The Junk Drawer

He finds Hunk in the yard, halfway to the barn where they’ve all parked their cars. Keith’s crutches sink into the soft earth, but he hobbles after his friend, desperate to make some gesture that will show the world just how sorry he is. If he looks pitiful enough stranded in the muck, maybe they will forgive him.

“Hunk,” he calls. It is dark in the grassy field. He can see only the broad slope of Hunk’s shoulders turn in the darkness, the light of Lance’s distant farmhouse flashing in his eyes.

Hunk, of course, drops what he’s doing and meets him halfway.

“Keith, what are you-”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.” Keith can’t find his footing. He scrabbles at his crutches, fighting to see Hunk in the low light. “I’m not…” The words escape him. Sputtering, uncertain, he manages, “I’m not myself.”

Hunk lays a hand on his shoulder. Keith knows that it’s meant to be a comforting gesture, but the weight of it throws him off balance all over again. He’s fighting to stand upright while Hunk says, “There’s leftover cake in the fridge. Hang in there, buddy.”

Keith watches him go.

Too embarrassed to walk back when someone could see, he sinks onto his ass and waits for the last of the cars to leave. They move slowly, one by one, headlights tracing tire tracks in the dirt.

Even Shiro is gone by the time he returns to the farmhouse.

He finds his duffle bag on a bed in a room just off the kitchen. A note from Shiro is folded on top: Call me. I love you. Like the party, like Hunk’s warm hand on his shoulder, this kindness puts a pit in Keith’s stomach. He stuffs the note into his duffle, kicks off his shoe.

Somewhere upstairs, a shower hisses to life.

Keith climbs into bed and does not move for a day.

Shiro had said it would be just like old times, like bunking down the hall from each other in the Castle of Lions, but it isn’t; space is quiet.

Here, there is the squeal and smack of the back door. Drifting in and out of sleep, Keith learns the path of Lance’s heavy work boots on the hardwood. He knows now how one or two stairs in the old farmhouse creak more than the others, how the banister groans under Lance’s hand. In the morning and at night, he hears Lance cook. His voice dances with the radio; dishes clatter in the sink. Nothing he makes smells particularly good, but the sound of meat sizzling on the stovetop, of his breathy high notes and the low tones that snake beneath the bedroom door…

He never sleeps better than when Lance is in the kitchen.

For most of the day, though, Lance works outside, and Keith is alone. Alone and awake, unmoving.

The weeks stretch out before him.

By the third day of this, Lance startles Keith awake by tossing a ring of keys at his chest.

“This has gotten way too depressing,” he says, breezing past and tugging open the room’s curtains. Keith hadn’t noticed the curtains. “Get up. We’re going for a drive.”

Keith scowls. The room is so bright, and Lance is moving so fast—dumping half-empty cups of water onto a drooping house plant. He sits up onto his elbows.

“Maybe you can.” He pulls back his blankets, baring the hard shell of his cast. This, at least, stops Lance in his tracks. He leans over the bed for a good look. Keith is quick to cover it back up. He mumbles, “In case you’ve forgotten.”

“Jesus wept. Can I sign it?”

“What? No!”

Lance throws up his hands and gets back to work. Lance, Keith remembers, is a lot louder when they’re in the same room. “I’m serious about that drive,” he says, snatching up a handful of Keith’s dirty laundry with a wrinkled nose. He turns to Keith, free hand outstretched. “Give me your shirt.”

Keith pulls his blankets up to his chin, knocking the keys Lance had thrown at him to the floor. He is worn out and bleary-eyed, certain he must have heard Lance wrong. Maybe, he thinks, this is an awful fever dream.

But Lance says again, “Keith, your shirt,” and Keith still does not wake up.

“I’m not taking off my shirt,” he says, incredulous. Then, remembering himself, “And I can do my own laundry!”

Judging by Lance’s raised eyebrows, he has some doubts about that. But he drops Keith’s clothes where he found them and heads for the door, spinning around at the threshold. “I’m serious about that drive,” he says, jabbing a finger at Keith. “Be ready in ten, and change your shirt. You smell like shit.”

Keith, who has felt very little for a lot longer than three days, is nearly knocked off his feet by the twinge of pleasure he feels at the sight of Lance and his truck.

It’s an old thing, a sun-bleached baby blue and light on its tires. Lance, who’s got a straw hat pulled low over his eyes, runs a hand along its body, smirking at the car like he’s trying to pick it up at a bar. It’s familiar. Lance always had better luck talking engines into starting than women into his bed.

Keith, hovering in the shade of the front porch, clears his throat. Lance doesn’t even look up. “Nice, right?” he calls, and it’s not a question. He loves this truck. He knows what it’s worth better than anyone. His hand catches on the driver’s-side door handle, and he turns to Keith. “Got the keys?”

Keith lifts them into the air. They glint in the sunlight. Lance cracks a smile. “Alright,” he says, “let’s go,” and pulls open the door for Keith to climb inside.

“You’re joking.”

“Nope.”

Keith shuffles onto the driveway, keys still outstretched. “Lance-”

“Can’t drive manual?”

His face burns under the late-summer sun. Is Lance stupid? Well, he knows Lance is stupid; Keith’s the idiot for thinking otherwise. He jabs a free hand at his broken right leg, bulky beneath a baggy pair of jeans. “Not right now.”

Lance barks a laugh, teasing. He doesn’t bother looking down, just gets in Keith’s face like they’re back at the Garrison. “Come on, man,” he says, voice low. “You’ve flown in worse. It’s a truck.”

Keith squints up at him, mouth twisted into a thin line. That rage returns to him, the anger he felt bubbling up in his stomach at the sight of Lance with a beer and his work boots and a shit-eating grin. He could punch him. He could set a course for the sharp corner of his mouth or-

“You know you want to.”

Or he could drive. Lance is right; he wants to drive.

He shoulders past him and pulls himself into the driver’s seat by the ceiling handle. Lance claps his hands together. He’s rounded the cab and is in the passenger seat by the time Keith starts the engine.

Predictably, driving the old truck with one foot is damn near impossible.

Keith kills the engine three, four, six times before they’re off. The first time it happens, Keith lurches forward in his seat, but says nothing. He grits his teeth and tries again.

The last time it happens, he’s swearing in alien languages even Lance hasn’t heard, and Lance is cackling like it’s the funniest thing on Earth. He draws his hat from his head, fanning himself with it as they bump along empty country roads. “I’ve got a good feeling about this time,” he says, voice frayed by laughter.

Keith glowers out the windshield. “Fuck you.”

He creeps from the third gear to fourth, his good foot slipping from the gas to the clutch, then back again. The truck growls. He doesn’t back down.

Soon enough, they’re going seventy and Lance has got the windows down. Earth—Nebraska, Keith reminds himself, I’m in Nebraska—unfolds before them. There’s dune grass as far as the eye can see, the sandy rock formations of Keith’s childhood butting out of the horizon. His hand slips from the gear shift. He takes the wheel, letting his other hand trail out the open window. Wind buffets his skin, his hair. He breathes.

Lance, for once, is wordless beside him. His face is turned away from Keith, watching the Sandhills fly by. In the corner of his eye, though, Keith catches the bright blue edge of one Altean mark.

Lance can play cowboy all he wants, but the universe is vast, and he has a history.

“Bet you can’t go any faster,” Lance calls over the roar of the engine, the wind. Keith tears his eyes away, feeling caught. But Lance doesn’t know. He has no idea.

Keith shakes his head. His hand flutters back to the gear shift, his foot easing up on the gas. “It’s your truck,” he warns.

Lance reaches over the bench seat, surprising Keith with a brush of his hand on his thigh. The touch is fleeting, light, but it trails fire.

“Punch it,” Lance says.

Keith doesn’t think; he just does.

They end up at a gas station three towns over according to Lance. It might as well be a history museum, with gas you have to pay for at the counter and a campaign sign in one dusty window for Richard Nixon circa 1960.

Lance goes inside to settle up. Keith leans against the truck bed.

When Lance returns, he’s got two bottles of Coca-Cola and a bag of peach rings between his teeth. He hands one Coke to Keith, then tears open the peach rings. “Want one?” Keith shakes his head. Lance shrugs. He falls against the truck beside Keith and says, “We need to talk.”

When Keith broke his leg, he had been rocketing planetside in a light cargoship carrying Galran dictionaries to an inhabited moon off of the restored planet Daibazaal. He had been the only passenger.

He can’t recall what exactly went wrong, only that, when it came time to fix it, he had been too tired to lift a finger. Fighter pilot, defender of the universe, and a bone-deep exhaustion would be the thing to kill him. He was thirty-four. He was ready to die.

We need to talk, Lance had said, and Keith feels that weariness return to him. He feels like falling. He takes a swig of his cola. It is cool and syrupy-sweet slipping down his throat. Condensation gathers between his fingers. He presses the bottle to his temple.

“Keith?”

He hates the obvious worry in Lance’s voice. It’s a voice made for laughing, for ribbing and indignation. This pity—it sounds all wrong. Keith waves him off. “I’m fine.”

Lance snorts. The world steadies. “Where were you for the last three days, Keith? Was that fine?”

“I need rest.”

“Ever heard of moderation?”

Keith looks up at Lance, brows furrowed. “Have you?” The two face each other in the empty parking lot, each one daring the other to back down. Lance is the first to roll his eyes and turn away. He sips at his soda.

“Alright,” he says. “I asked Shiro to let you stay with me.”

Keith blinks. “What?” He’s not sure what Lance has just admitted to. There’s a weight to his words, and he won’t look up from his drink, but the situation isn’t exactly a secret. At least, not that Keith knows of. “I know that,” he says, trying to catch Lance’s eye. “Shiro told me. His house is being renovated, there was a change of plans-”

“No one’s house is getting renovated, Keith.”

The bottle of soda in his hand grows heavy. He sets it on the rear lip of the truck. Lance keeps talking.

“Shiro could have taken you in just fine. Hunk offered up his place too, and Pidge. Hell”—he breathes a laugh—“half the Garrison would have taken you in.” Keith watches with growing dread as Lance frowns. When he does, his forehead wrinkles. There’s a crease between his eyebrows that Keith hasn’t noticed before, a roughness to his sun-tanned face. “All of these people, but I insisted.” He faces Keith. “Do you know why?”

Keith shakes his head.

“Because I know you.” Lance’s words cut through Keith’s panicked fog. His mouth moves carefully, like he’s thought about this moment and what he’ll say: “I know what you think of us for staying when you took off and never looked back.” Keith thinks of the farmhouse. He remembers the party, all of them in one place, smiling and eating cake. He remembers heaving on Lance’s back porch, counting down the days.

“I don’t blame you,” Lance says. “I’m happy for you, Keith. I really am.” His eyes slip from Keith’s face, back to his bottle and the open bag of peach rings, untouched. “But I couldn’t let you break their hearts like you broke mine.”

Keith looks down too. He feels the force of Earth’s gravity weigh on his neck, his shoulders. Lance’s words should hurt, he thinks. Propped up against the pickup, nothing more than a speck in the middle of nowhere, he should flinch at the truth. But he doesn’t. It washes over him like the wind in the cab of the truck in high gear. He feels relieved.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asks. Maybe there’s absolution to be found at this gas station at the end of the world.

But Lance smiles. “Because I want you to know the effect you have on people,” he says. “They worship the ground you walk on, Keith. They have ever since they met you.” An old jealousy creeps into his voice. He nudges Keith’s shoulder with his own. Keith turns to him. “And I’m telling you so that you know, you can be yourself around me.”

Keith cocks his head. “Myself?”

“Yeah. A major asshole.” Keith shoves off the truck, rolling his eyes while Lance makes himself laugh. “I know how it is!” he calls after Keith, who is already at the driver’s-side door with one hand on the handle. “Just go easy on them, and I won’t ask anything more from you. Deal?”

But no one is asking Keith, not these days. Not since the accident on Trappist and his right leg in a cast. With a duffle bag slung over one shoulder and crutches tucked under the other, he stumbles onto Earth soil.

Shiro follows close behind. “You’re sure this is everything? I know some things never change, but this…?” He gestures to the sagging duffle bag, not even half full. “Please tell me you brought a change of underwear.”

“Ha, ha.”

“I’m not joking. Did you?”

A year ago, Keith would have flipped off the old man without hesitation or remorse. Even now, the impulse to make light of it all, to slip into their old routine as if nothing has changed, flares in his chest. But he can’t. He can’t even face Shiro, who looks… different. Softer. New glasses, maybe. The white scruff on his face. If the car on the tarmac is any indication, he’s even traded in his sleek, black motorcycle for a busted-up minivan. Keith is used to not seeing his old crew for months on end, but, this time, it seems Shiro has crossed some irrevocable milestone.

When he had seen him at first, crossing the docking bay of the space station with his phone pressed to his ear and a small, watery smile on his face, he hadn’t even recognized him.

“Yes,” Keith says flatly, eyes on the ground, “I packed underwear.” His hand wraps around the passenger-side door handle. Sun-warmed metal cuts into his palm.

Four weeks. Four weeks, and he’d be back in the air.

Shiro unlocks the minivan. Keith climbs inside.

He watches his ship through the window while Shiro wrestles with the ignition, the car’s engine turning over a few too many times. Its sleek, metal frame glints back.

“Thank you,” Keith says. He feels Shiro stiffen beside him. This, at least, hasn’t changed: Shiro is worried about him… and failing miserably at being cool about it. He throws the car in reverse, stretches an arm behind Keith’s headrest.

“Sure,” he says, easing them onto the runway. “For what, exactly?”

Keith shrugs. “For coming to get me.”

“Of course, man.” Shiro’s hand slips from the headrest to his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. He’s got that old mentor voice, the one that could talk him down from any ledge, the one he scoured the universe for all those years ago. If Keith closed his eyes, he could be a kid again. Fifteen, eighteen, twenty-two. “Keith,” he hears him say, “that’s what we’re here for.”

“I’m not ready.”

“What?”

“I needed it just to be you. I can’t-” He shifts his broken foot out of sight. “I’m not ready for the rest of them to see me like this. I’m glad it was you. Just you.”

Shiro’s hand drops from his shoulder.

Keith’s eyes flutter open.

He risks a look at Shiro, terrified he had said something wrong, given too much away. Shiro stares studiously out the windshield, even as a beam of sunlight falls into his eyes, even when it must hurt. At last, he clears his throat to speak.

“Yeah. About that."

The last time Keith saw Lance had been across a dinner table at their yearly celebration of Allura. He had been himself, which is to say, light. Laughing. There were the soft blue arcs of Altean marks on his face that Keith had never gotten used to, but the rest was like the lyrics to an old song he knew by heart. Or something.

Keith doesn’t think much of Lance. Not anymore.

He’d heard stories of his farmhouse, the fields of Juniberry flowers he kept tirelessly. From what he gathered, Lance didn’t leave Earth much. Didn’t have to. He had built a life for himself here, that much is clear.

Shiro’s minivan bounces its way down Lance’s long, gravel drive while Keith tries to get a read on the squat cottage that Lance calls home.

Like Shiro and his car, his glasses, it seems wrong. Panic feathers Keith’s breathing. His hands clench into fists in his lap. Four weeks, he thinks. Four weeks, four weeks, four—

He might as well be shacking up with a stranger.

“You’ll be fine,” Shiro says. Then again, “It’ll be fine. Just like the old days, right?” and Keith gets the feeling that he’s trying to convince himself of this fact.

“Shiro…” Keith searches for the words that will spell out just how disastrous this is, how many places he’d rather be than right here, right now. All he can manage is, “Lance!?”

Shiro parks the car with a grin. “See? Just like old days.”

The farmhouse is quiet. There’s a barn twice its size at the edge of the property, flush against swaying fields of purple-pink Juniberry flowers. The nearest neighbors are a smudge in the distance; they might as well be on another planet.

Shiro’s voice changes, gets low again—“Keith”—and he has to face him. Shiro, former paladin of Voltron, defender of the universe, behind the wheel of a minivan. “I know this isn’t what we planned, but I am here for you. You can call me. You can always call me-”

“I know, I know.” He laughs lightly, but Shiro is unconvinced. “Like you said,” Keith says, throwing open the car door, “just like old times.” He fumbles with his crutches, unsteady on his feet. When he’s righted himself enough to reach for his duffle bag, he finds that Shiro has already slung it over his own shoulder.

“That’s reassuring,” he calls over the hood of the car. He nudges Keith as he passes, leading the way to Lance’s front door. “Because you have always been so good at asking for help.”

This time, Keith finds he can manage the middle finger.

It is worse than he could have imagined. Even Shiro, ever-prepared, ever-the-optimist, stands beside Keith at a complete loss for words.

The sound of the word, Surprise! still buzzes in the air.

Keith just stares.

Before him is a living room spilling over with people. Some, he recognizes; many more, he doesn’t. There is a cake hissing with sparklers, balloons skidding along the floor. Tacked to the wall behind them is a hand-painted banner that reads, “WELCOME HOME, KEITH!”

He opens his mouth, closes it.

Thankfully, there is Hunk.

“Keith!” He slams into Keith with enough force to knock him off his feet, if not for the arms wrapping around his back, holding him upright. “It’s so good to see you, buddy.”

“You too…” Keith wheezes, gripping his crutches for dear life. Even with his face pressed to Hunk’s chest, inhaling kitchen smoke, flour, and something else—something warm—he can feel the room’s eyes on him. He sinks further into Hunk’s embrace, willing himself to disappear.

“Jeez, Hunk. Don’t break him.” Pidge’s voice cuts through the darkness. Hunk draws back, holding Keith at arm’s-length, and there they are, eyeing Keith’s cast with open curiosity. “Don’t break him again, I should say.” Their eyes flick up to Keith’s. “Hey. Long time no see.”

Stupidly, Keith says again, “You too.”

Hunk looks between them, near tears. “Coran’s here,” he says, letting go of Keith to count off on his fingers. “And Shay. And Romelle, you remember Romelle.”

Keith catches their eyes over Hunk’s shoulder. Coran nearly falls over, he’s waving so hard. Keith raises a hand back. Romelle giggles.

The party remembers itself, and the room is filled with the sounds of chatter once more. With Hunk and Pidge standing between him and these strangers, Keith catches his breath. Beside him, Shiro leans close. “I had no idea-”

Keith shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he says. And because Shiro is still frowning, because Hunk is watching him with his heart in his eyes and no one can keep anything from Pidge, he adds, “Really.”

Hunk wipes at his eyes. “I just wish it didn’t take, well…” He gestures to Keith’s cast. Keith shuffles on his feet but, even in a pair of baggy sweatpants, there is no hiding the bright white plaster wrapping his ankle and foot. “It’s a shame we don’t see each other more often.”

“You’re absolutely right, Hunk.” Shiro claps a hand on his back. “Lucky for us, we’ve got Keith for a few more weeks.” He steers the two of them into the living room, shooting a wink over his shoulder. “It’s been a long day. I know Keith and I could use some cake.”

Pidge hangs back. They’re doing an awful job looking Keith in the eye, but he doesn’t mind. It’s not like he’d do much better. “You’d think they’d have better ways to treat this,” they murmur, craning their head for a better look. “What’s a broken leg to advanced alien technology, right? I mean, I could probably fix you right up, and medicine isn’t exactly my wheelhouse...”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

Keith surprises even himself. He hadn’t planned on telling anyone what happened on Trappist and in the days that followed, not even Shiro. He was supposed to lay low, keep to himself until he could return to his post with the Blade and live life as if none of this had happened.

Already, though, nothing is how he imagined it.

He scans the room, keeping his voice low. “They sent me here on purpose. Broken leg or not, I’m grounded.”

“Why?” Pidge isn’t looking at his leg anymore; they are searching his face. Keith only shrugs.

“Everybody takes breaks, right?”

They both know he’s lying. Pidge follows his gaze to the crowd where, sure enough, Hunk is slicing into the cake. Shay hands out red paper plates of it to smiling partygoers, waving off Shiro when he tries to help. It’s a happy scene, but Keith’s skin is crawling. He can’t focus on any one person for too long, can’t find his footing with crutches digging into his armpits.

“Looking for Lance?” Pidge asks.

He isn’t. But Pidge points down the hall, to a kitchen with a back door, and suddenly there is nowhere Keith would rather be than outside. Well, maybe airborn. Maybe on another planet entirely. But he could settle for a backyard.

He slips silently from the room. Laughter follows him down the hall.

The sun is low in the sky, washing the yard in red-orange light like the back of Keith’s eyelids. He stumbles onto a screened in porch, breathing hard. Cicada song roars in his ears, or maybe that’s his own blood. He doubles over and tries, tries to breathe.

“Four weeks,” he gasps. He counts the days down in his head, one of them nearly over. “Four weeks.” The words are like breathing, in and out. “Four. I can do this.”

“Wow.”

And, of course, just as Keith has nearly gotten his bearings, his stomach drops to his feet. His eyes crack open. He peers to his left, through locks of dark hair.

Sitting on an old church pew in blue jeans and a flannel is Lance.

“Fuck.”

Lance cracks a smile. “I’ll say.”

Keith unfolds himself, shakes his hair out of his face. Lance watches him with that self-satisfied smile and, Keith sees now, a beer in his hand. He raises the bottle to his lips. “Shiro said you wouldn’t be happy about the change of plans, but this-”

“It’s been a long day, Lance.”

“Well, I’ve got beer. And I hear there’s cake inside. What do you need, Keith?”

Keith feels the wrongness of the day unfurl inside him. He is tired and sore and mortified from all of this unexpected attention. Lance of all people had caught him doubled over and gasping for breath; and here he is, grinning. Lance. Lance in muddied work boots, with hair so long that it’s begun to curl at the nape of his neck. Lance and his farmhouse, nursing, of all things, a bottle of beer. The Lance that he knew wouldn’t touch a drink that didn’t come in a color of the rainbow.

Then again, the Lance that he knew had been nineteen years old.

Keith grits his teeth. “Screw you.”

Lance lowers his bottle of beer. He sits up straighter, brows drawing together. “Excuse me?”

“It’s just like you to throw a party.” Keith’s voice climbs higher and higher. It feels good to yell. Like speeding. Or pressing a thumb to the purpled skin of a bruise. He throws out his arms, leaning into the feeling, into the way that smile falls from Lance’s face. “I can hardly walk,” he cries, “and there’s a fucking cake!”

“Keith-”

“If any of you cared what I wanted, you’d leave me alone.”

Lance’s eyes darken. “You don’t mean that,” he says, lowering his bottle of beer to the deck between his feet. He moves as if Keith is a wild animal, easily startled. Maybe he is.

“You’re so selfish, Lance.” The words make his heart race. He is floating off-planet, watching their small bodies with a bottomless helplessness. He knows this will hurt, knows what he’ll say next and how it will end this conversation completely.

He knows this, and he says it anyway: “Some things never change.”

Lance stands from the pew.

Keith faces him, panting. He’s holding his crutches loose at his sides, pain striking the length of his injured leg. He looks up at Lance, who crosses the porch, pausing at Keith’s shoulder to speak low in his ear. “We better pick this up another time.”

Keith turns. Standing at the back door, slice of cake in hand, is Hunk. Pidge peers around him, then Shiro. The kitchen is full of partygoers, and all of them have gone silent.

“For the record,” Lance says, “the party wasn’t even my idea. I knew you would hate it.”

Keith smothers his face with his hands. He hears the back door squeal open, then smack closed. Cicada song returns to him.