#singer lance

Guitarist / Singer Lance and Photographer Keith AU 🎸🎤🎶📸

Ok, what if Shiro pays Keith to take some photos for the new band he’s managing. Keith goes to the bar where the band is going to do a small concert. He goes backstage and finds the guitarist/singer, Lance, and he just thinks Lance is kinda hot 👀

--- --- ---

Lance can barely see through his tears. His chest keeps heaving with great wheezing sobs, desperately trying to force air in his lungs that refuse to cooperate. He gives up on standing when he stumbles for the fourth time, hitting the wall with a crash and slowly sliding down to the floor. He can’t think over the sound of his own pain, the roaring ache in his heart having finally escaped the corner Lance has been shoving it in and spreading down his limbs, pouring down his face. He doesn’t even know if all the wet on his face is from tears, or if his skin has ripped away and he’s bleeding to death. He hurts bad enough that he feels he might be.

The team. The team. They can’t see. You gotta make it out of the hallway. Behind a closed door. You can do it, okay? Closed door. 

The potential humiliation of the team watching him fall to pieces on the castle floor triggers the last of his energy, and he forces himself forward, crawling towards the first door he sees. He can barely make himself stand, clawing his way up the doorframe and standing on shaking legs to slap his hand on the lockpad. His body feels like it’s shutting down, like any strength left in him had left the second he walked on that stage. He staggers over to the bed, collapsing into it as the doors slide shut behind him. 

When the scent of the bedsheets finally hits him, a pain rips up his spine that’s so sharp it feels like it’s tearing his cells to shreds: pine and sandalwood. 

In his blind retreat, he has stumbled his way to Keith’s room. 

He clutches the pillow to his chest, squeezing so tightly his fingers shake. He tries desperately to breathe properly, in and out, but it feels as if he’s forgotten how to exhale. The breaths keep coming in, short and static, faster and faster, but his lungs refuse to let go, refuse to exhale the relief. With every blink, his eyes burn so badly he feels as if he’s doused them in acid, so he squeezes them shut, but that only makes the burning last longer. He can’t bring himself to open them. 

In the back of his mind, he registers the whoosh of a door sliding open, then hurried footsteps of a heeled boot. Then hands on his shoulders, as gentle as they are frantic. It’s hard to focus on them, hard to notice the presence of a new person in the room, when he is so sure that he is going to explode, or collapse, or die. He feels like his body is tearing itself apart. 

“Lance, you need to calm down. I know you are hurting, dear, but you are going to make yourself sick or worse. You’re okay. Deep breath, asteraki. You can do it. In and out.”

“I can’t,” Lance sobs, and the realisation that he’s telling the truth only makes his panic worse. He’s going to die. He is. His lungs are going to collapse, his heart is going to give out. He can feel it. “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t I can’t I can’t –”

“You can,” Coran says firmly, “and you must. You are hyperventilating. Take a moment to feel the room around you, hm? The pillow in your hands, the blankets under your knees.”

But the reminder of the room he’s in only serves to make him cry harder. All he can think about is every time he and Keith fell asleep in his room after staying up for hours planning their next missions, walking up after nightmares, talking each other through them. He feels Coran’s gloved hands on his shoulders and imagines them hot enough to feel the sear of them through his clothes – because Keith always ran hot, always rolled his eyes and clutched Lance’s freezing fingers between his hands to warm them up with a fond tease, always threatened to throw his nasty sweaty shirt at Lance’s head after training, always burned as hot and passionate as the heart inside him – and the pain of knowing he won’t ever feel those hands again rips through him. 

“He’s gone. He’s gone and I’m never going to see him again and he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead –”

The last thing he hears, besides his own voice getting more and more hysterical as he chants the words he knows must be true, is Coran’s gentle “I’m sorry, dear,” before there’s a prick in his neck and everything goes black. 

—

It takes him a few tries to open his eyes when he comes to, because it hurts. But eventually the pain is no longer a shock, and he manages. 

“‘D’you sedate me?” he mumbles, and yikes, it sounds like his voice has been dragged over hot coals for eight hours. 

“Yes,” Coran says, never ceasing his gentle motions through Lance’s hair. “You were hysteric and struggling to breathe. You were out for about two hours.”

Lance sniffles. “Oh.” He leans farther into Coran’s hold, noting that his face doesn’t feel as sticky with tears and snot and his shoes have been taken off. Coran must have done it. “Thank you.”

“Of course, my dear.”

The tears bubble up again, surprising Lance a little. He wasn’t sure he had any left in him, but obviously he does. They scorch his already dry eyes, burning a hot trail down the raw skin of his cheeks. He still feels the ache in his chest, but it’s no longer all-consuming, no longer a panic that clouds his thinking. 

“That was harder than I thought,” Lance whispers, barely audible. “I wasn’t – when I wrote the song, it was painful, but it was relieving. It hurt and it took me a lot of tries because my voice kept shaking. But the stage – God, it was so much worse. It felt like I was flaying myself alive for a live audience.”

Coran’s grip tightens. “You were.”

Lance can hear the tightness in his voice, and when he looks up to see his face it confirms it: Coran is not happy about Lance’s performance. 

“You think it was a mistake?”

“It does not matter what I think,” Coran says gently, the anger fading from his features when he notices Lance’s eyes on him. He carefully turns Lance’s head back, facing forward, so he can settle again. “You saved us. I am endlessly proud of you, and the strength you hold in your spirit. I only wish that it did not cost you so much. I wish that people did not have such evilness in your hearts, and that you – the whole team – did not have to sacrifice so much on top of the sacrifice you are already making to prove your worth to the people you are trying to help.”

“We had to. For the good of the universe.”

The words are bitter in Lance’s mouth. The good of the universe. 

It was for the good of the universe that Keith left for the Blades. And it was for the good of the universe that he went on that mission, all those weeks ago, and his calls suddenly stopped. For the good of the universe, Keith is missing in action. For the good of the universe, he is very likely dead, lost to the emptiness of space. 

How much more will Lance be expected to sacrifice for the good of the universe? 

Coran pauses for a moment, his hand stilling on Lance’s head. It takes him several minutes to move again, and Lance can hear his heart start to beat faster from his place over his chest. 

“I have never felt love the way you do for Keith,” he says quietly. “I am not young. I have seen many decapheobes, met many fascinating and lovely people, but that kind of love has always eluded me. I do not mourn it. I am happy the way I am. This means that I have never felt the grief or pain you are feeling, not exactly.” He sighs, deep and long and heavy. “But long before the fall of Altea…I had a son.”

Lance’s eyes widen. It makes sense, given Coran’s paternal nature, but it’s still a shock. 

“Really?”

“Yes. He was my everything. I spoiled him rotten, that child.” His lips quirk up at the memory. “I took him with me everywhere. I was lucky Alfor was so fond of us both, and allowed it. He was the sun in my sky, the hope in my heart.” The light fades from his eyes, and he closes them, leaning back with a sigh. Lance follows. 

“What happened?”

“It was no one’s fault, the accident.” Coran swallows roughly. Lance keeps silent, offering only his own hand, which Coran takes gratefully. “But you know as well as I do that the pods do not fix everything.”

The scar on Lance’s back stings slightly, as it always does when Lance is reminded it’s there. He does know.

“They certainly do not fix dead on impact.”

Lance winces. That...God. The pain of that loss. 

“I’m sorry, Coran.”

“As am I.”

The silk of Coran’s glove is cool in Lance’s hands, and catches on the callouses on his fingertips and palms every time he fidgets. He wonders if this is the same pair of gloves that once held the hand of a small child as Coran walked this very castle. He wonders how Coran handles the pain of walking the same halls he once walked with his son. Does his ghost not haunt him? Do entire rooms not serve as aching reminders of his laughter?

“It was a choice,” Coran says quietly, “to keep going. To rise from my bed each morning. To eat and drink and smile and breathe. To live. It would have been so much easier to fade away.”

Lance squeezes his eyes shut, tears dripping salty onto his lips. “How did you make it?”

“I could not. I could not make the choice to live. I did not want to. All I wished to do was fade to pieces.”

Fade to pieces. Lance understands the sentiment. Sometimes, when he’s sure Shiro is asleep, he sneaks into Black’s hangar, and she lets him climb into her cockpit and onto the pilot’s chair. It doesn’t smell like Keith, not anymore. But there’s a trace of him, there; lingering. For the first few weeks that Keith was gone, Lance would cry silently, curled up in the chair and aching for the distance between them. Aching from the changes. Those first few weeks were hard, and he struggled to adjust for a gaping hole where Keith used to be a constant, placated only by the tinny sound of his voice over the speakers of their comms. Those first few weeks, he would let the tears he swallowed in the day drip onto the leather of Black chair, and feel the distant tendrils of Black’s affection in his mind. 

For the last few weeks, as Lance’s sobs have filled her cockpit to the point of suffocation, she has only cried with him. That is how Lance knows he is mourning. That is why Lance’s heart has shattered beyond repair. Keith has gone somewhere even Black can’t reach – and the gravity of that grief drags Lance to the deepest pits of despair. 

How is he supposed to choose to live when he feels like his life has been wrenched from him?

“I could not make the choice to live,” Coran repeats gently. “But I could choose to take my next breath. I could choose to take my next step.” He squeezes Lance’s shoulders. “I could not look too far ahead. The future was bleak, to me. But I could breathe, and every breath got easier. I could walk, and every step was lighter. And above all, child, I had to make the choice to do the next right thing. That was all.”

“I don’t want to do the next right thing,” Lance says, and he chokes around the words. “I don’t know what the next right thing is. I did the right thing when I let Keith go. And it was the worst choice I ever made. What if the next right choice I make takes away the rest of the people I love? How much do I have to sacrifice until the universe is satisfied with me?” 

Coran looks pained. He tries to smile anyway, and Lance appreciates the effort. 

“I know you have already done so much, my dear. I know. And the universe is so lucky to have someone like you protecting it, someone who is good and kind and sacrificial. I know it is hard to make the right choices when you are angry, and righteously so.”

Lance is angry. He tries to ignore it, tries to choke it down, but sometimes it bubbles out of him, hot and mean and acidic. Sometimes he wants to tell every dignitary where they can stuff it, show every pompous monarch the list of things he has lost trying to keep them safe. He left his family – his mother and sisters and brothers and nieces and nephew and aunts and uncles and friends and cousins – and his home behind. He doesn’t know when he’ll see them again. He left so much of his soul behind, and continues to chip away at it, every time he takes a life. And now he’s lost his Keith. What’s next? Who will be the next person that Lance is not allowed to keep? Why are so many people insistent on making everything harder for him, making him face his pain with a smile? When will he be allowed to suffer, plain and simple, without the crushing weight of responsibility on his back?

“Then what do I do?” His words are desperate, his eyes pleading as they bore into Coran’s. “How do I choose the next right thing when I don’t even know what the right thing is?”

“You know what the wrong thing is,” Coran says simply. “Given the choice, you know what you do to make things worse, yes?”

“...Yes.”

“Then you must keep that in mind. You are shroud in darkness, child. Of course you are. Pain is as dark as grief is heavy.”

“And the best way to fight the dark is to find the light,” Lance whispers. 

Coran hums. “Yes. If you choose to do the next right thing, no matter how small that thing is, it will get easier to move forward. The pain will never leave, but you will grow around it. It will become comforting, even. A reminder of what you have lost, so that you do not forget that you loved.”

Lance shudders around his next breath. The next right thing. What’s the next right thing

Well, maybe washing his face, for starters. Drinking some water. 

“Okay,” he says hoarsely. Coran smiles at him, squeezing him tightly, for the enth time. Lance smiles back, as weak as it is. 

Can I recommend my fic “I Can Hear the Bells”?

Klance can always use more theater kid aus!

100%!! theatre kid fics are where its at - karri

I Can Hear the Bells by KatelFireDemon (1/1 | 606 | General)

Rating: T

Summary/Preview:

Keith has just opened up his tattoo parlor, but in an age where robots will take any image you want and print and tattoo that image perfectly, he's not getting much business. He's lucky that he was able to open the parlor in the first place, thanks to his brother's support. He's lucky that anyone was supporting him, considering Keith isn't the type to ask for help. He doesn't show his feelings often. He doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve.

But when a man named Lance McClain walks into his parlor looking for a tattoo, everything changes.

So I was supposed to upload a fic yesterday for the end of week 2 but because my first fic couldn’t be reblogged (I didn’t realize that Shallura, even when they broke up before the story started, was considered controversial, but those are the rules so that was my fault) I decided to not force myself to write a story that wasn’t working. It just required a lot of back story that maybe if it had been in the first one, wouldn’t of been so hard to write. Anyway, this story is inspired by my klance BB from like 2018, which still isn’t technically finished so there are a few spoilers, but the main things: Lance had cancer and had a year left to live. The reason he could see his Shinigami Hunk and Pidge is reveled in this but how they find out will be told in the final chapter that will hopefully be released before the end of the year. Hunk gave Lance a bit of blood to help turn him into a healthy, slightly older Altean, posing under the name Isamu, Prince of Altea. Keith is also a singer, who went under the name Red (orginal) but later switches labels, also to be revealed in the story. Hunk and Pidge are given a chance to become humans again after Lance is saved by a surgery that removes the chance and doesn’t damage his vocal cords. Again, all to be revealed in the last chapter. It’s called Forgotten Prince’s Song by sasuhina_gal on AO3 if you want to check it out. Anyway, this is from after all that, enjoy! Also, if anyone cares, Keith’s song is TAEMIN’s ECLIPSE from his last Japanese CD release. I’ve got a TAEMIN  problem. Meteor Shower/Promise

Keith watched his reflection as he went through his choreography. He was so focused on watching his moves, he didn’t see the door to the dance studio open, but he did hear the person calling his name.

“Keith! Keith, Keith, Keith!”

he turned in time to catch a hyperactive 21 year old jumping on him. Bright blue eyes and dyed white hair, similar to the kind he’d fallen for, but it wasn’t the looks that made Keith fall for Lance. It was that bright smile and his sunny personality. Even when Lance had to hide behind the mask of popular singer, Lance was still himself and that’s what Keith had fallen for.

    Shiro was having a hard time. Meeting after meeting with the Tharians quickly became irritating, and Shiro is sure he’s one word away from going insane. He can tell from Allura’s sharp glances in his direction that she’s one more sharp response coming from his mouth away from cutting his head off. He can’t bring himself to care. 

    He’s relived when the last meeting of the day is over and they can head back to the castle. His head is starting to pound and he really wants to sit somewhere quiet so he can slowly die in peace. They usually go over everything on the way back to the castle, but neither of them want to hear anything ever again after listening to the high-pitched voices of the Tharians for 6 hour, so they settle with walking quietly back to their space-home.