Chapter Text
What drives Keith crazy is that if his ex apologized, he’d be back with him in an instant. That’s all he needs—proof that the boyfriend in his head isn’t a figment of his imagination projected onto the person he’s been dating for over a year. And that’s why his heart is bleeding out onto his ribs; he knows he’s never gonna get the one thing that would fix him. Instead he’s drowning in the feeling of being the stupidest, most pathetic fuck to ever exist.
The weather itself conspires to douse him in misery, frigid rain pelting his hunched shoulders as he trudges across campus with his insides exposed. How do people live like this—stagger through heartbreak and go racing back for another? Not Keith. If he survives this, he’s never doing it again. His ex ruined him forever, and that’s fine. Everyone leaves. He knew that. College isn’t some magic haven where life gets good.
He arrives to class soaked-through and wallowing, just in time to crash into somebody going in the door at the same time.
It’s him. Not Jay. The other guy present to witness Keith’s life erupt and get sucked into a black hole.
An elastic face stretched into a smile melts into horror when he meets Keith’s eye.
Keith swears he shuts down. Just a quick little factory reset to his person, to prevent him from bursting into tears, or throwing a punch, or both.
“Dude,” the guy says. “Are you okay?”
His reply is a choke. “No.”
And he shoulders past him into class.
His mind’s stuck on a wretched loop of memory; no more than five minutes total, but they pummel him over and over like the foster brother from home number four.
Walking in on his “not-a-boyfriend-we-aren’t-exclusive-we’ve-talked-about-this” making out with that annoying guy from class, promptly followed by him urging Keith to join the threesome he’d apparently shown up to.
It was worse than Keith catching him sexting other guys and then acting confused that he was mad. Worse than believing Jay when he said he wouldn’t do it again, and finding a stranger’s boxers in his bedroom a month later. Worse than him convincing Keith to let him pull this shit, because monogamy is a weapon of the patriarchy and they should, like, be enlightened about it.
It’s nothing, it doesn’t matter, it’s just somehow one of the worst moments of Keith’s life, and it was a pretty shitty life to start with.
And that’s where it’s Keith’s fault. He had himself convinced that it could only go up. He escaped high school and all the foster homes, indifferent social workers and incompetent guidance counselors. He got a full ride to his first choice college, his own dorm room and the perfect major.
He even got a boyfriend.
What could go wrong?
God, it’s embarrassing. He should be good at interpreting data. He’s never been worth caring about before. Adulthood doesn’t change that.
The professor rattles off the requirements of Keith’s latest death sentence, and Keith talks himself down from self-immolating.
It’s not just the impending group project. It’s the back of Lance McClain’s head. He’s got one of those shaggy modern mullets that every queer person seems honour-bound to get, and his curling ends flip up over the collar of his jacket to mock Keith every time he peeks over his shoulder, approximately once every thirty seconds.
It sets Keith’s teeth on edge.
Keith is bad with names; they’ve never been important enough to stick. Case in point, he’s had classes with Lance for two years (of which they’ve shared multiple arguments that derailed lectures) and he just learned his name last week. This is not a fortuitous turn of events for either of them.
“Pick your partners!” the professor swings his axe, and Keith’s chair scrapes the floor as he scrambles to his feet.
Lance makes a beeline for him, his long stretch of body somehow slipping through the crowd of students like water to arrive in front of Keith before he’s taken two steps.
“Hey,” he offers gently. Keith recoils. Lance raises his hands in surrender. “I’m really, really sorry, okay? And we can talk it out if you want to, or not if you don’t, but…” His shoulders lift up to his ears. “I thought we could be partners for this?”
He stares at him with such abject incredulity his jaw nearly hits the floor. When Lance only waits, Keith adds a rather unnecessary, “No.”
“I can do most of the work if you want.” He does not quit. “Make it up to you?”
“Absolutely not. The whole point of being here is to learn something.”
A grin blooms, eyes brightening like the flames of a bunsen burner. It’s baffling. “So you wanna do halvesies?”
“What? No. I wanna do wholesies by myself, without you.”
“It’s a partner project.”
“I don’t need a partner.”
“That’s the assignment, buddy.”
It’s the same reasoning Keith had used when he was younger, getting shunned from every group of classmates. The assignment is to work together. Work with me. He’s ghost-written enough of these things to do it on his own.
“You have friends,” Keith accuses. “Work with them.”
“I told them I’d work with you.”
“Why?”
“I told you.” He gestures dramatically, as if showcasing his two obvious points. “I’m sorry— and I wanna make it up to you.”
His expectant look pisses Keith off. Like Keith’s somehow making the social faux-pas of not accepting his ex’s threesome partner’s offer to team up.
“What do you want, applause?”
“I wanna work with you.”
“You don’t want to work with me,” he snaps, hackles rising. “You want to not feel guilty anymore.”
His elastic face melts, and Keith knows he got it right. He can see himself well enough through Lance’s eyes: poor dumbass getting cheating on over and over, and then having it thrown in his face, leaving him wandering around campus like a drowned fucking rat. So lonely he can’t even scrounge up a partner for class. And then there’s Lance, swooping in like some selfless knight to save him. Self-obsessed idiot.
“Just forget about it,” Keith rasps. “I have.”
Lance ducks his head, eyes darting around the room. “And if…” He taps his fingers together, “I told you we were the only two people left?”
He’s right.
Keith resists the urge to grind his teeth as Lance signs them up together at the professor’s desk, muttering Keith’s last name under his breath. He pronounces it perfectly.
Prick.
He hasn’t told Shiro about the breakup. Keith stopped talking to Shiro about Jay a while ago. His diplomatic comments of “I understand why his behaviour would upset you” and “That doesn’t sound healthy” cut deeper than Pidge’s repeated insistence to “dump the Dinkwad headfirst into a landfill!” (After repeated requests from Keith to not call his then-boyfriend a dickhead, Dinkwad was Pidge’s compromise.)
Pidge knows what went down, but that’s because they talked to Lance. They’re friends, apparently. Keith hadn’t noticed.
Keith’s not hiding anything from Shiro, he just doesn’t know how to explain that the final straw in his relationship was a surprise proposition for a threesome. He’ll do just about anything to avoid saying the word “threesome” to Shiro.
He met him through a high school mentorship program to help foster kids avoid ending up dead in a ditch the moment they turned eighteen. It worked for Keith, at least. While he did apply to other schools, this is the one where Shiro’s a TA working on his Master’s. It also has a stellar STEM department, which means getting his bachelor’s in physics here is Keith’s first step in getting to NASA.
Anyway, Shiro’s known him long enough to know that something’s wrong, so Keith’s been avoiding him.
Shiro finally catches him in the library, which is typically a waystation for Keith, to quickly find the resources he needs and then work in peace in his dorm, away from distractions or the threat of being perceived. So when Shiro happens across him at a table on the third floor, he does a double take.
“Shaking things up?”
Keith spits out the strands of his leather bracelet he’s been chewing on and mumbles, “Group project. Waiting for the guy to show up.”
Lance is late. He shouldn’t be surprised. Lance had made them exchange numbers for this, and he’d already pushed their meeting time back an hour only like thirty minutes before they were supposed to meet. As if Keith had nothing better to do than spend his whole afternoon waiting on him. And, like—to be fair, all he had planned was eating and working on other classes, but that’s still a schedule. He’s really very busy, and if he doesn’t follow his schedule with its pre-planned breaks, he’ll just never stop working, like he can reach space faster through sheer force of will. It’s how he almost burned out in freshman year.
Shiro asks how his classes are going, and then segues into being nosy. “I haven’t seen you in a while.” By which he means that Keith has been responding to him with one-word texts and avoiding the gym when he knows Shiro will be there. “Did anything happen?”
Keith shakes his hair in front of his eyes. “Just been busy.”
He pauses for too long. “Matt mentioned something Pidge said—”
He snaps a glare up to him. “Then why are you asking like you don’t know?”
“Do you wanna tell me?”
“No, or I would have told you,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Impending embarrassment creeps up the back of his neck. “What did Matt tell you?”
“It sounded like you and Jay are over,” he starts, testing the waters. “Is Matt wrong?”
He twists his leather braided bracelet around his wrist in a sharp motion. “He is not.” And of course that’s the moment Lance comes striding up the aisle behind Shiro, slurping on a giant boba tea. Keith shoos Shiro away. “Now get out of here, I’ll text you later.”
He can’t explain the way his entire being down to his bones rejects the idea of having Shiro and Lance interact—he just knows he’ll melt away if he has to witness the meeting of Shiro and the guy that his ex wanted to fuck together.
“Catch me at the gym, okay?” Shiro says, not disappearing quickly enough for Keith’s comfort.
“Yeah, whatever, just go.”
Shiro finally looks over his shoulder as he’s walking away, and mercifully just waves at Lance approaching Keith’s table.
Lance nods at him, and once he’s out of earshot, says to Keith, “He’s hot. Was that your brother?”
He gapes. “If he were, why would your opening be telling me he’s hot?”
“Just an observation.” He tosses his bag onto the table with a shrug. “Like, ‘it’s a nice day outside’ or ‘they still haven’t fixed the door in that building’.” He tosses himself into a seat with a flourish. “‘Oh, your brother’s hot.’”
Keith’s ‘just an observation’ is that Lance’s hair is messy and tousled in the exact same way it was the last time he saw him, which implies that an artful effort went into making it look just as unkempt as Keith’s does simply rolling out of bed. He has the sudden rabid urge to bury his hands in it, which he hastily tamps down.
“He’s not my brother,” Keith says. “Why do you think that, just because we’re both Asian?”
“More because I’ve never seen you voluntarily talk to anyone other than Pidge or—” He cuts himself off, clearing his throat. Keith, for once, knows exactly what he was going to say. His stomach solidifies into cement. “Well, sorry for assuming.” He sucks up a tapioca pearl. “So do you think he’s hot?”
He grimaces. “He’s not that much not my brother. And, again, we don’t need to be together to get this done.”
Lance shoots him an exaggerated pout, one that would perfectly suit a cartoon character asking pretty please with a cherry on top. “I can’t focus by myself. You gotta hold me accountable.”
“You can’t put that on me.”
“C’mon, please? I’m flunking out.”
Keith rolls his eyes. “No, you’re not.”
“How would you know?”
“I wouldn’t have partnered with you if you were failing.”
“You didn’t have much of a choice.”
He flicks open a text book, glaring at the pages. “Sure I did. I could’ve told the prof that you and my ex propositioned me, and there was no way I was working with you after that. I don’t think he’d have had any follow up questions.”
“You think having messy gay drama gets you special treatment?”
Keith’s gaze flicks to his flatly.
Lance winks. He’s insufferable. “But for real, dude, I’m really sorry. If I’d known he was full of shit, I’d have never shown up like that.”
The masochistic part of Keith wants details. What his ex promised Lance, how they started talking, if they’d hooked up before. But that would be as soothing as tearing through an open wound with a rusty knife. Besides, he knows how Jay invited him in. He’s charming. He’s hot. He has a way of knowing exactly what you want to hear, and saying it.
“Well, yeah,” Keith says dully. “That’s why people lie. To get what they want when the truth is in the way. So what’s our project gonna be?”
With much effort and prodding, he gets Lance to stay on track, and they decide on a topic that interests both of them, and miraculously, Lance whips up a project outline. They pre-schedule times to meet up, and by the end of it, Keith must look too impressed, because Lance shoots him a cheesy grin. “Told you we’d make a good team.”
“When?”
Lance taps his chin. “Hm. Must’ve just thought it.”
In. Sufferable.
He and Shiro hit the gym at 7AM. Between classes and schoolwork, and working as many hours as he can at a campus lab, the gym is the most consistent time Keith sees Shiro. He’s been avoiding him by going at 6AM instead.
He knows Shiro wants details. Shiro worries about him—and that’s Keith’s fault. Shiro was the first person who made him feel normal since his dad died, and as a high schooler, he dropped so much shit on that man. Like stuff he really should’ve been talking to a therapist about, but the therapy referral process in foster care is a bureaucratic nightmare, and whenever Keith landed in front of a licensed professional stranger, he clammed up.
So Shiro is unfortunately more aware than any person on the planet about Keith’s problems and issues. Keith’s assurances that everything is fine are not remotely believable, but he promises to show up for their normal gym meet ups again, so Shiro takes what he can get.
After a few sessions at the library, they go to Lance’s. Keith doesn’t love that, but it beats both the library and having Lance in his dorm, so he sucks it up.
Lance lives in a student apartment with three other guys, which makes it both a mess and strangely bereft of decor. It’s at about the same level of Keith’s dorm, honestly. The living room has at least been cleared enough for them to spread out with books and laptops.
At one point, Lance pops out to return something to someone in the building. Lance gives him a whole story that was surely supposed to be entertaining about why he needed a hammer and rubber gloves at 1 AM, until Keith’s dull-eyed glower shuts him up. To be fair, Keith might’ve listened if Lance hadn’t taken off his sweater. Very unfortunately, his forearm muscles were more interesting than his little story.
In any case, without Lance’s constant muttering and clicking, Keith can really focus.
Keith’s deep in a research hole by the time Lance returns. He barely hears the door close; locked in, chin in hand, chewing absently on the tassels of his leather bracelet.
So when Lance throws himself into the couch opposite him, Keith bangs his elbow off his armrest ripping the bracelet from his mouth.
Lance pulls his laptop back onto his lap. “They make jewellery for that, you know.”
“For what?”
He clacks his teeth and points to Keith’s bracelet. Keith’s cheeks flare red.
“What, like teething toys for babies? Fuck off.”
“No, I mean like chewing fidget jewellery for autistic people and other super cool neurodivergent individuals.” A flourishing hand towards himself.
“What?”
“Like rubber—or I guess I don’t know what they’re made out of. But whatever kind of plastic that’s nice to chew and like, easy to clean.” He stretches across the coffee table to grab the library book he’d been using before. “My sister’s friend makes them, or just buys them to sell online, whatever. The texture—it textures, you know?”
“No. I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What part?”
“Any of it.”
“Are you not autistic?”
“Not professionally.”
“Self-diagnosed?”
“I guess.” He shifts uncomfortably. “Why are you talking to me about chew toys?”
He shrugs, which is infuriating. “Why do you act like the cops are gonna show whenever you get caught?”
“Because people have told me my whole life to stop fucking biting things?” he says incredulously. When he was a kid, he’d chew on his hair. He’s gnawed pencils into wood chips. Adults always insisted it was gross, dangerous, unhygienic. His ex said it was childish. They were all right, Keith knew that. Lance is bullshitting him.
“Well, lucky you’re in charge of your own mouth, huh?”
Keith is briefly, flatly, flabbergasted, and then Lance pops his brows with a wink, and Keith scowls and returns to his research.
Everything Keith has ever learned about himself has been against his will.
He has abandonment issues? Oh thanks, high school receptionist. Oh, he’s prone to fits of rage? Thanks, foster dad from home number three. His outburst certainly couldn’t have sprouted from the bastard throwing all of Keith’s worldly possessions in the trash and then calling him a dog when he went rooting through it. He’s probably autistic? Thanks, random kid from tenth grade gym class.
Keith had done his own research and decided it lined up well enough, but he didn’t mention it to anyone who would stick it in his file. A diagnosis would make him harder to place, and he’d made things hard enough already. It was a relief having a reason for why nothing people did made sense to him, but it didn’t make him any less lonely.
He wondered if his dad knew. If his dad was the same way. He never made Keith feel weird and incomprehensible. Keith bets his dad would still love him if he knew. And if he were alive. Nothing would be as hard if he were still alive.
Oh, he has unresolved grief that he refuses to unpack in any meaningful way? He figured that one out on his own.
Lance interrupts that helpful line of thought to ask about the difference between Boyle's law and Charles law, which Keith explains, and then, to distract himself, goes into the ideal gas law and how it relates to star formations.
“Oh, you just got that shit on lock, huh?” Lance asks, as though there would be any reason for Keith to not be intricately familiar with gas laws.
“I’m majoring in physics,” Keith grits out. “I’m sure you know just as much about… whales, or whatever.”
Lance crows with delighted laughter and leans forward. “Do you think my major is whales?”
Keith’s saved from replying by one of Lance’s roommates showing up. He greets Keith by name. Keith nods in answer, recognizing him from Lance’s table in physics. Keith’s seen him around Pidge, too. Engineering major (a lot of astronauts are engineers).
The only hint ping-ponging around Keith’s brain for a name is ‘H’.
Luckily, he doesn’t linger. After giving Keith and Lance the living room to work, Keith forgets about him entirely until he’s coming back from the bathroom.
Keith overhears his name being spoken and freezes in the hallway. If for some godforsaken reason they’re talking about chew toys again, he is going to leave.
“Oh, you guys are getting a lot done.”
“Don’t be too impressed, Hunk my man,” Lance says. “It’s easy avoiding distractions when your partner is only in your presence under duress.”
“Your world-renowned charm isn’t winning him over?”
“I think I’m wearing him down, through pure productivity. Ugh.”
“I have full faith in all your abilities.”
Keith doesn’t know what to do with that. He awkwardly makes a performance of opening the bathroom door again so they know he’s coming back, and then gets back to his notes without looking at either of them.
When they’re done, Lance is making meaningless small talk as Keith packs up to leave.
Keith doesn’t decide to speak so much as having a question burst out of him. “Why are you wearing me down?”
“Huh?”
“I heard you and your roommate talking.”
“Hunk.”
“If you say so.” And then he sets a baleful glare at Lance, waiting for his explanation.
Lance perches on the back of the couch. “It’s nothing weird. Or like, nefarious.”
That remains to be seen, but Keith doesn’t argue. He lets Lance talk—Lance likes doing that, it should be easy enough to get an answer from him.
“I just, y’know, thought we could be friends.”
“For what?”
He spreads his arms wide. In addition to his damned forearms are his biceps, toned and wiry. He’s a fucking menace. “I dunno, because humans are a social species that benefit from connecting with others?”
Keith grimaces. “Why me?”
It’s where his incredulity stems. Volunteering to be partners because he feels bad about what happened with Keith’s ex is one thing. Willing a friendship into existence is quite another.
“I mean…” He waves a limp hand up and down Keith’s person.
“What?” He’s getting ready to be offended.
“You don’t seem to have any friends other than Pidge and the hot TA who isn’t your brother.”
He struggles to see what that has to do with Lance. His confusion must show on his face.
Lance continues, his explanation sounding more like word vomit the longer he goes on, “And, like, I guess I don’t know, but I don’t think you’re hanging around with him anymore, and that’s because—”
“That’s none of your business,” Keith cuts in sharply. “And it has nothing to fucking do with you.”
Lance sits up straighter. If he tries to look any taller and more important, he’ll end up standing on the couch. “Okay, but, I was there. I saw you, and you looked fucking heartbroken—ugh, not to overstep,” he groans with the grudging acceptance that he’s overstepped a thousand times before and will do so a thousand more. “And then in class, you looked like the crypt keeper. You don’t—I mean, I hope I’m wrong, but you don’t seem to be, like, thriving.”
Keith tries in vain to will down the embarrassed flush in his cheeks. Why would he want more friends? So more people would pay attention to him, judge him? Feel sorry for him? Lance is out of his mind.
“You think you were the first guy he fucked around with?” He shoves his laptop in his bag. “Think he couldn’t have gotten a dozen other guys on that couch? If it wasn’t you, it was gonna be someone else.” Gruffly, he says, “Hope you didn’t think you were special.”
“Keith—”
He leaves without another word.
Keith had a strong understanding of labels from a young age. Strangers’ opinions made a big impact on foster care placement (as well as treatment from teachers and peers).
He got pegged with “antisocial” a lot, which wasn’t too bad; more liable to be left alone with that. “Shy” was perfectly normal, and easily used to hand-wave away all manner of social awkwardness. Could be paired with “cute”, which may or may not be helpful depending on what a person did in reaction to someone assigned “shy” and “cute”.
“Weird” got tricky. Because the nonthreatening weird, like kids obsessed with bugs or weird animes, could get bullied, but adults didn’t worry about what they could do, like with the less palatable weird. Avoiding eye contact. Refusing to laugh at jokes or smile for no reason (there rarely was). Liking knives. Being “too intense” for a twelve year old. Add quiet and antisocial to all that—plus all the fights Keith got into—and he’s a “violent”, “dangerous” kid that you don’t want in your home.
He was always a good student, but that didn’t really matter—not much to him, or to any of the powers that be, with the rest of his behaviour.
He’d been deemed “difficult to place” after his second home. Anger management issues were part of that. And the grief and trauma—those two were just thrown about, to understanding nods. Not understanding of what that meant for Keith, but to whoever was in charge of Keith. Yes, grief and trauma can make teenagers difficult to handle, of course.
Hence the “difficult to place”. Hence the anger. The bloody noses and the black eyes and detentions and expulsions.
He was running out of foster homes and on the slippery slope to juvie when he met Shiro.
Shiro showed him a way out. And suddenly, escaping high school and foster care meant something, more than just getting dumped onto the gutter with nothing and nowhere to go. He could follow his dreams of getting to space.
Once he had a reason to rein in his worst impulses, he got better at the alternatives, like the gym, but also cursing people out. “Using his words”. And you don’t go to juvie for that.
Keith barges into the campus robotics lab, lips twisted like he’s spitting out poison. “Did you know Lance was trying to befriend me?”
Pidge pushes their glasses up their nose, just barely flicking their gaze away from their contraption. “You didn’t?”
He makes an exasperated noise.
“How is making friends not better than whatever you thought he was doing? Riding your coattails or whatever?”
“What? No, we have the same coat.”
From their handful of shared classes, Keith knows that Lance at least shows up and pays attention, which seems to be half the battle among their classmates. And Lance is more than pulling his weight on this project. Keith had told him the truth at the library—he wouldn’t have partnered with him if he were a shitty student.
But he refuses to explain Lance’s hero complex, so he doesn’t elaborate.
“Yeah, the coat’s big enough for the both of you?” Pidge hums, fiddling a sensor. “Won’t Lance be thrilled.”
“Because he wants to be friends?”
“God, you have got to work on your powers of observation before you get to space, or else you’ll miss an alien shaking its ass right in front of you.” Pidge dives into their tool bag and produces the smallest screwdriver Keith has ever seen and starts twisting a similarly small screw.
He crosses his arms and waits for them to get on with it.
“He wants in your pants,” they elaborate when they notice him glaring. “Sorry, a joke’s not funny if you need to explain it. Ignore me.”
“So he was still lying when he said he wanted to be friends?” he asks incredulously.
They straighten in their stool, and fix them with their full attention for the first time since Keith walked in. “Keith, I know I talked a lot of shit about Dinkwad, and how you should’ve locked him in a dumpster and thrown away the key, but Lance isn’t like that. He’s not gonna trick you. Whether you hook up or not, it’s not the end of the world. I just didn’t expect it to be a surprise that he’s hot for you after what went down with Dinkwad.”
“He wanted to fuck Dinkwad—I mean, Jay.”
“He wanted to fuck both of you. That’s—like, I know I’m ace, but that’s the point of a threesome, yes? Fucking two people at the same time?”
There were a lot of things from that night that Keith’s still working through, and other parts that he’s elected to ignore entirely. Lance’s attraction to both involved parties had not occurred to him.
“Well.”
“Well,” Pidge agrees. Moving on, they ask, “Pass me the transfibrulator?”
It takes Keith five minutes of searching to realize they made the word up.
Keith didn’t come out until college, because he hadn’t realized he needed to—Shiro had to tell Keith he was gay.
Before that, Keith had been patiently awaiting these mysterious feelings for girls that everyone promised would appear. He thought it might be one of those things he’d never understand, like being okay with strangers touching him, or most social interactions. He didn’t worry about it. He focused on what was important; his academics and saving money. When he needed to, he jerked off thinking about Andrew Garfield or Michael B Jordan, and didn’t do any introspection on that front until freshman orientation week when Shiro pointed out how much Keith was oggling the shirtless guys wandering around.
Keith said something stupid like “Am I not supposed to?” and Shiro said he could do whatever he wants, does he think he could be gay—and the rest is history.
He met his ex the next spring. He asked Keith out a week later (possibly because he’d gleaned that Keith was never going to notice the flirting by himself).
Now, after much further oggling, and sex with a real guy and not his own hand, Keith would like to say it’s outrageous that he hadn’t known he was gay earlier. And yet here he is, a month after the break up suddenly realizing that he’s missed sex. He’s been trying not to miss Jay, and those two are so inextricably linked that he hasn’t let himself examine the insistent heat nipping at his gut.
But idle spicy musings have now returned, and after Pidge’s revelation, they come with Lance unwittingly slotted into the role of his ex.
And that’s… oh, boy.
Keith’s dorm is the first room he’s had entirely to himself since he was twelve. It’s a single, cramped little thing with thin walls, but it’s all his. A door that locks; a sanctuary where he’s left alone with no threat of anyone barging in unannounced to mess up his shit. He rarely takes visitors; between Shiro and Pidge, there’s always somewhere better to hang out than Keith’s dorm, and his ex always wanted Keith at his place.
His decorations are sparse; fairy lights he’d picked up on sale after Pidge caught a peek and compared his room to a prison cell (cheap lights topped his Google search of how to decorate a dorm room). Shiro gave him a corkboard and pictures of them, which made Keith tear up. And Pidge got him posters of the solar system, which Keith did his best to artfully frame in the fairy lights. Other than that, it’s just his meagre collection of clothes and towels strewn across every given surface, and pockets of books screaming for a shelf; pleasure reads like Fundamentals of Thermodynamics, a worn copy of Cosmos, and an equal amount of respected works on the potential for extraterrestrial life as there are trashy conspiracy theories on aliens among us.
It’s his space, he can do what he wants with it.
He does not intend to invite Lance over.
Lance catches him after class the day they’re supposed to meet up for the final time. They haven’t talked since last week. Keith’s been ignoring him—well, he always does, but he’s been doing it a lot more pointedly.
Lance greets him with a winning grin, brows drawn up hopefully. And yeah, it’s charming. That’s not news. The guy’s got a smile that could end wars. Who cares?
“What do you want?”
“To still be on speaking terms,” Lance crows like it’s an answer on a game show.
Keith grunts and waves a hand for him to continue. Lance had shared an observation; just because Keith didn’t like hearing it didn’t make it not true. He’s over it.
“My roommates have commandeered the living room with mad science, should we go to yours?”
Keith shocks himself by agreeing.
The library would be more than sufficient. They’re almost done; the only reason they’re getting together again is Lance’s apparent inability to concentrate without a chaperone.
As they walk to his dorm, Keith tries to work up the wherewithal to redirect them to the library. But he stays quiet while Lance gushes about his favourite band’s new album. Does Keith care? No. Is he going to listen to it later? Yeah.
Before he knows it, Lance is trailing him into his room. The blinds are drawn, because Keith likes just the fairy lights and his lamp on, but that’s setting a mood he doesn’t intend. He jerks the blinds open, leaping across the carpet of his clothes to do so, and then kicks everything under his bed, silently daring Lance to say something stupid so he can kick him out.
Instead, he points out the stack of protein bars and goldfish crackers in the corner of his room. The boxes are the height of his desk. “Whoa, you find a good sale?”
“No.”
Another thing somebody once told Keith about himself is that he has problems with food scarcity, which is why he’s so anxious about running out. Since they’re allowed to store food in their dorms, he loads up. Lance doesn’t need to know that.
“Oh.” Lance keeps going, his words eating up the empty air. “Yeah, I should keep more snacks stocked. If I get the midnight munchies, I’m kinda screwed.”
Keith grasps for the meaning of his comment and decides that Lance must be hungry. “You can have some if you want.”
“Oh, that’s nice of you.” He looks shocked. That Keith could be nice. “I’m good, but maybe we could grab something after?”
Keith grunts something noncommittal and gets them to work.
Lance starts out at Keith’s desk, and Keith working on his bed, but Lance migrates over when Keith has him look at a graph and does not leave. So Lance is just. On his bed. Leaning against the wall, typing away. It’s not a big bed. Keith has to cross his legs to not touch him. It’s lucky they’re almost done, because his attention is mostly stolen by the three inches that separate them.
After some indeterminable amount of time, Lance announces, “Alright, I think we can call that donezo!” With a dramatic twist of his wrist, he closes his laptop and tucks it into his bag on the floor.
Keith expects that momentum to roll him onto his feet and out the door; goal completed, exit to follow. Instead, Lance resumes his slouch against the wall, comfortable on Keith’s bed. In Keith’s presence. In continued want of Keith’s company.
“So, Pidge says you’re gonna be an astronaut?”
“Why are you talking about me with Pidge?” Instantly suspicious, as if he hadn’t been talking to Pidge about Lance just last week.
He laughs, his mouth curling up at the corner like he’s curled up on Keith’s bed. “Sorry, awhile ago I asked them why you’re ‘like that’. When they said you’re going to NASA, it all clicked. Your passion, your irrepressible drive—you got your heart set on the stars!”
Keith swallows, and it feels loud in the small room. His passion. A new descriptor to apply to himself.
“My dad always used to—” He stops himself, second-guessing sharing anything so personal, but Lance nods at him encouragingly. “He’d show me the constellations. Talk about how the stars are born from space dust, collecting and collapsing in on themselves, pressure building until it all explodes, impossibly bright. Nuclear fusion,” he adds absently. A rudimentary understanding of it, but it was enough to get Keith hooked. “I’d ask him a hundred more questions than he could answer, and the next night he’d come back and explain it all.”
More stars in the sky than grains of sand on Earth, living and burning for billions of years. Planets made up of solely liquids and gases, with their own gravity and moons and secrets to discover. The sheer unending expanse of space, too big and dark and too much for the human mind to fully comprehend. More life had to be out there somewhere.
Space felt impossible and fantastical, like a fairy tale. He’d spend hours gazing into the night sky, willing something otherworldly into view. That was one of the worst parts of moving to the city after his dad died; he lost the stars.
“It’s just always felt like where I’m meant to be.”
“Out of this world?” Lance’s cheesiness remains unmatched.
“Yeah.” He plays with a rip in his jeans. “Return to the mothership.”
He’d grown up reading too many books of kids feeling othered and alone, all leading up to uncovering their incredible destiny. The few times he’d run away from a home, he’d taken the bus as far out of town as he could and walked until he found a suitable field to be beamed up from.
His social workers were always flabbergasted at his explanation. What was there not to get? He wanted to be abducted by aliens. He sure as fuck didn’t belong here.
“That’s really cool,” Lance says. “Ambitious.”
Keith’s been called ambitious before—by a guidance counselor when she finally took him seriously about wanting to be an astronaut. She said it like she’d pulled something particularly gruesome from her kitchen sink—the implication being that the impulsive, anger-issues orphan was never getting close to rocket fuel.
Lance says it a little too impressed. Almost with awe.
“What are your plans?” Keith says dismissively. “You’re not taking advanced physics for fun.”
“Whales.”
Keith scowls.
“Marine conservation,” he tells him, stretching a leg out. “I want the oceans to not be totally overheated and garbage-filled by the time my nieces and nephews grow up. Is that ambitious?”
Fuck, that’s sweet. And hot. Shit. Fuck.
“On this planet? Looks like it.”
“Well, working with you has given me a real kick in the butt. You live and breathe this stuff.”
“Easy to do when you don’t have friends.”
Lance knocks his shoulder; easy camaraderie that snatches the breath out of Keith.
“You feel like—?”
“You wanna fuck?” Keith says.
A reckless want itches at his skin. More than anything, he urgently needs to replace the phantom touch of his ex haunting his body with someone else. Anyone else. And Lance is nice to him. And hot. And in his bed.
He watches his offer tick through Lance’s brain, cycling past all the checks and balances to make sure he’s heard right. It’s a safe enough bet, considering what Pidge shared. Unless Lance’s interest has had a steep decline after getting to know Keith. That would be—well, not entirely unlikely.
By the time a smile like lightning flashes across Lance’s face, Keith needs a second to shake off disappointment of his own making.
But he recovers swiftly, and Keith is clearing mattress space for them in time with Lance’s spirited, “Yeah!”
They converge with a magnetic draw. Lance lifts a hand for Keith’s face, a question rather than an intent to touch. Keith grabs him by the collar as an answer.
Their lips meet in an inelegant crash. Keith readies himself for the perfunctory rushed foreplay, but Lance’s palm fits against Keith’s cheek, and it’s gentle, despite the eagerness of his mouth. He stretches toward Keith languidly, Keith still fisting his shirt as he lies back on the bed.
The heat of Lance’s body sets Keith’s senses on fire. Touch me. He doesn’t say it, but when their chests brush, Keith tugs him down, demanding his full weight. Steady. Heavy. He groans. The nonsense Lance puts in his hair smells beachy, and Keith takes great satisfaction in messing up all his hard work.
Lance tilts Keith’s head; the hand on his jaw not just comforting, but practical, and deepens the kiss with another question, his tongue. Keith replies just as tentatively, since he’s never had it used effectively.
Lance takes the hint and licks sparingly, not thrusting against his molars on an expedition to reach his uvula. He laves Keith’s bottom lip after he nips it, and it leaves Keith gasping, arching into him.
Maybe Keith actually likes kissing. Maybe Lance is just really good at it.
It’s interrupted by Lance, somehow, finding Keith’s knife under the pillow. “Um, huh?”
Keith scowls and tosses it onto the bedside table. “Yeah, I like knives. Take off your shirt.” Halfway through that, he tries really hard to switch it to a request. It doesn’t work, but Lance does it anyway.
And then Lance is straddling Keith shirtless, and Keith finally gets to discover where the arm muscles that he’s been so mesmerized by disappear to. Miles of warm brown skin, toned and taut and begging for Keith’s wandering hands. He explores until Lance smirks, and then he goes for his belt buckle.
Lance drops to Keith’s throat, kissing where his pulse thuds like a horse winning a race. Keith swallows an embarrassing sound. He glares incredulously at the ceiling, betrayed by the butterflies in his stomach over the tender sensation of Lance mouthing at his neck.
Only made worse by hot breath at his ear, words a soft rumble. “What do you wanna do?”
“I don’t care.” Keith snakes a hand into Lance’s pants, squeezing the length of him within the cramped confines of his boxer-briefs. Lance whines and jerks into his palm, which rips a smug grin out of Keith.
They promptly lose their clothes, and when they reconvene, Keith sits atop Lance’s thighs. He pushes sweaty bangs from his eyes, lips swollen and chest flushed. Lance’s gaze could swallow him whole.
To hide from that, Keith goes back in for a kiss. And instead of Lance’s gaze, it’s his mouth that devours him, sucking up Keith’s moans as Lance hooks a leg around Keith’s hip and rocks. Pleasure shudders through Keith, greedily chasing that serotonin high from friction and slick, skin-on-skin contact.
Lance asks if he has lube, and Keith paws blindly at his bedside drawer until he has to pull away with a growl to actually look for it.
“You in a rush or something?” Lance laughs, a little breathless. Effortless. The nonchalance of a person somehow totally at ease in their body, comfortable in any situation. Hair mussed and eyes darkened with anticipation and a smile always tugging on his mouth. Keith can’t stand him. They should stop this right now. They should do it every day.
Lance wraps lube-slicked fingers around both of them, soothing Keith’s flare of irritation. He drops his forehead to Lance’s, pumping into the tight space of his fist, flooded with an uncharacteristic gratefulness. He hasn’t felt this good in a long time.
“Good?” Lance asks.
“Yeah.” A groaned exhalation. “Don’t stop.”
Lance likes that. Of course. The guy preens at any crumb of a compliment. A dozen bits of praise for Lance tumble through Keith’s mind; he’s hot, his hand feels good running up his spine, he kisses better than his ex, thank you. Keith shuts it all down.
Instead he returns to Lance’s mouth, sloppy and open, and suddenly hopes he’s a good kisser.
They get food after.
Keith’s gaze is glued to his plate. Not from embarrassment, but to curb his restless search for approval. Dinner at the dining hall doesn’t imply that Lance plans to ditch him forever after this, but Keith has to be ready for it. Has to accept it without getting a stitch in his chest. Because if this was the start of a trend, the first explosion of space dust breathing life to a star of overheated gases, then that will end much, much worse.
Lance laughs at some grumbled reply of Keith’s, and despite himself, Keith looks up.
He hates him, just a little, for all the promise and ruin dancing in that smile.