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Unrequited love is messy.
It’s unanswered questions, reading into situations, and angry tears. It’s throwing blame at everything and everyone who isn’t yourself, and then internalizing blame so roughly that you wonder how you ever could have thought this was anyone else’s fault but your own. It’s late nights because your brain won’t stop thinking of unlikely scenarios that will never come to fruition, and early mornings due to hyper-realistic dreams that have you blushing into your pillow and avoiding eye contact with the object of your affection for the whole day. It’s convincing yourself that things will work out, that you’re meant to be. It’s building your schedule around theirs to optimize your time together. It’s watching other couples and immediately thinking of them, and how you’d treat them and vice versa.
It’s knowing, logically, that the chances of them loving you back are slim, but the hope that they will sends your soul flying through the roof and soaring among stars made specifically for you.
It’s Keith late at night, homesick for a home he doesn’t have, convinced something’s missing but not recognizing that the feeling goes away when he’s with Lance. He calls it ‘restlessness’ but he seldom finds himself restless when the team is together.
It’s Keith on earth, watching Allura blush up at Lance as he stands on the land rover and telling him to be safe in a way Keith, himself, lacks the courage to do.
It’s Keith calling out Lance’s name in moments of desperation because Lance could be injured and Lance isn’t answering his comms and Lance, please, say something, please!
It’s Keith in the astral realm, looking up at a bright star illuminating the sky around it a royal blue, seeing the star beside it that shines a deep red colour, and thinking maybe those are for us.
or maybe they’re for him and her.
Because after all — and anyone who studies astronomy can tell you — stars that look together are often hundreds of light years apart
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Keith loves messily. He flirts through empty insults and backhanded jokes that he’s sure mean nothing at the time, though he regrets them when his head hits the pillow. He’s a concoction of making sure nobody figures him out and hoping someone — Lance — will see through the facade anyway. He finds himself standing too close and overcompensates by standing too far away. He stares for longer than he means to and is always the first to look away. When they’re alone, just him and Lance and a thousand different possibilities of conversation and action, he’s awkward and fumbles and although Lance is quick to recover and pick up where Keith leaves off, Keith can never drop the feeling that Lance does this with everyone.
But Keith’s hands are perpetually sweaty with nerves and his voice scratchy from disuse, his legs shake as he stands in the mornings and all he can think about is Lance while beating the absolute shit out if himself for doing so.
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When Keith was young, he asked his father what love really was. It wasn’t profound, but his dad quickly said “I love you,” on his way out the door and Keith, for whatever reason, threw himself into an existential crisis about what that could mean.
“There’s different typesa’ love,” His father said. “Familial love, like we have, and then romantic love, and love for your friends, love for your pets, love for… whatever.”
Love for whatever.
“What’s it feel like?”
Keith’s father was a firefighter with more brute strength than brains and more brains than ability to use. He was smart, but like his son, wasn’t very good with his words.
“It’s like a fire,” He started, and then felt lost for words as Keith put his head in his hands and gave his father his utmost attention. “Starts slow, but grows fast. You can ignore it, but that won’t make it go away. You gotta’ either contain it or feed it n’ keep it healthy.”
As a pre-teen, Keith took those words in and then forgot about them an hour later. As an adult, he wishes he had focused on their meaning more.
Loving Lance was like watching a fire grow. He’d noticed it when it was nothing but a spark; small, manageable, and nothing to worry about. But he’d ignored it, hoping it would go away on it’s own.
It didn’t.
The spark turned into a flame that warmed his belly at the sound of Lance’s laughter and his heart when they clasped their hands together as a team. It grew when Lance smirked after a particularly good jab at Keith’s being and grew again when Lance solemnly told Keith he’d resign from his position as paladin for the greater good.
Keith loved Lance. He warmed his hands on, toasted marshmallows over, and added fuel to that fire and fed it all on his own. Lance had very little help in that.
But Keith wasn’t the red paladin anymore, and though he stayed the guardian spirit of fire, it was Lance’s thing now.
And Lance had his own fire to worry about.
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2 years was a long time to be away. Long enough to grow taller and find a need to shave his face. Long enough to crave friendship again, to crave Lance.
2 years for Keith were only a few months for Lance, and while Keith was sure he’d be able to get over his “crush” in that time, he’d learned that when people say distance makes the heart grow fonder, they’re not just talking out of their asses. He really, truly saw Lance for the first time planetside before Shiro’s revival when he broke down crying. Keith wanted nothing more than for things to go back to how they were — him with the team, the whole team alive, and Lance smiling again.
The next time Keith saw Lance smile, it wasn’t at him. It wasn’t at Hunk or Pidge like it usually was, either. His smile was reserved for Allura, and that’s when Keith pieced everything together. The flame in his soul matched the one Lance fed for Allura. The stars, red and blue, matched Lance and Allura. Everything Keith was, Allura was and more.
It was the first of many heartbreaks.
“I don’t want to spend eternity with Lance” wasn’t a lie. He’d rather die than spend eternity alone with Lance as he cozied up to Allura. But Lance had looked at him like he’d mattered and called him the future and Keith made a calculated and last second decision to shut that shit down as quickly as he could because the first heartbreak he endured was enough for a streak of insomnia and two occurrences where he shed one single tear and moved on.
It’s not like he wanted Lance to go away, he just couldn’t deal with another heartbreak.
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Adam’s gone and in a way it breaks Keith’s heart, too. He sees Shiro’s blank face and hard expressions when anyone mentions the war or the casualties it brought and he knows Shiro weeps at night all the same.
Keith knows he’ll miss Adam, knows Adam probably missed him while he was gone. He feels Shiro’s grief in a way that is not his own and it scares him to no end, but he feels comfort in it as well. It’s sadistic, but he finds solace knowing that he never did — never will — get close enough to Lance to feel this pain first hand.
He thinks maybe he won’t get close to anyone else either. At risk of sounding cheesy, Keith will always consider Lance the one who got away.
Maybe if he’d stayed with the team. Maybe if he hadn’t insulted Lance so often, or had just let him win the arguments from time to time. Maybe if he’d supported Lance more vocally and told Lance just how much his smiles and laughs and tears meant to him, Keith would be the object of his affection instead.
But he isn’t, and there’s no real way to go back and fix it.
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Keith’s third heartbreak comes when he least expects it. It comes with an almost-kiss and teary eyes as Allura says goodbye and she looks at Lance like he’s the world and he looks at her as if she’s the universe holding him together. Lance doesn’t pout or cry, but his voice cracks and they hug tightly and Keith can’t even bring himself to be bitter that it’s her and not him because Lance looks so hurt. In a moment, he decides that if he could, he’d keep her here with Lance forever so long as Lance never feels the heartbreaking pain Keith feels in that moment.
Allura leaves, and that’s when Lance cries.
Lance cries, and that’s when Keith’s heart breaks one more time.
“I really love her,” Lance says into Hunk’s shoulder as Hunk pulls him in for a hug.
“She’ll be back,” Hunk says softly in return, and Keith looks up to the sky where he knows the red and blue stars are and wishes that she would come back.
Come back for him.
Lance moves back to Cuba the following weekend. Keith moves back to the desert with blueprints and what he calls restlessness in his bones. He builds a house, much like his father’s but not an exact replica because he’s only one man and memory is fickle, but he builds one. He lives in it for a few years, visiting Shiro and Hunk and Pidge in between, before deciding he wants to move on.
At 24, Keith declares that he’s going back to space. He never truly felt at home on Earth, and the reasons he’s stayed for so long have lost their appeal. Shiro isn’t alone anymore. Lance isn’t around as often. He isn’t needed.
He burns the house down — much to Hunk’s displeasure later — and declares it his flame for Lance before calling 9-11 anonymously and leaving the premises completely, a bag of his treasured belongings slung on his back.
And as he leaves Earth again, this time out of his own free will and under no obligation whatsoever, he leaves behind the flame and looks up to the stars that seem to shine for him, though they’re hundreds of light years apart.