Allura looks to Pidge, who shrugs, before she asks Hunk, "Is he not one of the pilots of the MFEs? Why would Lance have troubles with him? You are speaking of your time before finding the Blue Lion, yes?"

"Yeah." Hunk buries a laugh at Lance's wide-eyed gaze boring into the wall he refuses to glance from. "Why did you have so much trouble with Kinkade anyway?" Across from them, Keith sits heavily, crossing his arms over his chest and looking with a reserved curiosity between the two. "You used to talk about him for hours."

"Hunk." Lance manages to somehow sound desperate and menacing at the same time with just the beckon, and Hunk shrugs at Allura when she still looks curious. Romelle leans forward to get a better look with her latched curiosity, and she gasps loudly at the same time Lance realizes he has to confess something before somebody does for him. "I guess I just had a crush on him!" He laughs in such a high pitch Hunk flinches and regrets the topic a minute, knowing maybe they're all too stressed for it. "It's not like he noticed and it not like it matters anymore! We've got more important things to do than focus on old stuff like that! You know that, Hunk."

Hunk looks ready to relent, but Keith cuts him off in a fog of confusion by simply repeating the obvious. "You had a crush on Kinkade?"

Lance laughs again, though it's much more throaty and genuine as he meets Keith's eyes in almost a challenge. "Yeah. I did. Maybe I still do, I try not to think about it."

"Forget that. That guy didn't even know your name when we showed up, he's not worth your time." Keith rolls his eyes, sinking back in his chair and feigning an aloofness that is too tense to be genuine. He jolts as Lance slaps the table and laughs harder. "What!?"

"This is quite tense." Coran muses to Pidge, who steeples her hands and closes her eyes as Lance practically cackles. A realization seems to have drawn in her expression in the same point as her eyebrows furrowing.

"You're right, man! No, you're so right!" Lance throws his arm to Hunk, who eyes it warily as it connects to the shoulder he had just been picking at and Lance begins wiping away tears, still laughing. "Why would I get so hung up on someone who won't give me the time of day!?"

"That's what I mean!" Keith insists, serious despite his confused furrowed brows at Lance's hysterics. "You deserve someone who's going to recognize you for who you are, at least! You-you're a defender of the universe."

"This is embarrassing." Pidge murmurs to herself, still looking contemplatively from the cradle of her fingers. Hunk has a long trail of regret as Romelle seems to try and blink a communication of sorts to him excitably.

"Oh, yup! That's me!" Lance cackles on, slapping his knees as he kicks away from the table, "Maybe if I'm lucky he'll get around to seeing that--"

"And everything else!" Keith's voice is almost frantic as he swipes a hand forward to urge Lance to understand something he's spent no time articulating, and Shiro eyes him warily from the end of the conference table. "Once we save Earth, you have the chance to show him yourself even more than whatever all this heroism is going to make us look like. He'll get to see how selfless and kind and--"

Lance's laugh borders hysterical, and he stands fully from the table as half of them swivel to watch him pace restlessly. "Keith, buddy, you've got it. You're right! I've gotta show him all the goods!" He seems breathless, but he approaches the table again to make ferocious eye-contact with their Black Paladin across the table, it being wildly returned.

Keith nods on in earnest, though his expression remains stony and serious. "Like I said, though, forget it if he's not going to give you the time of day. You deserve better than that."

Lance plops back down as Hunk holds up two pacifying and gentle hands. "Yeah." He croaks through another laugh, much less enthused but still smiling almost maniacally. "Sure did miss him, though."

"Ah. This is rather sad." Allura says with insightfully to Hunk, catching on and resting a hand on Romelle's own restless one.

               Keith asks, much quieter than Shiro would expect from him, “You sure this is how you want to do it?” Because he knows what Shiro’s trying to mimic by crowding his newfound family behind him at the doorstep and Keith carefully at his side, a flimsy plastic bag clutched in his human hand with three pints of ice cream in the same favorite flavors knocking each other within. Behind him, Shiro thinks Romelle is curiously looking into the other bag holding everyone else’s if the rustling is anything to go by, because of course they needed to get new favorites and pick up some extras, but he’s trying to focus on the door in front of him for the sake of summoning his Garrison and Voltron courage all at once. The courage that made him a leader and broke him through imprisonment. The courage that brought him home to stand at this doorstep. He nods a smile at Keith, who, in a rare display of nostalgia, mimics a former self to ask gently, “Wow, who even likes butter pecan?”

               “You’re going to have to be nice to him and his ice cream tastes if you want us all to get along.” Shiro steels himself and raps against the door, feeling his eyes well with tears and his voice begin to splinter. “We’re a family now, you keep that in mind.”

               Keith’s hand at his elbow is a comfort that’s sorely needed, and it’s impossible to miss the way Hunk tries to muffle his tears in the group behind them. It does nothing but add to the swell of anticipation in Shiro’s chest, and he realizes for as many times as he’s been thrown around and made a mess of in space he’s probably the most broken and reduced in this single moment before his team, and he can admit that freely.

               Retrospectively, they probably look a little silly, crowded so tightly in front of the neat house in the middle of the block. In hindsight, it might be a lot of pressure to put him under after so long apart, and it might be unfair to him, and it’s been longer than his Kerberos mission and who knows how far he’s moved on because Shiro was pronounced dead, not to mention cloned over and actually deceased before hauling his way to this stoop after who knows how long it’s been (Pidge had mentioned an exact time, but Shiro hadn’t listened, distracted and unsure), and before he can even tell them all to scatter and regroup at his second guessing the doorknob is turning and the door being pried open and Shiro can’t breathe.

               He looks the same. Maybe there’s a grey hair or two, but Shiro wins that competition by a mile. He’s looking down, at first, and blocking something from escaping between his legs as he slowly raises his gaze up Shiro’s legs and lingers dramatically on the plastic bag he’s strangling. “Hey.” Keith is saying and Shiro can’t believe he can remember his lines after so many years, but Shiro can remember the day he brought Keith home vividly, too, so he guesses they’re both saps, “Shiro was going to make some weird joke about how he knows it’s too soon for kids but it sounded weird so I’m just going to tell you he adopted me.” His voice is quiet, and maybe Keith is nervous, too. Hunk cries louder.

               “Takashi.” Adam says, voice a whisper and knees jolting apart to let a stray snout through the crack it creates with the door. His face is unreadable to the rest of them, probably, but Shiro knows he’s hurt. He knows there’s so much for him to explain and try to make up for and he would begin to in a heartbeat for him. The dog trying to break through his knees is sniffing frantically.

               “There’s a few more than last time.” Shiro weakly tries because he doesn’t know what else to make use of in the exchange. He doesn’t know how to fit his apology in for everything he’s done, his explanation in for everything that’s happened.

               Keith continues ritualistically, despite Shiro breaking pattern, “We brought ice cream, too. Butter pecan is gross. I’m not sharing.” His voice cracks. Shiro feels the tears track down his face despite his grasp for composure, feeling every strain of it seep away and remembering their last bitter words to one another.

               Adam’s hand is shaking as it reaches towards Shiro’s face, and the dog shoots past his legs as the door cracks open further but it doesn’t get farther than Keith’s legs to jump up and examine them. It’s a black lab that sniffs and huffs with pure curiosity. Shiro thinks he’s crying harder but Adam’s fingers trace the depressed skin over the bridge of his nose and his other finds the crest of his forehead to card into his white hair. “You really made me think I lost you both.” The way he says it is hard and angry despite his small voice, and Shiro gambles to step forward so they can collapse into one another.

"You're just watching me do chores? Wow!" He'll say every time, throwing his head back dramatically at Keith's reluctance to interfere with the rhythm and not understanding the effects of how powerful a saucepan looks in his hand sometimes or how agile and talented he seems when he sidesteps a cat tumbling down the hall without so much of a second glance. Keith wants to grab him and press him gently to the warm blankets he's deciding between (they threw a yellow one over the back of the couch last week because Hunk was visiting and yellow is a "Hunk Mood" and they have so many Fucking Blankets) and he wants to press pause and grapple at the explosion in his chest that demands to be known. It fizzles and leaves an incomprehensible warmth behind but Keith knows every step back he takes is just to see better--he just wants a better look at Lance and his brightness.

"Yeah." Keith teases, watching Lance roll his eyes as he finally decides on some scruffy looking woven thing his mother had given them. Keith thinks Veronica might have made it in a fleeting crafting phase as a teen (it reminds him of a few of the scarves Lance has that are from a similar time). Keith stares on as Lance ignores him, sauntering into the kitchen now that their couch is sorted out for the week so he can take some strange inventory in his head that Keith still hasn't exactly begun to figure out. "We need mayo." He jumps in before Lance can begin his reciting of a grocery list he'll expect Keith to write down somewhere, and the interjection is enough to make him pause in the center of the tiled floor and hum. When he leans over towards the fridge door, he seems to stop himself just short of actually opening it, and Keith wonders if he just remembered their last debaucle with mayonnaise.

"Mayo!" He declares loudly while Keith scrambles for his phone so he can take notes. "Ugh. Chicken. The twisty macaroni."

"Gemelli or the one that starts with a C?" Keith asks blandly, giving away nothing of the soaring he feels when he glances up and has to take a moment to appreciate how astounding Lance looks drumming his fingers distractedly against the pantry door, his head cocked to the side. If he didn't risk losing half of their grocery list he would take a photo, but Lance would lose his place and sour at the loss of the routine and he looks like he's absolutely blooming so far in their early morning.

"I don't know." Lance finally decides, "Put twisty macaroni for pasta salad and I'll know which one it is when I see it."

Keith holds a laugh in, "What if you're not the one shopping and I just get stupid looking elbows?"

"What if I never grocery shop again? What if I suddenly become adverse to doing all the chores in this place while my partner watches me from afar? What if I go to the bathroom? And I break my leg?" He sticks his leg up impressively far, and Keith feels like he's lost the point of who they're mocking, "No thanks, Romelle. The day you grocery shop alone is the day I commit to some weird caveman diet or something else you'll get there and decide we need to do on a whim, and that's not happening, buddy."

"I don't understand your work relationships." Keith says as he punches in 'twisty macaroni for pasta salad' on his list instead of watching the loose boxers slide down Lance's thigh as he jumps around.

"Me neither. Call Pidge." Keith tabs over to their joint to-do list very quickly so he doesn't confuse Lance's trains of thought.

While he speeds through his addition, Keith is sure to ask, “Is there a sub-note to calling Pidge or are you just checking on her?”

“Our basil plant is wilting and I don’t know why.” Lance informs very officially, shutting the pantry and centering himself in the kitchen again. He folds his hands as dramatically as possible while he thinks very loudly, and after a moment he tacks on, “Also I want to ask how her visit to Matt and Nyma’s weird cabin went, she always goes nuts when she’s off-grid.”

Keith hums, remembering he hasn’t seen any update from her in a while despite her being home for a day or so already, and he tabs back to their shopping list before Lance can begin his calling different assortments of things at him while he is unprepared. “I want to live in a house with a root cellar.” Lance declares as he peers into the fridge and digs around their corner that holds mostly jams and stuff Hunk better knows what to do with. “That seems cute. Do you think houses still have those?”

Quickly, Keith tabs away again to open a private note where he has a very extensive list of dreams Lance has mentioned off-hand that Keith would make a reality if he could. ‘Cow’ is on there, along with ‘skydiving’ and ‘8 children’, and some are more doable than others, but Keith thinks for sure they can get themselves a root cellar someday between kids one through eight. He wouldn’t mind hunting down and fixing up an old farmhouse for the love of his life. “Yeah, I think.” He finally reports as it’s punched in, moving back to their to-do list and trying to hide his pleased smile at where his thoughts have been wandering all morning, “Not any new houses, probably.”

“I bet we could flip houses if we put our minds to it.” Lance hums, rapping his nails against a mysterious object hidden from Keith’s view in the fridge. “You’d look hot toiling away in some house we’re flipping. All sweaty and carpenter-y. Just as hot as you think I look doing all our chores all the time.”

Keith can’t stop the laugh that bubbles from him fast enough, “I take out the garbage.”

“Oh my god.”

“I do all the dishes so your hands don’t get dry.” Keith tacks on lamely, still laughing.

“Red peppers!” Lance exclaims suddenly, like he had been begging for the realization to come. Keith taps away at his phone to add it. “That’s what I was trying to remember. Red peppers, pineapple soda, salt! All the words connected.”

When Lance stands from the fridge and shuts it firmly, he seems awfully pleased with himself for the simplicity in their task, and Keith can’t resist the temptation any longer. He closes the distance between them to press a warm and firm fluttery kiss to his lips, and Lance chuckles as soon as Keith parts from him. “Good morning.” He greets, like he hadn’t whispered it into Keith’s hair two hours prior or said it as Keith dished their breakfast or even while they had been passing to trade off the shower in a towel-less standoff. “You’re being awfully mysterious today.”

“Do you want to get married?” Keith asks instead of being competent, staring at Lance’s glowing face and wanting to be trapped in their very position until the end of time.

“Yeah.” Lance answers back easily, smiling softly and rocking back on his heels a bit. He gives the kitchen a cursory glance before he snaps and points back to Keith, “Baby spinach, Italian dressing.”