Kiss prompt! Kallura: "I almost lost you" kiss
Kiss Prompts | still accepting
[Takes place at the end of Hole in the Sky, consider it an alternate conversation on the bridge. <3 Hope you like it! I know I’m a little rusty - thank you for prompting me!]
This was still hard for Keith; the careful effort of working with feelings that didn’t belong to him. Hell, even his own were a challenge on a good day. But just the sight of Allura on the bridge, alone, set fire to his bones and he wanted desperately to try. He approached, letting himself be heard so that he wouldn’t startle her. Tension hung thick around her, tangled, like the waves of hair cascading down her back. Keith couldn’t recall ever seeing her hair loose while she was still in armor. It felt as if there were more battles to be had, something coming for them.
He came up beside her, taking a moment to look out at the quiet and vast sky. Somewhere out there was a hole in the sky, like a thin veil between them and a reality that had gone horribly wrong. Allura’s hand grasped for his at their sides, and he sucked in a breath at how hard she squeezed his fingers. He had barely turned his head to her before she’d hooked her fingers into his chestplate, pulling his mouth to hers. With a soft sound, he kissed her back, just as desperate for some unnamed thing, as if it would mend the matching tear somewhere deep within themselves.
Allura was the first to pull back, breathless. “I’m sorry, I…”
“It’s okay.” Keith licked his lips. “This was…”
“I feel like I lost something today. I had to make sure it wasn’t you.”
Carefully, the actions still new to him, Keith slid his arm around her, slotting them so they could breathe each other in, feel pulses rabbiting under trembling lips. It did feel like they’d lost something. Keith was so tired of losing things, which was such a terrible way to express the insidious truth of being robbed. The things they seemed to lose out in the stars had all been stolen.
“I’m here,” he said, as much for himself as for Allura. More words drifted to the tip of his tongue, and like so often before, he hoped he wouldn’t regret them. “And you are not her.”
Allura flinched. “I could have been. I could have been someone completely different. Why?”
“I think…I think the possible answers to that are as many as there are realities out there. You can’t… you can’t put a name on it, or a number. You only have to live in this reality, Allura. That’s all anyone can ask.”
By then, she’d moved her hand up to the side of his throat, her face tucked against the other side. Keith’s eyelids fluttered, his heartbeat trapped between her gloved fingers and her hitched breath. She was as scared as he was. All she could do was nod.
Swallowing, Keith added, “It takes one thing you…you really care about. Even one thing that matters to you, and it changes you to lose it. We both know…what that’s like.” When she kissed his sweat-damp skin again, Keith wondered if she could taste his guilt. He could have changed their reality with his anger, his grief, and he suspected it was quite the same for her. He held her tighter, and she responded in kind instantly. There were so many terrible things out there. Lotor, the comet, the unending possibilities for how this changed their future, their reality.
“I’m here,” she said in an echo of his earlier affirmation.
Keith grounded himself in this moment, in all the reasons they were fighting. Who they wanted to be, and who they never wanted to become. He closed his eyes, determined to be as strong for her as she was for him.
