WHERE:Vallo City: Morningside Apartments WHEN:October 2nd, 2021 WHAT:Lance and Keith have a late night snack together and talk about Allura and feelings. WARNINGS:N/A STATUS:Complete
It was surprisingly easy to find reasons to stay out until well into the night Lance had realized. And it wasn't as though he was entirely avoiding their apartment - he wasn't. There were just as many evenings spent with Keith and Shiro and watching movies or playing games, or heading out somewhere with a group of people.
But Lance made an effort to not be home every night. To let Keith and Shiro have those evenings to themselves without him third wheeling. If he was honest, he needed it too. He'd never deny the pair their happiness and he was thrilled they'd worked their stuff out and found each other in the way they had. It was just hard sometimes. Poked at the loneliness that had settled into his bones, reminded him of what he'd lost, what he'd barely had the chance to have before it was gone.
So he'd pick his nights to find a distraction. It was Eli that night, a distraction Lance knew he could easily extend into the mornings, but Lance wasn't quite there. After all nothing would immediately throw a bomb in the middle of the easy fun thing they had going like giving Eli a front row seat to Lance's shitty sleep habits that more often than not ended in nightmares, or just bolting up in bed and being half dressed before realizing the alarm wasn't from the Atlas or the Castle, that there was no immediate attack, and rather it had all just been in his head.
Besides, coming home in the wee hours of the night was nice when Keith was up too, already at their usual spot at the kitchen table. Lance dropped his bag beside his chair and reached across with a shit eating grin and brazenly swiped the other half of the sandwich from Keith's plate. "Turkey, my favourite," he said with a laugh and took a bite knowing full well he was making Keith seethe.
They had picked up on what Lance was doing pretty early on and they had a brief conversation about whether they should confront him about it, until it became obvious that he was spending just as much time with them at home as he wasn't. So until it became an actual problem, they agreed to not say anything.
Even if Keith was very tempted some of these nights, where Shiro was asleep and he was out in the kitchen passing time by snacking and watching something on his tablet. Lance would, more often than not, find his way to the kitchen if he was already home or would come stumbling in from wherever he was, if he wasn't. And he would be annoying too, tipsy some nights, or just stupidly cheerful because that's who Lance was as a person.
He was also the type of guy to help himself to your plate, if he considered you a friend.
Snorting as Lance swiped half of his sandwich, his tone was completely deadpan as he said, "Attractive. Truly." He reached out to wipe a bit of mayo that had escaped the sandwich and smeared on Lance's chin, then proceeded to wipe his hand on Lance's shirt with a smirk. He didn't wait for the indignation to follow, immediately asking, "Where are you coming from tonight?"
"Jokes on you buddy, pretty sure this is your shirt," Lance pointed out with a smug smirk. Or at least he himself didn't remember buying this particular shirt he'd snatched out of the dryer that morning in a race to get ready for class.
Lance set the sandwich down and got up to pour a glass of water. "Working at the library on a group project," he started to answer as he sat down, "went to Eli's for a while after." One of those things infinitely more fun than the other. Lance had forgotten how terrible school projects were when expected to work with a bunch of near strangers.
Frowning, he examined the black shirt that Lance was wearing and then narrowed his eyes. “Thief,” Keith accused him, as if he didn’t have a closet full of stolen pieces of clothes from both Shiro and Lance. But he was in a low energy level kind of mood that night, so he didn’t actually get up to demand his shirt back and start a mini brawl in the kitchen. Which could have very well happened, if it had been the daytime.
At the mention of Eli, Keith frown took on a sadder turn. There was a reason he had been up that night. Earlier in the night, after Shiro had settled into a peaceful sleep, Keith had been working on some homework in the living room when he noticed a new picture on the mantle. He had gotten up to examine it and found it to be a picture of Lance and Allura, from what seemed like a date. It hadn’t been there earlier in the day as far as he could recall, so he figured it was one of those ‘random gifts from Vallo’ they all occasionally got.
Except Lance hadn’t been home to see it first and now Keith was sitting on that knowledge that this picture existed in this universe. So the mention of Lance’s current...whatever Eli was, sparked that reminder and now he was feeling awkward. “Uh, I hope you had a good time.” Maybe the picture could wait until the morning. No need to make things weird now, right?
Lance had gotten good at reading Keith the past couple years, way better than he had been when they'd first found themselves in space at least. So the shift in the frown from more joking to more serious did not go unnoticed. That it came at the mention of Eli also wasn't unnoticed.
And Lance knew that he and Keith had some pretty different approaches to things, that for Keith the idea of being friends with someone and also being physical with that person didn't have an overlap. For Lance though it was different, he didn't need to be with someone to be with them. It didn't need to mean more than just a couple hours to act like the dumb twenty one year old he was.
But an anxious feeling took root at the turn in conversation. He shrugged as he drummed fingers against his water glass. "I guess, yeah?" A pause. "I complained about group projects and we watched a dumb horror movie." He cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. "What about you? What'd you do tonight?" A quick pause, a teasing smirk that didn't quite land but an attempt to shift the expression on Keith's face, "other than Shiro."
Keith had always been shit at conveying emotion correctly. His turns in logic were never easily followed and it usually took a detour from point a to point b to understand why he felt the way he did about things sometimes.
So he wasn’t frowning at the thought of Eli and Lance. He had been actually pushing Lance to have some fun, actually, and liked Eli as a friend himself. It was just the sudden, weird situation of remembering Allura suddenly that had him feeling a kind of way. He didn’t want to bring her up, not now when it was obvious Lance was smiling without that cover of sadness he had haunting him those weeks after his memory update.
But he could tell he messed something up already, with how stilted the words from Lance felt. Like he was attempting to fix something that wasn’t actually broken. He ignored the obvious Shiro bait - he was not going to talk about his sex life, Lance! - and tried to fix the weirdness himself. “One, shut up. Two, just some calc homework. I never want to see math again after this semester.” Pause. Then in a rare moment of sincerity, said, “I’m really glad you and Eli have been hanging out lately. You seem happier.”
"That's what you get for taking it in the first place," Lance pointed out with a teasing smirk.
The rest though, well, that was a lot to unpack. Lance took a drink of his water and set the glass back down as he mulled over Keith's sudden sincerity. You seem happier. It was good, right? He should be happy to hear that, to know he was succeeding in appearing better than he felt. But it left him feeling weird and panicked, like there was an assumption being made that had guilt building in the pit of his stomach. The idea that his happiness was wrapped up in one particular person, the thought that it could come off as moving on when he was anything but doing that.
"It's not - we're not - " a pause. "It's just for fun, Keith, we're just - friends. And I kind of got lucky and got a few of those here and you're all you know, making me happier or whatever, not just -" he trailed off with a frustrated noise, hating that he didn't know how to make what he wanted to say make sense, and let his forehead clunk to the table. "Somedays at least," he added, muffled from his head against the table. "It's still - really fucking hard sometimes," he admitted, his own rare moment of sincerity, something other than the constant I'm fine.
When the distractions stopped, when there was no one to goof off with, when people had their own lives and their own things to attend to and he found himself alone. When it'd all come crashing down like it had that afternoon at the festival.
Oh good, he made it worse. Keith really believed that sometimes he needed to stay in his room and just not talk. He was just…bad at making people feel better or understanding them and the complex emotions people had. It was one of the disadvantages of having grown up with just his dad and a TV around for company, during his most formative years. He didn’t fault his dad for it, understood the man had been left to raise an half-alien baby by himself and he had been doing his best to protect him.
It unfortunately just meant he was very, very bad at comforting his friends and regulating his own emotions.
“I...I know it’s not the same. Not at all. I know that. But I know a little bit about how you feel. It’s probably going to be hard for a long time still. It’s still good when you’re feeling happy though. You’re allowed that, you’re allowed to not let yourself drown in it being bad sometimes.” More quietly, he added, “I miss her too. I know it’s not the same, but when I remember, it’s hard not to miss her.” Like earlier that even, when he came across her picture with Lance.
Truthfully Lance wasn't much better than Keith sometimes when it came to matters of emotions. At least the really deep stuff. The stuff that lingered and festered for years, beyond simple home sick or well that sucked. He'd complain endlessly about the dumb shit, the easy shit. Half the time for nothing more than to get a rise out of people and get them out of their own heads. But talking earnestly about the deep wounds? Yeah, that was hard. Especially after their years of shoving it all down because who had the time to dissect things like deep emotion and trauma and whatever else they ignored while fighting for your literal lives day in and day out.
But he appreciated that Keith was trying. That even if they both kind of sucked at it Keith was giving him the space to suck at it.
Lance lifted his head, ran a hand over his face and parked his elbow on the table, chin resting heavily on his palm. His expression when he looked at Keith was earnest. Open, if a bit tired. "It's not a -" he paused because competition felt like the wrong word but he couldn't quite pin down another to Keith quantifying their respective feelings of grief. "You miss her," was what he said instead. Plainly, a fact. No if, no but, no it's not the same. It just was.
"Allura meant a lot to you - to all of us. She was there for some of our best moments and some of the worst," he added and reached his other hand across to give Keith's a little squeeze.
"And I know she'd want us all to be happy, even if we miss her. That she'd want me to be happy," a little shrug of his shoulders there. He offered Keith a bittersweet sort of smile, a little tug of the corners of his mouth. "I'm working on it."
It sucked, this whole situation, but Keith tried to offer a smile back that wasn’t mostly just a grimace. “I know you’re right. And I know you are, I just wanted to say I’m glad it looks like you have good days too.” Then, a little more teasing than it was biting, “Even if those good days are because you’ve been a pain in the ass to me.”
Talking about Allura though, brought back the memory of the picture he found. The internal struggle about whether to reveal it to Lance was obvious on his face, but he finally sacked up and left his seat. He quickly walked over to the mantleplace and picked up the framed picture, before walking it back over to Lance.
Offering it to his friend, Keith explained, “This showed up today. And I know it’s a lot, but I think you’d want to have this.”
"Whatever, you enjoy it," Lance said with a bit of a teasing tone himself. Lance knew Keith well enough to know Keith would have firmly told him to fuck off ages ago if he didn't find his own amusement in their never ending bid to annoy or one up the other.
He raised a brow as Keith got up but Keith was back before Lance could really even ask about it. He still looked a little lost though as Keith held out the frame and it wasn't until he had taken it in hand and let his eyes fall to the photo inside did it really hit him.
He huffed a small laugh at first. "God, I looked like such a dork," he said almost immediately upon looking the picture.
He went quiet for a moment, the memory of that night still so vivid in his mind. Taking Allura to meet his family, officially. Their walk after, how sure he was when he said he'd follow her across the universe, that he'd be her family when all was said and done. How much hope he'd had then that he could make good on his word. The photo blurred a little in his vision and he rubbed his free hand rough across his eyes. "Thanks," he said quietly to Keith.
He looked up at Keith and the other memory for that day hit him hard. "This was not my first outfit for this date by the way," he started and turned the photo for Keith to see again before setting it down on the table. He was sad, lost in a million what could have beens and the general unfairness of a universe that had asked so much of their friend. But the words were lighter, conspiratorial almost. "I made the mistake of asking Coran for advice and ended up in the most ridiculous get up ever," he continued, a soft laugh at the memory. "Thankfully I found you and you talked some sense into me before I made a complete fool of myself."
There was a brief moment of panic where he really thought Lance would cry and then he would have to do something about it to make him not cry. But while the sadness of the whole situation was still there, Lance almost sounded positive about the whole thing as he spoke about that night.
“Well, that was your first mistake - to go to Coran. Even I could have told you that he would be ridiculous.” The man was so protective of Allura, Keith knew he probably would have been tough in dealing with whatever challenges he had given Lance to prove himself worthy of dating their Princess. But he smiled, glad that somehow in the future he didn’t manage to make things worse. “Well, whatever it was that I told you, clearly I was right about it. You guys look happy there.” And so stupidly in love already, even after one date.
He was once again reminded about how cruel everything turned out. But he pushed through it. “I’m glad you had that chance with her. That she was happy before everything that happened. I also know, despite these moments of sadness, you’re going to be happy again too. However it happens.” With Eli, without, Keith just wanted Lance never looking as miserable as he did immediately following his memory update. He narrowed his eyes, because he didn’t think he could keep up the sincerity for much longer. “But if you keep stealing my food, I will make you regret ever agreeing to live with us.”
Sometimes it bugged Lance, the things he remembered that Keith didn't. The last push of the war that had brought them closer together in the end. But it was okay. He could handle it and he'd rather Keith and Shiro be spared the things he'd lived through, the terror that Honverva had unleashed.
But there were moments still. When it felt like there was a bit of a divide there, that as much as he could amuse Keith about a memory it wasn't the same as knowing Keith remembered it, moments like that afternoon watching the sunset before they left earth again. It was strange, to miss parts of a person who was right in front of you, he mused.
In the end though did it matter? Keith was still there and they were making new moments to think back on. Those soft little interludes between all the noise they usually fell into, moments that Lance held close. So he gave Keith a smile, filled with his gratefulness for the words and the sentiments.
He was more than ready to take the opening though, to shift the conversation away from the heaviness to something easier. So the smile quickly turned to smug smirk. "I already did the moment I caught you calling Shiro honeybuns over coffee last week," he shot back, though there was no heat behind it and really honeybuns was probably not right but whatever. Lance leaned forward and re-stole the sandwich half, not exactly hungry anymore, but he knew it would do wonders to push them back to an easy visit in the kitchen after all that.
"And if you don't want me stealing your food stop making such good sandwiches, Kogane," he said, purposefully after taking a bite and with his mouth still half full - just to really hammer home the annoyance. Yeah, it wasn't perfect, and maybe he'd always be sad and lonely, but at least he had this - friends to keep him busy, to have late night kitchen talks with. And it would be enough.