Chapter Text
Keith is good at his job. Great at it. Legendary, even.
He’s been employee of the month every month since 1980 and his record is spotless. He’s never fucked up anything that couldn’t immediately be fixed and he treats each and every case that makes it to his desk with the same amount of devotion. He doesn’t remember the last time he took time off but he thinks it was probably sometime before VHS fell out of popular use.
Keith deserves nice things. Maybe a little bit of respect. Some recognition for all his hard work at the very least.
Instead, he thinks as he slams open the door to Allura’s office, he gets this.
“Keith,” Allura says sweetly, unflustered by his entrance and hands folded neatly in front of her. “How can I help you?”
“No,” Keith says, and slams the thick manila folder he’s carrying down on her desk. “No, absolutely not.”
Allura quirks a brow and flicks the cover open with one delicate finger. She pauses. “Ah.”
“Yes,” Keith grits out. “Ah.”
“Close the door, please,” Allura says.
Out in the hallway there’s a distressed fluttering noise. Keith ignores it.
“Why?” He hisses.
“Why do I want you to close the door?” Allura asks. “Because you’re scaring the interns.”
Keith’s palm hits the folder as he leans over the desk to glare her eye to eye. “Why is Lance McClain’s folder on my desk?”
Allura sighs, getting to her feet and crossing the room to shut the door.
“Lance’s folder is on your desk because you’re his new guardian. I thought that much was obvious.”
“But why?” Keith presses. “Did I do something wrong? Have I upset you somehow? Been unsatisfactory in my performance?”
“God no, Keith. That’s not it at all.” Allura sinks back into her chair, but she seems more tired than amused now.
“Then why are you punishing me?” Keith asks, baffled.
“It’s not a punishment. It’s a promotion.”
Keith has fuzzy memories of getting promotions when he was alive. They usually tended to include a raise and less of the shitty work. He glances dubiously down at the folder. “This doesn’t feel much like a promotion.”
“Look, Keith,” Allura says, reaching out to press the palm of her hand against the back of his. “This case has been bouncing from guardian to guardian for pretty much as long as this kid has been alive. He’s a mess. Nobody knows what to do with him.”
“I’m aware of that,” Keith says, dryly, although his anger is fading a little beneath Allura’s calm, more a bubble of indignation now. “Did you think that might be why I don’t want him on my caseload?”
“Oh, he’s not that bad.”
Keith narrows his eyes. Abruptly he pulls away from Allura’s comforting grip and flips open the folder.
“June, 1999. Locked himself in a cupboard. Was stuck there for three hours before his guardian could get his family to check on him.”
“He was a toddler, it happens -.”
“- August, 1999. Got into the freezer lacking adult supervision and ate an entire carton of strawberry ice cream. Of which he was allergic to. Nothing responding guardian could do. Wound up in hospital.”
“Human children do tend to -.”
“- January, 2001. Knocked an entire shelf of televisions over while with his mother at an electronics store. Guardian managed to convince the shop owner not charge them, but Lance and his family were still permanently barred from the store.”
“Okay, yes -.”
Keith ignores her again, ruffling through the pages some years.
“November, 2007. Fell off the bow of a boat. Guardian managed to limit injuries to non-permanent, but barely.”
“Keith -.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Oh, this is a good one. September, 2008. Tried to ask a classmate to a school function only to somehow accidentally set off the emergency fire alarm. The whole school had to be evacuated. The guardian managed to keep the incident off the security cameras but the girl turned him in. Wasn’t enough proof to charge his family with the false alarm fee, but it did a good job of setting the school headmaster against him for the rest of his stay there.” Keith taps his finger against the incident. “Funny. That headmaster later winds up being a contributing factor in an event in July of -.”
“What is your point, Keith?” Allura sighs.
Keith scowls and shuts the folder venomously. “My point is that this kid is a curse and I don’t want his name on my list.”
“Well, tough luck. I’ve tried being reasonable here, but I didn’t give you the case as your friend, I gave it to you as your boss.” The look she gives him is half exasperation and half professional disdain.
Keith shuts his mouth but his lips curl up, grimacing.
Allura stares him down for a moment. Keith stares back mutinously and does his best to radiate betrayal and anger. Allura’s eyes do not soften.
“Keith,” she says, “you’re the best guardian here. The best guardian we’ve had in a long, long time. If you can’t turn this kid’s luck around, then there’s nothing for him.”
Well, when put like that Keith can sort of understand how Lance wound up his problem.
He was good at his job. Great at it. Legendary.
“Fine,” he says, like there was any chance he could actually refuse her without winding up on clerical duty for the next decade. He snatches the folder up from the desk with as much dignity as can muster. “But if this ruins things for me I’m giving you lousy feedback for the employer review.”
He storms out of the office. An intern hiding by a wall who is easily twice his size flinches away from him as he passes and nobody in the corridor meets his eyes.
Keith tries to pretend that means it’s a victory.
.
The thing about being a guardian angel is that nine times out of ten it’s just plain fucking boring.
Over the years humans have done a good job making it seem like some great exciting endeavor. Mostly what it involves is this;
Human woke up and ate breakfast. They left the toaster on as they were leaving the house. Relocated their keys beside it so they would remember to turn it off.
Human got coffee on the way to work. Distracted barista so coffee would cool down enough not to scald.
Human was called on in class and didn’t have the answer. Gently prompted the bell to ring three minutes early.
Human slipped on a patch of ice on the way home. Let them fall on their ass because I’m bored and they deserve it.
Keith may have been guilty of that last one a time or two which is, all things considered, technically an infringement on his duties as a guardian, but he’d long argued that you couldn’t just turn a human’s luck around completely without it being suspicious.
Still, at the end of the day Keith is good at his job. Some days he even manages to like it.
Guarding Lance McClain though? It’s enough to make Keith believe in hell.
“No,” he says, on day three of his new assignment. “No, that curry has been in your fridge since Sunday. You are absolutely not ingesting that.”
Lance hums obliviously under his breath as the microwave dings. Keith watches in horror as it opens and Lance reaches for what, at one point, was probably a fairly nice butter chicken dish but now seem to be a distant relative of salmonella.
“Did you never hear the peanut song as a child? It was a very good cautionary tale against food poisoning.”
Lance lifts the bowl up to sniff. Keith experiences a momentary flare of hope.
“Smells fine to me,” Lance declares cheerfully, and is going for a spoonful before Keith can so much as blink.
Lacking other options, he reaches out and touches Lance’s hand. A sharp spark jumps between them and Lance swears, hand opening on instinct and dropping the bowl.
It hits the bench on the way down, splattering on Lance’s shirt and his jeans and his bare feet when it finally hits the ground. Keith is very not sorry.
“Shit! Are you kidding me right now?” Lance hisses, shaking his hand out vigorously. “What is it with these electric shocks lately?”
“Maybe if you didn’t have the common sense of a piece of roadkill I wouldn’t have to resort to the shock collar treatment,” Keith huffs, and pulls out his clipboard to make another note.
Human continues to defy basic logic of reasoning. Saved him from food poisoning. Becoming increasingly endeared to the idea of letting him consume whatever he pleases.
He glances up at Lance who is still flexing his shocked hand and wrinkling his nose at the floor like he plans to leave it there to congeal.
“No,” Keith says, for what feels like the hundredth time this week.
“I could leave this for Pidge to clean up,” Lance muses. “Tell them it was like that when I got home.”
“No,” Keith says again, more emphatically this time. He vanishes his clipboard. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to guard somebody against murder? The amount of paperwork it generates?”
Lance glances at Keith then and Keith freezes only to realize that Lance isn’t looking at him - of course he’s not looking at him - just through him to the clock on the stove.
Keith doesn’t have a heart, strictly speaking, but he remembers being human well enough to know that the ice cold wash of dread-relief means Lance came damn near to giving him a stroke.
“Two hours,” Lance says, and it takes Keith a moment to realize he means until Pidge gets home. Lance shrugs and turns around to leave.
“The longer you leave it the more annoying it’s going to be to clean,” Keith calls, trailing after him.
Lance continues to ignore him, stripping out of his shirt as he walks.
“If you slip over and break your neck in it, I’m just going to let it happen,” Keith warns, but Lance is too busy kicking his jeans off at the bathroom door to listen to him, obviously. “I’ve seen broken necks. It’s not a good way to go. You deserve something better than that. Like a one-way trip in a trash compactor.”
Lance’s hands sink to the waistband of his briefs. Keith doesn’t turn around even though the tips of his ears feel too hot because once a guardian tried to give Lance privacy and he nearly brained himself in the shower.
Keith is working on maintaining a perfect record. He really doesn’t want to tell Allura that the reason Lance’s folder winds up back on her desk with a big red X through it is because Keith was embarrassed by a bit of naked skin.
(he keeps his eyes firmly on Lance’s belly button or higher though because whether Lance knows he exists or not, staring at a stranger’s dick is just no.)
“Do you know I once stopped a world leader from committing government embezzlement?” Keith asks, going on as if he’d never stopped talking. Lance pads across the bathroom to turn on the shower. “I bet you didn’t. That’s the kind of track record I have. And yet here I am trying to keep you from putting food you find under the sofa in your mouth or chugging six cans of Red Bull on a dare.”
(that had happened on Monday; Keith hadn’t managed to stop him but he’d managed to make him puke it all up. It’d almost been better, really, because Lance really did deserve at least a fraction of the suffering he was putting Keith through.)
Lance whistles under his breath as he reaches for the hot water tap. It snaps off in his hand.
“Huh,” Lance says.
“Oh my god,” says Keith.
.
On Thursday Lance does not look both ways before crossing the road and the only thing Keith can do to stop him from making good friends with the oncoming traffic is grab hold of his wrist so the sudden shock jerks him to a standstill.
(it works but Lance spends the rest of the day rubbing at his skin where Keith may have left slight red marks and frowning. This is why Keith doesn’t like to touch his charges.)
Friday morning dawns with Lance about to stub his foot on a door. It would have been funny, but Keith had foreseen that it’d fucking break his toe and had to intervene by slamming the door shut on Lance’s foot as a whole. It had resulted in an unpleasant bruise on his ankle and Lance cursing up a blue streak loud enough to wake Pidge, but he’d avoided the ER at least.
Nothing much happens over the weekend and Keith foolishly lowers his guard, just a little.
Monday Lance sets his kitchen on fire. Keith manages to get the fire out with minimal damage but it’s exhausting and irritating and he’s honestly running out of energy to magically fix Lance’s problems.
“I need permission to do something drastic,” he says to Allura two days after Lance’s dryer somehow shorts out and burns all of his underwear.
Allura raises one perfect brow at him. “To do what?”
“Something drastic,” Keith repeats grimly and does not elaborate.
Allura considers him for a second and then considers Lance’s open file on her desk. It’s gained at least a pound since she handed it to Keith. “Alright,” she says. “Permission granted.”
“Thank you,” Keith says fervently.
.
Keith appears in Lance’s room without any warning whatsoever. He hasn’t much energy left to spare on dramatics at this point, so he’s relying mostly on the surprise to achieve the appropriate amount of awe.
“Holy shit!” Lance shrieks as Keith pops into being a foot from his bed. Lance falls flat on his ass. It’s very gratifying.
“My name is Keith. I am your guardian angel,” Keith says, drawing his shoulders up high. The shadows paint large wings upon the wall behind his back. “And I am here to tell you to stop being such a fucking trainwreck.”
“Oh my god,” Lance wheezes.
“Exactly. God is sick of your bullshit and so am I. Get it together, man. I haven’t done this much paperwork since I was an intern.”
Lance gapes at him.
“And for fuck’s sake, stop eating things you find at the back of your fridge. You don’t know what they are, I don’t know what they are, but they’re definitely a bad idea. That’s how people die Lance, and I’d never be able to face my boss if I lost you to some expired milk. So just - stop. Stop being a moron. Do you understand?”
Lance whimpers.
“I’m glad we had this talk,” Keith says and vanishes.