Chapter Text
Keith had been acting suspiciously ever since the rescue mission. Everyone else had shared stories of what had happened when they were all split up, everyone else had hugged each other, and a few people (okay, maybe only Hunk) had cried when they were reunited. But Keith had participated in none of it. He had found his way back to the Castle of Lions, waved a quick hello to everyone, and then disappeared into his room. He had been sighted occasionally in the few days that followed, but he even seemed to avoid eating dinner with the others.
But, Lance had to admit that, without any doubt whatsoever, this was the weirdest thing Keith had done yet. Lance was standing in the dining room of the castle, helping himself to a quick post-dinner snack of only the highest quality green goop, when Keith approached him, draped in the sheets from his bed.
“Lance,” he spoke in a hushed voice from behind the shadows of his makeshift cloak.
“Ah!” Lance jumped out of his skin before realizing that what was now in front of him was more humorous than anything else. “Keith, what-” His sentence broke off into a fit of giggles, which only prompted a low growl from Keith.
“Lance I need to talk to you.” Keith said, more urgently this time.
Lance rolled his eyes, “Sure, right after I get a picture of this.” He laughed, fishing in his pockets for his phone. He didn’t have a chance to take his picture, though, because after an exasperated sigh from Keith, he was being dragged down the hall. The hand that was almost painfully clenched to his wrist was still carefully covered by the sheet.
On their way to the sleeping quarters, they passed the entry to the living area, where a very bewildered Shiro raised an eyebrow in Lance’s direction. Lance just shrugged in response. Finally, Keith pushed Lance into his own room. The constant low hum of noise that came from Lance’s hand held radio somehow made the atmosphere infinitely less tense. When the paladins had found themselves stranded on Atlea, Lance had spent seemingly endless homesick hours fiddling with the out of service device. It didn’t take more than a week for Allura to notice something was wrong. Lance still joked that what she had done was witchcraft, but he was immensely grateful when she somehow got it to pick up some of earth’s radio waves.
“Okay, what the hell is up with you?” Lance plopped himself down on the bed, and turned to see Keith, without the sheet. He took a solid moment just to contain himself. To do nothing but sit and take it in and, at all costs, not react. Keith was turning purple, his fingers were crooked and sharp, he had animal-like, purple ears poking from his unruly hair. It almost looked like he was turning Galra. “Oh,” Lance finally trusted himself to speak after a moment of painful silence between the two. “Okay.”
“What do you mean okay?” Keith exclaimed in an outburst, whether the cause was anxiety or anger Lance couldn’t tell. “This is anything but okay! I’m turning into one of them, I am one of them! I don’t know, but it’s not ‘okay!’” He yelled, baring his teeth in frustration. His very, very sharp teeth, Lance noticed.
“So what?” Lance faked a yawn. “You’re turning into Barney or whatever. You’re fucked up complexion doesn’t change anything except maybe your success rate on Grindr or whatever you use.” Keith’s tension seemed to ease after that, his ears even perking up.
“You’re not afraid?” Keith asked apprehensively, his eyes softer than Lance had ever seen them. His eyes. They were the same, human, with dark, purple irises. Despite himself, Lance found it comforting.
“‘Course not, you’re still Keith, right?” Lance pointed out, and then added, “I could still kick your butt anytime.” He took a deep breath. “Your new, weird ears don’t change anything about you. If you’re Galra then you’re the best Galra any of us will ever get to meet.” Keith smiled and, although it was hard to tell through the scattered splotches of purple, it looked like he was blushing. “But,” Lance’s goofy smile dropped off his face. “You do need to tell the others. This whole hiding in your bedroom, and just generally acting shady thing has got Shiro all worked up and worried about you. We're all good guys here, especially Pidge and Hunk, I can vouch for them. They deserve the truth.”
Keith’s smile had vanished as well. He looked like he would be sick. “Yeah, I know,” he trailed off.
“We can do it together,” Lance’s suggestion sounded like more of a question, but it was completely sincere. He understood that something like this could be decidedly horrifying. He had firsthand experience.
- - -
Lance Sanchez sat on a couch in the Castle of Lions’ living room. On the couch across from him, five pairs of eyes were intently focused on him. The flashbacks to his coming out were vivid and damn near unavoidable. Lance had spent the prior twenty minutes staring at the ceiling of his room, doing his best to prepare himself for this moment, and to bury his memories of announcing his sexuality. All to no avail.
The event had been much smaller for Lance back on Earth, with only his mother sitting across from him. “Is everything okay, mijo?” She had asked, her face framed by curls that had grayed impossibly prematurely. Her warm brown eyes were soft with concern.
“Yeah, mom,” Lance responded, he remembered how he couldn’t seem to get enough breath, and his anxiety twisted his stomach into a sickening knot. He had gone over the words a thousand times, exactly how he would say them to her. “There’s something I think I need to tell you.”
“Si?” She prompted. Lance recalled the feeling of struggling to swallow with his exceedingly dry throat.
“I just think you deserve to know this. I mean, it shouldn’t be a big deal, though.” He only allowed himself to ramble for a second before getting down to business. “I’m bi, mama,” his use of Spanish made his nerves obvious. He avoided his native tongue as often as possible, mostly to suppress bad memories. Whether he had used it because of nerves, or to sneak his way into his mother’s good favor was unclear, even for him.
“Oh,” his mother had breathed. “Oh.” She had been his hero. His model for how to stay calm in the face of anything, how to stay caring and accepting. He missed home. He missed her.
“Keith has something very important to tell everyone here,” Lance announced matter-of-factly. “And, I have a request from the man himself that no one here flip shit, okay?”
Shiro gave his signature ‘concerned dad’ raised eyebrow. “Are you and Keith finally going out?” Pidge asked apathetically. “Is that what this is about?”
Hunk smiled, “It’s about time.”
Lance felt heat rising to his face. “What? No! God, no! You two are so dumb,” he spluttered. “Ugh, just shut up and listen.”
Pidge and Hunk broke into a fit of snickers and exchanged fist bumps. Lance frowned and listened to his heart pounding in his ears.
“Keith, come on, man,” he yelled out to the hallway. “We don’t have all day.” Deep breath, Lance reminded himself, attempting to make a dent in the mounting anxiety that was weighing down his stomach.
Keith came from around the corner after a surprisingly short amount of hesitation. This time, he wasn’t covered in a sheet, and the contrast of his skin and the purple blotches was striking in the living room’s lights. Lance made eye contact with him for long enough to share an encouraging smile before turning to see his teammates faces. Pidge looked astonished, Hunk’s expression was bordering on anger, if Lance wasn’t mistaken, and Coran seemed to be wearing the best neutral face Lance had ever seen on the usually very animated Atlean. It was the last two on the couch that were a real cause for concern. Both Shiro and Allura looked somewhere between distressed and ready to kill. Shiro’s Galran hand glowed a subtle pink, and both Allura’s fists sat balled at her sides. She looked close to tears.
“Keith…” Hunk was the first to talk, despite evidently not having his thoughts together. “Your… Ears?”
A nervous laugh escaped Keith. “Um, yeah,” he stuttered, the parts of his face that weren’t purple steadily turning red. “They’ve- uh- it’s been, I mean, I’ve been like this since getting stranded. I started changing like this, I mean.” Keith had made his way to standing next to the couch where Lance was seated. Instead of sitting, he stood there uncomfortably. Lance gave him a quick thumbs up, right before everything went wrong.
“No, no way,” Shiro had finally articulated his thoughts well enough to get out words. “He has to leave. We can’t trust a Galra here.” Lance knit his eyebrows together in frustration.
“You’re expecting him to leave the Castle?” Lance asked in disbelief, his blood already beginning to boil. “Because of your issues?” Silence. Everyone knew what Lance was referencing, despite his ambiguity and, for the most part, everyone was shocked. Any discussion about Shiro’s time on the Galra ship had long since become a point of mutual avoidance among everyone at the Castle of Lions. The fact that Lance would bring it up, not to mention in such a rude fashion, was a serious breach of taboo.
“Well,” Allura recovered after the moment of appalled silence, apparently electing to ignore Lance’s comment all together. “I raise issue with it too.” She began, but Lance was already standing up and responding.
“‘With it?’” He exclaimed.
“I meant keeping a Galra in the Castle, not to say Keith is an it!” Allura eyes lit up with indignation, and she sat taller. Shiro also shifted uncomfortably next to her.
“Don’t say you have an issue with ‘keeping a Galra in the Castle,’ like this is that impersonal.” Lance insisted. “Say what you mean. You don’t trust Keith anymore because he’s turning fucking purple. But he’s still Keith!”
“I hardly think I need remind all of you what happened the last time we trusted a Galra to pilot one of the lions!” Allura finally exploded, tears rolling down her cheeks in anger. Even Lance snapped his mouth shut at that. Allura didn’t need to remind them. They were still fighting Zarkon, her father had died. Her entire planet had been lost, her entire race.
“Zarkon and Keith aren’t the same.” Lance finally said, more carefully this time. “We know Keith. We trust him. We can’t stop just because he’s from somewhere we’re not. That’s not right. We should know that.”
“Stop,” Keith spoke for the first time since he’d explained his ears. He didn’t sound timid anymore, he sounded somewhere between sad and pissed off. But at least he sounded sure of himself. “Stop talking about me like I’m not right here. I’m not any different. Lance is right, the only reason you have to distrust me right now is because of the color of my skin. And, I don’t know how it was on Altea, but being from Earth we should damn well know that’s not right.” He took a deep breath, or maybe it was a sigh. Lance couldn’t tell. “Look, I get that my opinion doesn’t really matter in this, it’s up to you guys. So, um, I’m gonna go to bed. I’ll, uh, see you tomorrow, I guess.”
Watching Keith’s back retreating, Lance suddenly felt sick to his stomach. “You guys can’t be serious. You’re being,” his brain fizzed out in his anger. He couldn’t quite think of a word to do his friend’s actions justice. “You’re being, ugh I don’t know, dumb.”
“We’re just being cautious.” Hunk said diplomatically. It was obvious that all this conflict was really messing with him. Lance knew Hunk well enough to be very familiar with his hate of confrontation, especially among friends.
“Cautious of Keith? He’s only ever helped us and,” Lance tried to get his tone to seem joking. He almost felt bad for Hunk. “Come on, the guy couldn’t even make it at the Garrison.”
“Yeah, but we came here to fight Galra, so it wouldn’t really make sense that we’d trust a Galra.” Almost. “Not to mention let him pilot a lion.”
“Right,” Lance’s sarcasm was sharp enough to make Hunk flinch. “We shouldn’t trust him to pilot the lion he saved right from under the Sendak’s nose.”
“Lance,” Shiro’s tone was a warning one, eerily similar to the one Lance’s mother would use when he stepped out of line.
“No,” Lance, after hearing Shiro’s tone, nearly felt like a defiant kid. But, he reminded himself, he knew what he was fighting for was right. He was fighting for Keith. “No, Shiro, you don’t get to tell me to chill when you are all being so,” again, an appropriate adjective escaped him, “difficult. Nothing about Keith has changed, and you guys are all up in arms because he’s from a different planet than you. You can’t expect me to believe that you guys don’t see the parallels to home here.”
“It’s not that we don’t, but,” Shiro stopped, his head had found it’s way into his hands at some point during Lance’s previous tirade. An exhausted sigh escaped from behind his hands. “We will need to keep a close eye on him.” His change of mind was apparent in his voice. “Not necessarily because he’s Galra, just because we’ve never seen anything like this before.” He peeked out from behind his hands, but not in Lance’s direction. “You have the final say, princess. You have the most experience with the Galra.”
Allura’s eyes were still bloodshot from crying, and she looked miserable, but it was easy to see that her anger had faded. “He’s Keith, not Zarkon.” She said, as if it were more for her to hear out loud than anyone else. “I do agree that we’ll need to keep an eye on him, but I trust the rest of you to judge your fellow paladins’ character, regardless of where they are from.”
Lance fell back on the couch behind him in relief. If he wasn’t hallucinating, he thought he caught a miniscule, relieved smile on Pidge’s lips.
“I’m sorry, Lance,” Lance looked up sharply at the sound of Shiro’s voice.
“You know I’m not the person that any of you owe an apology.” Lance pointed out, making sure that enough hostility made it into his voice to get his point across. “I’m going to bed.” As he left the room, the hushed voices of his other paladins were already audible.
He had a pretty good idea of what they were talking about, after two incredibly good conversation starters had just been supplied. Keith in general, the whole transformation, did he know about it before this?, etc. And, “What the hell has got Lance all up in arms?” Lance did not have the energy to worry about which one they were discussing. He had one, simple objective: sleep. His door slid open and he reached over to turn on the lights, already tugging his shirt off. When he turned, lights on and shirt off, he jumped in surprise at Keith’s presence on his bed.
“How’d it go?” He asked innocently, obviously not bothered by the fact that he had caught Lance in the act of undressing. Obviously not bothered by the fact that he had scared the life out of Lance.
“Ah, Keith!” Lance yelped, his heart racing in response to his surprise. “God, you can’t just do that!”
“Do what?” Keith asked, again very evidently unaware of his fault. He sat cross legged on Lance’s bed, the blue paladin’s radio in his lap, turned to a generic talk show.
“Well, sure, Jim,” some radio host’s wheezy laugh came buzzing from the tiny radio, “you could say that, but honestly it’s more likely that…”
“Just, I dunno, be in my room like that, sneak up like that, do anything that you just did.” Lance took a long breath, trying his best to slow down his heart.
“Okay,” Keith agreed, but Lance got the sneaking suspicion that he hadn’t really been listening. “But how did it go?”
“I don’t know.” Lance breathed out in frustration. He couldn’t believe his teammates had responded the way they did. Especially Hunk, he had expected better from Hunk. “I mean, they’re not going to kick you out. But, I don’t think Shiro or Allura are very happy about it.”
“Oh,” Keith started to fiddle with the tuning knob of the radio. Static and clips of voices and music filled the silence.
“They’re acting like they’ve never met you, it’s so dumb. And besides, the Red Lion trusts you, so that’s good, right?” Lance spat out, trying to control his temper. He honestly felt like punching something, or screaming, maybe both.
Keith shook his head, his eyes still trained on the radio. “The Black Lion trusted Zarkon, it still does more than it trusts Shiro.” He pointed out hopelessly.
“Fine then,” Lance threw his shirt on the steadily growing pile of dirty clothes on his floor. “I trust you, but I know better than to trust Zarkon.”
Keith let out a half hearted laugh and pushed himself off Lance’s bed. “Thanks, Lance,” he said and before leaving added, “I mean it, I owe you.”
Lance wanted to insist that there was nothing owed, because he was just doing the right thing, but Keith was already gone. So, Lance finished getting changed, turned off the lights, and threw himself on his bed. He laid there, just running through rude and, frankly, brilliant things he could’ve said to the other paladins but had thought of too late. Eventually, to the sound of a muted beyonce song sifting in and out of static, he drifted off.
- - -
“Lance seemed incredibly, um,” Shiro, Pidge, Coran, and Allura still sat in the living room, more or less in shock from the night’s previous events. Hunk had excused himself to get a snack “before he lost his mind,” in his own words. The remaining four sat around, discussing the new developments of their small little circle. As far as most of them were concerned, the president had just been shot, a solid seventh of their world had fallen into the sea. Their world, the tiny few that they had, were exactly that: all that they had. A change like this would reshape their team, their dynamic, their world, population seven. “Passionate.” Shiro finally finished, his final word sounding almost like a question rather than anything else.
Pidge raised an apathetic eyebrow, if anyone were to ask them, they would never admit it, but it was, more than anything, a facade. A mask to hide the fact that, although not nearly as angry as Lance, they were just as appalled by their teammates’ opinions. Hunk reentered the room, holding a plate with an impossibly large pile of Altean goo. Coran sat quietly, obviously not compelled to involve himself in the conversation for one reason or another.
“I’m surprised you weren’t.” Allura commented, almost absently. Everyone was tired. She was the only one who could even form words, and there was no guarantee that what she said would be well thought out.
“Well,” Shiro seemed laser focused on his knees, as if he’d never seen them before, but trying to comprehend them was a little more than he could manage with his overwhelming exhaustion. “I’m trying to keep everything…” He made a strange hand motion, almost like he were pushing away an undesirable meal. “I don’t know, keep it all down, if that makes sense.” He finally added.
“Lance has his reasons, too,” Hunk offered diplomatically, “he’s just doing what he thinks is right.”
“So am I,” Shiro insisted and the room fell into silence.