Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

At first, it’s a french restaurant.

Slate grey and stationery white, sunlight drooping over the tablecloths like curling petals on calla lilies. Keith presses the knot of his tie into the hollow of his throat and swallows against his fingers. The get-up is ridiculous—grey suit, red tie, cufflinks, Italian leather shoes.

He’s never worn anything so expensive or well-tailored in his life, and he can already picture the precise geometry of Lance’s expression when he sees him: badly suppressed smile, like a slipped disc, his cheeks puckered.

Keith seats himself next to the window, fiddling almost immediately with the circlet of his napkin ring. The trees outside rustle and drizzle shade over buskers and vendors across the street. His designer watch has both hands folded over the twelve. A waiter breezes past and lays a rectangle of cardstock in front of him, smiling conspiratorially. As soon as he’s out of view, Keith has forgotten his face.

He looks at the menu, and the transition from the burbling restaurant to the cramped typeface is disorienting, like a cut scene in a video game. When he puts the menu down again, his head is swimming sickly with words like bordelaise and remoulade. And then, like a sweet apparition from a terrible dream, Lance drifts through the doorway.

For a moment, the sight of him is impossibly painful.

Keith’s fingers go again to the knot of his tie, and he makes an involuntary noise, gulping air as if surfacing from extreme physical exertion.

“Lance,” he chokes.

Lance smiles, quicksilver. “Hello.”

“You’re here,” Keith says, staggering to his feet. He crosses the bistro to take Lance bracingly by the wrists. The napkin holder is still in his hand, and the circle of it presses into Lance’s forearm so tightly that his skin bulges through it a little. “Do you—do you know where you’ve been?”

Lance should be defensive, or sly, or angry, or bashful. He should be telling a story that Keith can barely follow at a pitch that he can barely stomach, bragging about all the stupid things and downplaying all the impressive things.

Keith knows that’s not how this works, but still. It’s the Lance he knows.

He focuses on the brittle warmth of his body, the details that are just right. His heart breathes into the paper bag of his chest.

Lance just keeps smiling wanly. His hair is styled wrong—there’s too much volume, and it swoops down too close to one eye. His tie is robin’s egg blue. “No need to get up for little old me.”

Keith shakes his head, off-balance. “What?”

“I’m here to spend time with you! Why don’t we take a seat?”

Keith swallows painfully. It’s like looking at an animatronic figure of his friend—a jolting uncanny robot at an amusement park. “Lance, look at me.”

“How could I not?” he says cheekily, and winks. But his eyes haven’t quite settled into the same groove as Keith’s.

“Tell me—“ Keith starts. “Tell me what you remember. Tell me who you are.”

“Oh, you know me,” he says. “Name’s Lance ‘Loverboy’ McClain, blue paladin, sharpshooter extraordinaire, and defender of the universe.”

“Please.” It’s meant to be derisive, but it ends up falling somewhere closer to desperate. His hands slide up from Lance’s forearms to his shoulders. The napkin ring clatters pointedly to the floor. In a wide, embarrassing moment of weakness, Keith says, “you have to be him. At least try.”

Lance chuckles.

Keith shakes him, and his shoulders jitter unnaturally.

“Come on. What’s the point if you can’t even act like him? Who would fucking buy this?”

“I don’t—“

“Stop using his voice,” he warns. His hands have crept up to Lance’s neck, and abruptly he lets go, repulsed at the almost-familiar feel of him.

“I would also be pretty overwhelmed to meet an intergalactic celebrity,” Lance assures him.

He’s starting to breathe too fast. He keeps seeing the real Lance—craned into the three-dimensional spread of a star map, brow furrowed, freckled hand curled loosely in the handle of whatever hot drink he found planet-side—superimposed over this stranger’s weird, unblemished face.

“Who am I?” Keith demands.

Lance grins. “My date.”

Keith pushes him hard in the chest. He nearly topples into a neighbouring table, and it’s unlikely, how he keeps his gangly legs underneath his body.

“Easy, sweetheart,” Lance says. “This isn’t the place for roughhousing.”

It’s the wrong cadence, but it’s so like something Lance would say that it’s debilitating. Keith stumbles through the momentum of another graceless shove.

“I told you to stop using his voice,” Keith snaps. “This is cruel.”

“Didn’t you want to meet me here?” Lance asks innocently.

“Of course I did. But you’re not—not—” Suddenly, he’s so fatigued with disappointment that he can’t speak.

After a long moment, he feels an ephemeral hand on his shoulder. And with the help of the ghostly waitstaff, the false Lance maneuvers him back to his place at the table. “Just tell me where to look and I’ll go there,” Keith begs, half-stumbling, half-dragged into his seat. “I swear. I know I can find you, I’ve faced bad odds before.”

“How about a drink?” Lance is saying, apparently unfazed.

“I thought that if you thought like Lance, maybe I could talk an answer out of you,” Keith says. Lance cocks his head, pleasantly receptive. “But really I thought I would look at you and I would feel better. Or at least I would feel angry. But you’re worse than a punching bag.”

“Red?” Lance says, and Keith’s heart is—airborne.

“What?” he asks sharply.

“Wine,” Lance explains. “Red or white?”

His whole body caves in. Rockslide. Catastrophic. He looks into Lance’s wide, earnest eyes, feeling uncomfortably like he’s levelling a shotgun at a newborn. “Neither. End simulation.”

The bistro melts instantly into the oily blackness of the Paladin Simulator.

His jaw is clamped tightly with shame and grief, and as the dark presses in, he folds his arms self-consciously over his chest. He’s ending his session an hour early, and he’s grateful, now, for the uninterrupted quiet.

He shouldn’t have let himself do this.

It should have been obvious what a bad idea it was when he didn’t tell any of the other paladins what he was planning; he was already falling back into his old, knee-jerk isolation, trusting only himself with his secrets.

He just couldn’t take any more of their pity. It was constant, wide-eyed, confused—why would the person who got along with Lance the least feel his absence the most? Sometimes, Hunk looked at Keith exactly the same way he looked at an old clunker of an engine that was in need of replacing.

Keith had heard tell of the simulators years ago, they all had. Liberated planets with the tech (and the admiration) had started building little cyber shrines to Voltron. Like a hyper-advanced arcade game, you could plug in your specifications, step into the simulator, and play out your wildest fantasies.

He’d gathered that tittering fans, unexceptional nerdy types, and bright-eyed kids were the most common customers; the lettering on the swinging board out front promised all kinds of adventure and celebrity:

Join Voltron! Become one of the gang, fighting Galra scum and saving the galaxy from tyranny!

Enjoy a candlelit dinner with the paladin of your choice, and get up close and personal with your hero!

Pick up your very own bayard, and spar with living combat legends! Who will win?!

Although it’s more advanced than the training room controls on the castle of lions, the programming still has its limits. The likenesses aren’t really supposed to stand up to the scrutiny of someone like, say, a paladin himself, but the experience is still sensory, impossible, the science fiction daydream of someone on Earth.

Lance used to love the idea of it, joking that it was the Star Trek filler episode he always wanted. He said he would win every game, romance himself, and beat up holo-Keith without feeling bad about it. He said he could finally stop pulling punches when Keith was just, like, light particles and shit.

In his grief, Keith convinced himself it was right and just and necessary to believe in a false lead. He told himself that the coat rack in the dark looked enough like a person that maybe he could hang all his hopes on it.

And so he had sought out the small, ever-bright planet of Seachmall, where night lasted for twilit months, and massive outdoor markets boasted every good and service you could possibly think of. Continent to continent there were melting, zipping lights, sky-high neon encircling tall buildings like bangles, and criss-crossing lanterns—buoyant in the low gravity—coasting up towards their celestial cousins.

In the capital, the local population joyfully shared liquor and arm-clasping greetings, speaking in the fast creole dialect of a port city, dancing to reality-bending music that haunts every forking path in a dizzying labyrinth of market stalls. Every single day on Seachmall was a feverish, luminous midnight that raged unceasingly past its breaking point.

And every step in the springy too-dark soil, every halting conversation in common, every sizzling technological spectacle that borders on nightmarish, Keith thought that Lance would have eaten this experience alive.

But Lance is gone.

Lost in the plunging gaps between astral bodies, sewn into an invisible seam in spacetime. Missing, for two long years.

It’s impossible, to think of the time he's already lost with him. Time passes strangely in a war, and stranger still in space. Stars gasp their dying breaths and ripe dust clouds give birth to whole planetary systems. Some light reaches them with its centuries-old fingers and some can’t weather the journey. So many beings shiver and die. Lance would be twenty now. He tries not to think about it.

Often, he resents those years he spent on a space whale, cresting out of his teenage years faster than he could track, trying to staunch the flow of memories with the paladins before he lost them all. He gets double vision looking at his mother, thinking of what he knows about love and struggling to apply it to this stranger.

When Lance disappeared just months after Keith returned to the castle of lions, he understood, finally, that loss is the bitter shrapnel of love.

In an alternate universe, Keith would have threaded Lance’s difficult needle, held his jaw, sharp and slight as a paring knife, and told him every wriggling, guilty, breathless feeling he’s inspired in him since they were sixteen.

In that universe, he stepped out of the time warp and into Lance’s embrace, and they were never parted again.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Pidge started to refer to Lance in the past tense. Allura took over piloting Blue full-time, and Keith Red. The castle, already barren with the loss of Altea, became even more eerily quiet. Keith’s guilt swelled up and took any of their remaining teamwork hostage.

Space is so massively large and radiantly indifferent, but Lance is out there, surely, or Keith would have felt Voltron’s current being disrupted, as it had been when Shiro blinked out of the Black lion. But time stretched on, and he felt nothing at all.

When Lance disappeared it was from the middle of a battle for a nothing quadrant of space, and he was practically teleported out of the fray. They recovered his lion on a smalltime Galra ship within the hour, no sign of a struggle, no sign of Lance.

It was eery. Impossible. They interrogated sentries and hacked systems, combed entire light years of space using Allura’s wormholes. They waited for a distress signal, an apology, a triumphant return. But he just—vanished.

Keith ripped through the galaxy for any scrap of him, a blue flash, those bright ringlets of laughter, the flush of his skin tone in a kaleidoscope of different species.

Allura and Shiro joined him on the ground at first; Pidge, Coran, and Matt worked tirelessly to devise a tracking system, while Hunk took Red apart, hoping to unlock the moment that she and Lance had detached—but it was like her memory had been wiped clean. All they could feel was the panicked thrum of her loose bond with Lance, Keith more than anyone.

Romelle and Krolia hadn’t known Lance for long, but they always came when called. More bodies in the search party, more hands in the alliance. Once, he caught Romelle’s lip wobbling during a debrief, and he remembered the way that Lance had dragged an extra chair in for her first team meeting, winking, and then laughing himself to stitches when Romelle tried to wink back and couldn’t.

In pieces, Keith understood that he loved Lance, and as always, he was processing an obvious truth too late. His grief was swollen purple, and even as he told himself that no one would ever, ever understand, he knew they did. All around him they did, loudly and at length, hurting at such a frequency that Keith was scared it would drown out Lance’s return.

He left the castle of lions more frequently, turning over whole populations, infiltrating Galra ship after Galra ship, singularly driven—but also callous and unbalanced without his team, participating in more violence in six months than he had in five years of war and survival.

Once, Keith stumbled into Lance’s abandoned room and pulled clothes and trinkets out of his closet, stirring up the smell of him and crying like a child. He picked fights with his mother, because she had been a terrible absence once, too. In the artificial light of castle dawn, he sparred more than his body could sustain, and when he found a planet full of unmarked tombstones in his search, he ripped at the ground with his bare hands until his fingernails tore.

The longer he looked, the more he found that the whole universe was exquisite with death, every piece of it burnt out and drifting into expanding blackness. He was so tired of feeling like space rock himself, fast, deadly, and aimless, waiting to burn up in the atmosphere somewhere. So, heart striving ahead of his body like an eager dog, pockets full of tokens, he wandered Seachmall until he found the flashy booth where he would waste the next eight months of his life.

He leaves the simulated french restaurant that first time fully believing that he’ll never be so weak again, but it’s barely twenty vargas before he’s back, trembling all over.

He finds Lance in a simulation of battle, and in the rush, it’s much easier to forget that he’s a fake.

“Not this time, amigo,” Lance crows, looping around an enemy ship and blasting ice the whole time, showing off. Keith is shocked to find a smile bruising his own face. His hands close over fake-Red’s controls. It’s so strange, not feeling her at all while he’s piloting. It’s as impersonal as a Garrison sim, but eons more advanced, nearly authentic. He can feel the heat of battle through Red’s visor, and as always, his calloused thumbs creak against the wheel when he turns too sharply.

“On your right,” Keith warns.

Lance dodges dutifully. “Thanks!”

I know, Lance groans, in his memory. I’m out here flying too, Keith, this isn’t one of those drills where I’m fucking blindfolded—

“Red Paladin,” Allura’s voice cries, weirdly high and operatic. “The evil lord Zarkon is moving in for the kill. You must help us form Voltron!”

“Yeah, right,” he huffs.

The forming itself is so stupid, obviously programmed by an outside observer who’s never felt the itch of unity, the reverse detonation of an impossible bomb, where every scattered thing fits back together to be whole again.

There’s a silly bit of choreography, and fake-Red goes on rails, like a carnival ride. And then, without feeling anything concrete, Voltron pulls in around him.

“Hooray!” Pidge says, sounding like a munchkin from The Wizard of Oz.

“Nothing can stop us now!” Shiro says, sounding like Shiro.

“Can we get back to putting Zarkon in a second grave now, please?” Keith says.

“Always the fighter, Red,” Lance says. Keith blinks.

“I love you,” he blurts.

“Aw,” Hunk says. “I love you guys too.”

“Lance—“

“Use your sword? Exactly what I was thinking,” Lance says.

“Let’s do it,” Shiro says. “Use your bayard, Red.”

“I know,” Keith snaps.

It’s obvious that the simulation has programmed Red in as shorthand for whatever player is in his spot. It would be the same no matter what lion was chosen, but hearing Lance’s nickname for him out of Shiro’s mouth is just—stunningly wrong.

The world trembles from the impact of a Galra bogey, uncomfortably real, and his instincts press him into action.

He turns his bayard in its slot, and the sword shimmers into reality. He watches at a remove as Voltron slices at Zarkon’s craft.

It’s actually starting to get to him, the memory of this battle, the reality of which was a lot more challenging, and much, much uglier. He remembers his frenetic pulse in his fingertips, the threat pressing endlessly past their defences, the damage to Green’s hull, and the awful discovery of Black’s empty cockpit afterwards.

He shudders.

“End simulation.”

In the dark, the adrenaline eases its panicked hands from his throat. You’re alive, he reminds himself. You survived. So did Shiro. So will Lance.

The next day, he goes back again.

He spars with himself, out of curiosity, and then with Shiro and Lance, but the holo-paladins are uninspired, easily blocked, programmed to strut and preen through choreography more than they are to improvise and adapt. Lance doesn’t play dirty even once, and Keith shuts down the simulation again, gutted. He wishes there were different difficulty levels, like the bots in the castle. You could program almost anything into—

He stops, midway back to his cruiser, the braid of market-goers loosening around him.

He taps twice on his communicator, and hastily opens a channel with Pidge.

After the long, peculiar swish of the line connecting, she answers, “‘sup?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Urgently?” she asks, distracted. He can hear the clatter of keys and the beep and whir of her latest project.

“It’s about Lance.”

The clatter stops. She doesn’t speak for long enough that Keith feels truly bad about himself. And then, “well Jesus, Keith. Isn’t it always?”

He breathes out. “How comfortable are you with the holodeck interface?”

“Very,” she says, no hesitation.

“And do you still have those files from a couple of deca-phoebes ago? That user profile thing you tried to instate, the uh—“ he dodges a Seachmallian waving a kebab in his direction.

“Yes, Keith,” Pidge drawls. “What, do you think I burn data when my projects don’t pan out?”

He shrugs, though she can’t see him. “I would.”

“Forgot who I was talking to,” she says flatly. He’s paused at the ice-cold entrance of a shop selling edible soap bubbles, light and iridescent.

“Do you think you could put together a—a simulation, compatible with a more advanced operating system?”

There’s a throb of silence. “What exactly are you asking me to do, here?”

He closes his eyes, still ducked under the awning of the store, feeling the cold move through him. “Don’t make me say it.”

“You want Lance,” she says. “On a fucking USB.”

“I want to find him,” he growls. “Remember when you wanted that too?”

“That’s low,” she says, deadly. “I’m not the one who’s trying to sleep with a hologram of my dead friend so I don’t have to grieve him.”

He cuts off communication. He feels feverish with embarrassment, and completely sick to his stomach. Candy bubbles breeze past him, over the apron of the booth across the way, which is advertising robot fights—both in Seachmallian and blocky common.

He remembers Lance, a lifetime ago, saying, when I go, I want all the stuff in my brain stored in a giant ship.

His comms ding, and he jabs the accept button on his wrist.

“Fuck you,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Pidge says. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he says fiercely.

“I know.”

“I just need to know if it was premeditated, if he ever had a safe house or a code in case we got separated, something we could look for.”

“It’s not the worst idea,” Pidge says thoughtfully.

“I know.”

“But I do think it’s a pretty terrible idea for you to do it.”

He grits his teeth, upset in a directionless kind of way. “I can handle it.”

“I know you’re on Seachmall,” Pidge says, “and I already thought that was going to get pretty gnarly. All they’ve got is, like, the mythology of us. Can you imagine what the information in the Altean databases could do to that kind of tactile VR experience?”

“Sort of,” Keith says.

“It would be like if all the OG broadway actors showed up to participate in a high school production of Cats, comprende?”

“No,” Keith says, waspish. “Less.”

“It’s the next step for Altean hologram technology for sure. It would probably revolutionize AI. It’s also not real, Keith.”

“I don’t need it to be real,” Keith snaps. “I need a lead.”

“Well,” Pidge says slowly. “You know I can do it. Can you wait a few quintants?”

He sets his jaw, and against the deep blue horizon, a billboard gleams so brilliantly yellow that for a moment, he thinks it’s the sun.

“As long as it takes.”

Keith meets Pidge when she touches down on Seachmall, windswept and gaunt, and although he doesn’t really understand what she intends to do, he dutifully distracts security as she futzes with the control panel.

It’s barely fifteen minutes before she beckons him into the alley adjacent to the simulator room, a sample platter of bolts and wires spread out around her knees.

“Alright chief, it should be compatible, now.” She pulls a stray length of cable from where she’s been holding it between her teeth and pockets it. The little nib of her ponytail bobs as she stands.

“So it’ll be him this time?”

“I mean, almost exactly. I programmed his profile into the grooves set into the existing simulation, but I softened the edges a little so he’s not too self aware. I don’t want him realizing he’s a projection, I’m not that cruel.”

“Right,” Keith says, uncomfortable.

“If you don’t find what you’re looking for and you have to go back in, all you’ve gotta do is punch in this code.” She jabs him in the chest with a folded piece of card, as close to paper as they’ve been able to find out here, and twice as durable. She could have sent him the info, but they both know this transaction is better left under the table. “The system should wipe itself automatically when you’re done. And Keith—“ Her hand flattens on his dark chestplate, and her eyes are troubled. “Please don’t forget why you’re doing this.”

He nods, and puts a gloved hand over hers. “I won’t. I’ll figure this out, and I’ll find him.”

She nods back, a wobbly smile rolling over on her face.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, I gotta go. I can’t—I wish I could see him, but.”

“Yeah,” Keith agrees sadly.

She smiles again, fleeting, and gathers her kit. “We can’t spare another paladin,” she says, quickly, like it doesn’t matter. “Don’t get lost in there.”

He opens his mouth to reply, but she’s already putting her visor down, and walking out into the crowd.

This time, he finds himself on a boardwalk during a powder pink sunset. The air smells blisteringly of salt and roasting meat, and faceless people mill over the beach: parents holding hands with kids, couples sharing shaved ice, a galloping golden retriever in a red bandana.

The leftover scorch of the day blows in off the coast to meet him, like the wave from an open oven door.

He walks purposefully onto the sandbar, craning in circles, trying to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. He feels—pre-heartbroken, caught in the final moments of a long walk to an open casket.

“Where’ve you been?”

He whips around, and Lance is pulling one earbud out, squinting into the sun at him.

“Lance?” he asks, through what feels like a mouth full of marbles.

“Uh-huh,” he says, eyebrow quirked. “The one and only.” He settles back into the shade of his umbrella.

Keith shakes his head to clear it. There’s a red and white striped towel set out next to Lance’s, and he sinks down onto it, overcome. Is this Earth? Did Pidge program this specifically? Is it one of the date settings on the simulator? He can’t remember. He can’t see past the illusion at all.

Lance offers him an earbud. “Come on, Red, will you relax? Pretend you’re not the kind of person who sleeps with a knife under your pillow.” He accepts the bud, numb, and tucks it in his ear. He’s expecting synth pop, but it’s an old R&B song, smoky and familiar. “No overthinking on the beach.”

He can’t stop looking at him. It’s uncanny—the dusky chapped lips, the mole next to his mouth, the cowlick over his ear. His eyes are intelligent, laser-focused on Keith. “Where are we?”

“Dear sweet Keith. Senile at age twenty. So sad.”

“Shut up.” He has to look away, to mask the full-colour magazine spread of conflicted feelings on his face. It all feels a bit like a lucid dream that he shouldn’t jostle too hard. “I’m not used to this.”

Lance’s expression softens. “Hey man, I get it. Being home is weird. Sometimes it’s like—I can’t even remember how we got here.” He shakes his head. “But also I’m so happy to be back, I’m like—screw PTSD.”

His chest aches, badly. “I don’t think it works like that.”

“Rich coming from you, Mr. repression,” Lance says, rolling his eyes.

“I’m not doing that any more,” Keith says. “I’m working through my shit.”

“How admirable.” His mouth twitches. He produces a Palm Bay from his slouchy little backpack, tossing it from hand to hand as if testing its heft. “I’m drowning my sorrows in coolers, personally.”

And then he lunges, spritzing the can open in Keith’s face.

“Jesus, Lance,” he sputters, smacking it out of his hand. They scuffle, briefly, and that helpless, ebullient laugh blows past him like candy bubbles.

“Your—face—“

“You’re so immature—“

“Easy, cowboy, don’t you remember what team bonding looks like?” He pinches Keith’s cheek teasingly, and Keith grabs his wrist.

A pulse flutters under his fingertips.

He scrambles backwards, clothes dragging against the sand, a stray sandal popping off. The heat and grit is so real. If he focuses hard enough on the smell of meat coming off the boardwalk, his mouth waters. Lance looks at him incredulously.

“What? That’s too far for you? I barely touched you!”

“You touched me,” Keith repeats. He can still feel that pulse, like a second heart in his own body. He stands up, shedding sand, and Lance looks up at him, mild expression tinted with hurt. Keith sways, sidelined by a wave of vertigo. He can’t be here right now. “End—“

“You’re being so weird. Like Kuron all over again.”

He stops. “You think I’m a clone?”

“Obviously not really,” Lance says, getting up on his knees. “But that is the level of weird we’re dealing with here. You’re looking at me like you’re about to cry.”

“It’s just—home.” He gestures awkwardly. “Tandem bikes. Coconut sunscreen. Seagulls eating fries out of the trash. The ocean. Earth reminds me of you.”

"Birds eating garbage reminds you of me?" Lance quirks a skeptical expression at him. “Maybe you are working through some shit.”

He reaches for his abandoned sandal, dusting sticky sand from the straps. “You can’t even imagine.”

“Try me.”

Keith looks across at Lance’s calm, determined face, and the words rise up in him like a groundswell.

“I know I haven’t earned it, and I know it doesn’t make sense to you, but I miss how things used to be. And the worse everything gets the more I keep wondering what you would say, or do, and I hate that—god,” he breaks off, and presses his palms briefly to his eyes. “I mean, you would’ve had no way of knowing how I felt. I didn’t even know. But I should’ve—I just thought we would have more time after the war, or I would die and it wouldn’t matter. And I guess I assumed you were always going to be there, because you always were, even when I didn’t want you to be, and now—I don’t know, Lance, I don't know how I’m supposed to go to the castle, or pilot Red, or look at the planet I grew up on without remembering how much you loved it, and how much I love you—“

“Keith, what?” Lance says, alarmed. “You’re freaking me out.”

“Where are you?” he frets.

“I’m here.” He crawls closer, but Keith can't look at him. He watches the fussy waves coming in off the shore instead. “I’m right here.” He rests his hands on Keith’s ankles, and he has to steady himself on Lance’s shoulders when his knees go loose. “Man, I shouldn’t have joked about PTSD. I mean, I feel like this sometimes too.”

Keith looks down into his face. “What?”

“You know, like I’m back there. Like—time doesn’t even exist. Being off-planet was such a bitch sometimes. You feel like you can disappear in all that open space. And sometimes you want to.”

“Lance,” Keith whispers. “You wanted to disappear?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” Lance says, serene. “Just for a while. Let someone else defend the universe for a bit, preferably an adult. Hey, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do it!”

“You would have told us,” Keith says, through bloodless lips.

“Sure,” Lance offers.

“No. No. You would’ve said something.”

Lance takes his hands away uncertainly.

“I wouldn’t have done it,” he says flatly. “I’m just telling you that I understand being pissed off, and I understand wanting to—hit pause.”

“What about hitting stop?” Keith asks. “What about disappearing so that whole galaxies full of alien technology can’t find you?”

Lance’s face is a spinning wheel; he cycles through all manner of confusion, impatience, and worry before settling on defensiveness. “What the fuck are you talking about? Are you out of your mind?”

“If I am, it’s your fault,” Keith snaps. “How could you leave us?”

“How could I leave?” There’s no question now, that this is data from his Lance. His tetchy, self-conscious anger is unmistakeable. “You’re the one who ditched us for the Blades right when we were at a tipping point. You’re the one who wadded two years up and threw them in the trash. You didn’t have to care about us but you absolutely should’ve talked to us. We were a team.”

“You think I don’t care about you?” Keith laughs. “That’s fucking hilarious.”

“I’m really laughing,” Lance says sarcastically. “I don’t know what sort of crazy pills you took that made you think that I’m the deserter out of the two of us. I wish I could be that delusional. I may have wanted out once or twice, but I would never, ever leave the people who need me.” He’s fuming, and the wind is blowing through his curls like it’s trying to placate him.

Keith’s anger wobbles. It hurts, to hear Lance talking this way after so long. It’s not the reunion they deserve.

“I know. I know that.”

Lance sits back on Keith’s towel, frowning. He brushes the drained cooler away, and the remnant dribbles out and darkens the sand. “I don’t know why you always have to ruin everything.”

Keith’s throat aches, and he crosses his arms protectively over his chest.

“Me neither.”

Lance glances up, surprised. And then his gaze slides purposefully beyond Keith, considering. After a moment something comes over him, and his whole demeanour changes. “Keith,” he says softly. “Did you say you loved me?”

Keith screws his eyes shut. After a moment he hears Lance moving closer, reaching out, fingertips barely grazing the back of his hand—

“End simulation. Please.”

He crouches in the dark. “Please.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Lance crows. He ducks out from under Keith’s staff, and then grabs the end of it, using the momentum to slide through Keith’s wide stance.

He spins around, and Lance is five feet away, holding his own staff up to his eye like a sniper rifle.

“Bang,” he says.

“This is close combat,” Keith reminds him. He throws his weapon like a spear at Lance’s ankle, and he yelps when it makes contact.

“How is that close combat? You javelin wielding motherfucker. You should be disqualified, and jailed for your crimes.”

He watches Lance shake out his foot like it really hurts, testing his weight and pretending to stumble, falling forward—and then whirling around in time to clash staffs with Keith.

“Shit,” Lance laughs, up close, hot with exertion, putting the pressure of his body weight on the cross they’ve made between them. “Thought I had you.”

“Do you want to surrender?”

“Do you want to kiss my ass?” Lance retorts.

Keith steps out of the way, and Lance’s momentum sends him tumbling head-first to the floor.

“Sure,” he says coolly. “Turn over.”

“What the hell,” Lance says, rolling onto his knees, flustered.

“You lost.”

“Yeah, whatever, like six to five.”

“Six to four,” Keith corrects, and offers him his hand. Lance pretends to spit into it, then flops back onto his hands instead.

“If we were duelling with pistols, I would humiliate you. You would have to drop out of Voltron.”

“By that logic, you should be packing your bags right now.”

Lance throws his head back and laughs. “I’m going to kill you, Kogane.”

“Try me.”

Lance shrugs, but just as Keith starts to look away, he throws himself at him. It’s so unexpected that Keith actually goes down, wrists slammed to the mat on either side of his body, wind knocked out of him.

Lance laughs breathlessly, looming messy and sweaty above him. “Wow, that was embarrassing for you. Your arrogance is your downfall.”

“You’re my downfall,” Keith says, a little too flat and sincere across the top, and Lance purses his lips.

“You’re taking this too seriously, dude.” He lets go easily, and rolls out on his back next to him instead. He flexes his wrist in the air above them both, and Keith watches his fingers work. “Why does it feel like it’s been forever since we sparred?”

“It has,” Keith says simply.

“I guess,” Lance yawns. “I can’t even remember the last time.”

His heart is still pounding from the first serious, sustained training he's done in months. When Lance goes to sit up, Keith puts a staying hand on his chest.

“Hey, Lance," he says. Lance hums. "If you got separated from your lion for any reason, would you—what would you do?”

He frowns. “I dunno. Alert you guys. Rescue mish.”

“What if you couldn’t contact us?”

Lance looks sideways at him. “Not loving this thought experiment. Why are you being so weird?”

“Please,” Keith says, taking Lance’s sore wrist, feeling for the artificial thud of his pulse. “Just—answer.”

“Uh. I don’t know, am I captured? Or planet-side?”

Keith swallows. “Planet-side.”

Lance nods, considering. “If the locals are part of the alliance, I would get their intel, and find a way to reach you. If not, I guess I would lie low. Wait for a friendly ship and signal them.”

“That could take years. It might never happen, depending on where you ended up. Like—alien vessels aren’t cruising over Earth very often.”

“Says you,” Lance jokes. “The truth is out there.”

“You could die waiting,” Keith insists, dropping his hand. “What if the atmosphere wasn’t compatible? The flora and fauna? What if your suit was compromised?”

“I would heroically overcome all obstacles, whistle for my trusty lion, and ride off into the cosmos,” he replies sardonically, “what do you want from me?”

“I just think we should have more rescue protocols in place in case something goes south.”

“Right,” Lance says slowly. “Well, I mean—and I’m going to try and get through this without gagging—I have your back, man. And if we get separated, I’m pretty sure you can take care of yourself.” He gestures at their discarded staffs. “Not as well as me, of course,” he sniffs, glancing sidelong at Keith to see if he’s cheered him up.

Keith feels the phantom weight of Lance’s body crushing him to the mat, a window of weakness pried open, broken and entered. He breathes out. “Yeah. You’re too good for that.”

He asks Pidge for more scenarios, and more user profiles. For fleshing things out, he tells her. For recreating the circumstances under which Lance was lost, testing his reactions to different situations, and introducing as many variables as possible.

Slowly, inevitably, he starts to lose control of it all.

He’s still a correspondent to the Blade of Marmora, and he’s on call as a paladin, but they haven’t been able to form Voltron in years. He’s perpetually out of sync with the rest of the universe, living more and more like a washed-up casino-goer, existing only for the market stall where he can plug his friends in and relive the past.

He pays off the owner not to ask questions, and gets an apartment on Seachmall, barely the size of a lion cockpit, just a sparse kitchenette and a twin cot. He spends hours in the simulator and crashes on his bare mattress, bathed in the constant, spectacular glow from the street lights.

Every time he staggers away from the market he has to remember that the real Lance is rotting somewhere, and he’s here playing dress up with shadows.

It’s all easier, in the holodeck.

He loads the original paladin line-up into battle, relives their victories and rights their wrongs. He finds himself in the kitchen of the castle of lions, in a ballroom overlooking a fathoms-deep canyon, curled in Lance’s bed so he can finally sleep. He takes his friends to Earth a hundred different ways.

There’s always a fog, a strangeness about them when they think too hard about where they are, but he knows it’s a mercy. He ends each simulation on the verge of spinning out, functionally pulling the trigger on his dearest friends.

Reality sags out of his grip. Pidge and Hunk call sometimes, and often Kolivan or Allura will give him status reports, scattered missions, and lectures that walk the line between morally superior and deeply, uncomfortably worried. When Shiro starts up daily check-ins, he understands that they all know what he’s been doing, lost on Seachmall for so long.

“You’re taking care of yourself, right?” Shiro asks.

“Yes,” Keith tells him. He’s staring at the empty wall across from his bed, absently sharpening his knife. “I’m just killing time.”

“We really miss you around here. It’s too quiet.”

He tests his blade, rolling his shoulder. “I’m not exactly bringing the party when I’m out there.”

Shiro hums. “I don’t know, you certainly keep things interesting.”

Keith snorts.

“I’m serious!” He can hear the smile in his voice. “There’s only so much quantum mechanics and ancient magic I can take before I want to hit something. I want my sparring partner back.”

They lapse into silence, and Keith traces patterns in the air, enjoying the fine metallic sound of a weapon without a target.

“You know we’re still looking, right?” Shiro asks. Keith stops cutting the air, and puts his knife down on the bed beside him.

“Are you?”

“Yes,” Shiro says. “Of course we are. Allura and I are visiting every contact she has, and Hunk and Pidge are working—overtime. We’re picking up a lot of slack here.”

The back of his neck prickles with guilt. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Shiro sighs. “I’m telling you this because you’re my brother.” But he has his diplomat voice on, which Keith has always hated. “And I don’t know if you’re thinking about what it’s going to do to the rest of us if you don’t come back from this.”

“From a simulator?” he asks, incredulous.

“From grieving,” Shiro corrects. “I would never tell you to stop looking, but I think you know you’re not going to find him in those projections.”

“I could,” he says stiffly. “He tells me things—every day he gives me clues and he doesn’t even know it.”

“He doesn’t tell you anything,” Shiro says gently. “Because it’s not him. Do you remember when Allura had to let go of her father? It was so easy for her precious memories to be corrupted, and even easier to get swept away in the illusion. Everything in a simulator is finite, Keith, but you can’t be. You have to grow, and change, and move on.”

He thinks of every different shade of Lance he’s seen, every secret door that gives and leads to another wing. “You don’t get it.”

“Of course I get it. If Adam—“ he cuts himself off, and his breath shudders over the line. “You’re not the only one to be feeling this loss, or to be struggling.”

“But I never even got to love him," Keith argues. “I never got close enough to put any of these feelings anywhere, and now they’re everywhere. No one ever gives me the chance to love them before they—“ he swallows, and when he goes to speak again he finds there’s nothing else to say.

“I know how hard it’s been for you,” Shiro says sadly. “But Keith, understand—we all love you. No matter where we are or what we’re doing. We don’t have to verbalize it to feel it.”

“Okay,” he says, numb.

“We love you,” he reiterates. “Lance did too.”

“Thanks for checking on me Shiro,” he says, and hangs up.

“No way, no way, no way,” Lance crows. “This is slander.”

“It can’t be slander if all of us were there to see it,” Hunk says, but he can’t look at Lance without cracking up.

“You’re remembering wrong,” he says. “She asked me to give a speech.”

“She asked you not to,” Pidge says, rolling her eyes. “Begged you, even.”

“Boo,” Lance laughs. “I was just trying to have a good time at alliance banquet number five zillion.”

They’re clustered on blankets between the yellow lion’s hulking paws, in the soft local vegetation of one of the last planets they liberated as a team. They were buzzed, when this conversation actually happened, but Keith hasn’t been able to replicate that particular feeling through the simulator.

“I don’t know why you always have to lie to these people,” Keith says, just as he did on the actual occasion.

“Embellish,” Lance protests. “I live by the principle that everyone wants to hear the best possible version of the story, and you owe it to them to tell it.”

“But the best version is almost never the real version,” Hunk says, exasperated.

“I dunno man, what’s real anyway?” Pidge says, easing back into the blankets. “Our lives are such a clusterfuck as it is. The line of what’s actually impossible gets farther away every day.”

“Yeah,” Lance says. “What squidge said. Lying is cool.”

“Ugh, don’t call me that,” Pidge complains.

“What, I’m agreeing with you,” Lance says, grinning. He leans over to give her a big-brotherly hair-pull that she intercepts with a karate chop.

“People deserve to know the truth,” Keith says mechanically, following the script, but then feeling flushed and hypocritical all at once.

“Okay, here’s a truth, universally acknowledged: Keith sucks,” Lance says.

“Hm. Sounds like another lie to me,” Hunk says, and Lance reaches up to steal his headband in retaliation. Hunk rolls his eyes and lets him have it, like he’s appeasing an overactive puppy.

Something skitters in the dark, beyond the dunes of Yellow’s paws.

“Don’t you have a rebuttal, Keith?” Pidge asks, sitting up on her hands.

“Why are you encouraging them?” Hunk groans.

Keith shrugs and stays silent; Lance’s gaze narrows shrewdly.

“You aren’t one of those weepy drunks, are you?”

Keith picks at a loose thread in their shared blanket. “No, I just changed my mind,” he says, veering off-book. “I don’t know why I was acting like it was ridiculous that you like telling stories, when it obviously makes people feel better to believe them.”

“Oh. Well. Glad you came to your senses,” Lance interrupts, overly loud. He always seems to hate it when Keith gets sincere like this. He begs for attention but recoils when he gets too much.

“Most of these alliance parties happen after a long period of unrest. So… what, you helped grieving people by acting like a superhero? To them, you are a superhero. God, I couldn’t stand that you took so much credit for our victories, but I should’ve given you more.”

Lance blinks at him.

He remembers with fire-bright clarity how this scene actually played out, the way Keith kept needling at Lance’s hero complex, accusing him of making things up so he could pretend he’d been helpful. Lance had dialled his bravado to a screaming pitch so he could hide the soft, spoiled look in his eyes where Keith had lodged a cruel sword that he couldn’t pull out.

Now, Lance purses his lips so he doesn’t have to figure out what to do with his expression.

“Huh,” Pidge says, chewing on a pseudo-protein bar from their rations. “That’s some unexpected character growth.”

“Are you… feeling okay?” Hunk asks.

Keith looks miserably down at his own crossed legs until Lance says, “not that I don’t appreciate it, but you did just do kind of an impressive one-eighty.”

He looks up. “Yeah, sorry. I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

Lance smiles a little, relieved. He waggles the flask they’ve been sharing in his direction. “You just need to drink more.”

“No,” Keith disagrees, shaking his head. “I want to remember this.”

He opens his eyes to the world on its side, gritty endless flatlands sprayed out against a hazy auburn sky.

He rolls, putting his arm over his face, a visor against radiant twin suns.

He doesn’t have to look to remember the architecture at his back, a cubist explosion of edges and colours, each shape squared off and set into the hills. When the paladins liberated Imedemaa, they were offered accommodation in homes that corresponded to their lions: terracotta red, cobalt blue, mustard yellow, foliage green, and a brown so dark it could pass as black.

It’s his favourite place to visit: brilliant views, kind people, warm bed, privacy and proximity bumping shoulders comfortably.

Keith rolls again, sitting up. He feels heat-sick, and if it were real, he knows he would be bruised tan in the coast-to-coast sunshine. He’s spread out on the same outdoor palette where he fell asleep nearly three years ago. His apartment is warm, dull red, nearly orange. The shimmering public baths sparkle with activity just below his balcony.

“Yoo-hoo, neighbour.”

Keith squints over the waist-high wall and finds Lance clambering from his own balcony onto Keith’s.

“You’re going to fall to your death.”

“Nah,” Lance says, swinging a leg down over the railing and sitting contemplatively with one foot dangling over empty space and the other brushing the floor. “There’s a pool down there. Worst case scenario I perform an exceptional and history-making canon-ball.”

Keith watches him climb the rest of the way over, staggering and sitting heavily on Keith’s palette next to him.

“Oof,” he says. Lance's skin is dazzling in this climate, dark and freckled like granite. The simulation reminds him that he smelled like lotus, this day, fresh from the baths, warm shoulder and drizzling wet hair. “Are you ready to absolutely blow this popsicle stand?”

“And do what?” Keith asks, a little breathless from proximity.

“Did you seriously forget? It’s racing day!”

“Oh,” Keith says faintly. “Right.” They used to rent speeders for fun sometimes; the whole team participating at first, and then Keith and Lance alone when they surpassed friendly competition into bet-making and sabotage.

They would sneak back whenever they could swing the time off, careening around dusty corners and ramming one another’s speeders into hysterical tailspins. They would sob with laughter and then spritz their canteens all over each other, tussling in the dirt, so coordinated that it was almost an embrace.

The thought of it had driven him out of bed this morning, but he felt sick and shaky as he typed Pidge’s code into the simulator, setting the modified location of Imedemaa and rolling into a memory so fine and warm that it reminded him of death itself.

“Woah. easy, Red,” Lance says, his voice sharp with concern. Keith comes back to himself to realize that he’s angling into a panic attack, holding his own head in his hands. He can’t spoil this memory. Not this one.

“I—I—“ He can’t speak. Lance makes a dismayed noise, his entire demeanour turning inside out.

“Can I hug you, man?”

Keith jerks his head ‘no’. “I—can’t—you—“

Lance gets to his feet, and Keith grabs at him, hooking fingers in a belt loop, a fistful of shirt, whatever his hands find first.

“Hey, shh, it’s cool, I’m just getting you some water.”

Keith shakes his head again. “Don’t leave me.”

“Will you tell me what’s wrong?” Lance asks softly, sitting back down. “We don’t have to go racing today.”

Keith huffs this weird cartwheel of a laugh, and scrubs a hand over his eyes and nose.

“I think I dreamed you were dead,” he tells him. He doesn’t look up into his face, but Lance’s chest is steady in front of him, rising and falling evenly with each breath.

“Who, me? I’m fine, Keith, look at me.”

“It felt real.”

“Pretty sure it wasn’t,” Lance says, laughter tucked into his worry like a concealed weapon. Keith looks up at him, and Lance beams under his full attention. He wipes the tears from Keith’s cheeks with his thumbs.

Abruptly, he can’t stand it.

“You’re a hologram,” Keith whispers. Lance’s smile falters.

“What?”

“Do you remember how Pidge took our mental blueprints?”

Lance nods quickly. He’s not brushing Keith off, he’s not slow with disbelief. He’s clear and sharp and his face is increasingly overcast with fear.

“I’m using your data in a simulation. This holiday on Imedemaa, it was years ago. You’re not the real Lance.” It hurts, to admit it, but it’s clear that it hurts Lance much, much more.

“No,” he chokes. “No, I feel real.”

“I know you do,” Keith says, reaching for his hand.

But Lance jerks away, standing and reeling backwards, hands splayed out on red paint, which could be gore, really, bleeding out from Lance’s palms like that. “I was so fucking scared of this.“

“I’m sorry,” Keith says, watching this shade of Lance shaking through self-awareness, and feeling the weight of the words that could end it in his mouth.

“Why—where—“

“He’s gone,” Keith whispers.

“Gone as in gone?”

“Gone as in I can’t find him.”

“So why are you wasting time on this black mirror shit, and not out there looking for me?” he demands.

“I’ve looked everywhere.” The agony of his failure slides home all over again. “The search party is a million strong by now. I’ve talked to a hundred versions of you looking for an answer.”

“A hundred,” Lance says. “So what, when I tell you what you want to hear, you delete me?”

“I’m not wiping the data or anything, I—I don’t know how it works,” he admits.

“Jesus. Jesus Keith, this is fucked up.”

Tears start to well up, and he wipes them away furiously. He never used to cry like this. He never used to feel so constantly ravaged by guilt and fear. It used to live in his gut and press at his throat, but he could keep it wrapped and sealed inside his body.

“I miss you,” Keith tries, and Lance’s face twists with despair.

“I really wish it didn’t take this horror show to make you say that.”

Somewhere, something splashes and someone shrieks with laughter. Lance looks at him miserably, hunched in the shade from the terrace, brow damp with terrified perspiration. He absolutely shouldn’t have told him. He remembers Pidge laughing darkly, I’m not that cruel.

“What do you want me to do,” Keith asks quietly.

“What choice do I have?” Lance asks. “I’m a video game character. I’m a dead man walking.”

“Do you want to do anything? Before I end this session.”

Lance swallows, considering. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I do, actually.”

They race.

What feels like all day, ripping in circles under arching rocks and through clinging, dragging sand, until the suns are setting, twin flames set into the desert like jewels.

Lance is extra reckless, gorgeous, perched high on his speeder and arched forward to reach the controls. His face, below the goggles, is streaked with mud, and he keeps crying out when he tips over too far or pulls triumphantly ahead of Keith, cathartic, unfiltered.

“One more lap,” he shouts, over the thrum of noise from the speeder.

“I’ll beat your ass,” Keith calls, trying for normalcy, but they’ve both kind of been crying on and off all day, and this is the last thing this Lance will ever do, and really, he’s not that cruel.

“Fucking try,” Lance says, pulling his bandana up over his mouth and taking off.

“Hey!” Keith laughs. “No countdown?”

“I think I deserve a head start,” he calls over his shoulder, but most of his voice is whipped away by the wind.

The speeder rips sideways, sliding over a natural boulder ridge that drops off into nothingness. Strange gravity keeps him on the right side of the cliff, and he hoots with joy, galloping metres and metres ahead as Keith eases through the same turn.

“You’re gonna—“ get yourself killed. He bites his tongue. Lance can’t hear him anyway. He zigzags through natural obstacles, glancing back in disbelief when Keith pulls up behind him. His face is red with the effort of staying upright.

“Can’t you let me win for once,” Lance cries, slamming on the thrusters and stirring up a fog of dust behind him. Keith coughs and dodges, feeling on the very edge of an awareness too big to name, like being able to feel one stage of grief ending and another beginning.

Sometime during Lance’s luxurious lead he’s taken off his helmet, and now the desert wind is whipping his hair straight.

He takes the next corner much too fast, and Keith’s heart is in his throat as he inevitably spins out, in smooth little frictionless circles at first, weightless as a bumper car—and then the rear of the speeder catches on a jutting rock and he’s ejected altogether. He topples out into the sifting dunes, rolling half a dozen times and stopping himself so abruptly that Keith can hear something snap.

He pulls up hard, tumbling off the speeder and throwing his helmet out into the sand, running as best he can to where Lance landed.

When he reaches him he’s cradling a severely broken arm to his chest, and the bone is piercing through the skin. There’s blood everywhere, weeping through his fingers, streaked high on his hairline, staining his shirt and the tawny sand beneath him.

“Would’ve been great if you could have programmed me to not hurt,” Lance wobbles. Stiff upper lip, terribly pale.

“Didn’t know you were going to throw yourself off a speeder.”

“Yeah, well. Me neither.” He hisses as Keith takes his wrist in his hand, unfathomably gentle, turning it this way and that.

“This looks terrible.”

Lance snorts. “Thank you doctor Keith.”

“I don’t think we brought any first aid,” he mutters, frowning, digging through the pack at his hip.

“I don’t need it.”

“Are you kidding me? You’re—“

“Keith.” He looks up at him, smudgy and sweaty and splashed with five kinds of red in the fading light. “I don’t need it.”

Keith trembles, still searching for a bandage or a stopper or an answer of any kind. “No. I hate this.”

Lance smiles grimly. “I don’t love it that much either. But hey, maybe there’s a way to bring me back. This exact version of me. From the ether somewhere. Doesn’t feel quite as permanent as capital D Death.” His eyes narrow. “As long as you don’t lose me, Red.”

“I won’t,” he whispers, parched and grief-torn. “Never again.”

“Okay. Okay.” He makes himself comfortable, stretched out on the sand, arm folded over his chest. “Hey, Keith?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you not—raise me from the dead again? I don’t think—I mean. A hundred versions of me and you haven’t found what you’re looking for.”

“But I have,” Keith says fiercely. “I always find what I’m looking for, because I’m looking for you.”

Lance laughs, coughs, squeezes his eyes shut. “That’s real romantic.”

Keith’s mouth twitches. “I’m glad you think so.”

Lance cracks an eye open. “Just find me the old fashioned way, will you? No more beautiful Lance casualties.”

“I—don’t know if I can promise that,” he says. “I miss you,” he reiterates.

“Yeah. More, I bet, when you’re looking right at me. Ever wonder why that is?”

Keith shakes his head fast.

“Dumbass,” Lance says fondly. “It’s literally always gonna hurt, trying to live in the past. Makes you feel like you don’t have a future.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“That’s a pretty insensitive thing to say to a dying guy.”

Keith laughs wetly. “You’re being melodramatic.”

“When can you be melodramatic if not on your deathbed?”

Keith brushes the sticky hair from Lance’s forehead. He turns his face and Keith’s hand softens and cups his cheek comfortably.

“Pidge can do anything,” Keith tells him. “All your ones and zeroes will be safe somewhere until she can figure out somewhere for you to go.”

“Yeah, okay,” Lance says, like he barely heard him. He’s determined, heroic. Fucking heartbreaking. “I hope the real me gives you hell.”

Keith nods jerkily. “He always does.”

“I hope he—I hope he’s good to you, too.”

Keith’s face crumples, and he puts his forehead to Lance’s, feeling him wince when his chest grazes his broken arm.

“Sorry, sorry,” he sniffs, holding his face, wiping the blood and muck and tears back.

“It’s okay,” Lance says, starting to slur. “It’s okay, Red, just end it, quick.”

“You’re the last one,” Keith promises.

“Good,” Lance says, “because you’re not gonna do better than me.”

Keith laughs, putting their foreheads together again, and then kissing the place where a tear has rolled down into his hairline.

“See you soon,” he whispers. Lance leans up, golden, bloody.

Keith shudders, and says “end simulation” into his mouth.

Imedemaa winks out, and his whole world narrows instantly to a pinhead. He’s huddled on the floor over nothing at all, caught in the throws of fantasy, like a sleepwalker. When he licks his lips though, he swears he can still taste salt.

He leaves the simulator into the whiz and pop of another Seachmall night. The owner nods at him, looking vaguely troubled, possibly by the amount of time that Keith has been locked in his simulator today, and by the look on his face now, which he can only imagine is ripped in half by loss.

The market is busier than usual, stranger, overfull with alien tourists, so much so that the paladin simulator has accumulated a long line-up.

He sidesteps their stares, slipping soundlessly into the alley, already dialling Pidge on his communicator. She said the system would automatically wipe after each use, but he’s certain she can retrieve whatever information would be inaccessible to the public. She said herself that she doesn’t burn data.

He waits through the suck of the empty line, feeling antsy and keyed up, aching from a day of racing but incongruously clean and dry.

“Come on, Pidge,” he mutters.

Somewhere in the market, there’s a great clamour of voices. Something clatters to the ground, and someone apologizes profusely in common. Keith chews his lip distractedly, waiting for a thief to run by, a sheepish tourist, or scuffling rival business owners.

The line connects and disconnects in quick succession, and Keith kicks a trash disposal chute so hard that it dents.

He frets, thinking of Lance’s final moments, the wilting fear on his face, his mouth split open like fruit.

A hoverbike rounds the corner, and Keith only steps barely out of the way, nearly clipped by a wide fender. It crashes to a stop, making a thin, rumbling sound, and then its rider has whipped all the way around to stare at Keith. Achingly humanoid. Cobalt blue Motorcycle helmet. Rippling with motion even while sitting still.

They swing a leg over the seat of the bike, staggering closer, and Keith knows. He knows when a slender, gloved hand reaches for the visor, and when twin pistols clink and gleam from their holsters. The helmet falls, rolling into the dirt.

“Keith,” Lance breathes.

Chapter Text

They stare at each other.

“Tell me you’re the real Keith, because I’m about to lose my mind.“ Lance rests a hand on one pistol, and Keith feels a belated throb of fear.

“End simulation,” he says, quick, as if testing the handle of a pan for its temperature. His grip holds. The world doesn’t waver, or dissolve.

“Simulation?” Lance repeats. He’s trembling, and Keith can see him perfectly now, the tweaks, the new colours, the length of his hair, the familiar heave of the shoulders under two long years alone. He’s wearing these—these fingerless gloves, and for a confused moment he thinks Lance must have stolen them from him after the race, when they were pinned together by the desert sky. But that would be impossible.

Suddenly, it seems even less possible that he could’ve believed in those hundred copies in the first place, those lovely unfinished forgeries.

“It’s you,” Keith says, through numb lips.

Lance jerks a nod. “Last time I checked. And you, you’re…”

“It’s me,” Keith rushes to say. He does the first thing he can think of and unclips his bayard from his belt. It unfolds into a gleaming sword in his hand, and even though it’s held horizontally, non-threatening as a blacksmith testing its balance, Lance flinches hard. “It’s me,” Keith reiterates, pressing intention into those words. It’s me. I would never hurt you.

Lance relaxes, dropping his grip on the pistol. Slowly, a smile takes over his face like prairie fire, brilliant in the space between them. “Of course it is. No one but you would pull a sword on somebody to prove you’re an ally.”

For the second time in twenty minutes, Keith tosses the whole complicated bundle of love and terror out to Lance like a life preserver, crossing the space between them hand over fist.

This time, no broken arms or illusions between them, he throws both arms tightly around his neck. They lose and find their balance together through a stumbling step or two, rocking and turning as if in water.

“Keith,” Lance chokes.

He pulls Lance’s face into his hands, and he grabs his wrists in return, holding them in place, looking shocked at the contact and simultaneously famished for more.

His hair has grown out, and he has most of it braided loosely out of his face. His shoulders are broader, freckles denser, and his clothes have been carefully mended, a collage of new and old armour.

“I can’t believe I did it. I did it,” Lance is saying, over and over, rough with emotion. His fingers slide over Keith’s sleeves, settling heavily over his chest, both of them testing the truth of the other, heartbeat and bone, breath and strength.

Keith shakes his head, hands torqued into Lance's collar. “Where have you been?” he asks thickly.

“Lost,” Lance whispers. “On the fucking—wild west of planets.” Keith sees it then, the techno-turquoise of Lance’s left eye, the slight unnatural pucker of his eyelid. He brushes his thumb over his brow, and Lance shudders, hand flying up to cover his eye. “It’s—I can still shoot,” he says quickly. 

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Keith says, horrified.

“It’s not as bad as it looks. It was way worse when I had an eyepatch. Well, really more of a bandage. Think Birdbox.”

“They took your eye,” Keith says dumbly. His hands flutter down to Lance’s jaw, and he turns his face into the light. The fake pupil reacts, contracting, and Keith compares the navy iris of his real eye with this wild Caribbean blue, heart in his throat. “Lance, I’m so—I’m so sorry. I tried to find you. I should have found you.” His voice is rickety with emotion.

“Come on, Red,” Lance murmurs. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Keith carefully swallows this absolution. “I wasted so much time being an idiot.”

“Well,” Lance shrugs, half-smiling. “No arguments here.”

Keith shakes him, and Lance laughs, wide-open, stumbling back into his bike.

“It’s so good to see you,” Keith breathes, a terrible understatement that Lance accepts sweetly, eyes creasing. They’re still embracing. The idea of stepping away makes his muscles quake and clamp tighter. It would be like prying his fingers from the cliff face and plummeting to his death.

“You too, buddy,” Lance says. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen a friendly face. I’m so whacked out of my gourd that I thought you were a hallucination for a minute there. Big sign talking about the ‘Voltron experience’, and I find you right around the corner. Too good to be true.”

“Me too,” Keith says quietly. “I never thought I’d find you here. Not—like this. I thought I was going to break you out of some galra cell somewhere. Or find you in another desert lab, like Shiro.”

“I found you for a change,” Lance says. “It’s good for you. Keeps you humble.”

Keith scoffs wetly. “I should’ve known you would show up like nothing happened. Maybe that’s why I stayed here for so long.”

“Stayed here,” Lance says, confused. “On mission? Where’s everyone else? Are they—“

“They’re fine,” Keith says quickly. “Everyone’s okay. And Earth is still safe.”

Lance sags with relief, leaning heavily back on the seat of his bike, which sways beneath their combined weight. “I knew it. I knew Voltron would still be kicking, you resilient bastards.”

“It’s not—I mean. We haven’t been forming Voltron. The connection—“ his throat goes tight. “It’s not really there. Without you.”

Lance looks up, alarmed. “Wh—of course it is. Keith, you’re shitting me. Tell me you’re shitting me.”

“I’m not,” he says. “We’ve got five pilots, and we do okay, but I can’t… it’s been really hard. Mostly we try and nip big projects in the bud. Pidge and Matt developed a new system that blankets Galra communication, and we do a lot of stealth missions. Not so much fire power.”

“They think I’m dead, don’t they,” Lance asks, achingly soft.

Keith winces. “They just… prepared for the worst.”

“But not you?”

He shrugs, like it hasn’t been a deadly schism in the single largest defence against the Galra regime. “I didn’t have it in me to lose anyone else. I wouldn’t do it.”

Lance watches him closely. He hasn't been dulled at all by his time away. He’s endlessly intuitive, the reactive defence to Keith’s intuitive offence. “You left Voltron.”

He closes his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“What happened to you?” he asks.

“What happened to me?” Keith repeats incredulously. “You’re the one who disappeared into nothing. You left Red in a room that was locked from the outside. None of us could even begin to track you. Not with Allura’s magic. Not with Pidge’s tech, not with my fucking—bare-knuckle will—“

“I’ll tell you,” Lance says hoarsely. When Keith looks up at him, his bravado is mulch, and he looks much older than twenty. “I’ll tell you everything, if you—you’ve gotta tell me what’s got you like this, because the Keith I know would never leave a fight early. And Voltron’s out of commission, apparently, and I’m what—years behind on everything, good and bad. I’m just trying to figure out where I fit in all of this.”

“There hasn’t been any good,” Keith says darkly.

“Keith,” Lance says, hands spread, simple. “Just talk to me.”

Keith sniffs, wiping his eyes and mouth, and puts his trust over Lance’s shoulders like a blanket.

“Come with me,” he says, pulling away, finally, tugging Lance after him. “I know a place.”

They ride through the backstreets of Seachmall on Lance’s clever little bike, and by the time they reach Keith’s apartment, the enormity of what he’s going to have to admit to Lance has crushed him nearly flat.

Loss and love are still twins, and they’re each still pulling at a side of Keith’s body, intent on drawing and quartering him. He lost Lance, and he loved him, and then, sick and resigned, he chased him through the sort of memories where reality wouldn’t find them.

And now he’s perched on Keith’s fire escape, bathed in the red neon from the club across the street, and he’s telling a survival story so harrowing and far-fetched that it could only come from Lance’s mouth.

For twenty-five of the twenty-six months he’s been missing, Lance was trapped on a low-tech high-conflict planet, designation P3R50, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Keith recognizes the name with awful certainty. They had looked into it, scanning the surface and planning a scouting mission, but Coran had warned that it was engaged in active civil war, and that if Lance had touched down there, he would most certainly be dead.

The last battle that Voltron fought together, a foreign signal lured him out of the action, and then hacked Red’s system somehow, jamming her controls so that she rolled over, ejected Lance into space, and flew, pilot-less, towards the nearest Galra base.

Lance describes the free fall in excruciating detail, the disbelief as his harness failed and the magic-technological hybrid that he had come to trust like religion started working against him—hostile, overheating, screaming-loud, his connection with Red severed and cauterized in quick, agonizing succession.

And then the tumble through space, head over feet over head over feet, where he was unable to stop his momentum, unable to keep sight of anything except the fog of his own breath inside his visor and the wash of unfamiliar constellations in every direction.

Through the crush of panic, he was able to use the last of his thruster capability to level off, cruising towards the nearby P3R50, where he had to rely on his Altean armour to carry him through the atmosphere. It was severely damaged in the fall, and his charred comms, he realized quickly, were permanently down. He told Keith in a haunted voice that he knew Hunk or Pidge could’ve figured something out with the parts, and that he would resent his inattentiveness in the castle workshop, over and over, for years.

The next part seems difficult for him to talk about.

He tells Keith that he barely scrounged a life in the wilds of his new home planet: fighting through a hostile environment, stealing barely palatable food, and getting sick from water that was filthy with grime and alien blood, straining to hear news of anything space-side.

P3R50 wasn’t a part of the alliance; they weren’t even aware of the Galran threat. Like Earth, space was only as wide as the night sky, and aliens were hypothetical.

Until Lance came along, visibly other, in-ear translator intact thank god, but utterly unable to communicate in return. Seeking help and asylum, he received mostly fear and disbelief, and in some instances, he was openly hunted. I’ve never experienced that kind of prejudice, he tells Keith, and I’ve been the only brown employee at a Hollister.

As far as Keith can tell, most of his time on P3R50 was spent running, the only alien on a strange new world, a single mistake away from death at all times. He was voiceless, strapped into broken armour, and stranded in a war zone.

Keith tries to picture this stoic, silent Lance and finds he can’t quite do it. He’s always been mouthy, even through bouts of grave danger or laser-focus, but he’s also never had to be alone before.

He doesn’t go into a lot of detail, and Keith can already tell that there are some things he’ll never want to talk about. He wears more weapons than he ever did as a paladin—bayard strapped to his back, those pistols at his hips, and an array of knives tucked into bracers and ankle holsters. He has scars snaking out of his gloves, that strangely luminescent eye of his, and a swagger that Keith thinks might actually be a limp.

He’s been in disguise for years, keeping his skin covered and hunkering down to appear small and anonymous. He studied the language in private, kept to the streets, and moved endlessly from place to place, trying to find any tech he could finagle into helping him. He got into scuffles, took part in some petty crime, and watched the planet viciously eating its own tail as the war got more and more blindly destructive.

When Keith asks again about his eye, Lance grimaces. “Long story. Cyclops versus Sharpshooter. Three eyes enter, one leaves.”

And then, Lance tells him that, like a cruel miracle, the Galra invaded P3R50. The glow of their purple insignia in the sky woke Lance from a doze under the docks, and he literally wept with relief.

“It was awful, how happy I was. It was so busted. I could’ve sworn allegiance to the empire, I’m not even kidding.”

“That’s not funny,” Keith says.

“Nah, it’s not,” Lance agrees.

He tells him that he managed to sneak on board within a week of their arrival. And it only took so long because he had to get to their base on foot. He executed a dozen sentries, stole a shuttle, and careened off into space in under an hour. He was rusty and damaged, he admits, but his desperation worked to his advantage.

After that, he went planet hopping once or twice, trying to get far enough away that he could summon the paladins without attracting the attention of the Galra.

Finally he landed on Seachmall, the most blissfully advanced planet he’d seen in years. He got himself patched up, replaced his old gear, and followed word about the paladins in broken common until he found the holodeck. And Keith.

“That’s a hell of a story,” Keith tells him. Truthfully, he can’t imagine it. His time on the space whale was quiet, kept in strange but constant company. The thought of tender, silly Lance being flattened into one violent dimension is hateful.

“It’s been a hell of a year,” Lance says grimly. “I’m pretty sure I’m a wanted criminal in every continent on P3R50.”

Sometime over the course of recounting his stint on the run he’s moved from the fire escape to the head of the bed, and one folded leg bounces nervously against the other. Keith puts a steadying hand on his ankle, and they both stare at it.

“Are you going to be okay?” Keith asks.

Lance shrugs carefully. “I never thought I would make it home. It feels—unreal, to be in the same room as you again. And we’re not even fighting, yet.” It’s not an answer at all. Keith squeezes his ankle, brushing the buckle of his boot with his thumb.

“I have to tell you,” he says thickly. Lance uncrosses his legs, and Keith’s hand falls awkwardly back into his own lap.

“What?” Lance prompts.

“You’ll probably be mad.”

“My threshold for mad is pretty drastically different than it was two years ago,” Lance says.

Keith breathes deeply. “The um. The mental blueprints Pidge took. You remember them?”

Lance’s expression is clean and organized, a well-set table. “Sure. Paladin user profiles. For posterity.”

Keith nods. “And you saw what the simulator does, right? They’re selling full sensory paladin experiences.”

Lance studies him for a long moment. “If you’re trying to tell me that you… spent time with me in the holodeck, because you thought I was dead, I’m not going to be mad at you, dude.”

“I kept—I couldn’t stop,” Keith says helplessly. “I thought I could figure out where you went.”

Lance is shaking his head slowly. “Did you… did you think I left on purpose?”

Keith chews his lip. “We didn’t know what to think.”

“Great. Great. So you all thought I was a deserter, then? To be honest Keith that’s pretty rich, coming from you.”

He absorbs this jab patiently. “We’ve had this conversation before."

The connotations of this seem to land like a slap to the face. “Well I haven't,” Lance says, raising his voice. “Okay. I lied, I’m mad. You—so you uploaded me to the cloud or whatever and just—“ He stands, pacing to the door and back. “Did some role play? Tested me? Deleted me and started over?”

“I was trying to find you.”

“I get it,” Lance says flatly. “But you get how that’s messed up, right? Like, what did I even say to you? What kind of shit did you program into me?”

“Nothing!”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Keith reiterates. “It was just you and me talking. It was like… reviewing archival footage. I thought I could figure out how you were thinking before you left, what you might do in a crisis.“

Lance quiets momentarily. He’s standing by the door now, holding his own elbows. It doesn’t make sense, how scared he is. As if Keith peered into his deepest secrets and not into the same complicated surface he’s looking at now.

“But you kept doing it, right? You said you stayed here for a long time.”

“I couldn’t stop,” Keith repeats, shamefaced.

Lance’s mouth screws up, and he steps forward, into that smoky neon light again. “Why not?”

“Because you were still gone, and I still missed you.”

“Okay,” he breathes. “I’m having trouble with that. Because it’s like—what kind of twilight zone did I come back to that Keith Kogane tells me he misses me to my face.”

Keith grabs for him, fingers catching on his holsters, and Lance lets himself be pulled.

“Maybe I’m different now. You were gone for a long time,” he says.

“I know,” Lance says. “I felt every goddamn second of it. And you were here, rehearsing exactly what you wanted to say to me for months. So say it.”

“I’ve never missed anyone like this,” Keith says meaningfully.

Lance swallows. “I need you to really spell this out for me.”

“Fine,” Keith says, looking at his own hands hanging from Lance’s belt and trying to organize his thoughts. “I saw you a hundred different ways, in the sim. And the more I focused on you, the more I was… sure. About who you are, and about how I feel. It was like a training simulator, except it was more than strategy or reaction times—I learned from your kindness, and instincts.

“And—I don’t know. You showed me how to make friends with foreign dignitaries, and plants, and temperamental motorcycles. You taught me that a good story can turn the tide of war. You’re unimaginably good at what you do. And all of it was—nothing, compared to what I’ve seen you do in reality. But I was paying attention, this time. I could see everything.” He looks straight ahead now, at the fraying seam around Lance’s navel. “I never really think ahead. I never saw this coming. But I’m a good reactor. I lost you, and my path got very, very clear.”

He looks up into Lance’s face, and finds his brow crumpled with emotion.

“Have we had this conversation before?” he asks.

Keith scoffs. “Do you really think I could say this twice?”

“I don’t know, I’m learning a lot about you today.” He smiles a little, and Keith has to smile with him. “Say it,” he says.

“I’ll say anything you want,” Keith admits, hands bunching at Lance’s sides. “I’ll do anything.”

The smile changes. “You love me.“

“Of course I do,” Keith says, exasperated.

Lance’s face does something pretty and sad, like wilting flowers, and then he’s climbing onto the bed, guns clinking heavily against Keith’s belt. “You could’ve used that technology for anything.”

“No,” Keith says gravely. “I couldn’t have. There was nothing else I wanted.”

He’s looking at Keith like he’s never seen him before. It’s the same shock-flushed expression as the Lance from the beach, with his hair full of strawberry sunlight. Only this time, Keith doesn’t stop himself from leaning up to kiss him.

Lance tilts down to meet him, crushed together on Keith’s tiny bed, swallowing each other’s sadness like wine. They bump weapons, notching knees between ankles, Lance’s hand sliding warm under the collar of his shirt, his weight pressed safely to Keith’s thighs.

“Keith,” Lance murmurs, between mouthfuls, “I really hated being alone.”

“I know,” he says, brushing his lips over the snap of Lance’s pulse, holding his slender jaw and then brushing his hands down, feeling the way this familiar body has changed, all the things he’s missed. “I’m sorry.”

Lance pulls back, holding himself tall and steady in Keith’s lap. Somehow, his artificial eye isn’t as vibrant as his real one, which is so wide and bright with tears that Keith can still see it when he closes his own eyes.

“I love you too,” Lance says urgently. “Did I say that?”

Keith shakes his head, feeling the revelation hit him hard, water in the lungs, two hands around his spine, a kick to the ribs. “You didn’t.”

“Did any of my clones say it? In holo-land?”

“No, Lance,” he says.

“That’s impossible.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m kind of going through a lot right now,” Lance says, almost annoyed. Keith loves him so terribly. Loves him a hundred times and then a billion more.

He seals their mouths together again, and Lance latches onto him, hooking his arms around Keith’s waist and up, to grip his shoulders. His kisses are silk, and they open like the slippery bow on an expensive robe.

“You’re real, right?” Keith asks, kissing distractedly down to the hollow of Lance’s throat. He traces a circuit from his hair down his back to his hips, again and again, until the skin goes hot with friction.

“Definitely,” Lance breathes into his hair. “Here, I’ll show you.” He turns quick fingers on his holsters, shouldering out of them and letting them fall heavily to the floor. He drops a couple of stray knives down to join them, then works at Keith’s belt, letting it slither to the floor as well. Their hips align, better this time.

Keith gasps and pulls Lance closer, rocking together for a moment with no leverage and no intention.

“Please,” Lance begs, and Keith rolls them, toppling Lance into his bed, watching his dark hair spill out onto the mattress. He’s dunked in red light, absolutely swallowed and digested by it. Keith zips his suit open all the way to the waistband of his underwear, and then puts both of his hands inside, flat to Lance’s ribcage.

He arches into the pads of his hands like he’s being shocked back to life.

“What are we doing, here?“ Lance asks, belatedly, hands in Keith’s hair.

“Whatever you want,” Keith says quickly. “I want… whatever you want.”

Lance grabs sloppily at one of Keith’s hands, lifting it to his lips to be kissed. His mouth opens on his fingers, and his tongue is so slippery hot that a trap door opens in Keith’s head, and everything goes tumbling.

“I just want to feel—something good,” Lance says, against his fingers. “And so far, this is good.” Keith nods, unable to speak. “Could be better,” he continues meaningfully.

Keith pulls his own jacket and shirt off in one fluid motion, and when he looks down, Lance is wriggling out from his unzipped flight suit. There are new scars, though nearly invisible in the coloured light, and Lance is thin from malnutrition but stronger through the shoulders. He must have been training with a sword. Keith holds his hand for a moment, overcome.

“It’s a lot for you, huh?” Lance says, trying weakly to be funny, but Keith just nods.

He leans down to kiss generously over Lance’s chest, not shying away from the hair, the ticklish ribs, the tight brown nipples. He holds his warm, living waist, and pulls his mouth through the perfect topography of his body, feeling—out of his mind.

“Can I touch you?”

Lance looks skyward. “Jesus. Yes, obviously.”

Keith is deeply, painfully affected by this, and he knows Lance must feel the hard line of him pressed into his hip, because he keeps squirming up against him, testing for a reaction. Keith breathes raggedly through a couple of helpless grinds, leg tight between Lance’s thighs.

He’s strung so tight, so reactive. Keith could rub off against literally any part of him and it would be the best thing he’s ever done.

He yanks the suit down Lance’s thighs, rolling his underwear down with it, and then he has to stop, Lance’s legs strung together, naked from the thighs up, to kiss him again. Lance’s cock pulses, trapped against Keith’s stomach, and this kiss is formless, so much tongue, so rich and hot that Keith swallows convulsively.

His hands keep returning to Lance’s chest, the fast breaths, proof that this is a reality that they’re sharing.

“I want—“ he can’t even say it.

“Me too,” Lance says. Keith wraps his hand around Lance’s cock, and rides out the buck of his hips, savouring the lovely, hitching noise he makes. He strokes him tenderly, and Lance’s hand flies to join him, encouraging his uncertain grip into the right shape.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Lance pants, licking his own messy lips, canting into Keith’s hand.

Keith laughs, breathless. “It’s not exactly how I saw my day going either.”

Last night, in this bed, he dreamed about Lance’s silhouette against the cliffs of Imedemaa, and tonight he’s spread out in the same bed, a gauzy shadow come to life. He hitches his leg up, and the unexpected friction against Keith’s dick startles a gasp out of him.

This time, Lance laughs. “You’re so cute.”

He kisses Lance’s red, red mouth, and when he pulls back, it’s only gotten redder.

“Can I fuck you?” Keith asks bluntly, because he can’t focus on anything else.

“Okay, not cute,” Lance amends, wobbly. “Also, yes. Do you have like—lube and stuff?”

“Yeah,” Keith says easily, and when Lance squints at him, he says, “spent a lot of time looking and not touching.” And then, like Lance doesn’t already get it, he says, “I jerk off a lot.”

“I used to—since the Garrison,” Lance says, disjointed. “I tried not to think about you, but you were always there. Like, even fantasy-you had something to prove.”

“Fuck,” Keith says, eloquently.

He rolls Lance’s suit the rest of the way off, unfastening knee-guards and ankle holsters, popping his boots off. All of these little worn and torn markers of his life without him. When he’s naked, he goes loose, piled backwards on the bed, leaking onto his stomach.

“Hey,” he says, reaching down to stroke himself, eyes spilling over Keith’s body. “Come here.”

He goes, levering himself up onto his lap, and for a moment he watches Lance fuck his own fist, tracking Keith’s movement against him with glowing interest. When he starts breathing fast, noisy, mouth hitching open, Keith crushes his hand over Lance’s, and they teeter out on the cliff’s edge of pleasure together.

Finally, he moves back far enough to strip the rest of the way, dropping pants and shoes in with the rest of their clothes. He mouths at Lance's thigh, his wrist, the skin over his heart. They slide comfortably together, hip to hip, and for a moment, he forgets what he’s doing. He just uses his teeth wherever his mouth lands, and jerks their cocks together dry.

Lance moans into Keith’s mouth. There is nothing about this that feels possible.

He leans all over him to reach for the bottle of lube under his bed, their hearts banging wildly together, and then leans back, knocking Lance’s knees apart.

The warm, trusting look on Lance’s face is killing him. He always thought that if they ever reunited, Lance would never trust him again, after so long un-rescued. His throat aches. He drizzles lube over his hand, then smoothes it over Lance’s cock and down between his legs.

He fingers him open, leaning into the tension, sucking kisses into his inner thighs to distract them both from the newness of it. He presses in so relentlessly that Lance sobs, wading so deep into the feeling that his grasp on English starts to loosen.

“You can—I need—” Lance starts to say, and Keith nods jerkily, putting lube-damp hands on either side of Lance’s face and exchanging a sparkler of a kiss. He lets it burn through him before he gets up on his knees, tops of his legs grazing the bottom of Lance’s, watching Lance’s dark gaze as his cock skids wetly between his thighs.

He lines up, and it’s this blunt, impossible pressure that opens into—everything.

When he fucks inside for real, Lance throws an arm over his face, chest heaving. It’s such a blur, that first press, the whole red room wheeling around them. There’s a mutual agreement between their hips, propped together like a house of cards.

He rocks all the way forward into the perfect clench of his body, and Lance’s thighs spasm around his sides.

“This is really happening,” Keith says, pressing his sweaty forehead to Lance’s chest. He squeezes around his cock, where he’s speared in to the root now, and Keith’s mouth opens in blind, furious pleasure.

“Move, immediately. Move yesterday,” Lance says. He crosses his ankles and pulls Keith close,  impossibly deeper. He twitches inside of him, and then Lance grinds down, and it’s this unbelievable feedback loop of pleasuring and pleasured that gets him moving for real.

He’s clumsy at first, just chasing the full-body feeling of hilting in him, held deep and close, an extension of his body.

Lance makes so much excellent noise, rolling down to meet him, braid coming loose amongst Keith’s blankets when he squirms with over-stimulation.

“Don’t leave me,” Lance says, holding Keith still inside him.

“I won’t,” Keith promises, gasping through a ripple of sensation when Lance grinds down on his cock. “I won’t.”

Lance moves, deliberate, pushing him backwards until they’ve switched positions entirely. Keith looks up into his face, palms spread wide over his sides. Lance looks thunderstruck, dragging his hands through his own hair, trusting Keith to hold him steady as he starts to ride him. It’s slower this way, but more precise, and Lance is washed out with pleasure.

“Keith,” Lance keens. “You’re—it’s a lot.”

“Too much?” Keith asks tightly.

Lance shakes his head, rocking with lush, serious strokes now, hands flexing against Keith’s chest, nails nicking into his skin just enough to leave indents. Keith reaches up, pushing two fingers to the wet seam of Lance’s mouth, and he sucks them obediently inside. His eyes flutter closed, and his cock bobs, a bolt of pleasure that Keith can feel.

He remembers Lance, stretched over the back of a speeder, rolling with the thrum of its engine, balanced through every toss and turn over the loose, shifting landscape.

His mouth goes lax again, and he says, “please, Keith, baby—“

Keith thrusts up into the heat of him, pulling at his wrists so he collapses onto his chest and they can kiss again, Lance pulling at his lip with his teeth. They’re so caught up in making out that Keith’s dick pops free, and Lance reaches back without hesitation, sitting up and sinking hastily back down on him.

“Oh, fuck,” Keith breathes. “You’re so good at this.”

Lance flushes, pleased, and Keith curls a hand around his cock, feeling the sensation clatter through him again, forcing him tighter around Keith. He jerks him off, sloppy, too focused on the whole production of being ridden, the strong thighs around him, the strike home, over and over. Lance shakes his head as if to clear it.

“Are you—“

“So close,” Keith says hoarsely.

He twists his hand, artfully, tight near the head, and Lance shakes. He does it again, and he spills beautifully over Keith’s chest. He rides the pleasure out, working Keith so thoroughly that he pulses spectacularly close to his own orgasm.

“Keep going,” Lance begs, and Keith gathers him close.

“I could never—go back,” Keith whispers into his neck, barely coherent. “I could never have just part of you.”

“Come on, Red,” Lance says, and Keith comes instantly, stuttering, spilling over.

Lance smoothes his hair through it, then holds a kiss to his temple for a flickering little eternity. Keith rocks just a little inside him, and they both shiver with the nervy, hyper-focused sensation.

“Sorry,” he says, pulling out carefully, watching lance’s knees twitch up and fold together, now without him tucked between them. The bed is too small, but he spreads out beside him anyway, shoulder to sweaty shoulder. He snakes his hand down and curls it around Lance’s, smiling when he grips back tightly. “You can sleep if you want,” Keith says, eventually. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Lance yawns, nosing over Keith’s neck. “You’d better be. No early morning dalliances with hologram number 101.”

“Ha ha.”

“Thanks for looking for me,” Lance says, warm and forgiving.

Keith pulls their joined hands to his mouth. “Thanks for coming home.”

He wakes up in disorienting, humid blackness. Lance is back on the fire escape in his underwear, knee pulled to his chest, holster slung over one shoulder. He’s watching the never-ending action in the market below, and his body is eerily still, no bouncing knee, no bobbing head, no tapping on the window sill.

“Hey,” Keith says groggily. “You okay?”

Lance looks distractedly in his direction, jaw outlined sharply in neon, the rest of him in darkness. Keith hasn’t even seen him in proper light yet.

“I’m maybe freaking out a little bit.”

Keith works himself up onto his elbows, blinking. “Why?” he asks, coming properly awake. “Did I hurt you?”

He looks out at the street. “No,” he whispers.

He rolls out of bed, blanket slouched around his hips as he crosses to the window. “Yeah, I’m not buying it.”

“You’ve got me all figured out, huh?”

He shrugs, close enough now that he can see the disarray of Lance’s hair, the insomnia in his half-closed eyes. Keith smooths his knuckles over his pillow-lined cheek. “I can tell when you’re overthinking things.”

“That’s not really fair,” Lance says, looking up at him. He has that four AM madness in his face, when your problems are the horror movie monster that you can’t quite make out. “Because I can’t read you at all.”

Keith leans up against the window frame, taking one of Lance’s hands between both of his. “Good thing I told you how I feel.”

“But how do you even know you still want me?” Lance asks. “Do you know for sure? Because I’m different. I’m trying not to be, but I am.“

“I know,” Keith tries, but Lance pulls his hand away.

“I know you’ve been abandoned, too, I know you had to fight to survive way before I did, I know that, but—you—I don’t know. I lost something, out there. I’m not made for that kind of life. I've never had to rescue myself before, and I'm not sure I did a very good job.”

“I’m—“

“I know you’re sorry, Keith,” Lance says tiredly. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I just think… I don’t feel like a hero anymore.”

“You’re a paladin. That hasn’t changed,” Keith says fiercely.

“What if it has?” he asks. “What if you spent all this time falling for someone who doesn’t exist anymore?”

“If you think I’d just give up on you, you’re an idiot.”

A flicker of honey, in those mismatched eyes. “It’s so fucked up,” Lance says softly. “What time does to people.”

“I know,” Keith says. “I was gone too, remember? And no one else even felt it. I came back and it was like—I stepped out for groceries or something.”

“I felt it,” Lance says, hand to his heart. He looks hurt that Keith would think otherwise.

“Okay,” Keith says. “Okay, so you get it. Losing someone like that.”

“Of course I get it,” Lance snaps. “But I didn’t have a magic room where I could go when it hurt.”

Keith steps backwards, shoulder jamming painfully into the edge of the window. “That’s not fair.”

“Exactly,” Lance says.

“You don’t get to be mad at for me for the way I mourned you.”

“I wasn’t dead!” Lance says, nearly hysterical. “And you got all these versions of me, whenever you wanted, from when I was younger, and happier—“

“I would much rather have had the real you,” Keith says. “I would have done anything.“

“—and I got all the worst parts of me, all the time, and I didn’t have the luxury of just… ending the simulation and flying home. I had nobody else on the whole planet who I could talk to, or even look at.”

“Believe me, Lance, I get it.” They’re too similar. Neither of them trust a good feeling.

“I don’t want to know how this feels,” he says, shaking his head. “If I could be a hologram I would be."

“Don’t say that,” Keith says, shaken. “Please don’t say that.”

He looks vaguely chastised, and exhausted from hurting. “I’m just—I’m scared I’m never gonna be the same,” he says. “I woke up and I didn’t know where I was, and I had to hold a gun just to feel—I don’t know.” His hand goes to the dark leather of his holster, like one might check their hair for fly-aways.

“None of us are the same,” Keith says. “We’re fighting a war.” He crouches, and Lance’s gaze follows him down. “But Lance—you’re—I’m looking at you, and you’re still everything you’ve always been. You just have a few extra battle wounds. And you used to say you wanted a cool scar.”

Lance smiles, against his will. “I meant, like, something sexy and subtle. Not this—buttload of trauma.”

“Interesting choice of words,” he says, propping his chin on Lance’s knee and sliding his hands comfortingly up his thighs.

“You’re insufferable,” Lance says. “Like, worse than losing the eye.”

“Are you done having your breakdown?”

“Do you even realize how insensitive you’re being? Is that something you can recognize about yourself?”

“Some people call it brutal honesty,” Keith says.

Lance cards a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe I'm into you. You’re the opposite of a class act. What’s that called?”

“A dropout?”

Lance laughs, startled, and Keith hides his smile in his hip, hugging him around the waist.

“Thanks for talking this out with me. I know it’s not your strong suit,” Lance says, and Keith shrugs against him. “Call me crazy, but I think two years in a war zone has made my anxiety worse.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Keith says, with certainty.

“Maybe,” Lance says quietly. “I’m going to be with you, so. That’s pretty good.”

“Very good,” Keith agrees. He kisses his thigh softly, and asks, “can I show you something?”

He breaks his promise, and loads one last simulation.

Lance keeps close, hands on his holsters because, there could be a glitch! You die in the holodeck you die in real life? Honestly, it’s like you’ve never even seen Voyager season four.

This is his second favourite memory to revisit, the wide open ballroom by the canyon, the indigo sunset and frosted clouds interacting like dye bleeding through water. The hall is heavily ornamented, an arching stained glass cathedral that opens directly out into a scenic drop-off into icy darkness.

It’s as cold as a Northern Earth winter, but there are fires lit every few metres, swaths of pillows and low tables full of the best food he’s maybe ever had—cured meat, fried, spiced dough, and pastry with a filling that could almost pass for red bean, always piping hot.

They don’t join the party, but it’s crowded enough that they can avoid their paladin doppelgängers by sticking to the edges and keeping their heads down.

“This fucks,” Lance exclaims, scooping up a hot copper mug from a passing waiter.  He’s shivering a little in the artificial chill, but he’s drenched in cascading colour from the sunset through the tinted glass, and his love for this planet is palpable. “Hiraeth would be in my highlights reel too.”

“Can you imagine if we’d never gotten to come to places like this?” Keith asks, leaning on one of the colourful glass pillars keeping the whole cresting roof up. He’s thinking of his old shack in the desert, and a life kept in isolation and ignorance of everything beyond the stars.

“Is this part two of your ‘trust the journey’ speech?”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

“That’s because your brain is too tiny to store thoughts in,” he says, pressing two fingers to the centre of Keith’s forehead.

Keith looks up at his fingers, and then at him, unamused. “I can tell you’re feeling better because you’re reverting to teenaged Lance.”

“We’re literally walking through our memories. I reserve the right to revert.” He takes an absent-minded sip of his drink and smacks his lips, wide-eyed. “I can taste this. How can I taste this?”

And Keith missed the bickering, the warm flight of ideas, and he can’t fight the smile off his face. “Don’t think too much about it. Something to do with a replicator. Pidge told me, but I guess I couldn’t keep it in my tiny brain.”

Lance knocks shoulders with him, amused, but it slips away fast.

“Pidge,” he says softly, sipping his drink and looking out onto the velvet horizon. “I miss that little heathen.”

“Well, don’t look now, but,” Keith starts, holding Lance’s shoulders so he doesn’t whip around. “She’s talking to you, over by the platform.”

The whole balance of his face changes instantly. He breathes in a couple of times, quick, and makes himself look. 

“Oh man.”

Holo-Lance is laughing uproariously at something, probably the way Allura has finagled Pidge into these flowing wide-legged pants that make her look about three feet tall.

Hunk is lounging at the nearest fire with Coran, and they’re both holding crystallized desserts up to the light, scribbling intermittently on the data pad in Hunk’s lap. He likes to write down ingredients, get his hands on samples, and learn culinary histories; planets like Hiraeth were always smorgasbords of alien delicacies.

“Look at them. Look at my eyes. God, the ambassador was still alive, here.”

“Yeah. I’ve tipped him off a few times, even though I know it won’t do anything. Mostly it just scares people, though. When I tell them what they are. Or what’s coming.”

Lance hums, obviously bothered by the idea. Shiro and Allura are talking seriously to the ambassador, and Keith aches at the way Shiro crosses his arms, artificial hand tucked to his chest as if to hide it. He’s missed him, although he hasn’t been letting himself feel it.

“Where are you?” Lance asks, scanning the crowd.

“Right here,” Keith replies, indicating himself. “This is my fantasy. I’m not programming a rival Keith into the mix.”

“Are you telling me they just accept grizzled, twenty-two year old Keith like that’s absolutely normal? I guarantee you past-me would have a problem with that. A crisis, even.”

“They’re not really supposed to recognize anything out of the ordinary,” Keith reminds him.

“So I guess that rules out asking myself to dance.”

“Only if you want to freak him out.” He remembers racer Lance, crumpled in the sand, and he shudders.

“Will you do it for me?” Lance asks, quieter, watching his younger self with an opaque kind of sadness. It’s fascinating, the way he keeps applying confidence like cosmetics, and then in unexpected moments turning and showing Keith his bare face.

“I can do that,” Keith says gently. “If he'll have me."

Lance's mouth twitches knowingly. "He will."

"I'll be right back," Keith says, backing up into the swish of fur-lined ballgowns and sharp, smoky air, only letting go of Lance’s hand at the very end of his reach. 

He finds holo-Lance sitting with Hunk, fingers sticky with syrup, his hair clipped short and his eyes warm and even.

“Keith!” Hunk exclaims.

“Oh good, you’re here,” Lance says, turning in his seat. “Settle this debate. Would you rather be pushed into the ice-chasm or into one of these fire pits. There is a right answer.”

“Ice-chasm,” Keith says automatically.

“A-ha! I rest my case, you bitch,” Lance crows.

“But someone would help me out if I fell in a fire-pit!” Hunk says. “Who’s going to get me out of a canyon?”

“That’s not the point,” Lance argues. “I’m talking pure sensation.”

“I’ll show you a pure sensation,” Hunk grumbles. Lance laughs.

“You’re so un-intimidating it’s tragic. Keith, are you giving stink face lessons, or is it more of a natural talent?”

Keith rolls his eyes. “I’m not even going to bother answering that.”

“Good call,” Hunk says.

“It was an honest question,” Lance says.

“Uh-huh,” Keith says. Then, softer, “are you tired of dancing yet?” It’s ridiculous that he’s still nervous. He can feel the real Lance’s eyes on him, somewhere on the outskirts of the party, and he remembers him saying that’s impossible to the idea that he never told Keith how he felt.

This version of Lance takes a moment to catch up to what Keith has just said, and when he does, his shock spins deftly into delight. Hunk is looking back and forth between the two of them, badly concealing his excitement.

“Never,” Lance chirps. “You’re not offering, are you? I didn’t realize you were capable of moving in a non-aggressive way.”

“I can’t. My dancing is lethal,” he says seriously.

“Sexy lethal or accident-prone lethal?” Lance asks, accepting Keith’s hand and letting himself be swept up into the murmur of swaying bodies.

“Both.”

Lance grins, dropping a hand to Keith’s waist. “I guess I’d better lead, then.”

They pull together, one couple in a sea of more technically graceful, outwardly compatible partners. They fight with a lot more synchronicity, but it’s nice not to feel any stakes, just moving for the sake of moving. Keith puts his cheek to Lance’s hair, feeling him tense and relax, unused to his affection. This Lance hasn’t been thrown out into space, or pierced in the eye, or held down in Keith’s bed.

The longer they dance, the more he feels like he’s trying to catch light in a jar. It glitters, on the glass, but it can’t be held in a way that matters.

“Is this a ploy to share body heat?” holo-Lance asks coyly.

“You caught me,” Keith smiles.

“I don’t blame you,” Lance continues. “It’s fucking freezing. If I’m not careful, I’m going to fall in love with the first warm alien body I find.”

“Good thing you’re dancing with me then,” Keith says.

Lance inhales sharply, and they miss a couple of steps.

“Uh, Keith?” He pulls back, eyes searching. His hand wrings Keith’s waist. It would be so simple, to keep dancing with him. But he’s so out of his mind ecstatic at the idea of getting back to the real Lance that the thought can’t find purchase in his mind.

Instead, he thinks of reunions in the sun, the five part harmony of forming Voltron properly, Lance devouring the Earth with fresh eyes, and his sharpshooter back in the wings, aiming true every single time.

“I've got to go,” Keith says abruptly. “Thanks for the dance. I’ll find you later.”

He pulls free, and surprisingly, Lance lets him step out of the circle of his arms without complaint. He smiles, and tilts, and seems to know better than Keith, as always.

“I’ll hold you to that,” he calls.

Lance must end the simulation, because the spectacular views melt into nothing, and Keith’s world zeroes down to Lance’s unruly hair, the jolt of red from Keith’s jacket around his shoulders, and the look on his face like he’s just been given a gift he can’t accept.

“Looks like you really love me,” he says.

His mouth quirks. “Good eye.”

Lance jabs him in the chest with a warning finger. “One more eye joke and I’m out of here.”

Keith shrugs. “No problem. I’ll just head back to Hiraeth and find my dance partner.”

“Too soon,” Lance groans. “Emphatically too soon.”

Keith kisses his smile, and Lance returns it so ferociously that he thinks he might have missed a cue, somewhere, that meant they should have been closer, sooner.

“Watching you with him—me—that was so surreal,” Lance says, arms folding over Keith’s shoulders.

“Should I not have—“

“No, no. I needed to understand, I think. Plus, no one gets the opportunity to see themselves like I just saw us. It was—very sweet. Kinda hot. Weirdly not that jealousy-inducing.”

“It’s one of my favourite memories of you,” Keith says, whisper-soft, even though there’s no one to overhear how vulnerable he’s being. “I always took you racing on Imedemaa, dancing on Hireath, surfing in Cuba… FYI, Pidge has a lot of dirt on us at this point.”

Lance laughs quietly, pressing close into this sort of heartbreaking hug, cheek to cheek. His fingers dig warmly into Keith’s back.

“You were doing heavy reconnaissance the whole time, right?” he teases.

Keith blinks. “Oh, yeah.”

He feels Lance smile into his hair, then pull away. “I’m glad you showed me, anyway. It’s kind of tragic that you had access to a holodeck and this is what you used it for. I’m honestly not sure if I mean that in a good way or not.”

“You do,” Keith assures him.

“I do,” Lance agrees. “God help me.”

They leave the simulator for the last time together.

Lance holds the door for Keith, and they walk out into the mild Seachmall morning.

The streets are empty. The sun is up, a bloated red star that looks angry to have been rolled out into the sky. The light displays have mostly been disconnected, or they’re washed out in the glare of the real sunshine.

They wander through the strange, silent city. Keith gathered his meagre belongings before they left, so they walk directly for Keith’s cruiser, leaving Lance’s stolen galra shuttle buried in the bush where he left it, and his bike parked in the lot next to Keith’s apartment block.

Lance insists on piloting, so Keith sits behind him, watching the sun rim his hair in gold when they rise into the atmosphere.

“Rusty?” Keith asks, as heat shakes around the sleek body of the ship.

“Never,” Lance replies calmly, not bothering to raise his voice over the noise. His posture is sure, and he strokes a thumb soothingly over the steering wheel as they climb dizzily into the stars.

They swoop up and away from Seachmall, and when Keith glances back at its dusty surface, it is utterly unremarkable.

Later, Hunk will see Lance and drop his toolkit, crunching across screwdriver heads and pliers to pull him into a mad, ecstatic embrace. They will sway together for whole minutes, pale with relief. Pidge will seem small like she never does, wrapping herself bandage-tight around them both.

After that, they’ll wake Allura, and she will swear she’s dreaming until Lance spins her around, nightdress flying. His hand in hers will turn into a hug that drags them both to the floor. When Coran finds them, the wild, slippery cadence of his excitement will break into a centuries-old prayer of thanks.

Shiro will be called home from a mission, and when he hears Lance laugh into the communicator, a long, hard fever will break. The clarity of his joy will feel obvious, steadfast as a guiding star.

For now though, Lance revs the engine, pulling faster, faster, out into the shiny, lacquered surface of never-ending space. He whoops, and says,

“Are you seeing this Keith?” There’s a pale gash in the darkness, the fine edge of a distant galaxy, shimmering like a wedding band. Lance grins back at him. “This is real.”