“Hey, Lance.” A taunting laugh, smirk audible in his voice. “I got your lion back.”
He’s so smug he’s dripping with it, truly. If satisfaction was a person he would be the one and only Keith Gyeong, prodigy pilot extraordinaire.
He did, however, go out of his way to get Lance’s lion back for him. So.
“Thank you, Keith,” Lance says, injecting as much sincerity into his voice as he can muster. He’s well aware he’s still at a disadvantage here, and he knows Keith is his best shot for help (he would literally rather die than ask Shiro, Pidge would take twelve thousand photos and hoard them over his head for eternity, Hunk has a told-you-so problem, and he doesn’t know the Alteans well enough to take that particular L in front of them). “Now can you come and unchain me?”
Lance is expecting teasing. Duh. That’s the point of this whole rivalry spiel. He is not, however, expecting to be abandoned.
“What’s that? Uh, you’re cutting out, I can’t — I can’t hear you —”
Oh, Lance is going to kill him.
“Come on! I thought we bonded!”
Nothing. Not even static over the comms, which tells Lance that Keith has yet to fucking cut the connection, and is, in fact, being a horrible smug jerk.
A horrible smug jerk that is Lance’s only saving grace, unfortunately.
Man, fuck. Why is Lance expected to be friends with this jerk again?
Fuck, not even a muffled snigger.
Is it desperate? Yes. Was the bonding dig also desperate? Yep. Is Lance digging himself into a deeper hole by the minute? Quite probably.
He does that regularly, though. He’ll get out eventually.
Lance continues to nag a silent Keith through the comms, and then switches to cussing him out, in as many languages as he can (which is a lot. He doubts Keith has ever been called a fart-snorting garbage-guzzler in Gaelic, heh. Ass). He’s hoping to incense Keith enough to get him to fire back and prove that he’s been listening all along, but not too much that he turns around and refuses to help. It’s a delicate balance. Lance is usually very good at it. (Nothing on Earth is funnier than making your older siblings absolutely raging mad and then watching them continue to help you with whatever you ask for. It is, truly, an art form.)
But since Lance was forsaken by the gods the very second he was shot into space, Keith remains absolutely soundless.
And honestly? How dare he.
Muttering to himself, Lance tries to shift into a slightly more comfortable position. Eventually he manages to get his knees under him, chest to the floor, and curves his back to take the pressure off his wrists, which isn’t amazing but is better than before. It’s certainly not easy to do — this handcuff shit is hard. Lance always thought it would be way more fun.
“Well, damn, Sanchez. You sure you even want me to help you? You’re lookin’ pretty comfortable all stretched out.”
Lance yelps loudly, startling at Keith’s drawl. When the hell did he get here? Why didn’t Lance see him arrive in Red?
“Did you seriously use Pidge’s cloaking just to sneak up on me?” he demands.
Keith steps into Lance’s field of vision, smirking up a goddamn storm. He crouches right beside the pole Lance is chained to, reaching out a hand (dodging Lance’s attempt to bite his fingers off) and tilting up his chin.
“‘Course,” he admits, easy as pie. Then his smirk gets wider. “Think I was gonna pass up a chance to see ya all tied up and testy, pretty boy?”
“Fuck,” Lance says, aghast. “Fuck, fuck!”
The sudden expletives startles Keith, a little, and the smug expression drops from his face.
Lance face contorts in panic. “You’re hot! You’re not supposed to be hot! Fuck!”
This is Lance’s own goddamn fault, really, but he would like to take a brief moment to blame both higher powers and the internet at large for making him this way.
The thing is that Lance likes to bug people. He likes to push people’s buttons and run off before they can push his back. Usually, anyway, people don’t want to push his back; they just want to throw shit at him or roll their eyes and walk away.
Of course not. Heaven forbid Keith act like every other human being on the planet — er, well, alien in the universe. No, Keith has absolutely no trouble snapping right back to whatever Lance throws at him. Keith actually plays his game.
And fuck, does Lance love it.
That’s a huge problem. Massive. Lance doesn’t know what to do with someone who indulges him! That’s not the point! The point is for people to get annoyed and for Lance to win by default! He’s not supposed to be the one getting flustered!
“…What,” Keith says flatly. He blinks rapidly at Lance, confusion written all over his face.
There’s a splash of red spreading across his nose.
“Oh, fuck you!” Lance explodes — or, well, as much as he can while he’s still chained to a fucking pole. “Of course you have to be a fuckin’ — smug jackass! And of course you look good doing it! And of fucking course you’re a goddamn country boy!”
And the hole Lance has dug himself gets deeper.
Lance astounds himself, really. He should arrange to have his mouth glued shut.
“This is the worst! It’s one thing if you’re just some guy, but nooooo! Of course you have fucking — crooked incisors and a Southern drawl! Oh, you are the worst, you know that, Gyeong?”
“This is going in a rapidly different direction than I pictured,” Keith manages.
“Oh, picture me tied up and at your mercy a lot, do you?” Lance snaps back.
It’s a reflex, really. Lance says shit like that all the time, because he’s his own target audience. It never does anything but make people roll their eyes at him, and occasionally land him in detention. Hell, he barely even registered that he said it.
But, fascinatingly, the tiny smudge of red over Keith’s nose explodes into a raging blush, from the roots of his hair down his neck.
“There’s no possible way you know that,” Keith says hotly.
Lance’s jaw drops. “No way that I — I didn’t! I wasn’t — bitch, I was joking!”
Keith scowls, flush getting deeper. “Well, what about the shit you said before? You said I’m hot!”
“Yeah, because you fucking are! I’m not — I don’t daydream about you, at least! I don’t have a — a fucking thing for you, though?”
As he says it, Lance knows he’s lying. All of a sudden every single one of Hunk’s raised eyebrows whenever Lance ranted about Keith start to make a lot of sense.
“Bullshit!” Keith argues. “You always stare at me during training, and you pick random fights with me all the time, and yet you sit next to me all the time for no reason! You’re fuckin’ obsessed with me!”
“I —” Lance stops, jaw clicking shut. It is occurring to him, just now, that straight, non-crush-having people don’t generally obsess over one-sided rivalries for five years, and then do everything they can to make that rivalry a reality.
So. An oversight, perhaps.
“There’s a possibility,” Lance concedes, “that my subconscious, without my permission, has perhaps harboured some strange type of feelings for you.”
“Told you,” Keith says faintly. He looks just as lost as Lance does, though, so it significantly lowers the effect.
Lance is gagged. He is, for once in his life, at a complete loss for what to say. What does this even — who comes up with this kind of shit? Who does this? Lance is his own worst enemy, truly. Sorry, Zarkon, but take a seat.
“Lance, dude?” Hunk’s voice, faint and tinny from Lance’s discarded helmet, makes them both jump. “Do you still need rescuing?”
“Fuck, sorry,” Keith mutters, finally springing into action and deactivating the stupid cuffs. Lance scrambles back the second he’s free, rubbing his wrists and avoiding eye contact with Keith while also constantly sneaking glances aren’t him that aren’t at all sneaky because Keith catches him every time.
“So,” Keith says eventually.
Nope. Lance isn’t having this stupid conversation.
Lance throws a random rock at him.
“Hey!” Keith picks it back up and whips it at Lance immediately, only his aim isn’t as good as Lance’s, and also Lance is already diving to grab more rocks, so he misses. Lance starts pelting Keith with the armful of space rocks he’s gathered, each of them no bigger than an ice cube, all of them pinging harmlessly off Keith’s armour.
“Lance — will you — fucking cut that out!”
He lunges forward, shoving Lance to the ground and pinning Lance’s hands above his head. Lance bucks and squirms, trying several of the new maneuvers Shiro taught them to throw Keith off, but unfortunately Keith had also been present at the training in which they learned these manoeuvres and is therefore unaffected.
“I’ll let you up if you stop throwing shit at me.”
“Guess you’re stuck, then.”
Lance tries for several more minutes to escape, but Keith remains firmly where he is, pinning Lance down. Lance is eventually forced to stop unless a new problem wants to pop its way up and make things more embarrassing and horrible.
Lance huffs. “Let me up. I promise not to throw more rocks at you.”
Keith squints suspiciously at him. “Are you lying to me?”
“Well then — no, obviously?”
Lance does what he always does when he’s backed into a corner — he pulls out the brown doe eyes. He furrows his eyebrows, widening his eyes as big as he can and pouting.
Keith rolls off Lance, grumbling the whole time.
That — that worked? All he had to do was ask, barely, bat his eyelashes a little, and Keith just — listened to him?
“Oh my God, we are down bad for each other,” Lance breathes.
Keith looks ready to argue, but then stops himself, sighing.
“What are we going to — fuck, what are we going to do?”
Because Lance is not new to crushes. He’s had more of them than he can physically count. But never in his life has he wanted to judo flip someone as badly as he wanted to make out with them. That’s a new development.
“I dunno,” Keith says helplessly. He’s kind of — curled in on himself, face still red, as if he curls into a tight enough ball he can escape the situation. “You’re the plan guy! When you’re not being a dumbass, that is.”
Ignoring the jab, Lance takes a moment to ponder that. He is kind of the plan guy, isn’t he? It’s him who came up with all the Garrison escape plans he dragged Hunk into. It’s him who came up with the elevator shaft idea. Hell, he can quite possibly trace every one of his major life moments to a point where he said ‘hey, I wonder how I can make this work for me.’
Plan guy. Plan guy. He can be the plan guy. That’s all anything is, right? Making decisions and working out how to get there. He’s good at that.
But what decision does he want with Keith? What does he want with Keith, period?
“Step one,” Lance decides, “is that we should make out.”
Keith looks at him in surprise. “That’s step one?”
Lance nods firmly. “Yep. If we make out now, we can figure out all the weird tension shit. Maybe we don’t actually like each other. Maybe we’re just, like, bored.”
Keith looks doubtful, but he makes his way closer anyway.
“Well, we don’t have all day, Mullet.”
Truly, Lance’s heart is pounding. He has no fucking clue how he’s managing to sound even remotely normal. He feels like he might implode.
Hesitantly, Keith reaches for Lance’s face, resting a palm on his cheek. His hand is warm, even through the gloves of their suits. Hot, really; nearly burning. He rests it there for a moment, absentmindedly — or maybe intentionally — rubbing his thumb across Lance’s cheekbone as his eyes trace nervously over Lance’s lips. He leans in close slowly, like he’s got all the time in the world, eyes fluttering shut as his lips get closer and closer to Lance’s. He gets close enough that Lance can see the startling length of his eyelashes, the tiny mole at the corner of his mouth, the chapped skin of his lips.
Lance doesn’t even know how to categorize the sound that comes out of his mouth when their lips finally touch. It’s — breathy; stuttering. Like all the air escapes out of his lungs the second his skin touches Keith’s.
Keith tilts his head a little, sliding their noses together, his free hand coming to rest at Lance’s hip. Lance’s hands move without his permission, sliding up the chest plate of Keith’s armour and over his shoulders, resting finally in his hair, fingers tangling around the thick black strands. He pulls on them slightly, and Keith gets the hint, opening his mouth and pushing closer.
Lance’s heartbeat slows from its jackrabbit pace. He stops focusing on anything except the warmth of Keith’s skin on his, the rhythm of their mouths moving together, the occasional sighs Keith makes at the back of his throat. He forgets where he is, what he’s doing; hell, he forgets his own damn name. The only thing he cares about is pressing closer to Keith, keeping them melded together.
“Well. Obviously you didn’t need saving.”
Lance’s eyes fly open and he shoves Keith backwards with a yelp.
“Hunk! What — where the fuck did you come from?!”
“Yellow is not a quiet machine,” Hunk says drily. “Like, seriously. The fact that you are just now reacting to my presence speaks wonders. I know you’ve liked Keith for a while now, dude, but there’s no way he’s that good of a kisser.”
“Oh my God,” Keith says faintly, and Lance can’t help but agree.
Goddamn. First he’s kissing Keith, now he’s agreeing with him. What’s next? They gonna co-lead Voltron together, or something?
“Let’s just go,” Lance squeaks, scrambling to his feet and desperately avoiding eye contact. He follows a very amused-looking Hunk back to his lion, enduring his painful amount of teasing with a bright red face and a truly herculean amount of self-control, if he’s being honest. The teasing from the rest of the team is almost worse, their ‘Loverboy Lance’ jokes briefly making him panic that everyone knows about the fact that he and fucking Keith Gyeong just made out, somehow, before he remembers that oh yeah, dumbass, you were just tied to a pole for flirting with the a scam artist.
Yeesh. How time fuckin’ flies.
The only consolation to the staggering amount of humiliation is that Keith keeps glancing at Lance, going red, and looking away. So obviously Lance isn’t the only one so affected, which is a relief.
Once everyone has finally gotten their fill of making fun of Lance, Shiro dismisses them, and Lance makes a beeline to his room. He rushes through his skincare routine as quickly as he can, refusing to let himself think about a single thing the entire time.
It doesn’t work. Every single time he catches sight of his own reflection, he’s reminded that his face just spent inordinate amounts of time pressed against Keith’s not even an hour ago. Keith is all he can think about.
Plan. Plan. What’s the plan? Is there a plan?
It is not a surprise when he hears a knock at his door.
“So,” Keith says when Lance opens it, rocking back in his heels. “What’s — uh, what’s step two?”
Lance smiles, allowing himself to feel the giddiness that’s bubbling up his throat, the parts of him that are yelling ‘Keith! Keith Gyeong! He sought me out! He wants to go further! With me!’
“Let’s figure that out together,” Lance says, pulling Keith into the room and shutting the door. “I’m thinking this is going to be more of a two-man operation.”
