucinations, but Keith doesn't fall asleep anymore and wanders around the spaceship, sometimes getting confused at forks because the Castle of Lions had a different room layout.
It was easier there in the Castle of Lions to understand oneself, to knock out the unnecessary with training, and not to feel the chasm between oneself and the team. And there was also a war, which burned out all the alienation and rudeness, broke the spine - life is not enough to put it back together in pieces now - stained the soul with napalm and scattered lighters across the universe.
But that’s all in the past, in the vanished Castle of Lions, in the victory over the Galra Empire, in the Lions who left space and their farewell magical trail that dissolved into constellations.
It’s all in the past; now Kitan sees a somewhat blurred vision of the future ahead, numerous scars, a grown mullet taken in the tail, and long-awaited calm. Yet Kitan feels even more lost than when they drifted in void, conducting roll calls every few minutes and fearing death.
Kogane thinks it's time to stop looking at the “now” through the prism of the past, especially worth stopping doing so while standing in the middle of an entire field of juniberry on McClain's farm. Especially when he loses to himself for the umpteenth time and the first thing he does after the mission is visit Lance, well, after Shiro, naturally. And if at first everything could be written off as anxiety and excitement for his friend, then after a few years it's hard to hide behind excuses and “it's already become a habit, and in general don't hurt your ego”.
And Keith considers this habit destructive and self-destructive. But he doesn't want to get rid of it.
Consciousness and Keith Kogane synchronize with the feel of Cosmo's wet nose against the palm of his hand. Keith runs hand over his scruff, brushing out grass and dirt, unconsciously comparing the wolf to an Earth dog. The amplitude of Cosmo's tail only increased as the blisteringly familiar blue shirt appeared on the horizon.
Lance throws up hand and holds up straw hat and takes off, while Keith wishes he had teleportation abilities like his pet.
Fizzy particles of cosmic quintessence on fingertips and lanky laughter drowning in Cosmo's neon fur. Keith thinks his wolf is too big and might crush the already lanky triangular Lance McClain.
"Who is the nicest, best, smartest and most handsome boy in the entire universe" Cosmo is completely unaware of what Lance is telling him, but his tail is still wagging vigorously. The wind picks up laughter and muffled whimpers, summer on Varadero beach lulled by children's laughter from the neighbor's yard, the heat contrasting with the cosmic vacuum, and the grass affectionately embracing Lance lying on the ground. Keith wanted so childishly to take off his heavy boots and run barefoot all the way to the beach-first on the soft, cool grass, rubbing his bloody heels against the sandpaper of the asphalt, and then burying his toes in the hot, sharp sand. But Kogane won't do that, not even on pain of death.
Keith feels superfluous here. The stifling stillness of space and the clang of metal are more familiar to him than the miniature, crushing barracks, the tamped-down tension crammed into his limbs so that at the first signal he can break free and rush to the other side of the ship, and the years of soldered emptiness.
"Are you more excited about the wolf or about my arrival" McClain smiles even wider, scratches the wolf's ear one last time, and rises from the ground, shaking off his blue striped shirt and picking up fallen shovel. With green patches on his knees and patches, he looks comical, the way Lance always looked: silly, funny, sometimes annoying and provocative, always standing out and leaving the world to be content with his own shadow. And now McClain hides from the sun behind a straw hat, hides his scars behind the long sleeves of worn shirt and the same emptiness behind his contrived smiles.
So many years have passed, and the paladins - heroes of the universe (!) - are still waiting for the intermission of their own theater.
"Wolf, unlike some, doesn't frown as often."
His gaze clings to the shimmering azure Altean markings on his cheekbones, and for some reason Keith wants to touch them, but he soberly realizes he can't. Kogane looks anywhere but at Lance, but not at his markings, but not at this immense field of Altean juniberry.
"For how long?" Lance smiles again and there's a radiant Cuban sunshine in the corners of his eyes. Keith wants to believe it's the sun burning, not burning out.
"I'm just passing through, so I'm flying out again tomorrow."
"It's so little! Even last time you stayed longer" McClain clutched the shovel too tightly in his hands, and the Altean markings seemed to blur. And with a long, frustrated exhale from the Cuban, Keith lets his heart beat a little faster than usual. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? "You're just in time for dinner, by the way. Do you want to stay? We won't keep you long enough to get back to your space. You'll finally get to try mom's garlic knots."
Keith has a peculiar reflex to McClain. And no amount of willpower or stamina can hold back a bursting “of course.”
Lance leans the shovel against the tree, rubs Cosmo's ear again, and heads toward the house. The McClain house looks small, ordinary even, nothing special, but even a few meters before it already smells cozy and life spilling into the corners. It was the kind of place you'd call home; Keith's little barn in the desert didn't even compare.
Lance's slightly older nephews, whose names Keith often confuses, line up on the terrace and immediately pile in with questions about travel, blasters, and magic. Kogane stammers on the third step, the fourth question, and can't even get a word in - the kids are so noisy and all-encompassing. Or maybe it's just the McClain's distinctive feature, coupled with their swarthy skin and ultramarine blue eyes, or is it just Lance's?
"All right, everybody, leave Keith alone, he's tired enough as it is, don't bother him!" Lance wants to take the kids home, as they are shouting enthusiastically when they notice Cosmo behind Kogane's back and they are not interested in ships, blasters and battles anymore. Keith exhales in relief and grins at the children's spontaneity.
Lance invites them into the house, Keith has been here before, maybe a year ago, when he came again, stayed only a few hours and left in a hurry. McClain's eyes had swirled with something indistinct then, holding Keith for a few more seconds, but Kogane had preferred to dismiss the obsession then.
Now Kogane looks around, looking for a change and can't believe everything has stayed the same. The same wallpaper in the hall and kitchen, the same arches and carved dark wood nightstands with seashells and a whole bowl of necklaces and gold earrings, as if no one had taken them since last time.
Keith undoes the clasps and removes his heavy boots with a loud squeak, catching a glimpse of Lance's parents entering the hall.
At first Cogane thinks it's the lamps silvering their hair, but when they walk toward him with their arms outstretched, saying something in clear spanish, Keith realizes it's the gray strands - not so noticeable a year ago. The McClains smell of sea salt, salads, roasted meat, and something inexplicably familiar and comforting; his mother smells of spices and the strange perfume that was so perfect for her, and his father smells of machine oil and freshly laundered striped shirts.
Perhaps if Keith had a living father, he would smell the same.
Parents' voice blends into the McClain house, with pictures on the walls, with piles of clothes on colorful hangers, with long hallways and many doors.
The McClains just tell him to wash his hands and sit down at the table, and Keith feels at home.
Lance next to him says nothing, just hands him a towel, and Keith's Supernova explodes under his diaphragm.
Lance smiles for the umpteenth time, and with every smile he makes, Keith's spacesuit cracks, armor breaks, and communicator goes dead.
Keith sits down at a large set table, rolls his sleeves up to his elbow out of habit, and runs his eyes over the vast amount of food on the table - in space he's only had a few minutes for tasteless Altein slop and seconds for dry rations. At a nearby small table sit his nephews, including the now slightly older and disgruntled Silvio and Nadia. Everyone starts to talk animatedly, as if seeing each other for the first time after a long separation, Keith puts on chicken, rice and some vegetables, which turn out to be too spicy, having to eat small pieces with a drink.
Lance's mom's gaze slid first to his shoulders, then down to his forearms, then down to the outline of the faded scars and yellowish bruises. Her lips drew together into a thin line, and a hardened sadness and longing swelled at the bottom of her eyes. It was as if Lance's mom had become smaller, as if she had shrunk, pushing her own memories back to the bottom of her consciousness.
But when she noticed Keith's gaze on her, she immediately shrugged, fixed her curly, graying hair, and smiled, but her eyes were still sad and terribly understanding. Keith shuddered as he remembered how Veronica had almost died in that war, along with Lance, only to be saved by Red flying in just in time.
Hiding another reminder of the past under his jacket sleeve, Kogane continued eating, still feeling the icy stares of McClain's blue eyes in his skin. Better storms and tempests than calm, especially in such clear eyes as those of the entire Lance family. Especially Lance.
"Keith, tell us something!" Veronica stretches out, propping her head on her arm. Kogane recalls a couple of letters Acxa received recently during the mission to Milaniuum-065. She had kept them with her the entire mission, in a small pocket on her hip, and reread them often, smiling occasionally. Keith could only speculate from whom, and that only when she was off duty.
"Yeah, Keith, what's the situation there now?" Marco pointed upward with his finger and smiled with one corner of lips. Lance, sitting on right, set fork aside and leaned forward a little. Keith wished he would, on the contrary, move away, or better yet, leave the kitchen. But Kogane had no right to kick someone out of their own home.
"Things are slowly getting better. Now the missions are much longer than in previous years. We're flying to other galaxies after all." Keith speaks concisely, crumpled, throws a piece of information and shamefully runs away. He doesn't want to talk about space on Earth and vice versa. These are two incompatible things in Keith's mind, diametrically opposed, and they should be exactly there, at different ends of the universe, not in the same kitchen or at the same table where no horizon separates them.
So Keith has his own terminology, where “Lance McClain” and “sentience” aren't even close, and between them a couple belts of constellations, planets, and two deca-fibs that have drifted into the Quantum Abyss. But with red footnotes and requests to go to another page.
Marco wanted to ask something again, but Kogane was saved by Lance's insight and a new topic of conversation, the essence of which Keith lost after a few seconds.
The rest of the dinner passed muffled and somewhere in the background. Thoughts lumped at the bottom of his stomach, his forearms itched like burns that had just grown skin, and time passed more quickly today. Keith only came to his senses when it was four hours to midnight and he still had to get to the Garrison.
Kogane leaves the plates in the sink, doesn't make eye contact with Lance's mom, and might even appear to be avoiding her, all the while pulling back the sleeves of jacket. Before leaving, he rubs nephews' heads and already has one foot over the threshold as Lance catches up, pulls on his blue shirt and says he'll walk him, though it's not a long walk here - to the gate, where a small jet shuttle has been boarded, the ruler of which has recently been specially designed by Pidge for fast travel and maneuvering in space, of course, in comparison with Red it doesn't go in comparison, but it's not bad either.
Lance didn't reach the gate, turning toward the field and the tree where he'd left the shovel. Keith didn't expect anything else, just followed him in silence. McClane is wrapped in his thin shirt, and Keith's heart is beneath his jacket, racing through his chest, and it's all so wrong, so immensely stupid and childish. Like there, in the Castle of the Lions, in the cracked smile of the stone sculpture of the savior Allura, in the scar stretching all over Keith's cheek, in Lance's muddy markings, like once upon a time. Once utterly understandable, long forgotten, rasping and faded. Like a once upon a time that one longs to return to.
The sun is clinging, wrapping the clouds in gold, reaching for the tops of the trees that cut the horizon line, streaming ochre waterfalls down their trunks, hiding in the half-closed buds of unicorn flowers. The sunset kisses the remnants of warmth on the exposed skin. Keith is sure that at night the sun sleeps between the Lance fingers on his hands.
That's where the sky spreads purple, that's where the bridges to the other ends of the galaxy are lined with amber, and that's the only place in outer space where you can breathe without a spacesuit.
Because the only reason Keith will die of oxygen deprivation is because of Lance.
Kogane intravenously injects himself with lilac-blue sunsets and Lance's dreamy gaze leaking out for a second. For a tick, he forgot about his cheekbone markings, about the Altean juniberry, about space and the imminent mission. And that tick was enough to take a full breath, to hide between his ribs the lulling rustle of wood, the smell of McClain's new shampoo, and a whole field of paradoxical space flowers that had taken root perfectly on Earth.
"It's beautiful here" Lance's voice blended so clearly into the peaceful atmosphere of the sunset field, as if he'd always been a part of it, as if he'd always been the missing note in the natural score.
Keith only shook his head silently, afraid to mar this moment, this hovering, singing, rustling and murmuring peace, with inappropriate speech. Because Keith doesn't belong here, because Keith is all misshapen, broken, sloppily glued together, flying only in bad weather and not knowing how to live. Forgetting himself in training, battles, missions; getting lost in gunfire, scarlet flashes, and billions of stars; but never being able to accept the new world and himself.
Because they've been coming to this for too long, falling, too many wounds and fears that can't be licked, that can't be transcended. Kogane is not sure that someone will be able to understand him without fear, to trace the contours of the scar on his cheek, to share memories of space and the deafening noise of Galrian cannons in the evenings, to go through the entire intergalactic war anew and return to the “now”, when the only things from the old days are the unhealed scars on his forearms and the glowing marks on his cheekbones - a memory of those who have not reached the peaceful “now”.
Perhaps Keith is demanding too much from a world that has been trying to strangle him for several years. Perhaps. So Keith keeps silent, plays cards with death, his own life is the stake, and listens to the shimmering cornflower markings from afar.
Everyone copes with the vestiges of personal warfare in their own way. Shiro sometimes flinches at the sound of clapping, Hunk is used to eating only green Altean slurry, forgetting that he has a whole restaurant at his disposal, Pidge gets anxious if she doesn't see her brother for a long time, even if he's gone to another room, and Lance is afraid to look at the sky. He'd told Keith about it himself once, in passing, but Kogane remembered. Keith isn't afraid to look up at the sky, because somewhere out there is his newly acquired “home,” his mother, and responsibilities he can't give up so easily. It's not in his power to forget about the stars, hide eyes from the sun with a straw hat, and keep working the land. It's Lance's station to trade escapism for panache.
Keith's vocation is to further maintain peace in a cosmos that has only just recovered from fear.
And the more Kogane thinks about what he owes, the less he realizes what he wants.
Keith would like to say that he still has plenty of time to think and decide, but he does not feel his material self. For him, time has always flowed away like sand through his fingers. Keith is afraid to come back to earth sometimes, afraid to return to a whole new world, afraid of change, afraid of not recognizing his friends. Keith is afraid of time and its passage, in space it is easier to deal with this - the stars have a lot to measure in this world, and their deaths are always bright and dazzling. There is only horror and emptiness in the deaths of men.
"After all these years, not much has changed."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you're still diving headlong into all these fights and problems, making enemies and getting hurt. Still the same "rebel" " - Lance's words sound so forced, with a sickening hope that things are still "the way they used to be", even though they both realize that "the way they used to be’" will never be the same.
"Well, like" McClane seemed to realize that he'd said something stupid and stupid again, "like before".
Keith was looking just above the horizon, drowning in the sunset glow, escaping from the muffled dialog that had not had time to begin, while Lance, on the contrary, lowered his gaze, still afraid to look up at the sky, afraid of the stars, afraid that some of them might burst through the atmosphere again with a meteorite and take all the peace away with it, smearing it in its own crater. It would take with it all the timid, neatly stacked letters to the different ends of the galaxy, the friendly paladin gatherings on New Althea, the nightly half-whispered conversations and the returning gleam in his eyes.
"We...never really got to talk much. It's been six months since my last visit, has anything changed?" Keith and Lance had been practicing talking around the bush since Voltron. Keith running away and then coming back after a while has always been Keith.
"It's just the way things are. Nothing ever changes, and even if it does, that's life."
"Would you want to change anything?"
Lance thought for a second.
"No, I like everything."
Keith wants to ask something else, but the words melt and stick to his palate without ever coming out. He just wants to believe in these words, to fall for this illusion and find an outlet in this wonderful tale, to fall in love with it, to let it pass through him and leave it. Run away from your own doubts and just live.
"You'll come for Christmas, won't you?"
"I'll try" Keith pulls up his jacket sleeves again and takes steps toward the gate, because Kogane is always running away from vague and indirect answers.
"We'll decorate everything here: garland, tinsel, Hunk and his culinary masterpieces" the Cuban closes his eyes dreamily, and Kogane clings again to the Altean markings glittering in the water. And yet they're glowing, "Christmas tree, toys, the whole deal. It's going to be fun. There won't be much snow, of course, but still."
"No promises. The next mission is on Effia-22, it's a long way away, I might be a little late."
"Let's just not like the last time, when your “I'll be a little late” stretched into “I won't come at all” " Lance chuckles huskily, he doesn't take offense, he understands. Keith, as always, promises nothing, so as not to disappoint and justify his own escape from reality. But not to the plantation, but to the familiar cosmos.
"Effium-22? Was that the same planet that had recently been occupied by the rebels of the new Galra power? " The small seas swirled in storms, and Lance's voice faltered at the worry lodged in his throat. Breath ragged and arrhythmic with the squall, Keith was sure Lance would kill him faster than the Galra rebels with their guns.
"Yeah."
McClain has anxiety, tension, and something else unidentifiable to Keith between his eyebrows. Something else Keith hoped, didn't even want to allow for the thought of it.
"Be careful" Lance exhales, and Keith only now realizes he wasn't breathing.
"I'll try" McClain forced out a grin, and Kogane thought the gap between them was still too wide to smooth out the wrinkles between the Cuban's eyebrows.
For some reason, it feels like the juniberry are chuckling quietly in the wind.
***
Lance barely looks Keith in the eye, hiding something very important, something that needs to be said in his fists. The tension between them supernovae explodes on their lips, McClain licking and squeezing them frequently.
Keith is willing to stand on the bridge for as long as it takes for Lance to materialize his words, except that Kogane doesn't command the resource of time - it's at the mercy of the Universe. And Keith has a personal vendetta against the universe.
"I have to go" Lance absent-mindedly jogs his gaze around the shuttle, Keith wanting Lance to look at him.
"Yeah, sorry" but McClain never did what Kogane wanted "I'm looking forward to seeing you at Christmas."
And Lance's “you promised” is completely glassy, transparent, Keith sees a no-holds-barred “just try not to-”.
So Kogane just smiles, and McClain turns away again, hides the unspoken “come back” in the pockets of his jeans, and hurries away. Keith promises himself that this time for Christmas he's obligated to fly in.
***
But Keith doesn't arrive, and reality is cracking at the seams as a monotonous voice on galactic cable broadcasts the news of an F-67 humanitarian shuttle being hit by rebels while attempting to land on the planet Effia-22.
It was followed by some sort of commercial, interrupted by convulsive sobs, curses, and the crackling of space matter. The garland went out in a flash, the tinsel too prickly and the futile attempts to re-establish contact with the ship's pilots.
***
The creak of a heavy metal door can slit veins and travel along nerve endings. It cuts deeper than a laser charge grazing the skin.
The measured beeping of instruments begins to be discernible through the concerned murmur, the smell of medicine and alcohol stinging his nose for a few seconds and shooting into his temples. Keith squints against the blinding white, wheezes, and opens his eyes.
"Keith!" Shiro's velvety voice breaks through the noise of the instruments, Keith finally opens his eyes and takes a few more seconds to realize reality.
Shiro, sitting next to him in a chair, smiles paternally, adjusts the loose sheet and looks worriedly at the monitors. Hunk, standing behind Takashi, exhales in relief, almost bending in half and muttering something about being sick with excitement. Pidge on the left wipes her glasses and squints tensely, blinking frequently.
"I never thought I'd be in the hospital again" Holt hissed, adjusting glasses and smoothing the wrinkles on her forehead, "I thought even your zeal for getting into trouble would end."
Someone snickers at Pidge's words, and Kit only now notices the tightly closed lips and the hard look in blue eyes that literally screws Kogane in the chest. Lance, hunched over and with his hands on the window sill, quickly averts his gaze, and Keith realizes he's not going to get any more out of McClain. And he doesn't deserve it.
"We were all very worried" Shiro begins to lighten the mood. He starts slowly, from afar, sidestepping the black holes and, as before, getting everyone in the right frame of mind. Hunk ties his bandana three times, clasps his big hands together and rubs them together to stop the trembling. Keith only now notices his friends' breathing is a little ragged, apparently as soon as they were informed of his whereabouts they rushed to him, "You were lucky to get away with only a couple of abrasions and one fracture."
Keith can't feel any pain, apparently the painkillers. He only feels several layers of bandages on his face and arms and a sharp needle from a catheter.
Pidge starts talking about the new innovations and discoveries made on New Althea.
But Lance's silence still blows out of reality, blows Keith himself out of his mind. McClain doesn't even go to his bed, staring blankly out the window for a minute, only turning occasionally to let him know that he's listening, even if he's not speaking.
The nurse who just came in says that everyone has a few more minutes, because Keith needs to rest. Kogane wants to say that he doesn't need anything but his friends.
Shiro gets up, tells him to get better soon and promises to stop by tomorrow. Keith smiles. Hunk and Pidge follow Takashi out of the room, Holt angrily saying something about next times and murders. Keith smiles at that too, because he knows Pidge won't kill him, even after the tenth crash from the spaceship.
The door closes again with a creak, and Kogane wrinkles his nose.
The footsteps outside the door gradually subside, and only Lance remains in the chamber. Standing there, still staring blankly out the window, seemingly ignoring Keith, as if Keith isn't even here. Kogane opens his mouth to say something, but realizes he has no idea what he should be talking about.
"Shut up" Lance's voice cuts harder than the metal door, McClain turns around, walks quickly to the bunk, and looks at Keith with a mixture of something inexplicable, unvoiced yet affecting to the core.
Kogane opens his mouth again, maybe in an attempt to apologize, maybe to provoke Lance into shutting him up again. Surprisingly, it works.
"Don't say anything" McClain slumps back in his chair, frowning, and he's all sharp-edged now, tense, storing it up inside him-one wrong move and it'll be unclear whether he'll burst into a string with the sound of an inverted wrong note or collapse into nothingness, to the accompaniment of Keith's silent desires and his own creaking ribs.
"I'm sorry" Keith squeezed out; he didn't know if Lance even needed an apology, but he thought it was the right thing to do.
Lance squeezes Keith's bandaged hand, sniffing his nose. Kogane is in a little pain from McClain's touch, but what's that pain compared to his life?
"You stupid piece of mallet!" Slips in somewhere between “You're alive” and “Quiznak, we were all so worried! I almost died of fright!”
"I haven't had a mallet in a long time" burned lips curve in a grin and McClain's eyebrows break, teeth clenching in a pitiful whimper and shoulders shuddering. Lance's choked sighs knock his teeth out, and Keith can smell the sea and garlic knots.
Lance takes a minute to recover his breath, pulls back a little, and stares. Stares, stares, stares. As if in the next second the check will blow, the meter will go to zero, the detonator will go off, and Keith will be impossible to look at anymore. As if in the next second there will be no more Lance, no more Keith, no more space and no more Varadero Beach. And Kogane understands him.
"Qwiznak, I...I was worried" McClain drops his head exhaustedly, wrapping both hands around Keith's fingers, massaging his knuckles, "when I heard about the explosion I...damn it , my heart almost stopped, you.... You idiot! I was so scared for you. You didn't contact us, we all thought you were dead! I, quiznak, I couldn't find a place for myself the whole time, hell, I wouldn't have survived your death, do you realize that?!" Lance exhales raggedly and Keith loses touch with the real world as small silver droplets tear roll down his swarthy cheek, "I just can't stand it if space takes what's most precious to me again" Kogane seemed to have a new universe in his chest, where Lance had circled a couple of celestial bodies in one hyperspace jump, jumped across a galaxy chasm, and was now close. Even too close.
McClain's Morse pulse beats out “stay,” the azure sea writhing in storms, beating desperately against the edges of his iris, salty foam accumulating in the corners of his eyes.
And Keith rips off his spacesuit, jumping out into outer space to comet to the bottom of that sea and suffocate with it.
"May I kiss you?" McClain's tags flare up like they contain a small tungsten light bulb, and Keith has found the right switch. Kogane picks up shards of his own tenderness, warmth, puts into Lance's hands that Galrian knife he was ready to rip out everyone's throats for a few years ago, just so they wouldn't touch him, wouldn't look at him. Keith was tired of running from himself.
McClain is silent, an unreadable veil in his eyes, and Keith's impersonal feelings before him. Lance carefully rises from the chair, shifts to the bunk, not releasing Kogane's fingers from his palm, instead squeezing them tighter, making it clear that this is not a dream, not a vision, not an illusion-it's real, it's what Lance wants to put into Keith's mouth in response to his sincerity.
McClane leans over Kogane a little, fixes his hair, brushing it away from his violet eyes, touches the burgundy bandages in some places - and those touches are like butterfly wings, airy, utterly intangible and tickling, even through the layers of fabric. Keith feels all his wounds opening up again - it must be the oozing of all the unspoken feelings. They burst forth, too many for Keith's weak, battered body.
"I..." Lance's fingers twitch a little, icy. Keith turns his palm over with the last of his strength and wraps his hand around McClain's arm in return. The needle from the catheter cuts and pricks unpleasantly, but Keith doesn't care so much about it, "I really can?"
"A long time ago" Keith wheezes, though he's not sure Lance was addressing him. More to the past, to his own scars, to the marks. Asking permission from memory to “let go and forget,” asking permission from the future to change, because right now change is scary. In that case, Keith was making too much of himself by giving an answer. But being someone's future he really wanted to be.
Lance stares into the purple galaxies of Kogane for a few more ticks, a moment, his face smoothing, his lips spreading into that shy, fragile smile, but Keith is washed by the sea breeze. McClain leans in and makes contact with Keith's lips.
Lance doesn't kiss, just touches, and Keith crumbles into a myriad of constellations, sprawling purple nebulae and love-love-love-love.
Lance stirs the kisses with salty tears and the brackish taste of blood from reopened wounds, and Kit seems to cease to exist.
Lance doesn't even need to aim, Keith sets himself up for the muzzle of the blue rifle and pulls the trigger. Dying at the hands of McClain is less shameful than dying at the hands of the Galra rebels.
The war ends with parity broken on McClain's side, because Lance's kisses taste like salty foam from Varadero Beach, feel like the last second before the Galra fleet self-destructs. Or before the F-67 wreckage disintegrates in the atmosphere of Effia-22. Keith hadn't made up his mind yet, but he'd already failed two or three attempts to pull himself back together.
"Why did I have to teeter on the edge between life and death to get that kiss?" Lance rolled his eyes, but smiled.
And at the corners of his lips, stars explode with a deafening pop, galaxies swirl and the universe collapses, the residual heat breaking his shoulder blades and smearing across his knees from behind shoulder, Keith now not sure he could stand on his feet afterward.
"Just try to pull something like that next time."
"I promise I won't."
"But let's not do it like last time, okay?"
Keith's grin was directed at the universe and the loser of this game of death. It was addressed to the same shaky and ethereal future, to the faint light of the lighthouse, which was waiting for Keith in “tomorrow”.
And Kogane will definitely enter it with his head proudly raised.