live for the fight (when it's all that you got) - Yuu_chi (2024)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Keith is good at his job. Great at it. Legendary, even.

He’s been employee of the month every month since 1980 and his record is spotless. He’s never f*cked up anything that couldn’t immediately be fixed and he treats each and every case that makes it to his desk with the same amount of devotion. He doesn’t remember the last time he took time off but he thinks it was probably sometime before VHS fell out of popular use.

Keith deserves nice things. Maybe a little bit of respect. Some recognition for all his hard work at the very least.

Instead, he thinks as he slams open the door to Allura’s office, he gets this.

“Keith,” Allura says sweetly, unflustered by his entrance and hands folded neatly in front of her. “How can I help you?”

“No,” Keith says, and slams the thick manila folder he’s carrying down on her desk. “No, absolutely not.”

Allura quirks a brow and flicks the cover open with one delicate finger. She pauses. “Ah.”

“Yes,” Keith grits out. “Ah.”

“Close the door, please,” Allura says.

Out in the hallway there’s a distressed fluttering noise. Keith ignores it.

“Why?” He hisses.

“Why do I want you to close the door?” Allura asks. “Because you’re scaring the interns.”

Keith’s palm hits the folder as he leans over the desk to glare her eye to eye. “Why is Lance McClain’s folder on my desk?”

Allura sighs, getting to her feet and crossing the room to shut the door.

“Lance’s folder is on your desk because you’re his new guardian. I thought that much was obvious.”

“But why?” Keith presses. “Did I do something wrong? Have I upset you somehow? Been unsatisfactory in my performance?”

“God no, Keith. That’s not it at all.” Allura sinks back into her chair, but she seems more tired than amused now.

“Then why are you punishing me?” Keith asks, baffled.

“It’s not a punishment. It’s a promotion.”

Keith has fuzzy memories of getting promotions when he was alive. They usually tended to include a raise and less of the sh*tty work. He glances dubiously down at the folder. “This doesn’t feel much like a promotion.”

“Look, Keith,” Allura says, reaching out to press the palm of her hand against the back of his. “This case has been bouncing from guardian to guardian for pretty much as long as this kid has been alive. He’s a mess. Nobody knows what to do with him.”

“I’m aware of that,” Keith says, dryly, although his anger is fading a little beneath Allura’s calm, more a bubble of indignation now. “Did you think that might be why I don’t want him on my caseload?”

“Oh, he’s not that bad.”

Keith narrows his eyes. Abruptly he pulls away from Allura’s comforting grip and flips open the folder.

“June, 1999. Locked himself in a cupboard. Was stuck there for three hours before his guardian could get his family to check on him.”

“He was a toddler, it happens -.”

“- August, 1999. Got into the freezer lacking adult supervision and ate an entire carton of strawberry ice cream. Of which he was allergic to. Nothing responding guardian could do. Wound up in hospital.”

“Human children do tend to -.”

“- January, 2001. Knocked an entire shelf of televisions over while with his mother at an electronics store. Guardian managed to convince the shop owner not charge them, but Lance and his family were still permanently barred from the store.”

“Okay, yes -.”

Keith ignores her again, ruffling through the pages some years.

“November, 2007. Fell off the bow of a boat. Guardian managed to limit injuries to non-permanent, but barely.”

“Keith -.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Oh, this is a good one. September, 2008. Tried to ask a classmate to a school function only to somehow accidentally set off the emergency fire alarm. The whole school had to be evacuated. The guardian managed to keep the incident off the security cameras but the girl turned him in. Wasn’t enough proof to charge his family with the false alarm fee, but it did a good job of setting the school headmaster against him for the rest of his stay there.” Keith taps his finger against the incident. “Funny. That headmaster later winds up being a contributing factor in an event in July of -.”

“What is your point, Keith?” Allura sighs.

Keith scowls and shuts the folder venomously. “My point is that this kid is a curse and I don’t want his name on my list.”

“Well, tough luck. I’ve tried being reasonable here, but I didn’t give you the case as your friend, I gave it to you as your boss.” The look she gives him is half exasperation and half professional disdain.

Keith shuts his mouth but his lips curl up, grimacing.

Allura stares him down for a moment. Keith stares back mutinously and does his bestto radiate betrayal and anger. Allura’s eyes do not soften.

“Keith,” she says, “you’re the best guardian here. The best guardian we’ve had in a long, long time. If you can’t turn this kid’s luck around, then there’s nothing for him.”

Well, when put like that Keith can sort of understand how Lance wound up his problem.

He was good at his job. Great at it. Legendary.

“Fine,” he says, like there was any chance he could actually refuse her without winding up on clerical duty for the next decade. He snatches the folder up from the desk with as much dignity as can muster. “But if this ruins things for me I’m giving you lousy feedback for the employer review.”

He storms out of the office. An intern hiding by a wall who is easily twice his size flinches away from him as he passes and nobody in the corridor meets his eyes.

Keith tries to pretend that means it’s a victory.

.

The thing about being a guardian angel is that nine times out of ten it’s just plain f*cking boring.

Over the years humans have done a good job making it seem like some great exciting endeavor. Mostly what it involves is this;

Human woke up and ate breakfast. They left the toaster on as they were leaving the house. Relocated their keys beside it so they would remember to turn it off.

Human got coffee on the way to work. Distracted barista so coffee would cool down enough not to scald.

Human was called on in class and didn’t have the answer. Gently prompted the bell to ring three minutes early.

Human slipped on a patch of ice on the way home. Let them fall on their ass because I’m bored and they deserve it.

Keith may have been guilty of that last one a time or two which is, all things considered, technically an infringement on his duties as a guardian, but he’d long argued that you couldn’t just turn a human’s luck around completely without it being suspicious.

Still, at the end of the day Keith is good at his job. Some days he even manages to like it.

Guarding Lance McClain though? It’s enough to make Keith believe in hell.

“No,” he says, on day three of his new assignment. “No, that curry has been in your fridge since Sunday. You are absolutely not ingesting that.”

Lance hums obliviously under his breath as the microwave dings. Keith watches in horror as it opens and Lance reaches for what, at one point, was probably a fairly nice butter chicken dish but now seem to be a distant relative of salmonella.

“Did you never hear the peanut song as a child? It was a very good cautionary tale against food poisoning.”

Lance lifts the bowl up to sniff. Keith experiences a momentary flare of hope.

“Smells fine to me,” Lance declares cheerfully, and is going for a spoonful before Keith can so much as blink.

Lacking other options, he reaches out and touches Lance’s hand. A sharp spark jumps between them and Lance swears, hand opening on instinct and dropping the bowl.

It hits the bench on the way down, splattering on Lance’s shirt and his jeans and his bare feet when it finally hits the ground. Keith is very not sorry.

“sh*t! Are you kidding me right now?” Lance hisses, shaking his hand out vigorously. “What is it with these electric shocks lately?”

“Maybe if you didn’t have the common sense of a piece of roadkill I wouldn’t have to resort to the shock collar treatment,” Keith huffs, and pulls out his clipboard to make another note.

Human continues to defy basic logic of reasoning. Saved him from food poisoning. Becoming increasingly endeared to the idea of letting him consume whatever he pleases.

He glances up at Lance who is still flexing his shocked hand and wrinkling his nose at the floor like he plans to leave it there to congeal.

“No,” Keith says, for what feels like the hundredth time this week.

“I could leave this for Pidge to clean up,” Lance muses. “Tell them it was like that when I got home.”

“No,” Keith says again, more emphatically this time. He vanishes his clipboard. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to guard somebody against murder? The amount of paperwork it generates?”

Lance glances at Keith then and Keith freezes only to realize that Lance isn’t looking at him - of course he’s not looking at him - just through him to the clock on the stove.

Keith doesn’t have a heart, strictly speaking, but he remembers being human well enough to know that the ice cold wash of dread-relief means Lance came damn near to giving him a stroke.

“Two hours,” Lance says, and it takes Keith a moment to realize he means until Pidge gets home. Lance shrugs and turns around to leave.

“The longer you leave it the more annoying it’s going to be to clean,” Keith calls, trailing after him.

Lance continues to ignore him, stripping out of his shirt as he walks.

“If you slip over and break your neck in it, I’m just going to let it happen,” Keith warns, but Lance is too busy kicking his jeans off at the bathroom door to listen to him, obviously. “I’ve seen broken necks. It’s not a good way to go. You deserve something better than that. Like a one-way trip in a trash compactor.”

Lance’s hands sink to the waistband of his briefs. Keith doesn’t turn around even though the tips of his ears feel too hot because once a guardian tried to give Lance privacy and he nearly brained himself in the shower.

Keith is working on maintaining a perfect record. He really doesn’t want to tell Allura that the reason Lance’s folder winds up back on her desk with a big red X through it is because Keith was embarrassed by a bit of naked skin.

(he keeps his eyes firmly on Lance’s belly button or higher though because whether Lance knows he exists or not, staring at a stranger’s dick is just no.)

“Do you know I once stopped a world leader from committing government embezzlement?” Keith asks, going on as if he’d never stopped talking. Lance pads across the bathroom to turn on the shower. “I bet you didn’t. That’s the kind of track record I have. And yet here I am trying to keep you from putting food you find under the sofa in your mouth or chugging six cans of Red Bull on a dare.”

(that had happened on Monday; Keith hadn’t managed to stop him but he’d managed to make him puke it all up. It’d almost been better, really, because Lance really did deserve at least a fraction of the suffering he was putting Keith through.)

Lance whistles under his breath as he reaches for the hot water tap. It snaps off in his hand.

“Huh,” Lance says.

“Oh my god,” says Keith.

.

On Thursday Lance does not look both ways before crossing the road and the only thing Keith can do to stop him from making good friends with the oncoming traffic is grab hold of his wrist so the sudden shock jerks him to a standstill.

(it works but Lance spends the rest of the day rubbing at his skin where Keith may have left slight red marks and frowning. This is why Keith doesn’t like to touch his charges.)

Friday morning dawns with Lance about to stub his foot on a door. It would have been funny, but Keith had foreseen that it’d f*cking break his toe and had to intervene by slamming the door shut on Lance’s foot as a whole. It had resulted in an unpleasant bruise on his ankle and Lance cursing up a blue streak loud enough to wake Pidge, but he’d avoided the ER at least.

Nothing much happens over the weekend and Keith foolishly lowers his guard, just a little.

Monday Lance sets his kitchen on fire. Keith manages to get the fire out with minimal damage but it’s exhausting and irritating and he’s honestly running out of energy to magically fix Lance’s problems.

“I need permission to do something drastic,” he says to Allura two days after Lance’s dryer somehow shorts out and burns all of his underwear.

Allura raises one perfect brow at him. “To do what?”

“Something drastic,” Keith repeats grimly and does not elaborate.

Allura considers him for a second and then considers Lance’s open file on her desk. It’s gained at least a pound since she handed it to Keith. “Alright,” she says. “Permission granted.”

“Thank you,” Keith says fervently.

.

Keith appears in Lance’s room without any warning whatsoever. He hasn’t much energy left to spare on dramatics at this point, so he’s relying mostly on the surprise to achieve the appropriate amount of awe.

“Holy sh*t!” Lance shrieks as Keith pops into being a foot from his bed. Lance falls flat on his ass. It’s very gratifying.

“My name is Keith. I am your guardian angel,” Keith says, drawing his shoulders up high. The shadows paint large wings upon the wall behind his back. “And I am here to tell you to stop being such a f*cking trainwreck.”

“Oh my god,” Lance wheezes.

“Exactly. God is sick of your bullsh*t and so am I. Get it together, man. I haven’t done this much paperwork since I was an intern.”

Lance gapes at him.

“And for f*ck’s sake, stop eating things you find at the back of your fridge. You don’t know what they are, I don’t know what they are, but they’re definitely a bad idea. That’s how people die Lance, and I’d never be able to face my boss if I lost you to some expired milk. So just - stop. Stop being a moron. Do you understand?”

Lance whimpers.

“I’m glad we had this talk,” Keith says and vanishes.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

He’s not expecting much after that, really. Maybe for Lance to be to be a little more careful with himself and a lot more wary of his mental health. But he feels better for it. Just a bit.

When it comes to this sort of thing it’s usually all or nothing - a total breakdown or absolute repression.

He’s been an angel awhile at this point. He knows his way around the job.

Instead, Lance spends two days looking jumpy and unnerved, like Keith may be watching his every move - Keith is, of course, but Lance has no way to prove that - but not quite looking on the threshold of an imminent breakdown.

On day three Lance slinks into his room after an afternoon of jumping at every shadow on campus, Keith on his heels and a little unfairly entertained at Lance’s expense, and takes the time to carefully lock his door.

He shuffles to the middle of his room and stands there, wringing his hands nervously and staring into the space three inches to Keith’s left. Keith, ever a little bit of an asshole, throws an amused glance at the nothing where Lance is looking.

“Okay,” Lance says, and Keith thinks Lance is talking himself for a second, until Lance says, “Keith?”

Keith freezes, arms folded across his chest.

Lance presses on. “Your name is Keith, yeah?” He wrinkles his nose. “God, what kind of name is Keith for an angel?”

“I perfectly reasonable one,” Keith snaps, appearing by Lance’s side, and Lance squawks and elbows him in the gut.

The indignation hurts worse than the hit but the hit is still pretty bad.

“Why are your elbows so pointy?” Keith hisses as he leans forward in agony, both arms wrapped around his middle.

“I don’t know - why do have to do that?” Lance cries, hands fluttering about Keith’s shoulders like he wants to help but doesn’t want to risk touching him. “Holy sh*t, I can’t believe I just beat up an angel, I’m going to hell, I’m going to hell.”

Keith’s wounded pride stings. “You didn’t ‘beat me up’.”

Lance pauses, looking him up and down dubiously. “You look like you’re in a lot of pain, dude.”

Keith makes an effort to straighten up, and manages to say, only slightly breathless, “because your elbows are sharp.”

“You’re the one who appeared out of nowhere! Don’t just do that to a guy.”

“You’re the one who called me,” Keith shoots back, and he can’t help but suddenly feel like a toddler tantruming with another child over nothing. Lance opens his mouth but Keith holds up a hand to stop him. “Enough, whatever. What do you want?”

“What do I want?” Lance asks incredulously. He flaps a hand at Keith; nothing specific, just his general existence. “I want to - I just - you’re an angel.”

“Yes,” Keith says, patiently.

“An angel.”

“Well, a guardian angel. That’s a very specific subset.”

Lance looks slightly faint. “There are angels other than you out there?”

Keith huffs. “Of course there are other angels out there. Entirely different branches of them, in fact. Do I look like I can guard your whole species by myself? It’s exhausting enough just trying to guard you.”

Lance looks at him silently for a moment, squinting hard. “Okay,” he announces, apropos of nothing, and sits down on the bed like all his strings have been cut. “Okay, angels are real. That’s - that’s something, I guess.”

Keith frowns. “You did call for me.”

“I wasn’t thinking you’d actually come,” Lance stresses, running a distracted hand through his hair. “I figured I’d probably imagined it. That it was all that Red Bull from the other day finally kicking in or something.”

“Yes,” Keith sighs. “I’m well aware of your Red Bull problem.”

“And then you actually just appeared.” He flails at Keith again. “I just - I need a minute here to restructure my whole world.”

Keith watches with detached amusem*nt as Lance coaches himself through a handful of breathes. “I could pretend to leave and you could pretend I never come?” He offers.

“No, please don’t do that,” Lance says quickly. “Then I’ll really be convinced I’m going crazy.”

Keith smiles, just a little. After the most stressful week of his career there’s some joy to be taken in seeing Lance so unsettled and off kilter because of him.

Lance rubs a hand across his face one last time and squints back up at Keith. “So. You really are an angel then. My guardian angel.”

“Afraid so.” Keith grimaces. “Believe me, it’s been no joy for me either.”

“No joy for you?” Lance repeats. “Do you know how many times I nearly died this week? I still can’t feel my left foot.”

“And you’re welcome for that,” Keith snaps, folding his arms across his chest as he bristles defensively. “It was better than the broken toe you were trying for.”

“And where were you when my kitchen caught on fire?” Lance asks, really going now. “Or when my dryer shorted out?”

“Right there trying to keep the damage to a minimum,” Keith says furiously. “Do you have any idea the kind of disaster you’re slotted for? Just trying to see into your future hurts,okay. It’s all I can to keep you from burning down your apartment or getting crushed under a falling piano.”

Lance shakes his head dismissively, and Keith is really missing those first few moments where Lance had been terrified of him. He dearly wants to go back to that. This disrespect is grating considering the kind of sacrifices Keith is making to keep Lance’s heart beating.

“No offence,” Lance says, with the kind of tone that says he means all the offence, “but I think you’re absolutely terrible at your job.”

“Terrible?” Keith repeats, dumbstruck. “Terrible? Do you have any idea the amount of bad luck contained in that body of yours? I have never met somebody as doomed to imminent disaster as you. I don’t know who you pissed off, but you’re cursed.”

“I’m cursed?” Lance shoots to his feet, patting himself down frantically like he might find something small and foul hiding in his pockets.

Keith reaches out to grab him about the wrists. “Not literally, you dumbass.”

“You just said –.”

“And angels have been known to employ sarcasm from time to time,” Keith sighs. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you’re defying the laws of the universe here and it’s taking everything we have to keep you breathing.”

Lance looks suspicious but allows Keith to set his arms back down by his side. “So I’m not cursed?”

“Probably not,” Keith says, soothingly. “If curses are real, I’ve never heard of them, and believe me, I’ve been around long enough to know.”

“Well, two minutes ago I didn’t know angels were real either so you’re gonna have to cut me some slack if I’m a little overly cautious for a while.”

“And I will,” Keith says, patiently as he can manage. “Just – be more careful. You’re enabling your bad luck, you know.”

“Well, now that I know the universe apparently has a hit out on me, I’ll try,” Lance promises, but he still sounds defensive and weirded out. He narrows his eyes at Keith. “You’re still sticking around, right?”

“Of course,” Keith frowns. “I just told you it’s my job to guarantee you make it past thirty.”

“And you’re job is, what? Following me around twenty-four-seven to make sure I don’t put a fork in a wall socket or something?”

“Pretty much,” Keith admits.

Lance makes a low, disgusted noise. “No offence, but that’s hella creepy.”

“I’m sorry, would you like to be left to fend off your sh*tty luck on your own?”

“No. No.” Lance rubs self-consciously at his bare arms. “An angel of the Lord comes down to tell me I’m on death’s watch list, who am I to argue? Just – can you do it like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like, you know, here.”

Keith clicks. “Oh,” he says, surprised. He looks down at himself. “You mean visible to you?”

“It’s just slightly less weird if I can see the person following me around all the time,” Lance confesses. His eyes rake up and down Keith; from the mess of his dark hair to the tips of his scuffed shoes. He makes a small, contemplative noise.

“What?” Keith asks.

“No, no. It’s nothing just…You’re not exactly what I thought an angel would look like.” He peers around Keith, looking behind him. “I mean; you don’t even have -.”

“Wings?” Keith supplies with a sharp grin.

“You did the other night,” Lance says defensively.

“No, I just thought if you thought I did you might be more likely to listen.”

Lance blinks, mouth dropping open in an offended O. “You – you faked f*cking wings so I’d be more scared of you?”

Keith shrugs, unashamed. “It worked, so I’m having a hard time regretting it. Besides, historically you humans have very specific ideas about angels. It’s easier to play into that sometimes if we really want your attention.”

“Well, you have it now,” Lance says, and then under his breath, “I can’t believe I’m being stalked by an angel.”

“Guarded by an angel,” Keith corrects sharply. “And it’s a great honour. You might treat is as such.”

“Yeah, yeah buddy, so long as you’re keeping my ass alive it’s all the same, isn’t it?”

Keith opens his mouth, closes it, speechless. After a moment he manages to say, “you know, out of all the people I’ve guarded over the years, you are by far my least favourite.”

“Excuse the f*ck out of you, I think I’m taking this rather well considering,” Lance huffs, getting to his feet and crowding into Keith’s space. He pokes him in the chest. “And you wouldn’t have been my first choice for a guardian angel either, pal.”

Keith bats Lance’s hand away and takes a step back, a little unnerved. Lance had certainly gotten over his instinctual respect quickly. “Your feelings are unfortunate but unimportant. We’re stuck with each other, I’m afraid.”

“There’s no way I could trade you in for a replacement, then?” Lance pushes. He squints, as if something has just occurred to him. “Are you covered by warranty or something? Is there somebody I can talk to? Report a faulty product? Dissatisfaction with my purchase?”

“I’m an angel not a television,” Keith says, almost wordless in his fury. “You’re assigned to me not the other way around. I’m - I’m a higher being than you, you can’t just -.”

Lance sighs. “Heaven really needs to work on its customer service.”

“Every other guardian who has ever worked your case has given you back to our boss and asked to be reassigned,” Keith snaps. “You’re something of a legend in my department. Nobody wants you.”

Lance blinks and pulls back a little at that. Keith’s stomach bottoms out and he has the realization that he’s said something wrong although he can’t pinpoint what.

It’s been too long since he’s been human and he has forgotten over the years the little intricacies that make up mortal thought processes. They niggle at him from time to time, like now, but trying to remember is like trying to catch clouds between your fingers.

“Oh,” Lance says in a small voice, and Keith feels a little sorry and a little sick and still doesn’t know why. Lance rallies though, smile back on his face and head held high, brushing aside the moment with a feigned disdain. “I mean, whatever. You guys are lucky to have me.”

Keith shoots back, still off kilter, “we’re not lucky to have you, that’s the whole point of this.”

“Pfft.” Lance waves that away and asks instead, “so? Will you do the whole visible thing?”

Keith had almost forgotten about that. He looks around Lance’s room uncertainly. “I suppose I can stay in physical form, if it’d make you more comfortable?”

“Yes,” Lance says firmly. “Yes it would. I can’t believe you don't understand why being followed around by somebody who’s invisible might be a little disconcerting.”

“It’s for your own safety,” Keith reminds him and Lance snorts.

“Yeah, that’s usually what Pidge says before they handcuff me somewhere too.”

“They’re probably right,” Keith says, having seen the way Lance gets into his roommate’s electronics. “And if you think I won’t handcuff you somewhere if I think it’ll stop you from doing something dumb, I have some news for you. Easier than shocking you at least.”

“That was you?” Lance asks incredulously. “All this time I just thought I was super attractive to static or something!”

Keith shrugs. “It’s hard to interact with human when you’re existing on different planes.”

Lance looks him over suspiciously. “Can you still do it now?”

“You know what, I don’t actually know,” Keith says thoughtfully and reaches out to touch Lance’s hand. He focuses on the tiny spark of annoyance that’s been slowly burning in his gut. It takes more effort like this, but he can feel it crackle out along his skin.

“f*ck!” Lance shrieks, pulling away from Keith so quickly that he stumbles and falls on his damn ass. Again. It’s no less amusing the second time.

“Huh,” Keith says, looking at his fingertips. “Guess so.”

“You guess so?” Lance hisses, cradling his hand to his chest and looking at Keith with betrayal. He makes no move to get up off the floor. “How can you not know?”

“I’ve never done this before,” Keith says.

“Done what?”

“This.” Keith waves between them. “Shown myself to a human. I’ve - I’ve taken physical form a few times, but never to… interact.” He holds out a hand to Lance and Lance frowns at him. He wiggles his fingers. “I’m not going to shock you.”

Lance still hesitates suspiciously. “Why, because it’s beneath you?”

Keith snorts. “No, because it takes much more energy to do is the form and I’d rather save it for when you really need it.” He waggles his fingers again and raises a brow. “I’d understand if you’re scared of me now,” he adds, maybe a little tauntingly. “All things considered, you probably should be.”

Lance’s frown turns mutinous and he all but yanks Keith’s hand from his wrist in his haste to take it. His grip is so fierce Keith is taken off guard for a moment. Lance’s skin is very warm, and the fingers that rest on the back of Keith’s hand are surprisingly rough. He’d forgotten, again, just how soft and fragile humans really are.

He pulls Lance to his feet.

“Huh,” Lance says in surprise as he lets go of Keith’s hand.

“What?” Keith says, too quickly maybe.

Lance tilts his head and that thoughtful look is back. Without asking he reaches for Keith’s hand again and Keith is so surprised he lets him.

Lance squeezes his palm curiously. “Yeah,” he says. “Your hands feel just like anybody else's. I don’t know why, but it’s sort of surprising.” And then he looks up at Keith and smiles. It’s sort of challenging, definitely not nice in any sense of the word, but it’s there. “Guess you’re not really all that different from us humans after all, huh Feathers?”

Keith, lacking anything else, says, “Feathers is not an endearing nickname and if you use it again I’m going smite you.”

Lance laughs and drops his hand again. “I’m pretty sure that’s how you get fired in your line of work.”

“If only,” Keith whispers under his breath.

Lance sighs and dusts his hands off on his jeans like he may have picked something up off of Keith. “Come on then, I better go think of a way to explain to Pidge why I’ve suddenly got a completely stranger stalking me.”

Keith watches as Lance turns to leave the room, trails after him with his hands in his pockets and shoulders up below his ears. As Lance reaches for the doorknob Keith has a flash of premonition; a small little shiver up his spine.

“Lance, hold on -.”

The doorknob snaps off in Lance’s hand with a loud crack. Lance looks at it dumbly and then back to Keith. “Thanks for the heads up, Keith. You’re a real asset to this household.”

“If you’d just listen when I talk to you,” Keith hisses, and shoves Lance aside. He places his palm flat to the door. The lock clicks and the door unlatches.

“I was listening,” Lance snaps, but he seems much more focused on the door. He doesn’t look unnerved nor impressed; just suddenly wary with a pinch between his eyes.

Despite himself, Keith feels pleased. “Something wrong, Lance?”

Lance’s nose crumples. “Nothing’s wrong,” he huffs, and shoulders past Keith and out the door. Keith realizes just a second too late what he’s about to do.

“Lance -.”

Lance slams the door. Not hard, all things considered, but hard enough for a luckless man. Something creaks andthen cracks and the door pops off one of the hinges, hanging sadly in the frame.

“For the love of God,” Keith says.

“Can you even say that?” Lance wanders aloud. “Isn’t that like, bad mouthing your boss or something? And you know what? It seem like you being here is doing absolutely nothing for me. Either you’re terrible at your job or I’m beyond help.”

“Yeah,” Keith says tightly from between his teeth “I’m starting to think that too.”

Chapter 3

Chapter Text

“So,” Allura says that night when Keith swings by her office while Lance is asleep, “when you asked for permission to do something drastic, I didn’t think you were using it as a synonym for stupid.”

“You gave me permission,” Keith says defensively, taking care to close the door behind him so as not to ruffle the feathers of the interns. Allura looks unimpressed as he sinks into the chair across from her desk. “And stupid is relative, anyway.”

“It’s a bad idea,” Allura says firmly. “A hilariously bad idea.” Keith opens his mouth but Allura holds up a hand and talks over him. “I am not revoking my permission for it though, so calm down.”

Keith lets out a breath. “Thank you.”

Allura’s lips twitch. “Don’t take that as approval. You know my feelings on human interaction.”

Keith slumps a little lower in the seat, scowling. “I know.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Allura says as she turns her back to start rifling through paper on her desk, a clear dismissal if Keith has ever seen one.

“Yeah,” Keith mutters under his breath as he gets back to his feet, “me too.”

.

When Keith returns Lance isn’t in his room. Unalarmed, he follows the trail of his presence out through the apartment and down the hall, casting a curious glance at Pidge’s room as he bypasses it.

“Lance,” he says as he pushes open the bathroom door. “I see you’re awake –.”

Lance cuts him off with a high pitched squeal and Keith winces back on impulse. “What are you doing?” Lance squeaks, one hand tight on the towel on his waist and the other wrapped around his chest.

“Supervising you?” Keith asks, baffled.

“You – you can’t just come in here when I’m naked,” Lance hisses. He’s red from somewhere above his bellybutton to the tips of his ears. It’s not a bad colour on him, Keith notices abstractly. “Where did you even go? I woke up and thought you’d f*cked off for good or something!”

Keith ignores that and folds his arms. “If I leave you alone in a small, slippery cubicle you’ll be dead before I manage to turn my back.”

“I’ve managed showers my whole life without cracking my head on the tiles!” Lancesnaps, indignant.

“You say that, but just the other dayyou took the damn hot water knob off and -.”

“What do you mean the other day? Were you watching me shower while you were invisible?”

Keith cringes again and presses his hands to his ears. “Wow, I did not know your voice could get that high. And I wasn’t watching you shower, I was just –.”

“Out,” Lance says, and before Keith can so much as blink Lance is shoving him to the door, hands hard on his back. “I understand that we’ve got something of a cultural gap to work through, but you are not staying in the bathroom while I shower.”

“I don’t know if that –.”

“Out,” Lance demands as Keith’s feet hit the hallway carpet. The door slams in his face. He stares at it, bemused.

“I’m a lot more help to you in there than I am out here,” Keith calls.

“I can’t hear you,” Lance shouts, and the shower rattles to life.

Keith sighs and leans back against the wall, preparing for a wait.

Down the hall a door cracks open and Keith turns just in time to see Pidge’s head duck out, bleary eyed and glasses askew. They stare blankly at each other.

“Who,” Pidge says, “the f*ck are you?”

“I –.” Keith starts to say, only to be cut off by an unpleasant feeling in his gut. A half a second later there came a loud squeak like somebody losing their footing on a slippery surface and a resounding crash.

“I’m okay,” Lance calls out, in the voice of somebody who does not sound okay.

“Lance?” Keith calls back, eyes still on Pidge.

Another crash and Keith winces.

“Still okay,” Lance shouts.

Pidge is still staring at Keith, one brow raised and hair a mess.

“Um,” Keith says. “Hi. I’m a friend of Lance’s.”

Pidge’s brow rises higher. Theirgaze flicks to the bathroom door. Keith can recognize, objectively, that it may be a little weird to see a stranger lingering outside while your roommate is having a shower.

“I can see that,” Pidge says. They sigh and step out, shutting their door behind them. They adjust their glasses. It really shouldn’t seem as menacing as it is. “Come on, I’ll get you some coffee or something. You don’t need to wait out here.”

Keith hesitates for a moment but Pidge is looking at him expectantly and he can’t think of a way to maintain his guard that isn’t immediately suspicious. Besides, Lance has started whistling loudly so Keith supposes whatever fall he’d had couldn’t have been too bad.

“Alright,” he says, and then, a little awkwardly, “thanks.”

Pidge smiles at him but it feels unnecessarily predatory. “Come on then,” they say, and lead the way to the kitchen.

As Keith follows he cannot help but feel Pidge is leading him someplace he won’t return from.

.

“Morning,” Lance says ten tense, awkward minutes later as he swishes into the kitchen, hair damp and voice a little too cheerful to be genuine.

Pidge is sitting at the table, Keith across from them. While Pidge is on theirsecond cup of coffee, Keith has silently nursed his first, suffering through small, disgusting sips to be polite.

During Lance’s shower Pidge hadn’t asked a thing, just chatting at him pleasantly about nothing in particular. It had been more unnerving than an inquisition would have been.

“Hey,” Pidge says. “I’ve met your friend.”

“Yeah,” Lance says as he busies himself pouring coffee. “This is Keith. He’s, um – we share a class. He crashed here last night.”

“I didn’t even hear you guys come in,” Pidge says.

“We were quiet,” Lance assures them as he plunks down in the seat next to Keith.

Pidge hums thoughtfully, raising their coffee mug. The look they give Keith over the rim is unreadable. “So you’re an engineering student?”

And there it is. Keith’s off kilter from Pidge’s bizarre friendliness, wound up from waiting for something that hadn’t happen. It makes it hard to keep all the small white lies he’d come up with straight in his head.

He suspects that was probably Pidge’s intention. They continue to smile blandly at him, and although the set of their mouth and the softness of their eyes seem innocent, Keith knows that it’s a good attempt to capitalize on their sweet face and nothing more.

He remembers pretty clearly the sharp and occasionally grumpy Pidge who he’d silently watched share space with Lance over the past couple of days.

Lance kicks him unsubtly under the table and Keith grits his teeth to stop himself from kicking him back.

He knows absolutely sh*t all about engineering. Lance sweats nervously by his side. “English,” he says, because it seems the easiest thing to bullsh*t on the spot. “I’m an English student.”

Pidge squints at Keith over the rim of their coffee mug. “What class was it you share again?”

“Um,” Keith says intelligently.

“Literature,” Lance blurts, a hand coming to rest heavily on Keith’s shoulder. He squeezes it and Keith can’t figure out if it’s meant to me some kind of tacit warning or a show of support. “You know, the class I’m taking to make up extra credits.”

Pidge raises a brow. Even though they’re still clearly groggy from sleep there’s something sharp in that gaze that makes Keith more nervous than a human really has a right to. “I thought you hated that class,” Pidge says.

“I do,” Lance says. “That’s how Keith and I met. We both hate it. We had a connection.”

“Aren’t you an English major?” Pidge asks. “I’d have thought literature would have been a great subject for you.”

“Um,” Keith says again. Lance stomps viciously on his foot and he barely holds back a wince. “The professor is sort of an asshole.”

“Yeah,” Lance agrees quickly. “Such an asshole.”

Pidge looks between them suspiciously and Keith hurries to take a huge gulp of coffee to seem busy. Between the unfamiliar sensation and the bitter taste he winds up spluttering into his mug.

“Keith, man, you alright there?” Lance asks, and thumps him a bit too heartily on the back.

“Peachy,” Keith says hoarsely, wiping at his mouth.

Pidge’s frown deepens and they get to their feet, coffee still clutched tightly. “Okay,” they say. “I’m just going to go now. I’ve got some things to take care of before class.”

“Oh, already?” Lance says, and does a sh*t job at looking anything but overwhelmingly relieved. “Well, I guess you’re busy and all. I’ll see you later, dude.”

“Yeah,” Pidge says, eyes still on Keith. “I hope to see you around again at some point,” they say, which sounds ominously threatening in a way Keith cannot understand.

“It was good meeting you,” Keith says, and manages to sound only a little stiff and uncomfortable.

“Yeah,” Pidge says again, and shuffles out of the kitchen with one last suspicious backwards glance.

When the door closes behind them Keith lets out a breath too big for his lungs and turns around to whack Lance across the back of his head as hard as his job position will allow him.

“Jesus f*ck, Keith!” Lance yelps as he bats Keith’s hand away. “For an angel you’re so violent! And that went well. You know, all things considered.”

“There is no way Pidge believes that I’m a classmate of yours,” Keith hisses, slamming his mug down on the table and casting it a disgusted look. “And if you make me drink that again I’m not going to catch you the next time you trip over your own shoelaces.”

“Hey, excuse the f*ck out of you, I haven’t tripped over my shoelaces in at least a month,” Lance huffs, but he reaches out to grab Keith’s mug, squinting into it. “But what was wrong with the coffee, man? Not enough sugar? Too much?” He looks up at Keith with a wrinkled nose. “Oh man, don’t tell me you’re one of those assholes that take it black.”

“This may come as a shock to you, but coffee isn’t high on my priority list these days,” Keith says, grimacing. His tongue feels fuzzy and thick. “I didn’t even like it when I was alive.”

Lance stares at him, mouth dropped and coffee forgotten in his hand. “Hold up, wait. Keith, are you telling me you used to be human?”

Keith blinks at him. “Yes?” He reaches out to take back his mug from Lance and puts it on the table before Lance drops it.

“And you – what? Died?”

Lance looks more pale than Keith really thinks he should be, more worked up than Keith has ever been about this whole thing. A little alarmed he says, gentle as he can manage, “yes, Lance. That’s what it means when I say I was human once. It was a long time ago now.”

Lance looks at him now like it’s the first time they’ve ever seen each other, like whatever picture he’s structured of Keith in his head is being reassessed. “You used to be alive.”

“Once,” Keith repeats. “It doesn’t matter now though.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Lance echoes, bewildered. “Keith, how can it not matter? You were alive. You have a life and –.”

“Had,” Keith corrects, harsher than he means to. He takes a deep breath, tries to draw on his limited well of patience. “Lance, it really doesn’t matter. It was before you were even born. Whatever I had in that life is gone now. This,” he gestures at Lance, himself, “is my life now.”

Lance’s mouth opens again, closes, and then he sinks back in his seat suddenly deflated. “Wow,” he says, running a hand through his hand. “Okay. I’m being haunted by an undead angel.”

“That’s really not how it works,” Keith says, but Lance continues to look unreasonably distressed.

Keith isn’t sure what he should be doing. Awkwardly he reaches out to pat Lance’s shoulder. “Are you, uh, okay?”

Lance twists to shoot him a dark look. Strangely, it puts Keith more at ease. “Am I okay? You’re the one who’s dead, Keith.”

“And I have been for a long time,” Keith says, rolling his eyes. “This isn’t exactly news to me. I don’t know why you think I’d choose today of all the days to start getting upset over it.”

“Well when you put it like that,” Lance sighs, and he hauls himself up and out of the chair. “It’s too early for this kind of conversation.” He gives Keith a narrow eyed look. “If you’re going to be a permanent fixture around here, I’m implementing a new rule.”

“Permanent fixture?” Keith repeats. “I’m your guardian angel not a new carpet. And you’re the one who wanted me here.”

Lance points a finger at him warningly. “No, I specifically remember asking if you had a return policy and you said no. If you’re going to be following me around regardless, I’d just rather you do it on terms I can be comfortable with.”

Keith holds up his hands defensively. “Once again, I remind you that you’re welcome to try to live past thirty on your own.”

Lance scoffs and collects their mugs off the table, trudging over to the sink. “Now I know you’re lying. You’ve made it pretty clear this is something of a serious commitment for you guys. Anyway. New rule. No depressing angel talk before noon.”

“You’re the one who asked,” Keith reminds him. “And I don’t think it’s fair to call my life depressing.”

Lance rinses out one mug and reaches for another. “You’re dead dude, how is that not – sh*t – oh, um. Thanks.”

Keith sighs and hands Lance back the mug he’d nearly dropped. “Pay attention to what you’re doing please.”

Lance rolls his eyes and sets the mug down beside the other and says accusingly, “you’re the one distracting me.”

Keith presses his lips together and regrets every choice he’s made thus far that has lead him to Lance McClain.

“Come on,” Lance says, taking care to ram his shoulder into Keith’s as he passed him by. “Time to try and figure out how to live my life with a professional stalker on my heels.”

Chapter 4

Chapter Text

Keith has never realized just how much effort existing takes.

On an abstract level he knows he is mostly made up of energy these days. The more he uses the less he has. Not all that different to how being human had worked, only with more… interesting results and greater repercussions.

Most days Keith doesn’t really use up that much of himself. The others he’d guarded had needed a nudge here, a quiet guidance there. Just tiny drops of his energy so small that he barely noticed.

Guarding Lance though is like a steadily running faucet. Guarding Lance while expending the energy necessary to keep himself visible is like a steadily running faucet pouring into an unplugged sink.

It is so f*cking draining.

By day he shadows Lance through his classes. These are the better times for Keith. Stuck in a classroom or workshop there is only so much trouble Lance can get himself into, and Keith is blissfully able to fade so he isn’t much more than a shadow that occasionally flickers in the corner of somebody’s eye.

After class he returns to Lance’s side, passing himself off as Lance’s new human companion, no different from the dozen of other important people in Lance’s life.

(“The word is friend,” Lance stresses, “please don’t go telling people you’re my new companion, for the love of god, Keith.”)

Between keeping up with that, maintaining a beat to Lance’s heart, and trying to keep on top of his paperwork, well.

Keith hadn’t even known he could get tired, and yet here he is. Exhausted in every conceivable way a being that has no need for sleep or sustenance can be.

It reminds him uncomfortably of being alive, and Keith has been working really hard for decades now to put that one behind him.

Living with Lance though isn’t as difficult of an adjustment as he feared it might be. To the best of Pidge’s knowledge Keith isn’t anything more than a suddenly close friend who seems to be over a lot. They’re aware that some nights Keith doesn’t go home, but his ability to disappear on will makes it difficult to prove that he has, for all human intents and purposes, moved in with them.

He still leaves sometimes to make reports and handle business up in the sky, theinterns still continue to be scared sh*tless of him, and every time he sees Allura she still gives him a raised brow but holds her tongue.

(Honestly, he wonders how long that’ll last. The amount of paperwork he’s been leaving on her desk has increased at least three fold.)

He comes back one day from such visit to find Lance sprawled across his bed, nose in a battered black book and his face unusually thoughtful. He hasn’t noticed Keith yet, but in fairness he rarely does.

Keith’s thought of making more noise when he returns like this, but, he’s yet to stop finding Lance jumping and squealing in shock anything but terrifically amusing.

“Are you…” Keith squints. “Are you reading the bible?”

Lance jumps and flushes violently. He goes to shove it under his mattress but Keith catches it out of his hand, thumbing through it bemusedly.

“I’m just doing research,” Lance says, still red. “An angel shows up on my doorstep and you expect me to just ignore that?”

Keith hums a little under his breath and brushes his fingertips along the tiny text. “I don’t know why you thought the bible of all things would be much help.”

“Uh,” Lance says, staring at him. “Because it’s the bible?”

Keith looks up at him and snorts. “I think you’ll find that there’s not that much on guardian angels in here, really.” He looks back at the psalm he has open. He doesn’t recognize it, but that’s not all that surprising.

He’d barely cracked a bible when he was alive, and it wasn’t like they had them just lying about upstairs.

“Are you telling me mainstream religion is wrong?”

Keith closes the bible and throws it back to Lance who just manages to catch it before it brains him. “Not wrong, exactly,” Keith corrects. “Just broad and heavy on the allegory, I guess. Besides, you’re asking the wrong person. Is your God any more real than the dozens of others across the world?” Keith shrugs. “Who knows. Not me.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Lance gapes at him. “Are you saying that you - an angel - doesn’t know if God is real?”

“Above my pay grade,” Keith says blandly. “If you’re looking for answers about the afterlife and the meaning of existence you should look somewhere else. I’m just here to do my job, the same as anybody else.”

“But…”

Keith raises an eyebrow. “But what? I get my jobs from my boss - who is not, I’ll tell you, God. Just upper management.”

Lance sinks back down on the bed, looking crestfallen. “You take all the fun out of this angel thing, I hope you realize this. What the hell is there to look forward to if the afterlife is that.”

“Plenty, I suppose,” Keith says. “This isn’t the afterlife. I mean, I guess it is, technically speaking. But this is more like … a selective interim.”

Lance stares at him. “What?”

“I can’t explain any better than that,” Keith huffs irritably. He pats his chest. “I’m not what you’ll be when you die, Lance. The place I come from is not the place you’ll go.”

Lance frowns at him. “I’m not going to heaven?”

Keith shrugs helplessly. “Look, I don’t know, okay? Wherever the people I guard go once their life is over is not a place I can reach. Do you even believe in heaven?”

Lance sighs and topples his weight sideways. He lands on the bed with a small thump and stares up at the ceiling. It’s littered with a sea of glow-in-the-dark stars. Keith refuses to admit he finds that little spark of childishness endearing.

“I don’t know,” Lance says. “I mean, I was on the whole ‘maybe, maybe-not’ side of the fence until you rocked up. Sudden angelic intervention kind of makes a guy reassess his beliefs a bit.”

“I guess,” Keith says uncomfortably. The conversation had already spread dangerously close to many things Keith didn’t even like to think about, never mind talk. In a hurry to change the subject he says, “anyway, you’d probably have better luck googling it.”

Lance rolls over a little and squints up at him. “Do you even know what google is?”

“Believe it or not, when you spend decades watching over humanity you get something of a bird's eye view on all their technological advancements,” Keith says dryly.

A grin breaks out across Lance’s face. “Bird’s eye view, hey? Was that a joke there, Feathers?”

“This ‘Feathers’ thing is offensive and not funny,” Keith says blandly. “I don’t even have wings. Your joke is terrible.”

Lance raises a brow, grin broad. He rolls over and props his chin on his palm. “Did I touch a nerve?”

“I don’t know why you think tormenting the one person keeping breath in your lungs is a productive use of your time,” Keith observes. “A million and one things on this planet you could be doing right now Lance McClain, and this is what you go with.”

Lance snaps his fingers. “sh*t, you’re right. What am I thinking just sitting here like this when I could be out curing world hunger with my half completed engineering degree.”

Despite himself, Keith can’t smother a small smile. “You’re a disgrace,” he agrees.

Lance laughs and rolls off the bed. “I’ll show you disgrace,” he says as he fishes his jacket off the back of his desk chair. “And I’ll show you just what good a half-finished engineering degree is, too.”

Keith quirks a brow. “Oh? We going somewhere?”

Lance flashes him a grin. “You could say that,” he says, and he beckons Keith to follow him out of the room. “Come on, it’s time you met my other best friend.”

.

Lance’s ‘other best friend’ lives in a small residential district not too far from the university that seems to be made up of student-based share houses. It’s quieter than the apartment that Lance and Pidge live in, and, Keith decides as they stroll up to a cozy two-story house, infinitely more calming.

Lance veers away from the house itself and Keith follows after him, relaxing in tiny increments now that he’s out of the busy city where unpleasantness oozes from every street corner and sets all of Keith’s angel-enhanced senses on edge.

Out here it’s less crowded, less noisy, less stained in lingering thought.

Just less.

For an angel who has been working at an exhausted half-capacity lately, the ‘less’ does him a world of good Keith hadn’t even realized he needed.

Around the back of the house is a garage and Lance doesn’t hesitate as he bends down and tucks his fingers in the small gap between the door and the floor. Keith watches interestedly as Lance hauls the shutter up easily.

The garage is crammed for all that it is small.

Benches are jammed up against the wall, littered with tools in a dizzy disarray. Plastic crates are stacked into corners, full to the brim with some mechanical paraphernalia or another that Keith couldn’t make heads or tails of if he tried.

In the center is a car that is, hands down, the oldest thing in the room, bar probably Keith himself. The hood is popped and somebody is bent down just out of sight, humming to themselves and tinkering softly.

For all the calmness around him, Keith has never felt so out of place in all his existence.

“Hunk!” Lance calls, voice loud and face split into a grin. A head emerges from behind the popped up hood.

“Lance!” Hunk pulls back out from the car gently - and Keith yearns a little for a charge who takes such care not to hurt themselves - and crosses the garage to pull Lance into a hug. Lance makes a happy, contented noise and slaps Hunk manfully on the back as they pull apart.

“Surprise.” Lance grins. “I thought I’d drop around and see if you needed a hand.”

“Not really, no,” Hunk says truthfully. “But you know you’re always welcome here.”

Lance presses a hand to his heart. “Wow, Hunk. Way to make a guy feel needed.”

Hunk shrugs and pats Lance on the head like he’s maybe half the size he actually is. “Sorry, buddy. You can come help anyway if you want. Make yourself feel useful.”

“Your generosity astounds me,” Lance says seriously, but takes the wrench Hunk hands over and wanders off to disappear beneath the bonnet of the car.

It’s been a long time since Keith has had to worry about human politeness and the like, but he’s starting to find that, with Lance, the awkwardness of being left on the wrong side of a situation is coming back to him quickly.

Hunk turns to him and raises a brow.

“Hello,” Keith says, lacking anything else. He tries to look as inconspicuous as possible. He’s not exactly a stranger to turning up in places he knows he wouldn’t be welcome, but he’s usually invisible enough not to have to suffer any kind of repercussions.

“You must be Keith,” Hunk says.

Keith nods, because he is, in fact, Keith, and he doesn’t have single flying f*ck of a clue what else to do.

“That’s right,” Lance says, peering out from behind the hood. He narrows his eyes. “But how did you know that? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time you two have met.”

Which is why, Keith thinks sourly, you might have introduced us.

Hunk taps thoughtfully at his chin and doesn’t take his eyes off of Keith. “Pidge mentioned you’d gotten a new,” he pauses for a second before saying, voice full of some uncomfortable implication, “friend.”

He looks at Keith meaningful. Keith stares back impassively, refusing to me embarrassed.

“Yeah,” Lance says, already ducking out of sight again, somehow completely missing Hunk’s thinly veiled insinuation. “Keith and I are buddies, aren’t we?”

He was like that sometimes, Keith was beginning to discover; unintentionally obtuse to things that he hadn’t really thought about.

“Yes,” Keith says, stone faced. “We’re just… such good buddies.”

Hunk’s brow climbs higher, but he seems more entertained than suspicious. Keith gets the impression that suspicion does not come naturally to Hunk, not when a part of Keith that is a little bit more than human can feel an innate cheerfulness coming off him in waves.

Hunk is just pleasant to be around, and Keith tries to shuffle forward discreetly to soak up some more of that feeling. Hunk doesn’t seem to notice, craning his neck to call back to Lance, “if you guys are setting up shop in here, I’m gonna duck out and order some pizzas. Maybe invite Pidge over. You two alright without supervision for a moment?”

“I’m not entirely sure what you’re implying but I resent it,” Lance says without even looking up. Keith feels a shiver down his spine but it’s soft and lacks urgency. He stays where he is and a second later when Lance goes to stand upright he bumps his head on the propped hood.

“sh*t! f*ck!” He casts Keith a glance of pure betrayal. Keith ignores him. “We’re fine, Hunk,” Lance says sourly, rubbing at the back of his head.

“Do you need any help with anything?” Keith asks Hunk.

Hunk smiles broadly. “Nah, you stay here and keep an eye on your ‘buddy’.”

“Yeah, that’s been my full time occupation lately,” Keith says honestly, and Hunk laughs and slaps him happily on the shoulder.

“Welcome to the club,” he says warmly. He plucks a phone off a nearby bench and wanders out of the garage.

“I like him,” Keith observes as he watches his back disappear around a corner. He turns back to Lance. “You might be a walking disaster, but your choice in friends is something else.”

He’d expected Lance to be maybe offended, or even a little smug, but the smile he gives Keith is absolutely genuine. “Yeah,” he says, ducking back beneath the hood. “I know.”

It leaves Keith off balance for a moment.

He’s so used to the front that Lance puts up that when he’s distracted and clearly pleased like this he struggles to know how to interact with him.

Keith feels awkward standing there in the silence after such a declaration, but if Lance feels it he shows no signs. He whistles under his breath and works at the engine with a slow and deliberate pace, more careful like this than he is of anything else in his life.

Keith casts a glance over his shoulder, doesn’t see Hunk, and pulls his clipboard into existence.

“You know,” Lance says, “it’s really creepy when you do that. Actually, the fact you take notes on me is creepy, period. What do they even say?”

Keith glances down at the top sheet.

Lance continues to show an unusual aptitude for disaster. And a disdain for personal welfare. I will not stop him if he tries to jump over a stairwell banister again and I will take much joy in watching him try to navigate a wheelchair with his astounding lack of coordination. I don’t even care if this earns me another seminar on ‘appropriate workplace attitude’.

I will let him fall. And I will laugh.

“Classified,” Keith says and then, to change the subject, “why engineering?”

Lance snorts and looks up. There’s a spot of grease on the tip of his nose. It’s strangely endearing; adding a softness to Lance’s usual vicious energy. He gestures with his wrench. “It doesn’t say there in your notes?”

“Believe it or not, we tend to be a lot more concerned with your average life expectancy over your career choices,” Keith says.

Lance huffs out a laugh and ducks back beneath the hood. Keith cranes his head, but he can’t see much from this angle. All the gears and oil are making him nervous though, and he shuffles forward unconsciously, ready to intercept should anything go wrong.

“It’s calming,” Lance says, voice muffled. There’s a tick and a click sound that Keith can’t place. “Calming and useful. I have a big family, you know?”

“I know.”

“So, when you have a big family like that, things are always breaking down.” There’s a loud bang and Keith flinches, but Lance goes on, unconcerned. “And it wasn’t like my mother could afford to keep calling in a repairman every time, could she? So I helped out where I could, learnt a thing or two about how mechanics all came together.” He pops up from behind the hood to grin at Keith. The grease on his nose seems to have smeared down his cheek. “Turns out I have a knack for it.”

Keith stares at him and forgets, for a moment, to speak.

He’s seen sullen Lance, sarcastic Lance, my-humour-is-a-gift-to-this-world Lance, but he thinks this might be the first time he’s seen him like this. Care free and excited. At home with a wrench in his hand and an engine going to pieces beneath his fingertips.

Like this he’s… charming, almost. Keith can see the sunny smile and selfless care of the boy written in his file.

A Lance who, as a child, once shoved his brother out of the way of a speeding car and wound up with a broken arm for the trouble. A Lance who once stepped into an unfair brawl that had nothing to do with him and came within an inch of breaking his nose for the third time.

It’s a pattern, Keith realizes. He’s starting to wonder if he should maybe check the numbers in his file, see how many of the disasters that befell Lance might have originally been slotted for somebody else.

If Lance’s track record may have less to do with a magnetic draw towards trouble and more to do with a magnetic draw to other people’s trouble.

“Keith?” Keith jerks back to attention to see Lance frowning at him. “You okay, buddy? You sort of zoned out there.”

“Yeah,” Keith says automatically, thoughts whirring. “I was just… thinking.”

“Wow,” Lance says skeptically, looking Keith up and down. “I didn’t realize that was such a dangerous past time for you guys. You need to sit down for a moment? A cold press? A hand to hold?”

“You are really the last person on this earth who should be making jokes like that,” Keith says, but it’s by rote. “Stay here for a moment, I need to go talk to somebody.”

Lance’s brows draw together and his mouth drops. “Talk to someone? Keith - what -.”

“If you need me, I’ll feel it,” Keith says distractedly, waving his clipboard away. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon. Tell Hunk it was nice to meet him.”

“Keith -.”

Keith vanishes, leaving Lance standing with grease on his face, eyes wide, and mouth opening to say something that Keith does not stay around long enough to catch.

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

Coran has been around for longer than anybody or anything under the sun. Well, as far as Keith is aware anyway. When asked, Coran says he came into existence sometime after the continents begun to drift but probably sometime before the printing press came to be, I don’t know, it’s been so long, age gets awfully tricky, just let an old man rest, Kogane.

As far as the magic of the afterlife and human existence is concerned there is no better authority.

The problem - because there is always a problem - is that finding him is an event and a half.

“He’s in the Records Room,” says the intern at the front desk. She doesn’t look up from the nails she’s filing to a point. Until this very moment Keith had not been aware that the nails of angels even grew.

“Yes,” Keith says with as much patience as he can muster. “But where in the Records Room?”

The intern shrugs. “Somewhere,” she says and promptly spins her chair around in dismissal.

Keith bites his lip, reminds himself not to pick fights with the interns because they have Allura on their side and would probably win, and heads down the stairs to Records with the air of a man walking to the gallows.

(it should be remembered that Keith has died before. He knows a thing or two about imminent demise, and this is feels an awful lot like it.)

When Keith had been new at this angel gig he’d done his time down in Records. They’d all done their time down in Records. It was mandatory for any guardian that wanted to one day take on a charge.

And it was, bluntly, f*cking awful .

The Records Room was infinite. That wasn’t hyperbole. That was fact. When you had the entirety of human existence condensed onto paper it was… well, it was hell on earth. Or heaven. Whatever.

There was a system to it, Keith had been told, but he’d spent five years of his afterlife working here and had never found it. Corridors changed, shelves moved, and nothing seemed to be in the same place twice.

During his intern stint he’d maybe cried a time or two. It was very stressful and not at all how Keith had imagined the afterlife. He’d been convinced for a time that it was purgatory. It’d been over fiftyyears since then, and Keith still wasn’t sure he’d been wrong.

When he’d graduated to full-fledged guardian status he’d promised himself he’d never come back down here again. He’d sooner die (again) first.

The things he was willing to do for Lance f*cking McClain.

“Coran?”

He treads gently down the last of the steps and glances warily around. The light is unnecessarily dim down here and the stacks loom like they’re going to fall at any moment.

Keith reminds himself that he doesn’t exist with the same human limitations anymore. He’s immortal. Even if the whole building were to fall down he’d go right on existing, if not living, exactly.

“Coran?” Keith calls, louder this time.

“At the back,” Coran shouts cheerfully, voice bouncing and echoing. “But for god’s sake, look whereyou’re stepping, I’m doing some spring cleaning.”

To the best of Keith’s knowledge heaven is immune to seasonal change but he gently picks his way forward,following the cheerful tune Coran is whistling and wishing he’d had the forethought to bring a ball of yarn to lead his way back.

He’d heard once that an intern had gotten lost down here. It’d been ten years before anybody had found them. He doesn’t know if it’s true or not - heaven tends to run rampant with rumours - but he wouldn’t be surprised.

He finds Coran at a dusty desk that seems to have been plopped down in between two off-kilter shelves, boxes of files piled knee-high on the floor and folders spread thick across the desk. From this angle Keith can see a label or two; things like Death by Bulldozer Malfunction: June, 1999 - August, 1999 and Prophets to watch for: 2000’s edition.

“Um,” he says, staring.

Coran looks up from the desk, a folder open in one hand and the other posed thoughtfully on his chin. He grins at Keith, delighted.

“Keith! Came to visit an old man, did you? And here I could swear the last time you were down here you swore you’d never be back. There were some choice phrases in there too, if I remember right. ‘Over my twice-dead body’ or something.”

Keith doesn’t remember saying that, but when he’d finally been allowed to leave this hellhole he’d been half delirious with relief. He could have told Coran to shove an egg some place deep and dark and he wouldn’t be surprised.

The Records Room is awful, alright. Just. Awful.

“I’m not here for a social call,” Keith says. “I’m here for work. I needed to talk to you.” He pauses and wrinkles his nose on reflex. “And you don’t take many trips out to the surface.”

Coran sighs and tosses the file to the desk. “I’ve told you before, Keith. You don’t need to refer to the office as ‘the surface’ when you’re down here. This isn’t actually hell.”

Keith holds back on the bitter it sure f*cking feels like it because he understands the Records Room is Coran’s baby and he doesn’t deal well with insults to its honour.

“I have a charge with bad luck,” he says, jumping right into it before Coran can derail him.

“Ah, Lance McClain, right?” Coran says, laughing at Keith’s puzzled frown. He spreads his arms to encompass the room; the towering shelves and the mess of files puddled about their feet. “I’m the Record Keeper, Keith. You really think I wouldn’t know exactly what cases you’re working when?”

“I guess,” Keith says, a little unnerved as he always is when Coran lets his omniscience slip.

Coran chuckles again and lowers his arms, settling back in his chair. “I’ve been expecting you might drop by, honestly.”

“You were?”

“To be fair, I’ve been waiting for somebody to stop by about Lance McClain since the boy was old enough to be given to a guardian. Nobody ever did. Not that I can blame them. You guardians are an overworked bunch.” His brow furrows in fondness. “But you, Keith Kogane, were always quite the smart one.”

“Thank you?” Keith says uncertainly.

Coran pushes himself to his feet with a groan, hands coming around to rest on the low of his back. “This weather ain’t so easy on these old bones.” He casts Keith a sideways glance. “Not that I’m still not spry enough to take you out in half a second.”

Keith doesn’t doubt it. “Lance,” he prompts.

Coran waves a hand at him dismissively and sorts through the haphazard files on the desk. “Yes, yes, give me a minute. I’ve got it right here - somewhere. I took to keeping it on hand after I heard McClain went to you.”

“If you’re looking for his file, I have a copy,” Keith says but Coran shakes his head, shuffling papers aside rapidly.

“Not of this one you don’t. I know it’s here - ah. Here’s the bugger.”

The file he pulls out is no different from the dozen or so others on his desk. Thicker, maybe. Yellowed at the edges and, if Keith’s suspicions are correct, coffee stained. Like maybe somebody had spent a lot of long nights poring over it with a hot mug on hand.

(Keith personally despises human food these days now that it’s no longer required to keep his body ticking, but it somehow doesn’t surprise him that Coran does not.)

“Here,” Coran says, passing it over. He’s quieter now, more serious. The smile he gives Keith is kind and a little tired. “It’s about time somebody else had a look at it. I’ve spent more than enough time putting it together. My eyes are darn right sick of it by now.”

Keith takes it, baffled, and flips it open. He scans the first page. For a moment none of it seems to make sense. It seems like a generic report and nothing all that much to do with Lance. He shuffles to the second page, the third.

Realization dawns, as does a cold shiver down his spine.

He looks up at Coran sharply. “This is the opposite of Lance’s luck,” he says slowly.

Coran leans forward and gently taps the page. “This,” he says, “is a collection of miracles.And do you want to take one guess what the common denominator is among them?”

“Lance,” Keith says, heart heavy and sinking to the lead lined pit of his stomach.

“More than that,” Coran corrects. “Each one of these can be directly matched up with a tragedy on Lance’s record.” He takes the folder from Keith and Keith lets it go willingly like it stings to touch.

Coran’s finger trails down a page. “September, 2001, Tristan McClain narrowly avoids a hit-and-run that would have left him dead. No guardian intervention involved.”

In his head Keith can see Lance’s file as clear as if it were laid out in front of him. September, 2001. Lance McClain pushes his brother out of the way of a hit-and-run driver. Breaks his left arm in three places.

“December, 2006,” Coran says. “Mary Sheldon, a student at Lance’s school, falls down the stairs and hits her head on concrete. She comes out of it with nothing more than a minor concussion. Her guardian was at a loss to explain how.”

The incident doesn’t ring familiar to Keith but the date does. That same day Lance had knocked over a bookshelf in his classroom and been trapped until the next morning. He’d escaped with nothing more than a minor sprain, but Keith knows just how terrifying it can be to be trapped alone in the dark with no idea when help is coming. He can imagine just the kind of scars that might leave on a kid.

He thinks, too, if he were to investigate he might just find a Mary Sheldon listed among Lance’s past friends somewhere. Just another name on the long list of people that Lance had no problem giving out his heart too.

“Here,” Coran says, riffling through the pages some years. “If you’re not picking up a trend, let me help some. January, 2013, Pidge Holt -.”

Keith feels cold all over.

“- and Lance McClain are involved in a serious car accident. Miraculously, Pidge Holt walks out of the wreck with only a few scratches.” Coran looks up to Keith’s eyes. “McClain is admitted to hospital in serious condition. He stays in the ICU for a week before he can be transferred to standard care.”

“I get it,” Keith says, and he knows he really should read the whole file, but right this second he can’t think of a single worse thing in all of the world than seeing all of the luck that should have been Lance’s scrawled down in neat dot points next to somebody else's name. “I get it.”

Coran closes the folder and presses it into Keith’s hands. He takes it reluctantly. “Your boy is something else, Keith. I’ve seen people pass on their luck before, but never like this. It’s usually small things, barely noticeable, and rarely often. I usually give it a footnote, not a whole folder.” He’s silent a minute before he adds, “and it’s getting worse. The degree of the luck he’s taking, the way it’s leaking out of him… It’s not meant to happen.”

Keith stares at the folder in his hands. It’s made of paper and cardboard and cannot possibly be as heavy as it feels. “I didn’t even know this could happen.”

“Usually you don’t need to,” Coran says grimly. “It’s not a secret, exactly. If a guardian gets curious enough to ask, we tell them it’s a possibility. But it’s rare. Very rare. And very easy to miss.”

“What causes it?”

Coran shakes his head. “Some people just can. Give them an emotional moment, a close relationship, a passing thought of 'Icare more about what happens to them than I do me’ and the thought, well, latches.” Coran snaps his fingers and Keith flinches. “The luck of the Bad Thing that was going to befall them slithers itself over to Lance. Big things - like his brother and Pidge living through accidents that should have killed them - but also the small things. They just ooze through, manifest in the small ways.”

That would be just like him, the asshole. So concerned with everybody else but so dedicated to his nonchalant persona that he winds up subconsciously sucking them dry of all the things that would ever do them harm. The best part was that they’d never know, just the way Lance would have wanted it.

Lance wouldn’t even know.

It was very typical of him in a completely infuriating way.

“Is there a way to fix it?” Keith presses. “Make him stop?”

Coran’s mouth thins. “If there was,” he says, “I would have come to you. I wouldn’t have waited this long. Like I’ve said, I’ve never seen anything on this scale before. If a usual occurrence is nothing more than a hiccup in the order of the world, your boy is an explosion.”

“Coran,” Keith says, “do you know how hard it is to guard somebody against this?” He waves the file at him, like Coran could possibly be in doubt. He might be feeling slightly hysterical, but in his defense he just found out that his charge is sabotaging him. Sabotaging himself. “Do you understand how hard it is to guard somebody against themself?”

“You can either try and find a way to stop it on your own,” Coran says patiently, and a hand comes to rest on Keith’s shoulder, “or you can try your damn hardest to make sure that McClain’s fierce affection isn’t the death of him.”

“For how long? Forever? Until he somehow stops caring for people like this? Until this luck transferal fades? Do I tell him? Do I not?” Keith presses the heels of his palms to his forehead, and he knows he can’t get sick, but he feels a headache building behind his eyes. “Coran, I can’t possibly be qualified for this.”

“You’re the best guardian we have at the moment,” Coran reminds him. “If you’re not qualified for this, then nobody is. The boy won’t make it another year on his own. Not at the rate he’s going.”

“I only have so much energy, Coran,” Keith says. “I’m one person, and Lance is starting to look like a black hole.”

Coran studies him quietly for a moment. “If you really don’t think there’s anything you can do for him, you can let him go.”

“You just said nobody else could take him -.”

“No, Keith.” Coran squeezes his shoulder, looks at him dead serious. “You could let him go.”

Oh. Oh.

“You can’t mean -.”

“It’s happened before,” Coran says. “You know it has. It has to. Sometimes things are just set in stone. We can’t guard against everything, Keith. As you said, we’ve only got so much energy. Some things are just bigger than us.”

Keith can hear Lance in his head. Some things are bigger than angels? Not so powerful and all-knowing after all, hey Feathers?

“No,” Keith says.

“No?”

“No. It - it doesn’t feel right. This isn’t what’s meant to happen. This isn’t bigger than me.” Yet. He gives Coran a thin smile. “Lance McClain isn’t going to be the one to ruin my record.”

Coran grins at him. “Over your twice-dead body?”

“If it has to be,” Keith says, and it worries him how little those words feel like a joke. He tightens his clutch on Coran’s folder. “Thanks for the help.”

Coran studies him for a moment but whatever he sees must reassure him because he gives Keith’s shoulder one last squeeze and steps away. “I’d say it was my pleasure but that was honestly the worst conversation I’ve had in at least a century. I hope all your visits aren’t going to be like this.”

“I’m never coming down here again,” Keith says, stepping away. “This room never does me any good.”

Coran snorts and turns back to his desk, sorting through the mess he made as he absently waves Keith away. “Keep me updated. I’d like to see how this one pans out.” He casts a look over his shoulder that is all but indecipherable. “Something tells me the pair of you are on your way to turning this into something truly phenomenal.”

Chapter 6

Chapter Text

Keith is surprised when he appears back at Hunk’s. It’s dark outside, not quite night but definitely teetering off the edge of evening. He’d assumed that Lance would have headed home by now.

“Where,” Lance says in the voice of somebody gearing up for a lecture, “the hell did you go?”

Keith spins around to see Lance sitting in the backseat of Hunk’s car, door open and arms crossed over his knees. The grease on his face from earlier has smudged terribly in the last couple of hours.

He looks tired and furious. It’s an odd look for him and more than a little unnerving.

“You’re okay,” Keith says defensively. “I would have known if you weren’t.”

Lance’s frown deepens and he gets to his feet so quickly that for a moment Keith has an irrational pang of worry that Lance is going to bang his head on the roof of the car. Irrational because none of his angel senses are telling him to worry, not because it isn’t a thing that Lance isn’t totally prone to do.

“Yeah,” Lance says angrily. “I’m okay. But you know who mightn’t have been? You!”

Keith stares at him blankly. “What?”

Lance throws his hands up in the air. With a wrench clutched tightly in one hand Keith worries he might just… hurt himself somehow. “You just - took off, dude. Not a word about anything. You looked like somebody had lit a fire under your ass and you were hauling it out of here before the building came down.”

“I…” Keith doesn’t know what to say. He hadn’t anticipated Lance’s reaction to his disappearance to be this violent. He hadn’t anticipated a reaction at all, honestly.

He’d forgotten again. Not about humanity precisely, but the fixation with which Lance latched onto the people around him. Keith had thought his relative inhumanity might leave him immune to that.

Apparently he’d underestimated Lance McClain.

“I told you -.”

“Keith, ‘I need to talk to somebody’ is not as reassuring as you think when you follow it up with vanishing into thin air. You just froze up mid conversation and the next thing I knew I was standing alone in Hunk’s garage talking to the wall. Do you not see why that might be disconcerting? Just a little?”

Keith hadn’t even thought about it like that. Hadn’t been thinking of Lance because he was too busy - well, thinking of Lance.

“Sorry,” he says in place of anything else because this kind of anger isn’t the kind you placate with empty words. “Sorry I - I wasn’t thinking.”

“Apparently,” Lance huffs, but his shoulders sink a little. He rubs the back of his wrist across his forehead and looks Keith up and down. “But you are okay, yeah?”

Concern coming on the heels of such justified anger should feel out of place but it doesn’t, not with Lance. “I’m fine,” Keith assures him. “I didn’t…” Keith struggles to remember how personal apologies go. “I didn’t mean to worry you?”

Lance sighs. His shoulders sink further. The tired is more apparent on his face than the anger now. Keith takes that as a good sign.

“Just give me a heads up when you plan on going for an upstairs visit, you know? I don’t wanna limit you or anything, and I know you’re not exactly used to this,” Lance gestures between them in a vague, awkward way, “but, just. Some forethought wouldn’t go amiss.”

“Right,” Keith says. “Heads up. Forethought. I can do that.”

“Good,” Lance says and just like that the fight seems to be over. Lance’s anger is as quick to blow away as it is to boil. “And just so you know, I had to tell Hunk you had a family emergency to try and explain where you went in the ten minutes he was out of the room.”

Yet another thing that hadn’t occurred to Keith. Seventy-somethingyears as a being that existed on a separate plane of reality had left him disassociated with the permanency of all things human.

“I hope you at least gave him a good one,” Keith says.

Lance snorts and finally tosses aside the wrench he’d been cradling. The way he flexes his knuckles gingerly makes Keith think he may have been clutching it like a lifeline since Keith disappeared.

“If anybody asks, your sister went into labour,” Lance says as he wipes his hands off on a rag.

Keith doesn’t know what to say to that, and his silence is apparently too long for Lance because he stops what he’s doing and squints at Keith in half-alarm, half-suspicion.

“sh*t, was that a bad lie? Did you have a sister when you were alive or something? A nibling? Is this bringing back bad memories? Should I have gone with something else? I didn’t even -.”

“Lance,” Keith says, cutting over him. Lance’s mouth immediately jams closed. Keith thinks of what to say, he really does, but what winds up coming out is, “nibling?”

Lance waves a hand. “You know, nephew. Niece. One of the other. Both. The second generation version of sibling.”

Keith frowns. “You’ve got to be making that up.”

“No, dude. Trust me on this. I’ve got six of them. I know my sh*t. Google can verify me, if you want.” Lance seems a little calmer though and he cautiously asks, “so, not upsetting?”

“I was an only child,” Keith says. After a beat he corrects, “Am. I am an only child.”

(he doesn’t know if death voids that or not; what it takes for an am to become a was. Is he less now than before? Has a century or so of cold lungs and a heart that does not beat taken more from him than just the right to call himself alive?)

It’s gone quiet between them and Keith waits awkwardly for Lance to comment on his slip up but Lance instead just tosses the cloth in his hands aside and says, “Come on, the others are inside. You’ve still got one more of my best friends to meet.”

The tension that had been leaving Keith suddenly comes back in a flood. He’s watched Lance from the sidelines for long enough, read and reread his file a dozen times, that he knows there can only be one person left to introduce him to.

“You coming?” Lance asks, pausing on the way out of the garage.

“Yeah,” Keith says and trails after him, stomach twisting in knots.

It’d be a lie to call what he’s feeling nerves, exactly. It’s more… anticipation. Something hard to place that the limitations of the English language can’t explain.

“I should warn you,” Lance says as they head towards the front door of the house, the lights on the battered porch encompassing them in a buttery yellow glow that adds a bronze tint to Lance’s hair. “Shiro is…” He hesitates.

“Lance,” Keith says as Lance pauses with a hand on the doorknob. “There’s a fifty-four page file on you, and I’ve been guarding you for longer than you’ve been aware of my existence.”

“Oh,” Lance says. He frowns. “I keep forgetting about the fact you stalked me invisibly for weeks before we met.”

“It was one week,” Keith corrects, offended without quite knowing why. “And I’ve told you before, this isn’t stalking.”

Lance rolls his eyes and shoves open the door before Keith can drag him into an argument on the front step.

Inside, the house smells faintly of pizza and a low buzz of voices trickle out from the kitchen. Lance leads the way forward as easy as if he lived there himself and Keith follows after him awkwardly, still a little stung.

The kitchen is full when they arrive. It’s not a big room and the personalities of Lance and his friends always seem so much larger than life.

Together like this they’re positively overwhelming. Keith is nearly bowled over as they enter by the force of them all.

Pidge and Hunk are sitting on a benchtop with paper plates on their laps, laughing loudly together at something that Keith didn’t hear, and at the table is Shiro, smiling at the pair of them in a way that is both distant and fond.

Keith had felt them from outside but it hadn’t been…. It hadn’t been like this.

With Lance in the room the lot of them burn. It’s not an unpleasant burn - like too much energy trapped in tightly coiled muscles - but without the time to prepare himself Keith has to take a moment to adjust.

Most days he likes being able to feel the world around him on some mystical sixth sense that he can’t explain. Most days, however, he’s not dealing with this much chemical intensity in one room. The spark in each of them bounces off one another, flares brightly, and douses Keith in a fervent feeling of home and belonging.

He hadn’t even known acceptance and family could feel so present and yet pain-free and he wonders why he never read this in the reports.

“Hey Shiro,” Lance says cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder as he breezes by, making a beeline to the pizza and leaving Keith floundering to adjust in the middle of the room. “Feels like I haven’t seen you in forever. Finally decided to come down from those stars?”

“Shiro’s a space nerd,” Hunk supplies helpfully, but then scolds, “Lance! The least you can do is knock! I hadn’t even realized Keith was back.”

“Sure thing,” Lance says easily, as he leans over Pidge to get to the food. Pidge curses and elbows him away. “I’ll do it next time.”

Shiro rolls his eyes good naturally. “It’s called astronomy,” he says to nobody in particular. “And it’s a respected profession.” He switches his gaze over to Keith and gives him a welcoming smile. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” he says, and holds out his left hand.

His right, Keith sees, is missing.

Most of what he knows of Shiro has come from a folder at this point, but it’s a folder he’s read more often than he really needs to. He could recite everything in it offthe top of his head.

Shiro was older than the others by a small handful of years. He’d started off friends with Pidge’s older brother and had inched his way into the group with shy fits and starts. He had a kind smile and sharp eyes and a small fluff of white in his buzzed hair.

And two years ago, when he was twenty-one, he’d enlisted. Three weeks into his very first tour he’d had the phenomenal misfortune to be in a jeep that just happened to roll over a mine.

The rest of his squad had not made it out. And neither had Shiro’s right arm.

Keith is very aware of Lance watching him out of the corner of his eye, pretending - badly - that he’s not. He takes Shiro’s hand without blinking. “Nice to finally meet you,” Keith says. “I thought Lance might never introduce us.”

Shiro’s smile is as bright as the stars he studies now. “I’ve heard a lot about you. From Pidge, naturally, because getting personal information from Lance that he doesn’t want to share is like pulling teeth.” The edges of his smile sharpen. “I wonder why that might be?”

“Hey!” Lance snaps, dropping all pretence that he’d been distracted elsewhere. “I resent that, okay. I’m a great sharer. I’m the best sharer in all the land.”

“You,” Pidge says as they hop down from the bench and shoulder by him on their way to the fridge, “are a giant geek.”

“I resent that too,” Lance snaps, putting a finger in their direction. “You’re the one here working on a nerd degree.”

“It’s computer science, and I’m okay with being a nerd. It’s better than a geek.”

“Okay, okay,” Hunks says soothingly, laying a hand on Lance’s shoulder and steering him over to the table. Lance goes begrudgingly. “No need to fight. We’re all nerds and geeks here. How about we try to behave for the new guy, yeah? Don’t want to be scaring him off anytime soon; Lance might not forgive us.”

“Please,” Lance says as Hunk pushes him into a chair. “Please scare him off. I will pay you.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” Pidge snorts. “These two have been attached at the hip for as long as I’ve known Keith. When was the last time I saw them apart? Does Keith ever leave our apartment? Who knows, not me.” They give Keith a look. “I’m going to start charging you rent soon.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Keith says with practiced blankness.

“That is slander,” Lance sniffs, even as he suddenly refuses to meet anybody’s eye. “Keith and I are our own beings. We do all kinds of stuff on our own.”

“Exactly,” Keith says. “I’ve got much better things to do with my life than babysit Lance.”

Lance laughs at the blatant lie and tries to smother it with a cough. Keith glowers at him. Lance’s eyes skitter away but his hand comes to rest over the slowly curling corners of his mouth.

“Anyway,” Shiro says with the atmosphere of somebody long used to dissolving fights before they can truly get off the ground, “is your sister alright, Keith?”

“My sister?” Keith repeats.

Shiro’s brow crinkles. “Lance said you left because she’d gone into labour? How’s the baby?”

Oh. Yeah. Lance had said that.

Keith pastes an expression on his face that he hopes says ‘mildly concerned brother and uncle-to-be’. “Uh, yeah. It went fine. She and the baby are all good.”

There’s a moment of silence as Hunk squints thoughtfully out the window at the sky which is only just beginning to purple at the edges. Keith had probably been gone for two, maybe three hours, tops. “That was a fast baby,” Hunk says. “I didn’t know childbirth could be so quick.”

“Uh,” says Lance, which isn’t helpful at all.

“It was a mistake,” Keith says. “The baby was a mistake.”

“Yeah,” Lance agrees immediately. “No. No. What Keith means is that it was a false labour. His sister panicked. The baby wasn’t coming after all.”

Pidge’s brows crawl higher and the look they exchange with Shiro says a million and one things. Keith can barely hold back a wince. He finds it ridiculous that between them he and Lance still can’t manage to make up a single believable lie.

“Oh,” Hunk says, and then, with genuine concern, “is she okay?”

Lance breathes out a sigh of relief and elbows Keith discreetly. “Yes,” Keith blurts. “She’s just - staying in the hospital for now. In case the baby decides to come after all.”

It might be good to have another excuse on standby, after all.

(it’s not that Hunk is anything remotely approaching stupid, or even oblivious, just that Keith is Lance’s friend and hasn’t given Hunk a reason to mistrust him, so why then would he?

Keith pities the people that do manage to elicit Hunk’s irritation and doubt because he can only imagine what it must be like to be on the foul side of such a cheerful, friendly, and devastatingly intelligent person.)

“Well, if you need any help with anything let us know,” Shiro says so earnestly it makes Keith feels a little bit guilty. “You’re a part of this group now, and we help each other out.”

“Oh my god, you sound like such a dad,” Lance moans, covering his face with his hands. “It’s like I’ve introduced you to my surprise husband or something. You know you guys aren’t my blood relatives, right?”

“Stop being dramatic,” Shiro sighs, and then, noticing the way Lance is quietly picking the toppings of his pizza, adds, “and leave those vegetables where they are. If the only way to get you to eat something green is to drench it in cheese first, god help me I will try.”

Lance wrinkles his nose and reluctantly put the spinach back on his slice.

Behind Shiro’s back Pidge points between the two of them and then mouths such a dad.

Keith barely notices. He’s too distracted just… watching them.

Up until this point he hasn’t seen Lance with his friends like this and now that he’s had the time to adjust to the sheer brightness of the lot of them, he can sort of understand how this group came to be so blinding.

The others gravitate to Lance with an exasperated fondness, a planetary system centred on a star. Keith can’t figure them out, can’t figure Lance out. There shouldn’t be anything all that special about the lot of them. And on their own, there’s not.

Together though. Oh boy.

Keith has guarded many humans and they’d all been interesting or kind in their own way, but not notable - not like Lance and the others.

Human energy is a strange thing to observe, calm and volatile in waves, latching to one person and pulling from the next, and when the group is all together like this, they seem to catch at one another. It’s not a click so much as a soft and steady blend between them.

As if - as if this is how they’re meant to be; together and whole. Not so much broken when apart as just… waiting for the others again.

It’s a dizzying thing to see, and Keith is so tired these days that just trying to focus on them like this hurts.

These people don’t even know the sacrifices Lance has made for them. The sacrifices he makes on a day-to-day basis; that he might trip in the shower or burn his dinner just so that the rest of them may have a day free of all the small misfortunes.

That Pidge is walking and breathing and smiling among them now only because Lance stood between them and death. That Shiro may have come home different than he left, but he came home at all because Lance’s touch lingered on his skin.

It’s terrifying. They’re a ticking time bomb. All of them. Lance’s luck is not infinite and Keith’s powers are not so vast and soon, so very soon, one of them is going to trip into something bigger than the lot of them and it’s going to be Lance that carries the weight of that down, down, down.

And watching them like this, Lance squashed between Hunk and Pidge at the table, Shiro laughing so hard that his eyes wrinkle at the corners, Keith is starting to realize that the feeling bubbling in the pit of his stomach for days now might just be fear.

Because it’s occurring to him that there just might not be enough of him left to catch Lance when he takes that fall.

Chapter 7

Chapter Text

Keeping the secret from Lance is easier than Keith had thought it would be.

He’d thought it’d haunt him, that a lifetime of existing outside of the need for subterfuge might have left him unsettled with the idea of it. It turns out Keith isn’t nearly as good a person as he thinks he is.

The Monday after Keith meets Lance’s friends, Hunk trips going down the stairs. It’s a small thing; a stumble down half a dozen steps, nothing more. Lance even laughs.

“Dude,” he says as Hunk winces at the floor below, rubbing a hand along the knee he’d caught on the rail on the way down. “You’re clumsy as f*ck.”

“I don’t want to hear that from you,” Hunk sighs.

“Excuse you, I am beauty, I am grace -.”

“If it’d been you, you’d have broken your face,” Pidge finishes breezily as they pass him by.

Hunk laughs. Keith attempts a smile, but there’s something unsettled in the pit of his stomach, an intuitive ah, the universe has made an adjustment.

Three hours later Lance nearly falls out a six story window. It’s nothing but the shiver of warning in Keith’s gut and the way he pushes Hunk clear across the room in his hurry to get there that saves him from a nasty death on the pavement below.

“sh*t,” Pidge says as Keith hauls Lance back into the room by a fistful of his shirt. They look more impressed than worried; probably because Lance nearly dying is an all but daily occurrence but it’s the first time they’ve witnessed Keith pulling him back from the brink. “Forget your face, Lance, you’d have broken every f*cking bone in your body.”

“Yeah,” Lance wheezes, a little winded. There will be a bruise there in the morning, but Keith thinks Lance has started counting his bruises as medals rather than close calls long ago now. He claps a hand on Keith’s shoulder and gives him a friendly shake. “Nice catch, buddy.”

Keith stares at him and then down at the street below. “I cannot believe,” he says, “that you tripped over your own shoelaces and nearly killed yourself.”

Lance smiles at him winningly. “But I didn’t.”

“No more close calls,” Pidge says sternly. “You’re going to turn me grey by the time I’m thirty.”

Lance solemnly presses a hand to his chest and raises the other. “I promise I’ll be more careful.”

Two days later the hem of his pants gets caught in an escalator and he trips and falls against the hungry, metallic teeth.

There’s not much Keith can do other than haul him free of the damn thing. He hadn’t even had any warning; just the smallest twinge of premonition and then bam. Lance, escalator, ripped pants.

Lance comes out of it with a pretty gruesome wound that requires eleven stitches. He moans the whole time, squeezing Keith’s hand whenever the needle sinks below his skin. “Those pants were expensive - limited edition. Do you know how hard it is to get blood out of denim, Keith?”

Denim hadn’t been in popular circulation when Keith had been alive, but in the last few months of his life Keith had spent extensive time trying to get blood out of absolutely everything he owned. It’d been a pretty impossible task when more blood was incoming every other day.

“The pants are missing half a leg, Lance,” Keith says as the doctor finishes bandaging Lance’s knee. “I’m pretty sure the bloodstain is the least of your problem.”

Lance sniffs and frowns at him through tired, red eyes. “Can’t you - I don’t know - fix them or something?”

Keith raises a brow. “Oh, sure thing. I’ll just ask the hospital to borrow a needle and some thread, shall I?”

Lance rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything until a nurse escorts them out of the emergency room and to the front desk to fill out some tedious paperwork. “I mean,” Lance says as she leaves them to it, “with your magic.”

Keith had been fully aware of what Lance meant. “I’m not magic,” he says, and then points to a box at the bottom of the paper. “You missed a signature here.”

Lance shoots him a filthy look and scrawls his name. “Not magic, my ass. I’ve seen the sh*t you do, Keith. Why can you convince a door to open with nothing but a touch but you can’t fix a pair of pants? Where’s the limits to this angel thing? And - would you stop telling me where to sign, I can read.”

Keith shrugs and sinks his hands into his pockets. “Shoddy paperwork offends me,” he says seriously. “And I’ve told you before that my power isn’t infinite. Say I could somehow coax your pants back to being whole, that’s energy I could have used on something vastly more important.”

“So,” Lance says as he sets the pen down and squints suspiciously at Keith, “what you’re saying is you’re too lazy.”

“No, Lance,” Keith says through gritted teeth as he shoves the paperwork over the desk and begins to drag Lance out by his elbow. “I’m saying that my energy isn’t meant for your convenience; it’s meant to keep you alive.”

“Okay, but consider - I will literally die if I have to replace those jeans.”

Keith considers this and feels nothing other than vague annoyance. “All signs point to no,” he says as he shoves Lance to the carpark. “Unfortunately, you’ll live.”

“You’re an angel, not a magic eight ball,” Lance grouses, but allows Keith to herd him out the door.

Keith rolls his eyes at him. “That’s exactly my point. If that’s the case, surely you understand that I’m not your personal tailor either. Thank you for your acknowledgement.”

Lance opens his mouth, closes it, and Keith takes the chance to add, “Shiro’s here to pick us up. You don’t want to keep him waiting do you?”

Lance cranes his head and finds Shiro’s car, rumbling quietly in its spot. Shiro waves out the window, and he’s sure Lance can’t see Shiro’s face from this far back, but Keith can feel the worried energy coming off him in waves.

“You called Shiro?”

“I wasn’t sure how else to get home,” Keith says blandly.

“There’s this beautiful thing called public transport. Oh hell, Keith. Shiro’s going to be furious with me.”

“Worried,” Keith corrects, nudging a reluctant Lance forward.

“It’s all the same thing, really,” Lance huffs, arms folded irritably over his chest as he hobbles. “It’s not you that’s going to get the lecture.”

“Stop being a baby.”

“You know,” Lance sighs as Keith opens the back door for him, and yes, Keith can indeed feel Shiro gearing up for a lecture, “you’re kind of a sh*tty secret keeper.”

Keith’s heart plummets.

“Yeah,” he says, and his mouth feels sticky and his throat dry. “Yeah, I - I can’t keep a secret to save my life.”

Lance looks at him sort of funny then, opens his mouth to say something, and Keith slams the door in his face.

By the time he climbs into the other side of the car, Shiro is in full on lecture mode, and Lance has all but forgotten Keith’s weird stammer.

Keith doesn’t though, and it haunts him long after they pull away.

.

The thing is, Keith wants to tell Lance.

He honestly does, but he’s been at this job a while, and he’s not dumb and, at the heart of it all, he knows Lance by now.

There are two options he can see.

Option one:

He tells Lance.

He sits Lance down and explains to him, as best he can when Keith himself barely understands, that Lance’s extreme selflessness has manifested into a misery vacuum. It takes a few attempts to convince him - because although Lance likes to pretend he’s a being made of confidence, the truth of it he has no real perception of his value in the eyes of others - but eventually Keith gets through to him.

However, even with Lance in the know nothing changes because Lance will of course - stupidly - refuse to try and control whatever energy he possesses that allows him to siphon off the oncoming trauma of his friends.

If there is one thing Keith has very quickly learnt, it’s that Lance may put his friends through a hell a half, but when it comes to anything approaching seriousness, he’d rather throw himself to the flames than even contemplate risking them.

Lance knowing isn’t going to fix the problem; if anything it’ll make it worse.

Because Lance will know that he has a way to take the pain away from the people he loves and Keith cannot see a world where Lance doesn’t take advantage of that, cost to himself be damned.

Option two:

He does not tell Lance.

Keith continues his research on his own, latches himself firmly to Lance’s side and makes frequent trips to heaven whenever Lance is asleep and thus as far from harm as he can ever be.

This scenario mitigates the danger of Lance actively working against him, because if Keith told him he has no doubt that Lance would keep their research on a tight leash, firmly forbidding Keith from taking any and all risks.

It’s not the option that fills him with the most fuzzy feelings, but it’s the option that Keith feels like he has the most control over. It’s the option that has the chance of fixing Lance.

And thus, it’s the option he chooses.

However, just because Keith has made that choice doesn’t mean Lance is aware that the subject should be dropped.

One evening while they’re crowded in the kitchen, Keith leaning against the bench and obediently drying dishes as Lance hands them to him dripping wet, Lance brings it up.

“Any luck finding out the reason I’m a walking time bomb?” He asks, and even though Keith knows that Lance doesn’t know he feels frozen in place anyway.

“I don’t…” Keith clears his throat and cautiously puts aside the dish he’s drying. “I haven’t found anything conclusive.”

That catches Lance’s attention in a way Keith hadn’t intended for it to. Lance pauses, soapy dish in his hand, and peers over his shoulder at Keith. “Conclusive?” He repeats. “Does that mean you’ve found something in general?”

Keith swears he hadn’t always been this bad at lying. “I talked with somebody,” he hedges, because the basis of a good lie is having an element of truth in it. “He’s looking into something but - but nothing yet.”

He thinks Lance is going to see clear through him but Lance only sighs and turns back to the sink, shoulders deflating.

“Figures,” he grumbles as he sets the plate aside with a low clatter. “Even God himself can’t find out why I can’t go two days without dying.”

“God might be able to, but Heaven hasn’t so far,” Keith says. “I wouldn’t know for sure. It wasn’t God I asked.”

“Could you?”

“Ask God?” Keith shrugs. “No. Considering I don’t even know if he exists or not.”

Lance groans. “It was an expression, Keith. An expression. Don’t take things so literally.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “How am I meant to know when you want to ask a real question and when you’re just being sarcastic?”

Lance pulls the plug and the water roars over the tail end of Keith’s sentence. “My mistake,” he says, turning around to flick the water on his hands at Keith. “From now on I’ll try and contain my jokes to things that exist on this mortal plane.”

Keith scowls and fails at flinching out of the way. He gets a face full of soap suds for his trouble. “Lance -.”

“Keith,” Lance mimics, and then grins, reaching over to rub his wet hands all over Keith’s face, leaving behind what is probably an impressive bubble beard. “There, an improvement. Maybe upper management will take you seriously with some facial hair. You might even get a promotion away from me.”

Keith doesn’t hesitate. He grabs the front of Lance’s shirt and jerks him forward so Lance flails ungainly and squeaks loudly. He takes his time rubbing his face clean on Lance’s expensive button up.

“There,” he says, as he pulls back. “This is as close to a wash as your clothes tend to get, so you should be thanking me.”

Lance splutters, cheeks bright and eyes crinkled. “You little sh*t,” he settles on eventually as Keith smiles innocently up at him. “There’s nothing f*cking angelic about you. You’re a sham. A disgrace to your department.”

Keith pats him sympathetically on his shoulders and steps away. “I make a much better angel than you do a human,” he says. “Your one and only job is in this life is to keep breathing and you can’t even manage that without intervention. I, meanwhile, have been employee of the month every month since 1980.”

“That’s because you’re a massive nerd,” Lance laughs, but the darkness of the topic before is gone and he knocks their shoulders together as he directs Keith out of the kitchen and back to his room. “I bet you wore glasses when you were in school. Probably had a pocket protector and everything.”

Keith rolls his eyes as he opens Lance’s bedroom door. “I couldn’t have afforded glasses even if I wanted to while I was alive,” he says as Lance tries to elbow him as he passes by. “And I didn’t go to school. So sorry, you’re wrong again.”

“You didn’t go to school?” Lance repeats, scandalized. “Were you alive in the middle ages or something, pal?”

Keith snorts, but shuts the door before answering. It’s not that he minds so much talking about his past - sometimes it’s nice to be reminded he was once alive - but he doesn’t think it’s a conversation they particularly want Pidge overhearing.

“I was born in the 1920’s, actually,” Keith confesses. “And I didn’t have much of a family to send me to school. I…” He thinks for a moment on the best way to describe what it had been like growing up in the time before his death. “I sort of did my own thing.”

Lance, who had been searching for something on his desk, turns around and gapes at him. The sudden shift in his things sends a mountain of books crashing down, but Lance doesn’t seem to even notice. “Wait - you were born in the twenties?” He repeats. “Holy sh*t, you’re old enough to be my grandfather.”

The idea disturbs Keith greatly. “I promise you I’m not,” he says, and shivers.

Lance, however, is on a roll. “You lived before internet was even invented. And colour TV. God, you lived through the war.”

The words are thoughtless and casual but Keith feels a prickle in his skin and a drop in his stomach nonetheless. “Lance,” he says, and even to him his voice sounds a little off. “Look at me; does it look like I lived through the f*cking war?”

Lance freezes. Between them the room goes silent, and Keith can feel it all too keenly. Lance looks startled and confused. He stares at Keith and then something clicks.

“Keith, how old are you?” Lance asks, and he takes a step in closer.

Keith smiles. “Old enough to be your grandfather, as you said.” The years have become lost to him the older he gets, but he tries to do the math regardless. “Ninety something, I guess.”

“No, I mean - like, how old were you when you died.”

Keith tilts his head back and thinks. The answer to this one is easy, but sometimes he likes to pretend he’d had more years to his life that needed counting. “Twenty,” he says. He looks back at Lance and tries to smile again. “I was younger than you are now, but only just. I was going to turn twenty-one the next month, actually.”

Lance’s eyes are tight and his mouth is thin. He looks Keith over like he’s terrified of saying the wrong thing.

It’s flattering. Nobody in heaven treats him like this, treats anybody like this. In heaven they’re all dead anyway, and Keith is just one sob story among many. They don’t talk about it there, it’s just another fact of the job.

Keith doesn’t know why, but he knows that guardian angels are made from those who die young and bloody. There’s too much trauma in their department for one person to matter.

“How did you die?” Lance asks softly.

Keith thinks of being young and terrified; he thinks of being cold and alone. He thinks of those last few moments in the dark and quiet when he finally realized he wouldn’t be coming back from this one.

“It was wartime, Lance,” he says instead. “Everybody was dying.”

Lance studies Keith quietly for a moment. Keith marvels a little at that, because it’s not often Lance is silent.

He waits for the inevitable question, the push.

Instead Lance says, “Come on. I promised Shiro we’d be over to his for dinner.”

Keith … he isn’t glad, exactly. That’s too specific of an emotion. It’s been a long time and his death doesn’t faze him the way mortals might assume it would. But he feels a loosening in his shoulders all the same.

It’s nice to have acknowledged he’d lived, that it had been taken from him sooner than it ever should have, without having to talk about the details of it.

“Shiro barely knows me,” he says, watching as Lance turns away to dig his keys from the mess he’d made of his desk. “Why is he even inviting me to dinner?”

“I think he’s adopted you,” Lance says, stuffing his wallet into his back pocket and offering Keith a slightly forced smile, trying almost a little too hard to dispel the lingering awkwardness. “He does that sometimes. When you start spending time with one of us, you kind of get taken in by all of us. I haven’t figured out a loophole for that one yet.”

“Oh,” Keith says.

He remembers the bright, vivid bonds between them clearly. He hadn’t thought there was room in there for another person, let alone somebody who was barely that.

Lance raises a brow and sets a hand on Keith’s shoulder, giving him a companionable shake. “I hate to remind you, but you kind of have to come. It is your job and all.”

“I wasn’t…” Keith trails off, frustrated. Words, he’s been finding lately, are terribly insubstantial things. “I want to come.”

Lance’s face cracks into a grin, eyes lighting up. “Of course you do,” he says confidently. “We’re great.”

You are, Keith thinks fondly, and he smothers down the smallest twinge of guilt at keeping all his secrets in the face of Lance’s cheerful smile.

You’re great, and it’s unfair that your future is such an uncertain thing.

As they leave the apartment, he has one last fleeting thought:

But I’ll set your existence in stone if it takes all the power I’ve got.

Chapter 8

Chapter Text

Time passes; Lance’s luck does not ease, and Keith is still devoting more energy than he seems to have most days to keep Lance functioning. He’s taken to spending whatever free hours he can scrape together in the Records Room, and it’s enough to make Keith positively miserable.

“You know,” Coran says one evening as Keith hunches in a corner, files in wobbling piles all around him, “I’d let you take some of these back with you, if you wanted. You don’t have to do all your researching here.”

“Can’t,” Keith grunts, not looking up from the folder he’s paging through. “Watching Lance is a full-time occupation. Besides, he’s bright enough to notice if I start reading strange folders when I think he’s not paying attention.”

“You do realize, of course, that he doesn’t necessarily have to see you do anything. In fact, management would prefer if he didn’t.”

It had been long enough by this point that the idea of being invisible to Lance again was almost unfathomable. Besides, it felt… like a violation of his trust. Lance tended to get panicky if he didn’t know where Keith was, and he’d made it pretty clear that Keith watching him when Lance couldn’t watch back made him uncomfortable.

Keith had lost grip of a lot of human peculiarities in his time as an angel, but trust was not one of them.

“Management knows my methods are effective,” Keith says evasively. He does look up now, and gives Coran a tired grin. “Besides, Allura’s well used to letting me do what I please.”

For once, Coran didn’t smile back. “If anything, Allura’s concerned these days. We all are.”

“About Lance?”

“About you,” Coran scolds, and at Keith’s baffled expression he sighs and runs a hand contemplatively over his moustache. “We’re worried,” he says, almost a little carefully, “that you might be putting too much of yourself into this boy.”

“That’s my job though,” Keith says, frowning.

“We’re concerned that… if things don’t go well, you might be a little too invested.”

It takes Keith a moment to figure out what Coran is insinuating, but when it clicks he slams his mouth closed so fast he feels something click in his jaw. Getting to his feet, he passes the folder he’d been examining back to Coran, perhaps a little more forcefully than he needed.

Keith is good at his job. The best. He’s been employee of the month since the 80’s. He is not used to people insinuating his failure. It’s the pride in his job, the barely veiled hint that this time he won’t manage it, that causes the drop in his stomach.

Nothing else.

Nothing else.

“Thank you for letting me read your files,” he says stiffly, and adds, “and your concern. But I’m fine.”

“Keith -.”

“I’ll be back again tomorrow,” Keith cuts over him, giving him a plastic smile. He taps the top of one of his wobbling piles. “Just leave these as they are - I have them in a very specific order.”

Coran considers him for a moment, and Keith can see something else waiting to be said, but Coran has not made it this long as the Records Keeper without knowing when to protest and when to stay quiet and wait.

With a barely audible sigh he accepts the folder and tucks it under his arm. “Be safe, Keith,” Coran says, which makes no sense because there’s no safer fate in the universe than being an angel, but Keith appreciated the peace offering.

“I’ll see you later, Coran,” he says, softer this time, and leaves.

When he gets back to Lance’s room, he’s still asleep even though the sunlight is pouring in through the crack in his curtains. Keith breathes a sigh of relief, because even though the connection between them is meant to keep tabs on Lance at all times, these days it has been slightly… faulty.

He’s not sure why, exactly, but alerts tend to come in with less and less warning and Keith is worrying that soon there might be a time when they exceed his actions.

That’s fine though. That’s a problem for another time. He has so many as it is, he’s not looking to mount on more.

In bed Lance mumbles something in his sleep and rolls over; he’s drooling and one arm is jammed under the pillow in what has to be an uncomfortable position. After a moment of squirming his eyes crack open.

They squint for a moment, his face frowning at the sunspot that’s leaked in over his bed, before they catch on Keith. And then, half asleep, drool still on his face and pillow creases on his cheek, he smiles dazedly and slurs, “Keith?”

There is no reason for it to catch Keith off guard but it does. There’s a sleepy openness in Lance’s expression, a kind of vacantness that tells Keith that he’s not altogether awake yet. There is no way Lance would be happy with Keith seeing him like this if he was firing on all cylinders, but with sleep still crowding his mind, he’s sandpaper-rough whispers and endearingly ugly smiles.

“Yeah - I mean, yes. I’m here.”

Lance blinks at him for a second, nearly dozes off in the inbetween moment where his eyelids flutter, and finally lets out a sigh worthy of its own tornado warning. The arm beneath the pillow sneaks out to fling over his eyes.

“Wha’ time is it?” He groans.

Keith lets out a breath he hadn’t been realizing he’d been holding. Probably because oxygen is inessential to him like this. This is the Lance he’s used to.

“Six past eleven,” he answers automatically.

Lance groans again, and then swears a little. “It’s Saturday, that’s so early.” He removes the arm from his face just enough to frown at Keith. “How do you even know that? There’s no clock in here.”

Keith shrugs. He doesn’t actually know. As an angel, the universe sometimes seems condensed into his bones. He can keep humans from wandering into death; telling the time based on instinct alone seems fairly simple.

Lance sighs again and the arm sneaks back over his eyes. “I could go back to sleep,” he ponders.

“Only if you want Pidge breaking down your door,” Keith replies easily.

Lance groans again, and then pats clumsily at the bed beside him. “If you’re gonna insist on talking, could you at least sit down here. It’s unnerving to have you looming over me like that.”

Keith puffs up indignantly, but Lance squints over his elbow at him and he relents. Tentatively, he sinks down on the small sliver of bed to the left of Lance. It’s warm, and it surprises him even though it should be obvious.

The residue of human warmth, he thinks, is such a strange thing.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Lance says out of the blue, startling the sh*t out of Keith. He reaches out and tugs at the corner of Keith’s jacket. “Your clothes.”

Not following and a little overly conscious about the brush of Lance’s knuckles on his wrist, Keith asks, “What about them?”

Lance rolls over in bed so that he’s facing Keith. He’s more awake now, Keith can tell, and it’s a little unnerving to be leant up against his bedhead while Lance stares up at him from the pillows. If Lance is as aware of it as Keith is, it doesn’t show.

Keith supposes there’s not much more intimate you can get with a person once their soul is in your care. He doesn’t know why he’s so fixated on the careless skinship of the moment.

“I used to think this was what you died in or something,” Lance says inelegantly, scanning Keith over with a critical eye, “but considering you died in the fifties, I sort of doubt it.”

Keith shrugs, It jostles the pillows slightly but Lance doesn’t seem to care. “It’s not,” he says simply.

Lance raises an eyebrow, tugs again on the sleeve until Keith breaks his grip with an annoyed huff.

“Lance, I manipulate your fate with mystical energy given to me by the bureaucratic nightmare that is heaven; deciding I want to wear a different outfit every ten years or so is hardly a stretch for me.”

“Okay, now I know you’re lying,” Lance snorts. “This outfit looks like it came right out of the eighties. Thirty years is a long time to go without a costume change, Keith. Here on planet earth, we tend to change our clothes every day.”

“It’s not that bad,” Keith protests, suddenly self conscious of the bright red of his jacket.

“Dude, our friends think you’re a cartoon character because you only ever seem to be wearing one outfit.”

“I picked this outfit only five years ago,” Keith insists, still offended.

Lance’s bedroom door chooses this moment to swing open, and Pidge sticks their head in. If they’re surprised to see Keith, fully clothed, sprawled on the bed beside a tired, irritable-looking Lance they don’t show it. They don’t even blink.

“Keith,” they say, “I see you spent the night. Again.”

“Pidge! Jesus Christ! Don’t you know how to knock?” Lance yelps, dragging the covers up past his chest even though he has a shirt hanging half off his shoulders.

“You were meant to be up half an hour ago, dickhe*d,” Pidge says unsympathetically. “It’s going to be busy as f*ck in town now, and it’ll be entirely your fault.”

“Pidge,” Keith says, while he has the chance, “is there something wrong with my clothes?”

“Oh my god, Keith, it was just a comment, I didn’t mean to upset your delicate fashionista heart,” Lance groans, pulling a pillow up over his face.

“It’s modern, isn’t it?” Keith asks, ignoring Lance.

Pidge stares blankly at him. “You know what,” they say, “it’s too early for this. I’m going to wait in the kitchen.” Their gaze ticks back to Lance. “If you’re not out in five minutes, McClain, I’m leaving you behind. Bring your boyfriend too.”

.

Shopping with Lance and his friends feels like it should be more fun than it is. Between Lance’s sh*tty luck that means Keith feels the need to keep a hand on him at all times in unfamiliar places, and the fact that Keith isn’t really into material possessions, the whole thing feels tedious and overwhelming.

“I know we love Shiro,” Lance says, picking up a snowglobe and shaking it viciously so the tiny mockup of New York contained inside is drowned in a sudden blizzard, “but we could probably give him some homemade socks and the guy would be ecstatic.”

“I gave him homemade socks last year,” Hunk says, considering a tiny porcelain pig for a moment before putting it back on the shelf.

Lance raised a brow at him. “Well? Did he like them?”

“Oh yeah. He got a little teary.”

“No,” Pidge says firmly, in a voice used to vetoing everybody else in the room. “This time, he gets a nice gift. No offence to your sewing, Hunk,” they add in a hurry.

Hunk shrugs cheerfully, completely unoffended. “None taken.”

The shop is pretty quiet out, and Keith allows himself to relax. At the counter of the cheap dollar store they’re haunting, a cashier leans on the counter flicking through a dog eared magazine.

Hi, his badge says in novelty flashing lights, I’m in training!

“You’re an old man, Keith,” Lance says under his breath, just loud enough for Keith to hear, passing the snow globe over. “What kind of things do you like as a gift?”

Keith takes it, squinting through the cheap glass. “Given that I existed in a very different decade from Shiro, I don’t think I’m the best authority for this,” he says dryly, and then adds, “also, I’m forever twenty. That’s how death works.”

“That’s a cop out and you know it.”

Keith is distracted from answering by the jingle of a bell at the door. Something trembles in his gut - not quite the usual death is imminent warning he gets before Lance does something dumb like walk into traffic, but something uncomfortable and twitchy.

A man walks into the store, shoulders hunched and face hidden beneath a beaten baseball cap. His hands are hidden in his pockets, and the ugly feeling in Keith’s stomach solidifies.

“Lance,” he says urgently, turning back to the group, but before he can get another word out he’s drowned out by a sharp bang.

Keith has heard gunfire before, but it never ceases to make his bones quiver for the violent suddenness of it all.

“Nobody move,” says the man who just walked in, his pistol slowly lowering from where he’d just sent a bullet into the ceiling. “Nobody move, and nobody gets hurt.”

Are you kidding? Keith thinks, slightly hysterical, because this is a dollar store. They’re in a shopping arcade - three storefronts down is a jeweller’s. And yet, it’s their store that gets hit for a hold-up.

Keith does not pretend to understand the rules that govern Lance’s luck, but this feels like the biggest f*ck you the universe could possibly issue.

“Oh my god,” Hunk says, “oh my god.”

Pidge’s hand latches onto his shoulder. “Keep calm,” they say firmly, even as their eyes fixate on the gunman.

“Keep calm? If I don’t piss myself in the next five minutes, it’ll be a miracle.”

Keith feels a hand settle on his waist, and he startles, turning to see Lance slowly easing himself in front of the lot of them in small, inching movements, jaw locked and eye narrowed.

For a second Keith is so overwhelmed he can do nothing but stare at him dumbly. There’s no privacy here for him to communicate to Lance how dumb what he’s doing right now is, but Keith promises himself when they get home he’s going to rip into him thoroughly.

Keith is the guardian angel here; protecting Lance is literally in his job description. He’s the immortal being between the two of them, and Lance is the squishy human bag full of blood and bones just waiting to be popped.

“I don’t want any trouble,” the cashier says, hands in the air and voice trembling. He very clearly hasn’t been trained for this, which Keith can understand, because, once a-f*cking-gain, this is a dollar store.

“Give me all the money in your till and we won’t have any,” says the gunman, and Keith can’t help but notice his finger trembling on the trigger.

As slowly as he can manage, Keith reaches out to hook a finger in Lance’s belt loop and tries to drag him back. Lance doesn’t budge an inch.

“I only have fifty dollars in here, man,” the cashier says.

“Fifty dollars?” The gunman echoes.

“It’s been a slow day,” the cashier says defensively.

The gunman gestures with their gun wildly. “Don’t you have any money out back?”

The cashier looks at him blankly. The “hello, I’m in training” badge continues to flash cheerfully.

“I asked you if you have money out back,” the gunman asks again, more agitated this time.

He’s going to shoot, Keith thinks dazedly with a moment that is more common sense than prophesy. There’s no way we’re getting out of here without a bullet leaving that barrel.

In front of him he can see Lance coming to the exact same realization, the dawning horror on his face. And then, in a move that defies all logic and reason, Lance takes a step forward and opens his mouth.

“Hey -.”

That’s as far as he gets. In a universe that can’t wait to see his name engraved in a tombstone, Lance was never going to be allowed to get any further.

The gunman turns, and Keith sees his finger tighten. He doesn’t know whether it’s intentional or just the nerves getting the better of him, but the end result is the same.

The uneasy feeling in his stomach is like he’s swallowed a rock; in slow motion, he sees the the kickback of the barrel, feels Lance flinching beneath his hand.

You stupid goddamn idiot, he thinks furiously, and then he pushes with all his energy.

Time slows ever so imperceptibly, and he can feel the strain of it all the way to his bones. Keith uses the grip he has on Lance’s jeans to swing them around, pushing Lance back towards his friends, and he could have pulled, had the both of them out of the path of logical harm, but the universe’s vendetta against Lance is not logical, and he doesn’t expect it to be.

Keith wraps his arms around Lance, hunches his shoulders and waits.

The hitch he’d given in time runs out, and Keith is welcomed back with an explosion of sound; the gun going off, the cashier screaming, Lance shouting.

His senses are so overloaded that it takes him a moment to even register that he’s been shot.

“Oh my god,” somebody says, and it takes Keith a second to realize this time it’s Pidge. He cranes his head up and catches a brief glimpse of their pale, terrified face.

Behind him there’s the clatter of a gun dropping, and Keith turns to see the gunman stumbling backward, as terrified as the rest of them, as the consequences of his actions finally seem to penetrate whatever high had driven him into the store.

Beside him, Hunk bellows and charges forward to tackle the gunman to the ground with a kind of practiced ease that makes Keith think he was probably on the football team in high school.

“Hunk!” Pidge calls.

The gunman is a skinny, terrified looking thing and he goes down without a fight. Hunk has him pressed into the ground face first in a split second. “I’m fine! I’ve got him!” He shouts, and out of the corner of his eye Keith can see people starting to gather at the entrance of the store, looking for the source of the commotion. “How’s Keith?”

Pidge’s attention rockets back to him at the same time Keith finally registers Lance’s hands on his elbows, turning him back around to face him. He gets the briefest glimpse of Lance’s pale, shocked face before it hardens in resolve and he’s shoving Keith back, directing him out of the store.

“Lance,” Pidge calls out behind them, but Lance doesn’t stop; shoves Keith through the confused onlookers and out the doorway into the shopping centre.

It’s been a long time since Keith has been overwhelmed, but in this moment he is. He catches sight of so many faces, cellphones pressed to ears everywhere, security making their way through the crowd in their direction.

There’s too much going on. It’s so loud, and everybody is moving, and the nervous energy pouring through the shopping centre is enough to feel as if somebody has hooked his nerves up to a live wire. Keith has never felt like this before, and he can’t -

“Keep moving,” Lance says in his ear, and Keith swallows and does.

The time between the shop and reaching the bathroom seems to be both an eternity and an instance; even for Keith, who can, under extreme duress, bend time to his will, this absence of perception is incredibly unnerving.

Once they’re there though, Lance locks the door in a hurry and crowds him up against the wall, hands patting him down and looking one more word off breaking down into hysterics.

“I’m fine,” Keith says, because he is, and he knows Lance can be quick to panic but surely he hasn’t forgotten that Keith’s an angel and his body is a means of convenience and nothing more, something like this can’t -

“Keith,” Lance says, low and urgent and very, very frightened. His hands are at Keith’s shoulders, pushing his jacket aside and reaching for the cool skin beneath it. His hands, when they pull back, are stained with blood. “I don’t think you are.”

Keith stares at Lance’s pale, terrified face, at Keith’s blood warming his fingers when Keith hasn’t bled in longer than Lance has been alive.

There’s a dull burn in his shoulder. The pain isn’t quite real, more the memory of agony than the reality of it. Keith remembers very clearly what it feels like to be shot and this mimicry doesn’t even approach it.

But the base ache is the same. Keith’s death-numbed senses trying to make sense of this familiar but so f*cking impossible thing.

“Oh,” he says, much too weakly. He puts his hand to the place that feels warmest and his fingers come away wet. “Oh.”

“Keith, what - what can I do? Is there somebody I can call? Do I - do I just take you to hospital?” Lance’s hands flutter about his shoulders, his arm, like he’s terrified to touch Keith in case he makes it worse. They settle on his face, tilting Keith’s head so Lance can stare him in the eye. His palms shake against Keith’s skin. “Tell me how I can make this better,” he demands.

“You can’t,” Keith says automatically, because he doesn’t even know what this is. This shouldn’t be happening. Keith is dead, an angel, and death shouldn’t have claim to him twice. “I’m fine,” Keith says again, even though it is very clear now that he is not. He curls his hand over his shoulder, nails digging into his skin. “It’s just a shoulder shot.”

“Just a -.” Lance cuts himself off, takes in a breath that shudders all the way along his shoulders and down his spine. “Keith, I don’t care if it’s a f*cking papercut; this shouldn’t be happening. You told me this couldn’t happen.”

“I know,” Keith snaps, fear and confusion finally getting the best of him. He tries to pull back from Lance’s hands but Lance won’t allow it; drops his hands from Keith’s face to his shoulders and gently takes over applying pressure to the hole two inches left of his collar. “I don’t - I’ve never experienced anything like this. I don’t know what to say, Lance.”

Lance’s mouth draws into a frown so tight that it creases all the way to his forehead. The hand he lays on Keith’s shoulder is firm for all that he can sense shakes in Lance’s fingertips. He can almost feel Lance trying to pull Keith’s pain away, trying so hard to press himself into the sliver of space between Keith and his mortality.

The frustrated focus is so unnecessary and typically Lance that a small part of Keith is endeared. It’s not a pleasant feeling though; it’s annoyance and worry and fear wrapped tightly around a core of hopeless fondness that he can’t even seem to quash during moments like this.

“I have to go,” Keith says.

Lance’s head snaps up. “Go? Keith, you’re bleeding all over my f*cking shirt and you want to go?”

Keith glances down at Lance’s shirt and yes, there is a few new stains that hadn’t been there this morning.

“I can arrange payment for the shirt.”

“The shirt is not the point, Keith,” Lance says, and his voice is high and hot. The trembles which had been slowly easing out of his fingers are back. Keith wonders how Lance would react if he told him about that; the way Lance’s fingertips quiver when he’s terrified. “You’re the point, okay? And you can’t just -.”

Keith lifts a hand and touches Lance’s cheek. Too late he realizes that it’s bloody. Lance jerks sharply and stares at him like Keith’s gone absolutely mad, which doesn’t make any sense because Lance is always grabbing at Keith, directing his hands here and his body there; wherever it is Lance wants him to be, and Keith always lets him.

But maybe - okay, yes, definitely, this may be the first time Keith has returned the gesture in kind.

He tries not to focus on that, just passes his thumb in the hair behind Lance’s ear. “There is nothing you can do for me here. I can’t go to a hospital - I’m not even part of this plane of existence. Or, I’m not meant to be. I have to see somebody back at the office, somebody who might know what just happened. Somebody who can help.”

Lance stares at him blankly for a minute, red on his cheek from Keith’s fingers and face pale from fright. “Take me with you,” he says, and Keith’s whole world is knocked off its axis.

“Lance -.”

“Take me with you to heaven,” Lance insists. His hands are still pressed at Keith’s wound. “It’s my fault this happened anyway. It’s my responsibility.”

Keith doesn’t know where to begin responding to that. “You’re my responsibility,” he snaps. “I’m your guardian, and you are my charge, and anything that happens to either of us is only because I’ve failed at my job in some aspect. None of this - yes Lance, even the goddamn food poisoning - is because of you.”

Lance’s mouth opens mutinously, and god help them both - Keith is bleeding out on the floor of a public bathroom, more scared than he can ever remember being since he died, and of course Lance f*cking McClain is going to make this even harder.

“And I can’t just take you with me to heaven. It’s not that simple, you know it’s not that simple. Mortals are not meant for it, I can’t just take you with me, it’s not done, I don’t even know if it’s possible.” He sees Lance’s mouth opening again, and he says, more harsh than he wants to be, “and even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

Lance’s mouth slams shut. Keith feels a throng of pain somewhere deeper down than the bullet had touched, but it needed to be done. He grits his teeth and touches his fingertips to the Lance’s wrist.

“You’ll be be fine,” he says as soothingly as he can. “Just - I can fix this.”

Lance squints at him. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

Keith’s shoulder gives another throb, and he can feel the blood on his skin. “I’ve got to go - I’ll be back soon.”

“Keith -.”

Keith is pretty sure this scenario has happened exactly like this once before - he’s hoping Lance goes easier on him when he comes back this time.

“I’ll see you soon,” he insists, and then, because he’s tired and worried and stressed and terrified for what this might mean for Lance, he leans forward and presses a kiss to Lance’s forehead. “Be safe,” he says.

Lance stares at him.

Keith takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and wills himself to heaven.

Chapter 9

Chapter Text

Keith wakes up.

This is disconcerting for many reasons; the least of which is that he cannot remember the last time he slept. A near century ago, at this point, eyes drifting closed with dirt in his mouth and blood on his lips and then gasping awake to a pale ceiling and a hard pillow beneath his head that was his first introduction to the afterlife.

The same pillow beneath him now, the same ceiling swimming above him as he slowly blinks grit from his eyes.

His shoulder doesn’t hurt, he notices, although he can’t quite remember why it seems like it should. Keith hasn’t hurt in years.

“For God’s sake,” says a voice to his left, “how many times, Keith - how many times have I told you to be careful?”

Reality comes rocketing back to him all at once; the shop, the gun, the bullet in his shoulder. Lance’s pale face, the terrified shakes in his fingertips, the lurch in Keith’s gut as he willed himself up and away to heaven.

He sits up so fast and sudden he nearly slams his forehead right into Allura’s.

“I made it back?” He blurts.

Allura’s mouth thins. It occurs to Keith then that oh boy does she look really mad.

“If by ‘made it back’, you mean ‘appeared in my office dripping blood all over my nice carpet and then fainting dead on the floor’, then yes, I guess you made it back.”

“I fainted?” Keith repeats blankly.

Allura’s face draws even tighter. “Yes,” she says tightly, and she gets to her feet with what seems like all of the wrath of heaven crackling like static all around her. “And took at least a century off my life, I’m sure.”

“You’re not alive,” Keith reminds her.

“Off my existence, then, but I have to tell you, I’m not here to debate the semantics of angelic existence with you, Kogane.”

Keith winces, cannot remember the last time Allura called him by his last name, but remembers the storm that tends to follow the occasion. “I can…” He trails off, as it occurs to him that no, he really can’t explain. He’d been rather hoping Allura could.

He must look as pathetic as he feels because the apocalyptic fury Allura has been nursing takes one look at him and slowly fizzles out. She sighs, sits back down, and leans her forehead on the heels of her palms.

“Keith,” she says, sounding suddenly exhausted, “I am too old for all of this.”

“Sorry,” Keith says, meaning it. “What happened?”

“Well, after you scared the sh*t out of me and this week’s newest intern,” Allura says dryly, “I took you to the awakening room and sat here, wasting my precious time, as your body finally pulled it together enough to heal.”

Keith’s hand creeps up to his shoulder. It feels fine, as good as new. “So it healed? It wasn’t before. I…” He cannot for the life of him find a way to say I thought I was going to die that doesn’t sound ridiculous coming out of the mouth of an angel.

Luckily, Allura knows him well enough by now to read between the lines. “Being here helped,” she says, gesturing around. “You didn’t have enough energy left in you for your body to remember it wasn’t quite mortal, but heaven has enough to spare. You just needed a jumpstart this time.”

“This time?”

Allura goes quiet for a moment, staring at him with piercing blue eyes that sometimes seem to Keith like the oldest thing to have ever existed in this universe. “Yes, Keith. This time.”

“I don’t know - I really don’t know what’s happening to me.” He presses his hand harder against his shoulder, and even though the flesh there is whole and empty now, he still remembers the burn of having it full of lead. “I don’t understand. Not just the injury but - all of it. Allura, I’m so tired all the time.” He looks at her helplessly. “I’m so tired, and it takes everything I have to do the simplest things now. I wasn’t…” He hesitates. “I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to make it back to heaven, I feel so empty.”

Allura raises her head just a bit, and when she looks at him there’s something alarmingly like pity in her eyes. Keith’s heart sinks and his throat feels as if it swells closed.

“You know,” he croaks. “You know what’s happening to me.”

Allura sighs. “I did tell you to be careful.”

“What…” Keith pauses, licks his lips, tucks his shaking hands beneath his thighs. He’s never been this scared before, had forgotten what it felt like, the jackhammer of his pulse in his throat, the wavering edge in his vision. “What’s happening to me?”

Allura’s eyes crinkle, and she reaches out, places the warm palm of her hand against Keith’s icy cheek.

“Oh, Keith.” She gives him a watery smile. “You’re falling.”

.

Keith stares at the apartment door for long minutes, desperately fishing for the energy to knock.

He’s hazy still, disorientated in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with blood loss and everything to do with the way his world seems to be crashing down around his ears. It’s not the first time the foundation of his being has been shaken to nothing, but it is not an experience that improves with time.

Don’t think about it, he thinks the same time Allura’s voice seems to whisper in his ears, you’re falling.

Keith shuts his eyes, takes a breath to blow the cobwebs from his mind, and knocks.

There’s a second of silence and then footsteps, too light and steady to be Lance, and the door swings open.

Pidge stares at him, mouth slightly open and a hand on the door handle.

“Hello,” Keith says, a touch uncertainly.

He waits, expects something bitingly sarcastic or barely restrained fury, but for a moment Pidge does nothing but just stand there and looks at him like they’ve never seen him before.

Keith is just starting to second guess his decision to use the front door when Pidge says, in the flattest voice he has ever heard, “I’m this close to shutting the door in your face, you inconsiderate little sh*t.”

Keith tries his hardest not to look gutted, but he thinks he must fail because Pidge takes one look at his face and all the stiffness leaves them, and then they’re reaching out and dragging Keith across the threshold and into the apartment like Keith doesn’t have several inches on them.

“You have no idea how worried any of us were, do you?” Pidge snaps, slamming the door behind them and pushing Keith into the apartment furiously. “One moment there’s a guy with a gun robbing us, and the next moment you and Lance have bolted like there’s hell on your heels - and then Lance comes back, completely alone, and asks us not to tell the cops you were even there.”

“He did?” Keith asks, surprised even though he really shouldn’t be. Lance is smarter than most people tend to give him credit for.

“Yeah,” Pidge says, “and you’d think that would have been a real dumb thing to do in the age of security cameras, but it turns out for some reason or another all of them on that side of the mall shorted out.”

Keith doesn’t exactly remember doing that, but he hadn’t had the best self control in that moment. Mostly he remembers being overwhelmed, too much, too much, too much.

“Oh,” Keith says, and the hand Pidge has on his arm gives a dangerous squeeze. “I’m sorry, I really am.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Pidge says, finally dropping the hold they had on Keith. “With you, with Lance, with any of this. Things have felt off since you arrived.”

Human senses are about as dense as a brick. They can’t detect a supernatural entity if they were having a psychic meltdown right in front of them. Human brains, however, are clever little things, hardwired to detect any and all threats, those little not-quite-human moments Keith is prone to now and then, the moments the words out of his mouth don’t quite match the reality of the moment.

“I…” Keith fishes for something to say and comes up blank.

Pidge smiles at him thinly. “That’s what I thought,” they say.

“I’m sorry,” Keith says earnestly, because he really is.

“Tell me one thing, Keith,” Pidge says, and Keith feels everything in him going cold, expects a dozen and one things out of Pidge’s mouth - are you even human? What are you really? What is it going to take to get rid of you? Instead, Pidge says, “Are you going to hurt Lance?”

“No!” Keith says, instantly and without thought, like the notion itself is abhorrent to him on every measurable level. “No, I wouldn’t - I would never.”

Pidge has always had an immeasurable talent for silences; the kind that drag, make you feel every second of them as they trudge on by. They stare at Keith, and Keith stares back, and he still can’t read a single damn thing on Pidge’s face.

Then Pidge smiles. It’s worn out but it’s genuine. “I thought so,” they say, and they reach out to punch Keith in the arm. “I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you, but you can’t fake the way you look at him.”

And what way is that? Keith thinks but doesn’t say. Afraid of the response, maybe. He misses the days where Lance was just another number in his files.

“Thanks,” Keith says. “I think.”

“Lance is in his room,” Pidge says, taking a step back and gesturing Keith down the hall. “He’s been pretty miserably waiting for you since we got back. Don’t keep him worrying for much longer.”

Keith nods and turns to go, hurrying before Pidge changes their mind and kicks Keith out of the apartment. Keith wouldn’t blame them at this point. When Keith gets to Lance’s room, he takes a moment to prepare himself, then knocks and throws open the door without waiting for an answer.

Lance is sitting on his bed, head in his hands and hair a mess like he’s run his fingers through it one too many times. Keith has never felt so guilty in all his life.

“Hey,” he says, shutting the door gently behind himself.

Lance looks up, sees him, and gets to his feet in half a second flat. He’s in front of Keith before he has time to blink, hands grabbing at him with surprising gentleness, pushing aside his jacket to get to his shoulder.

“Are you -.”

“I’m fine, Lance,” Keith says, but makes no effort to stop him, lets Lance push his hand against the place where the bullet had torn into him and pull back his hand to find his palm clean and bloodless. “It’s healed, I’m fine.”

Lance lets out a breath that sounds more shaky than Keith knows what to with and fists both his hands in Keith’s shirt. He pulls and Keith uncertainty allows himself to be dragged a step or two closer, and then Lance leans forward, rests his forehead on the centre of Keith’s chest with an aching kind of gentleness.

“You motherf*cker,” Lance hisses.

Keith’s hands hover over Lance’s back, unsure what to do, before settling just below his shoulders. “I’m sorry I scared you,” he says.

Lance’s grip on his shirt tightens. “I swear to god Keith, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. You were - you were bleeding so much.”

“It’s nothing,” Keith says, even though it’s anything but. “Just… a bad moment.”

Finally, Lance pulls back enough to look Keith in the eye. “A bad moment?” He repeats dubiously.

“I was tired,” Keith says, which isn’t exactly a lie. “My energy was… low.”

“And when angelic energy gets low, you guys turn mortal?”

Keith opens his mouth, tries to think of something to say, and realizes with a sinking heart he can’t think of anything. This is all too new to him, and every time he blinks he sees Allura’s face, hears her words in his ears, and he’s terrified, more terrified than he ever remember being in life or death.

He doesn’t want to lie to Lance, he’s never wanted to lie to Lance, but Lance makes it so hard to tell him the truth when he’s got a self sacrificing streak a mile wild and is emotionally invested in everything.

“Keith?” Lance prompts.

“It’s complicated,” Keith settles on.

The look Lance gives him says that he thinks there’s more to this, but he isn’t going to push. “Yeah,” he says. “It usually is.”

He finally takes a step back, and Keith feels cold where their skin had been touching. Lance runs his jittery hands through his hair, messing it up even further and takes a deep, steadying breath. “Is this going to happen again?”

Keith opens his mouth, lie already on his tongue, but thinks better and closes it.

The look Lance gives him is both exhausted and angry. “You can’t do that to me again, Keith. I can’t live with myself if something I do is the reason you get hurt.”

“If I don’t do something, then you’ll be the one getting hurt.”

“Yes! And it’s my responsibility! My actions, my consequences!”

A spark of anger races up Keith’s spine as he stares at Lance’s irritated but honest face. He wants to tell him that no, none of this is Lance’s responsibility, none of it is even really his consequences. He wants to grab him at the shoulders and shake all the self sacrifice out of him and cram him full of some self preservation instead.

Through gritted teeth, Keith says, “It’s my job to protect you.”

“You’ve been telling me for weeks that I’m more trouble than I’m worth,” Lance says stubbornly. “That I’m some kind of bad luck anomaly, and you angels only have a finite amount of energy.”

Keith has a bad feeling he knows where this is going, and he curses ever telling Lance anything at all. “What’s your point?”

“My point,” Lance says, stepping forward and poking Keith in the chest, “is that you need to start letting me deal with my own bad luck.”

“Lance -.”

“ - And before you say anything,” Lance says quickly, talking over the top of Keith, “I’m not saying you give up on me completely and let me get swept away by the next train I fall in front of.”

Keith can picture that all too clearly and it makes his stomach turn. “That’s not funny,” he says harshly.

Lance blinks at him, surprised, before giving him a pitying smile. “Keith, if you take away my ability to turn all of this into one big cosmic joke, all you’re leaving me with is the crushing knowledge that the universe wants me dead. Let a guy have his coping mechanisms, okay?”

Keith scowls at him and Lance sighs and presses his hands to Keith’s cheeks, takes a step in and looks him seriously in the eye. “Just listen to me, okay? All I’m asking is that we start - prioritizing, I guess. I can handle some bruises and some misfortune. Let me take on that stuff. If your job is to keep me alive, focus on that. Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Keith privately thinks that when it comes to Lance there is no ‘small stuff’. Things spiral and grow and they explode in his face. An untied shoelace might lead somebody else to fall flat on their face - with Lance, it might cause him to trip out a window.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Keith says, hands coming up to grab Lance’s wrists.

Lance’s smile this time is charming and sweet and Keith’s stomach flips a little bit even though he knows Lance is well aware that he can get away with a lot if he flutters his eyelashes just right. The knowledge does not make Keith any more immune to Lance’s charisma.

“Of course it’s a good idea,” Lance assures him, patting Keith’s cheek a little bit. “I’m full of great ideas. I’m an engineer; improvisation is how I roll. If something doesn’t work, I make it work.”

Keith still isn’t convinced, but Lance is staring at him with wide, blue eyes and his hands on Keith’s skin are warm and Keith knows deep down that Lance is right.

Keith doesn’t have enough energy to keep this up, and he’s only going to be getting worse and worse as time goes on. He hears Allura’s voice in his head on repeat; a broken record of falling, falling, falling and all the things that entails.

He’s running out of power and he’s running out of time and Lance has never had either.

Just like that though, an idea occurs to him. It’s so obvious he could wince at not having thought of it earlier. Keith is absolutely right; between the two of them, they just can’t manage this. Keith has been trying, has been trying his whole heart out, and nothing.

But. But.

“Promise me, Keith,” Lance says, seriously now. “You won’t run yourself into the ground over this again.”

“I promise,” Keith says immediately, and this time it feels more like the truth.

They might not be able to fix this - but Keith has in mind certain reinforcements that might.

Chapter 10

Chapter Text

Catching Pidge alone was a trial. For all the time Keith spent in the apartment, precisely none of it was on his own with Pidge. And why would it be, really?

These days Keith liked to think that Lance’s friends were his friends too, but the truth of it was not nearly so clear. Lance was the bright star the rest of them orbited, and Keith worried that without his gravitational pull Keith would just… drift away from the others. Lance was the one holding him there, Lance was his only true to tie to this particular plane of being, and his feelings towards the others were largely irrelevant.

Still, over the past weeks Keith had grown to know them, and although he doubts that they’d be anything approaching sacrificing for his sake, he knows that there’s not a soul in this little ragtag group that wouldn’t do anything under the sun to help Lance.

Keith spends a few days scoping out the situation, gauging when Lance likes to leave the apartment and when Pidge is most likely to be out of their room. It’s a delicate balance, and Keith stresses endlessly about how he’s going to find the time to pull away from Lance to enact his, admittedly rather shaky, plan.

In the end, Lance gifts him the opportunity himself.

“Look,” Lance says one afternoon as he wrestles himself into his sneakers, clinging to the doorframe as he wobbles dangerously. “Hunk and I are going to go sit out in the garden for a bit to study, it’s hard to focus in here.”

“Okay?” Keith says, frowning.

Lance finally gets his shoe on and straightens up, shooting Keith a stern look. “So you’re welcome to stay in the apartment. We’re just going to be downstairs for an hour or so, and Hunk will be with me the whole time.”

Keith blinks, hope rising even as concern draws his shoulders tight.

Lance raises a hand, preempting him easily. “We said that you’d stop shadowing me and breaking my every fall,” Lance says, “and I plan to hold you to that.”

It wasn’t exactly what they’d agreed to, but Keith needs the time alone right now, and there’s not a person he trusts more than Hunk.

“Alright,” Keith says. Lance gives him a funny look and it occurs to him then that he might be agreeing too easily when Lance expects, and would normally get, a screaming match. “I mean,” Keith hurries to add, “stay close by. Don’t go too far. If you’re not back in an hour I’m coming to look for you.”

Lance narrows his eyes at him and Keith puts a concentrated effort into looking reluctant and disapproving. He must pass inspection because after a tense moment Lance shrugs and steps away.

Keith lets out a quiet, relieved breath.

He escorts Lance to the door, and he’s sure Lance thinks he’s just being a mother hen, but truth be told Keith is trying to get him out of the apartment as fast inhumanely possible. Lance gives him one more dubious look at the front door and Keith smiles at him sweet as he can manage.

“Stay safe,” he says.

“Okay,” Lance says, “now you’re just really freaking me out.”

Keith blinks at him and Lance gives him one more narrow-eyed squint before turning around and shuffling off down the hallway and towards the stairs. Keith closes the door and, to make doubly sure they’re not interrupted, locks it behind him.

He pauses for a second, rests his head against the door, and takes a moment to psyche himself up.

Keith has become a stranger to nerve racking situations over the years. It’s amazing what death can numb your nerves to. He lets out a breath he doesn’t really need, steps back, squares his shoulders like he’s about to walk into battle, and heads for kitchen.

Pidge is standing by the fridge pouring milk into a glass of cereal as he comes in. They look up and grimace as they spot him. “It’s your turn to wash the damn dishes,” they grouse, gesturing with their cup to the full sink. “If you’re gonna live here, you have to pull your weight. I’m going to be implementing a chore chart at this rate.”

Keith is so tense he is, for a moment, thrown off. He stands there for a second as Pidge turns around and shoves the milk back into the fridge, and then starts drinking their cereal like it’s a refreshing cup of orange juice.

Keith has seen stranger things living in this apartment, has seen stranger things over the course of his career, but still, humans manage to startle him in the weirdest of ways sometimes.

Pidge turns back around and, finally spotting the perplexed look on Keith’s face, raises an eyebrow. “Did you need something?”

“Yes,” Keith says immediately, more on reflex than anything else. “I - I need to talk to you.”

Pidge gives him an odd look. “Okay?”

Keith clears his throat awkwardly. “It’s important.”

“What kind of important? Seriously important or seriously important?”

Keith hesitates.

Pidge sighs and glances mournfully at their cup of cereal. “I guess this isn’t really conversationally appropriate in that case. Give me a second.” The cereal goes in the fridge and then Pidge shoo’s him over to the living room, pushing Keith’s shoulders until he relents to sit on the sofa.

“Alright hothead, hit me with what you got,” they say. “But I’m warning you now, if this is about you and Lance then -.”

Keith has an inkling feeling he knows where that sentence is headed and it’s not a place he’s comfortable going with Pidge. “It’s not,” he says in a hurry and then amends, “well, sort of. But… not like that.”

Pidge looks dubious but gestures for Keith to go on.

Keith pauses, shifts uncomfortably on the sofa. “Maybe you should sit down too,” he suggests.

“There’s one sofa in here, and your butt is on it.”

“Oh,” Keith says. “I mean, there is room for two.”

“Keith,” Pidge says impatiently, snapping their fingers at him. “I’m all for being the supportive friend here if you need to get something off your chest, but I’m not a mind reader, and unless you’re going to tell me you voted Trump there’s really no need to be this nervous.”

“Give me a second... I’m just trying to figure out how to start this.” Keith runs an agitated hand through his hair and wishes desperately he’d prepared a script for this ahead of time.

“If you wanted patience then you should have talked to Hunk,” Pidge says bluntly. “You know the drill; Hunk for sympathy, me for solutions. You made your choice. Now cough it up or make an appointment and come back later.”

“You love Lance,” Keith blurts, which is more fact than question and probably not the appropriate way to start this conversation judging by the uncomfortable and wary look Pidge shoots him.

“I mean, I guess,” Pidge hedges and then squints. “You’re not scouting out the competition, are you? Because the way I feel about Lance is as platonic as it can be. He’s like a brother to me, and I should know how that feels, because I have one. Also, I’m like eighteen, I’m not in the market for a twenty-one year old boyfriend.”

It takes Keith a moment to decode that spiel and when he does he flushes all the way to the tips of his ears. “That’s not… I wasn’t…” He takes a deep breath and while Pidge looks on skeptically says, “What I mean is Lance is important to you. That you would do anything for him.” Keith pauses for a moment and then adds, “You think Lance saved your life that night in the car crash, but you’ve never been able to figure out how.”

Pidge’s eyes go wide and their mouth drops. Finally, Keith has hit the right cord. He has their attention well and truly.

“How did you -.”

“I think it might be easier to show you,” Keith says, cutting Pidge off before they can go too off track.

“Show me what?” Pidge asks, baffled.

Keith ignores them. “I need you to keep calm,” he says, “and remember that I’m still me and nothing’s changed.”

“I - what?”

“Pidge, tell me you’ll keep calm,” Keith insists.

“Keith, come on -.”

“Pidge.”

Pidge holds up their hands in surrender. “Alright, alright. I’ll ‘keep calm’ if it means so much to you.”

“It does,” Keith says tightly. He closes his eyes for a second to steel himself and then looks up and meets Pidge’s deeply confused eyes. You’ve done this a hundred thousand times, he thinks to himself. Now’s not the time for performance anxiety.

He vanishes.

It’s a surreal feeling being intangible again. These days Keith spends so much of his time interacting with Lance and the others he’d almost forgotten it’s not his natural state of being.

To Pidge’s credit, they take it better than Lance did the first time Keith popped in-and-out of existence on him. They let out a small, muffled shout before they clamp a hand over their mouth and stare wide-eyed at the dent in the sofa where Keith had been sitting.

The room is dead silent for a second and then Pidge lowers a hand and says with great reverence, “The f*ck?”

They take a tentative step forward like Keith might be hiding under the sofa to grab at their ankles, and wave a hand out in front of them. Encountering thin air they take another step, and then another, until they’re running their hands over the back of the sofa.

The risk of screaming seems to be gone, and Keith decides that now’s as good a time as any to return before Pidge really loses it. He returns, but badly misjudges his distance and has to grab ahold of Pidge to keep the both of them from immediately toppling to the floor.

Pidge swears under their breath, clutching at Keith with tiny, iron fingers.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Pidge hisses, not entirely hysterical but approaching it. “I’m too young and my brain is too valuable to die just because your… your… particle instability gave me a heart attack!”

“I told you to stay calm,” Keith protests defensively.

Pidge looks at him incredulously, fingers still buried in Keith’s shoulders. “Stay calm? Stay calm? That’s like telling somebody ‘stay calm’ and locking them in a cage with a ravenous lion.”

Keith grimaces, offended without quite knowing why. He privately thinks Pidge is over exaggerating, just a little bit. He’d only disappeared out of reality for a small handful of seconds, it wasn’t like he’d turned Pidge into a toad or anything.

Pidge’s face, which has always been a little pale, is sheet white and their eyes are blown wide.

“Are you okay?” Keith asks.

Pidge seems to think about that for a second before they answer. “No,” they say. “Not yet. Just give me a moment.”

“A moment for -.”

Keith is cut off abruptly as Pidge sits down heavily and without warning, dragging Keith with them. Keith plops to the floor beside them with an undignified grunt. Pidge releases them immediately, but Keith stays, too scared of moving in case Pidge thinks he’s about to disappear again.

They sit on the floor in silence for several long minutes, and Keith is just starting to get anxious that they’re going to run out of time alone when Pidge finally speaks up.

“Okay.” They let out a long winded breath and says, with more confidence this time, “Alright, alright, alright.”

“Yeah?”

Pidge’s gaze turns back to him in a heartbeat. Laser focused now instead of confused and overwhelmed. This is Pidge as Keith needs them to be. At their best, and processing all of the information around them logically and at the speed of light.

“You’re not human,” Pidge says, and it’s an announcement more than a question. “You haven’t been this entire time.”

“Yes,” Keith agrees.

“Lance knows?” They ask.

“Lance knows,” Keith confirms.

Pidge flicks a glance towards the front door. “But he doesn’t know that you’ve chosen to tell me.” Their gaze flicks back to him. “You need my help with something. Lance is in trouble, isn’t he?”

The way Pidge says those two sentences sounds like they’re connected at the very core alone. There’s no doubt there; Lance is in trouble, Pidge can help, and Keith doesn’t even need to ask.

The relief Keith feels is so overwhelming for a second he honestly thinks he might cry. He hadn’t realized just how tired he was of shouldering this burden on his own until right this very minute. He hopes dearly that Lance knows just how much his friends love him.

Keith takes a breath and manages to pull himself together before he gets his messy, too-human emotions all over Pidge.

Pidge had been right about that much. Pidge was for solutions. If Keith wanted to cry, Hunk had two perfectly good shoulders on him.

Something must show on his face though because Pidge gives him an uncomfortable pat on the head. “Alright,” they say. “Enough of that. What’s happening and how can I help?”

Keith gives them an unstable, cautious smile. “How would you like unrestricted access to the archives of heaven?”

Chapter 11

Chapter Text

Keith can no longer remember why he thought giving Pidge unrestricted access to Heaven’s archives was a smart idea. It’d been two days, but feels much closer to an eternity. Keith has begun to check corners before he turns them because it feels like Pidge is always there.

Keith likes Pidge, and he appreciates their help more than he’ll ever have words for, but goddamn Keith is running on a rapidly declining pool of energy and Pidge’s maniacal grin alone drains him something fierce.

“You know,” Pidge says as they shuffle around the endless files sprawled over their desk, “this would be so much easier if you just took me to the archives to look through this stuff by myself.”

It probably would be, but Keith can see a little too clearly how delighted Coran would be at this tiny, feisty human child and it scares him something awful. Besides, he’s pulled enough favours from Allura. He can barely remember what it was like to have that professional distance between them.

(He hasn’t spoken to Allura since Keith showed up in her office dripping blood and fainted dead away. They need to talk. Keith knows they do. But he’s got enough on his plate stressing about Lance and he’s not ready for that.)

“I’m not taking you to Heaven,” Keith says patiently, reaching out to steady a stack of papers that wobbles alarmingly. He vaguely thinks it might be a record of every single person Lance has ever interacted with, but it could just as well be the log of every kind of soup he’d ever eaten.

Pidge sighs and leans back in their chair to give Keith an exasperated look. It creaks alarmingly and Keith has to stifle the urge to right it before Pidge tips out. Pidge is not his charge, and Keith refuses to become the mother hen of this group when Shiro exists. “You’re so stubborn.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “I’ve told you before, it’s nowhere near as simple as you think. There hasn’t been a human in Heaven for a very long time. I’d need to get approval from my boss, and the Record Keeper - I’d have to fill out about a hundred different forms in triplicate, and -.”

Pidge groans and shoves their hands over their ears, slinking down in their chair. “Alright, alright, I get it, I get it. God, I never thought I’d be bored listening to an angel tell me about the afterlife.”

Keith is too tired to get into the whole ‘it’s not the afterlife’ spiel again so he just sighs and straightens up, heading for the door. “Let me know if you need anything else,” he says, “but please try and remember this is about Lance. I think Coran’s getting suspicious with some of the files you’ve made me pull.”

Pidge waves them off, attention rocketing back to their desk. “I promise you, the directory on all guardian angels is essential reading.”

Keith highly doubts that, but he’s not about to pick a fight. He cranes his head over his shoulder as he opens the door. “Just - be careful okay? The last thing I need is for Lance to see this stuff.”

“For Lance to see what stuff?” Lance asks.

Keith just about has aneurysm. “Jesus Christ, Lance.”

Lance gives him an amused look, dropping the hand he’d apparently had ready to knock before Keith had made a complete dick of himself by not looking where he’s goddamn going. “Dude, it’s not my fault your jumpier than the average housecat.”

Keith gives him a filthy look. “Living with the two of you would make anybody jumpy.”

“Ah!” Pidge exclaims, leaning forward to point accusingly at Keith. “So you admit you do live here?”

Keith shrugs ambivalently because as far as he’s aware there’s not really a correct answer to that. He turns his attention forward and gives Lance’s shoulder a half-hearted push. “Move. You’re blocking the doorway.”

Lance doesn’t move. He stands his ground and glances curiously between Pidge and Keith like he’s never seen either of them before. “What are you doing in Pidge’s room anyway?”

“Um,” Keith says.

Lance’s face drops into a squint as he leans forward to see past Keith. “Dude, what’s all over your desk?”

“Uh,” Keith says.

Pidge saves him with effortlessly tact. “None of your business, buttmunch.” They jerk a thumb at Keith and add, “Now, get your boyfriend to stop bothering me so I can get back to studying.”

Keith tries to look appropriately apologetic, but it doesn’t really matter because Lance flicks Pidge off cheerfully and seizes him by the shirt to drag back out in the hallway. “Love you too, bro,” Lance says, slamming Pidge’s door with some force.

For a second Keith cannot believe it was really that easy. It’s possible, he thinks, that events of late have made him just a touch paranoid.

“I’d wondered where you’d gotten off to,” Lance says. “It’s weird, usually you’re on me like a stubborn tick but lately it feels like you’ve developed… god forbid, free will.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Oh, shut up. You’re the one who’s been on and on about getting some space. Sorry for listening to you, I guess?”

Lance suddenly looks uncomfortable. He scrubs a hand through his hair and looks nervously down the hallway. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m complaining,” he says.

Keith raises a brow. “But?”

“But I wanted space not for you to - like, ghost me, dude. I’ve barely seen you for three days now, and I’m pretty sure that’s like, a contractual breach on your part.”

Keith blinks at him and frowns. “I assure you that I wouldn’t abandon my job like that. I can feel when you’re in danger, and I’ve been paying close attention to you even when I’m not here.”

Lance sighs and tilts his face to the ceiling. He seems frustrated although Keith cannot fathom why. “Okay,” Lance says, “that one was on me. I shouldn’t have dragged your job into it like that, I know how you get about your ‘employee of the month’ record and all that.”

Keith bristles. “My record is something to be proud of -.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Lance says, hands in the air. “Also not what I mean. Just - Keith, buddy, I’m trying to tell you I miss you alright? Hard for a guy to go from practically having you attached at the hip to seeing you like maybe once a day.”

Keith stares at him blankly. “Oh,” he says.

“Yeah, oh,” Lance says. He pulls a face. “Jesus, way to make a guy feel appreciated for spilling his guts, Keith.”

“That’s not what I…” Keith doesn’t know what to say to that. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Lance might miss him if he were gone. He hadn’t even really noticed he’d been gone. He’d been too busy running errands for Pidge, working his way through the Records Room and being utterly miserable that he was now its most frequent visitor. He can’t share any of that with Lance though, and he doesn’t know what to say in the face of Lance’s awkward sincerity.

Lance sighs. “You know what? It’s fine. Let’s just forget I mentioned it, yeah? Clearly, you’ve got the emotional range of very shallow puddle and it’s my fault for springing this on you.”

He goes to turn away and Keith reaches out lightning quick to grab his shirt. Lance lurches backwards a couple of steps and turns around to give him an acid look. “This shirt is vintage -.”

“I’m sorry,” Keith blurts. “Not about the shirt, because it’s kinda hideous, but about not being around as much. I didn’t intend - no, that’s not the point. I promise I’ll stop disappearing without a word. I mean, I’ll at least talk to you before vanishing so you know not to worry.”

Lance studies him for a second before sighing and reaching out to pry Keith’s hand off his sleeve. “Alright, yeah. Yeah, that’s fine with me.” He pauses uncomfortably for a second and asks, “We good then?”

“If you’re good, I’m good,” Keith says awkwardly.

“Okay,” Lance says. “Good.” He sighs one last time and Keith feels like he can see the tension leaving him, the relaxing in his shoulders and the straightening of his spine. He gives Keith a shy kind of smile which is ridiculous given how long and how well they know each other at this point. “Wanna come play some dumb video games with me until Pidge realizes it’s nearly three in the afternoon and they haven’t eaten yet?”

“Yeah,” Keith says, and he can’t help but smile too. “Yeah, that sounds nice.”

.

Keith tries his hardest to stick to his word after that. He tries to condense all his errands into a single visit so he’s not gone for more than an hour or two a day, and he makes sure to always tell Lance when he’s leaving. He’d worried that Lance might be suspicious about his vanishing acts lately, but Lance is the kind of guy who takes people at their word and his eyes usually glaze over the second Keith says ‘the bureaucratic process.’

For his part, Lance is less vocally disapproving of Keith’s company. There hadn’t been any real animosity between them for a while at this point, but Lance more or less stops with his jokes about stalking or lacking privacy. It blindsides Keith to realize that half the reason Lance gives up on that line of teasing is because he doesn’t really feel that way anymore, which is kind of flattering and awe inspiring.

Keith had resigned himself to being the annoying fly on the wall in Lance’s life. Lance wasn’t necessarily ungrateful to him, but Keith also hadn’t been a choice Lance had made for himself, and Keith couldn’t fault him for being wary of him. He’d always anticipated that was just how things would be between them, and he wasn’t going to waste energy being depressed over it.

Instead, Lance had adjusted like a champ. He welcomed Keith into his friends group, carved out this tiny nook for him in his own life that he absolutely did not have to. Keith doesn’t know how he’s meant to react to that, how he’s meant to tell Lance just how all those small kindnesses made him feel.

It culminates in some kind of movie night with just the two of them, the couch and far too many pillows for two people. Lance is frankly appalled that Keith hasn’t bothered to keep up on movie releases since he died, and Keith had decided to pass on explaining that he’s kind of had a busy existence and human media had hardly been a priority.

Besides, it’s not uncomfortable curled up in the dark with Lance half asleep on his shoulder watching a movie he’d given up on following ten minutes in. He’s cradling Lance’s popcorn bowl, because even though the greasy smell of it makes him vaguely nauseous, the warmth of it in his palms is relaxing.

Sometimes Keith forgets how much he misses these tiny little human moments. And yeah, possibly he’d missed Lance too.

“Pay attention,” Lance says sleepily into his shoulder. “This is a good part.”

“I’m watching,” Keith says dutifully, reaching up to give Lance a comforting pat on the head. His hair feels even nicer than the warmth of the popcorn bowl and he can’t bring himself to pull away. His leaves it there, arm curled around Lance’s shoulders and fingers sifting through the strands of his hair. It’s soft too. Unsurprising, given how long Lance’s typical shower lasts.

On the screen Will Smith punches an alien square in the face and Lance gives an amused snort. Keith smiles, just a little bit.

“See?”

“I saw,” Keith agrees.

Lance squirms, pressing his face just a little closer to Keith’s neck. It gives him shivers down his spine for no real reason. “S’funny. Can’t believe you haven’t seen this before. It’s a crime.”

Keith rolls his eyes good naturedly. His back is starting to cramp now and he goes to move but the second he lifts his hand from Lance’s hair he makes a deeply dissatisfied noise. Keith freezes and slowly resumes his stroking. Lance sighs, content.

“Now who’s the cat?” Keith teases.

“I’m tired,” Lance says. “And you’re comfortable and surprisingly warm for a dead dude.”

“Don’t be rude.”

“What? You are.”

Keith tries not to smile but it’s hard. “I’m an angel, Lance.”

“Mmhm. Sure thing, buddy.” Lance clumsily reaches out to pat Keith’s knee but does not seem inclined to remove his hand. “I kinda expected you to smell like a graveyard or something but you know what? You smell like goddamn lilacs.”

“That’d be Shiro’s aftershave,” Keith says. “Hunk got him a new one and he was so excited he insisted on sharing.”

“Damn,” Lance says fondly. “Gotta love Shiro.”

They drop back into silence. Keith is too distracted to pay much attention to the screen, but he’s enjoying himself. He can’t feel sleepiness in this body, but there’s a quiet contentedness building in his bones. He could happily stay like this for the rest of eternity, Lance at his side and safe and all his worries absent in the dark.

“Keith?”

“Mmhm?”

Silence for a second, and then, so soft it nearly gets lost in the white noise of the room, “Is my luck going to kill me?”

The connectedness in his bones turns to an ache. Keith closes his eyes for a second and breathes. “No,” he says. “I’m not – no, Lance. No.”

“But you’re trapped here until my luck… gets better or until it doesn’t matter anymore, right?” Lance shifts and pulls away. Keith’s arms drops back to the cold sofa cushions. The TV paints flickering shadows over Lance’s face. He’s frowning, and it’s an expression that looks oddly out of place. “Seems like you’re kind of stuck with me until I die.”

Keith does not know how Lance knows that. He’s certainly never said as much. Sometimes, he forgets just how observational Lance can be. For a second Keith considers lying, but he’s keeping enough secrets from Lance. Besides, it does neither of them any credit to treat Lance like he’s dumb when he’s one of the brightest people Keith has ever met.

“Lance,” Keith says, reaching out to take Lance’s hand and squeezing it. “Trust me, I think there are worse fates in the world then to be stuck at your side for the rest of your tiny human life.”

Lance stares at him. It’s very quiet and his palm is very warm against Keith. Keith stares back and wonders if maybe that was the wrong thing to say, if he’s still not quite got hold of this human emotion thing the way he thinks he has.

Lance smiles. The whole room lights up with it and Keith is momentarily blind.

Lance drops his hand and reaches forward, fingertips settling on Keith’s chin. He pulls him closer, tilts his head down, and place an affectionate kiss on his forehead that lingers just long enough for Keith to process what’s happening. When he pulls back his eyes are crinkly at the corner. “You’re such a sap, Feathers.”

Dumbly, Keith raises a hand to touch the warm spot on his forehead Lance had left. Lance laughs and pushes him so that Keith is slouched against the side of the sofa again. He resumes his place at Keith’s side easy, sliding in closer and tucking an arm through Keith’s.

Keith’s brain is glitching, stuck several moments in the past on an endless loop.

“Sorry,” Lance says. “Shouldn’t have brought up something so depressing but I just… anyway, pay attention. The movie’s about to get good.”

Something explodes on screen but Keith barely notices it. He’s looking at Lance and it’s like he’s never seen him before. He’s eyes are narrowed andfocus and he’s absently chewing on a thumbnail which is an appalling habit that Keith needs to break him of even if it is childishly endearing.

The spot on his forehead is very warm and Lance is like fire against his side.

His stomach drops.

Oh, he thinks. Oh no.

Chapter 12

Chapter Text

Keith had kissed exactly one person when he was alive.

It’d been a hurried, messy thing in a tent in the middle of the night. The other guy had been two years older than him, and his hands on Keith’s waist had been both terrifying and warm. They’d been friends, sort of, in that vague way you got to consider somebody a ‘friend’ when you’re forced to spend too much time together.

He’d been cute. Red hair and freckles. Keith had liked his eyes too, although he cannot for the life of him remember what colour they’d been. He can’t remember his name, either, but Keith is less surprised by that. It’d probably been John, anyway. Everybody was named John back then.

They might have gone further but at the second Keith had skated his hands up the back of Probably-John’s shirt somebody had opened the flap of the tent. It’d been too dark to see anything, but Probably-John had been off like a shot, into the night without a backwards glance leaving Keith breathless and dazed on his back and the newcomer confused and irritated.

He doesn’t think they ever really spoke again after that. Probably-John was assigned somewhere west and left without even saying goodbye. Keith wasn’t sad to see him go. Three weeks later Keith followed a bad order and wound up stalking into a building he shouldn’t have and kicking the bucket, so to speak.

Keith’s experiences with liking people are subpar, to say the least. It’d been best not to back then, and Keith had never found anybody he cared enough about to try.

Now though, he wishes he’d had more than one midnight fumble in the middle of a war effort to look back on, because he feels overwhelmingly out of his depth. Blindsided rudely but feelings he’d thought he’d lost the capacity to experience, if he ever had it at all.

And for Lance f*cking McClain of all people, for god’s sake. Keith couldn’t have developed a crush on somebody uncomplicated and simple, no he had to go and pick out the most confusing, co*cky, tragic mess of a human and think ‘this one - this one’s mine.’

Serves him right, he guesses. Keith’s entire life has been an endless run of bad karma. Why should this be any different?

In the wake of his revelation Lance looks both different and exactly the same. Maybe it’s more the way Keith views Lance that has changed than anything.

He still dresses like a fashionista who hasn’t slept in three days, but Keith can’t help but notice the way certain shades of blue match his eyes, or how freckled his shoulders really are when he wears a tank top. He still sleeps like it’s a marathon sport, but now Keith comes to the uncomfortable realization that he has and does spend hours watching him, fascinated by nothing more than the miracle that is his every breath.

He’s furious. At Lance, at himself. At anybody who will stand still long enough to let him work up a proper wrath.

“Dude,” Lance says, two days after The Revelation, as Keith has started calling it, “I don’t know what crawled up your butt and died, but you’re being a right asshole.”

“You’re an asshole,” Keith says snidely and goes off to sulk in Pidge’s room under the pretence of helping them understand Coran’s terrible handwriting.

Only Pidge takes one look at him and says, “I don’t care what you’re fighting about but I do not want to be involved.”

“We’re not fighting,” Keith says. “I just thought you could use some help reading over this stuff.”

“Uh huh,” Pidge says. “Because you’ve shown such an interest in it before.”

“I’ve read it all before,” Keith says, a touch defensively. He doesn’t like the implication that he’s not pulling his weight in the effort to save Lance from himself. “Several times, in fact. I could probably recite it all by memory at this point. I can, if you want me to prove it.”

Pidge holds their hands up placatingly. “Chill dude, I didn’t mean anything.”

Keith feels himself go from defensive to ashamed so quick it nearly gives him whiplash. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to… sorry.”

Pidge raises a brow at him. “It’s fine. You’re just being oddly… irritable, lately. Not that I’m not pleased to see you emoting, but this is not the direction I’d have advised you to develop yourself. Personally, I always thought of you as more the sullen, quiet kinda dude.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” Keith says. “I’m just… having a bad week.”

“From what I can tell, you’re having a bad existence.”

Keith smiles despite himself. “The life part was kind of awful,” he says, “but the death part has been alright. I’ve met some interesting people, at the very least.”

Pidge beams up at him. It doesn’t get to Keith the same way Lance’s smile can, but there’s a certain innocent purity init that makes him soften all the same. Maybe because Pidge usually smiles like they’re plotting for world domination, so a carefree one is like a nice, sunny day in the middle of winter.

There’s a knock on the door Keith’s leaning against, and he steps away from it just as Lance peeks inside. He glances warily between Keith and Pidge for a second before saying, “I was thinking of going to see Hunk. Check if he needs any help on the car. Did you two want to come with?”

Keith can recognize a peace offering when he sees one, and it makes him feel immeasurably guilty because Lance really isn’t the one that should be apologizing right now.

“Dude, Hunk hasn’t needed your help on that car a day since he bought it,” Pidge says, wrinkling their nose. “And you guys know I don’t do well with those kinds of mechanics. Grease? Oil? Do you know how dirty those things can get? No thanks, hard pass from me.”

Lance rolls his eyes. “Alright then. Keith?”

Like Keith actually has a choice. He goes where Lance goes. It’s gratifying sometimes though, to see that Lance either forgets that or is considerate enough to pretend like he does.

“Sure,” he says. “Just give me a minute”.

Lance nods and backs out of the room. Keith takes a second to prepare himself, to lock away all the small annoyances that have been making him a massive dick lately and remind himself that nothing has changed from a week ago, nothing except for Keith’s perception of things.

“Dude,” Pidge says. “What is going on with you? You look like you’re about to break out a yoga mat and share your self-actualizations."

“Shut up, Pidge,” Keith says, only mildly embarrassed, and scurries out as fast as he can with his dignity intact.

.

The walk to Hunk’s is mostly quiet. Keith can feel the pressure of the silence slowly crushing him, because this is normally the part where they snark back and forth like they’re getting paid for every playful jab.

About halfway there though, Keith can’t take it anymore, and he blurts, “I’m sorry.”

Lance doesn’t stop walking, but he does flick Keith a considering look. “For what?”

Keith grimaces and folds his arms tightly. “You know for what. For … snapping at you like that earlier.”

Lance does not let him off that lightly. “And?”

Keith grits his teeth. The fact that the apology is owed does not make it any more of a pleasant task. “And for being so moody the past couple of days. You didn’t do anything and it’s unfair that I took it out on you.”

Lance smiles at him, and Keith’s sullenness evaporates beneath the power of it. “There,” Lance says. “Was that so hard?”

“Immeasurably,” Keith says. “My pride might never recover.”

Lance shoves him with his shoulder, making them both stagger a little. “There you go, right back to being a dick. Should have recorded that apology. Got Pidge to make a remix of it. Make it my ringtone.”

“Lance, I’d hate to fry your phone with the power of my brain alone, but I would do it. And then possibly lock you out of your own house.”

Lance throws back his head and laugh and laughs.

“What?” Keith asks, because he’d thought he was funny but not that funny. Lance shakes his head and keeps on laughing, coming to stop so he can clutch his knees as he wheezes. “What?”

“Sorry,” Lance says. “Sorry, I was just thinking - and you said… it’s like, it doesn’t matter if I told anybody and everybody that you’re my guardian angel because I don’t think there’s a single soul that would believe me.”

“That’d be the fault of your species, not mine,” Keith says. “You lot are the ones that have a very narrow, biblical view about what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“Keith, you told me you literally used to be my species,” Lance says.

Keith shrugs. “It’s been a while,” he says. “The gap between me-now and me-then seems enormous some days.”

Lance tilts his head curiously. “Really? What were you like? You know, back when you were alive.”

It’s cold out and Keith stuffs his hands into his armpits as he considers the street thoughtfully. There are a lot of things he thinks he could say to that, little pieces of himself he remembers in abstract ways now and again, wonders where and when they left him. Eventually though, he says, more honest than he means to be, “Angry. I was very angry all the time.”

“Not much has changed then,” Lance observes, but rolls his eyes when Keith gives him a look. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”

“I was angrier then,” Keith says. “I had a lot to be angry about, in fairness to the young me, but I didn’t handle it very well.” He thinks for a second and then says, “Mostly though, I think I was just … lonely.”

He’d lived a lonely life and suffered a lonely death. He can feel the weight of that on his soul still, the fragile core at all his relationships, how even if he doesn’t think about it he’s always just waiting for it to break apart.

It’s an engrained habit that even ninety-odd years of death can’t cure him from, it seems. It’s strange the things that stay and the things that go.

“Dude,” Lance says, struggling to keep a straight face. “That’s… deep.”

Keith sighs and pushes him lightly. “I should have known better than to tell you that,” he says as he starts walking again. “You were the one who asked.”

“Hey, hey,” Lance laughs, jogging to catch up with him. Keith makes to swat him again, but Lance catches his wrist and pulls him closer, slinging his arm over his shoulders even though it makes it all but impossible to walk. “It’s a good thing, though, isn’t it?”

“Being lonely is a good thing?”

“We were talking about how you’ve changed,” Lance says. “And if you used to be lonely, doesn’t that mean you’re not anymore?”

“You’re making this way simpler than it is.”

“No, I think you’re just overcomplicating things, like you always do,” Lance says. “Sometimes, it really is that simple, you big nerd. Besides, how on earth could you be lonely now? You live with two of the greatest mind this world has ever seen -.”

“I know one of those minds is Pidge, but I’m unsure who this second one is supposed to be.”

“- and,” Lancesays, going on like Keith hadn’t interrupted him, “the rest of the group adores you. I’m fairly certain Shiro’s already plotting to rig this year’s Secret Santa so he gets to be the one to buy you a gift. You should be happy, by the way, because Shiro is easily the best gift giver in the group.”

Lance pushes him away, and Keith stumbles to stay upright, but when he turns to scold him Lance is grinning from ear to ear, hands in his pockets and eyes on Keith full of unselfconscious warmth. “So, you might have been lonely in the past, dude, but I think you’re doing pretty alright these days, don’t you?”

The sun behind Lance’s silhouette is practically blinding. For a second, Keith swears he feels the dead thing he used to call a heart beat in the cold cavern of his chest.

It's agony. It’s amazing.

“Yeah,” he says, unable to do anything but. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

.

By the time they get to Hunk’s the both of them are in significantly better moods, although Keith still feels somewhat dazed, fixated on the shadows of Lance standing against the horizon, the white of his smile and the way it made the tiny freckles on his nose pop.

Freckles again. It f*cking figured. Maybe Keith has a type after all. Trust him to figure it out when it no longer really mattered.

“Lance!” Hunk calls, sticking his head out from beneath the hood of the car to smile widely at them. His gaze catches on Keith and his grin only grows. “And Keith! Don’t know why I’m surprised, seems these days you can’t see one of you without the other.”

“That’s a baseless accusation and I refuse to stand for this kind of slander,” Lance says, swaggering forward to push Hunk out of the way of the car. “Show me what you’ve done to our baby since I saw it last.”

“Our baby? I’m pretty certain I’m the one putting in all the hard work to bring it into the world, Lance.”

“You can be the mother then,” Lance says. “I’ll be the deadbeat dad that shows up on weekends to fawn over it undeservedly while you stand like a guard-dog in the corner.”

“We can both be the father, don’t be narrow minded.”

“Alright, but -.”

Keith trails away. Once the two of them get each other going it can go on for hours. Besides, with an engine beneath his fingers Lance isn’t likely to emerge for some time yet. Best to get comfortable, maybe fill out some paperwork if he’s feeling particularly ambitious.

Hunk’s shop is small and cramped, but the doorstep to the main house is just fair enough away that Keith can keep an eye on Lance without feeling crowded. He’s just settled in for a wait when there’s a soft whooshing noise and Keith turns, startled, in time to feel somebody settling onto the step beside him.

It’s Allura, looking as uncomfortable wearing a plain sweater and jeans as Keith is seeing her in them. He’s not sure why she’s bothered considering that none of them can see her, but it’s not his place to comment. Her hands are folded in her lap, and she looks over in interest at the squabble that’s still going on between Hunk and Lance. They seem to be fighting over a socket wrench now, although Keith can’t say where it’d come from.

“It’s nice here,” she says. “Peaceful. I see why you like it.”

Privately, Keith wouldn’t use the word “peaceful” to describe his life lately, but he appreciates what she’s trying to say all the same. There’s a slight tickle in his gut and he looks over just in time to watch Lance drop the socket wrench on his foot. Allura winces in sympathy, and then gives a startled hiss as Lance stumbles back and trips clean over a stool to land flat on his ass, bumping the workbench on his way down. A cascade of tools follows, missing him by a narrow margin.

“And this is a calm day,” Keith says mildly. “You haven’t even seen him try to navigate the hellhole that is the public transport system yet.”

“Indeed,” Allura says, looking more than a little alarmed. “That would be… rough, I’d imagine.”

“You’ve seen his file, I don’t know what you were expecting.”

“Yes, well… reading it and seeing it are two different things entirely, as it turns out,” she says. She hesitates for a second and then adds, “Should you be helping him?”

Keith shrugs and leans back against the wall, crossing his arms. “He’s fine,” he says. “Hunk’s got him. Besides, he’d be more pissed if I intervened over something like this.”

Hunk was helping Lance to his feet, but he was also laughing so hard that it was slow going. Lance somehow manages to look grumpy, resigned, and reluctantly amused all at once. Keith has never quite figured out how Lance’s face is expressive as it is, but it intrigues him to no end.

Allura’s lips purse for a second and she flickers a glance from Lance back to Keith. Keith rolls his eyes and asks, with more venom than he really intends, “What do you want, Allura? You didn’t just come down here for a social visit.”

“I’m still your boss, and you will not talk to me like that,” she says, whip quick and electric.

Keith does his best not to feel cowed, but Allura has the look of a woman who commands entire armies sometimes and it’s difficult not to feel the weight of that. He glares her down for a second, maybe two, before his shoulders drop and he looks away. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t… I’ve been under some stress lately. I didn’t mean to take that out on you.”

She holds tight to her frigid fury for a moment but things between them have always been a little closer than just boss and employee and she barely lasts longer than Keith before her ice melts. “Keith, of course I know you’ve been stressed lately. But it’s not helping anybody if you take that out on yourself or me.” She pauses and then adds, “It’s why I’m here to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Keith says quickly. Too quickly.

“You can’t avoid me forever, Keith.”

“I’m not aiming for forever; just a vague approximation of it.”

“Oh no,” Allura sighs, looking to Lance with a smile. “He’s gone and given you a sense of humour, hasn’t he?”

Keith bristles. “I’ve always had a sense of humour.”

“A little,” Allura allows. “But your humour involves terrifying both my interns and your mortals. Mostly, I remember you as the guy who once gave me - your boss - a thirty-minute lecture on the importance of maintaining a proper filing system.”

“You can’t hold that against me,” Keith says defensively. “I’d just finished my time in Records; I was young, traumatized, and every time I closed my eyes I saw the endless rows of misfiled papers Coran made me organize looming around me.”

“Records isn’t that bad. Coran loves it.”

“Coran is a crazy old man who hasn’t seen sunlight in longer than you or I have been both alive and dead.”

Allura smiles. “He’s not so bad.”

Keith looks away and mutters, “I didn’t say he was.”

This time Allura laughs at him, overjoyed and unrestrained. “I see you haven’t perfected expressing your emotions after all these years.”

Keith looks over at Lance. He’s bent over the car, one hand steadying himself on the hood and the other waving animatedly to Hunk as he explains something Hunk doubtlessly already knows. There’s yet another grease smear on his cheek and the socket wrench is tucked into the back of his jeans. Presumably Hunk took pity on him after his fall, because Keith doesn’t really see that as an argument Lance was destined to win.

He looks like a dork, even by Keith’s admittedly very loose understanding of the phrase these days. Keith inexplicably and unconditionally adores him.

“I’m working on it,” he says quietly.

Allura studies him closely. Keith refuses to look at her. “Yeah,” she says, softly. “It seems like you are.”

This is a talk Keith wants to have even less than the one Allura’s ambushed him for, so he clears his throat and sits up straighter. “Alright, let’s get it over with,” he says. “Say what you came here to say.”

“I didn’t come here to say anything, Keith. I came here to have a conversation with you as both a friend and a colleague. It’d be nice if you stopped making that difficult for me.”

Keith turns around and gives her an incredulous look. “Difficult for you? You don’t think talking about - about what’s happening to me is maybe difficult for me?”

“You’re falling, Keith,” Allura says firmly. “Avoiding the word isn’t going to make it any less true.”

Keith winces despite himself. There it is, out in the open, swallowing him up in its hungry, all-encompassing awfulness. “What is there to talk about? It’s happening, I can’t stop it, and I really don’t want to think about it.”

“It doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” Allura says, laying a hand on one of his. “You don’t know -.”

“No, I don’t know - and neither do you. Nobody does. I could wind up reincarnated, I could wind up disappearing into the ether. Neither of those things sound all that great to me, Allura.”

“Reincarnation is a privilege -.”

“I could wind up as a goddamn pigeon or something!”

That last part comes out slightly more hysterical than Keith intends for it to, but he’s been studiously not thinking about this for so long that all the worst cases scenarios have just coalesced in his mind into a terrible, thriving mess of anguish.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Allura snaps, squeezing his hand hard enough to hurt. “I’ve never known anybody to be reincarnated as pigeon, for goodness sake, Keith.”

“But what if -.”

“Would you be happy as pigeon?”

“No, but -.”

“Then you won’t be reincarnated as pigeon,” Allura says firmly. “That’s all there is to it.”

There’s so much confidence in her voice that Keith can’t help but feel it draining the bubbling anxiousness out of him. Somewhat deflated, he mutters, “You don’t know how this works any better than the rest of us do.”

“No,” she agrees, “but I’ve been around for a long, long, long time - I know a thing or two about falling by now.”

Keith sighs and raises a shaking hand to cover his eyes. Distantly, he can hear Lance’s voice, rising and falling in waves, completely ignorant to the small but world-ending breakdown Keith is having behind him. Most days, that’d be enough to calm him; the knowledge that Lance is here, nearby, under Keith’s vigilante watch and unlikely to leave him anytime soon.

Today it is not. Today it just reminds him how transient this all is. How ultimately pointless this moment will be in the years to come.

This is exactly why Keith hadn’t wanted to talk about this. What is there to say? What is there to do? Keith is one small man in a very big world and all he’s trying to do is cling to the things that matter with everything he has.

Some days it feels like that’s not enough. Other days it feels like he should be able to hold up entire galaxies with the strength of his conviction alone. It’s strange how neither of those things make him happy.

“Keith,” Allura says.

Keith tries to answer her but all that comes out is shaky breath. He lifts his other hand to his face too and buries himself, unwilling and unable to let her see how goddamn hard he’s trying to pull himself together.

For just this moment the world is too big and time is so little and Keith has had enough.

“Oh, Keith,” Allura sighs, and there’s a faint rustle of movement and then Keith is being pulled into an embrace so gentle it aches something fierce. Allura’s warm and soft and her hair tickles Keith’s cheek as she pulls him close so that his forehead rests on her shoulder.

He can feel the small up-and-down of her chest, and he can’t help but think it’s funny how neither of them need breath to survive but their bodies can’t help but remember when they did. They’re stuck like that, he supposes, reliving the glory days long past when it matters.

“I’m fine,” he says, even though he is very clearly not. He pulls his hands away from his face and pushes weakly at Allura’s shoulders. His throat hurts and his mouth tastes like ashes and dirt. “I’m good, I promise.”

Allura’s hug tightens for a moment and then she pulls away, fingertips trailing over Keith’s arms as she goes like she’s reluctant to leave him with nothing to steady himself with. Keith appreciates the gesture even as he acknowledges its uselessness.

Allura’s strong. Easily one of the strongest people he’s ever known. But it’d take even more than her and her inconsiderable willpower to hold him up when his world is so close to falling down.

“You’re right though,” Keith says, wiping at his cheeks which somehow came up wet when he wasn’t paying enough attention. “We need to talk about this.”

“You’ll find I’m right about a lot of things,” Allura says with a weak smile.

“Of course you are,” Keith says. “You’re the one who made me employee of the month for over thirty years running.”

Allura’s laugh is as watery as Keith currently feels. She dabs a little at her eyes with her knuckles and looks highly embarrassed to have been caught at it. “Oh dear,” she says. “Look, you’ve made me laugh so hard I’ve cried.”

Keith snorts and gives up on all pretence of subtlety, drying his face on the front of his shirt. “Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s been real funny over here; a guy can hardly keep a dry eye.”

Allura sets a hand on his shoulder. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have ambushed you with this. If you’re not ready to talk about it -.”

“I am,” he says. “Well, as ready as I’m going to be. Besides, you’ve already gone and made me cry and I’d rather not do this twice.”

“Yes,” Allura agrees, clearly relieved. “Crying is awful. Can you believe humans do this all the time? It’s no wonder they’re always dying, they must wind up so empty after a while.”

“I’m reasonably sure that’s not how biology works but not sure enough to refute you,” Keith says.

Allura pats his shoulder once before letting her hand drop. Keith is glad. He’s hit a certain level of exhaustion that makes every touch feel so much heavier than he knows it is and he’d hate to shrug her off when she’s trying so hard to do right by him.

Allura’s the best boss he’s ever had. Considering his last boss had ordered him into a collapsing building that had wound up - shockingly - crumbling and burying him alive, Keith supposes that the competition isn’t very high, but he thinks the point stands anyway.

He takes a deep breath. Unnecessary but gratifying. “Alright,” he says. “Alright, let’s talk.”

Chapter 13

Chapter Text

Keith drags Lance aside before he takes off, because it’s the least he can do given what he’s put him through lately, and Lance had made it perfectly clear the next time Keith vanished without a word he’d find himself with a well-deserved fist to the face.

Hunk waves them away without so much as looking up from the car, unconcerned and distracted, and Lance gives Keith a suspicious look as Keith draws him back by his elbows. He stops just far enough out of the garage that Hunk cannot possibly hear them, and far enough from the steps that Allura stands no chance of eavesdropping either. He can see her over Lance’s shoulders, doing a terrible job of pretending to be looking at her nails, and he scowls.

“Hey, what’s up?” Lance asks. “Is everything okay?”

Keith grimaces at Allura and turns his attention back to Lance who is giving him a funny look. Possibly watching Keith make faces at the apparent nothing behind his back is an odd experience. “It’s fine,” Keith says. “I’ve just got to … go upstairs for a bit.”

Lance does a good job of hiding his crestfallen expression, but not good enough. “I see,” he says carefully, casting a look over his shoulder at Hunk. Hunk is still deeply engrossed with the engine of the car, and shows absolutely no sign of surfacing any time this century. Lance glances back at him. “Are you going to be long?”

“I have no idea,” Keith says honestly. “It’s - well, it’s kind of a meeting with my boss, I guess you’d call it. I’ve put if off for a while, and it’s gotten overdue.”

This pulls a smile out of Lance. “Hey, I thought you were meant to be a hard worker. That doesn’t sound good for your employee of the month track record.”

In truth, Keith hasn’t thought about his employee of the month record in weeks. It occurs to him now to wonder if there’s another picture on the wall of Allura’s office of some other guardian angel who’s probably sobbing from the sheer joy of bringing down Keith’s tyrannical rule.

Once, many years ago now, some of the interns had tried to stage a coup. It’d gone spectacularly poorly for them, because it took a lot more than confiscating all of Keith’s files and trying to usurp his charges to throw him off the job. Mostly, he’d just been miffed they replaced all the pictures of him on Allura’s wall.

He worked hard to earn his (many, many) spots on that wall, and he wasn’t planning on giving it up to a group of young upstarts who had only been dead for a decade at best.

(this was also about the time that Keith had the awful realization that death had turned him into a grumpy old man, but he hadn’t been spectacularly pleasant while he was alive either, and mostly it was a relief to have a ready excuse for being difficult.)

Keith had spent two days straight thoroughly completing all the paperwork necessary to reassign the entire department’s caseload to himself. Allura had been positively furious when she’d found out, but Keith was damn good at job. Legendary, even. His paperwork had been perfect, filed in triplicate, and there was nothing to do but begin the equally audacious task of transferring the caseload all over again.

Sometimes, rarely, the bureaucratic nightmare of heaven worked in his favour. He still thinks fondly of the interns crying into their papers because they couldn’t figure out whether they needed to fill out the IH-7 or a B-19 first.

That’d been a good week for Keith. It was also the last time anybody tried to sabotage him, and the beginning of his ongoing rivalry with Allura’s interns.

Now though, he couldn’t find it in himself to muster up even a fraction of the passion that had powered him through that fiasco. So he wasn’t employee of the month again, so what? His eyes were a little more fixated on earth this time, and the wall slathered with pictures of his smug smile seemed very far off in comparison.

“Obviously you’re a bad influence,” Keith says dryly. “But I’m glad to see you appreciate just how privileged you are to have your life in my hands.”

“Oh man, when you say it like that you just make me absolutely terrified, buddy. Is that a reassurance? A threat? I really can’t tell and it’s making me nervous.”

Keith rolls his eyes and finally drops the loose hold he has on Lance’s elbows. “Don’t be rude,” he reminds him, and then, before he can allow himself to get distracted, “I promise I’ll try and be back before nightfall. It’d put me at ease if you stayed here until then.”

“I’m not that helpless!” Lance protests. “I managed to get to and from my own damn apartment without escort for years without your help.”

The look Keith gives him is deeply unimpressed. “One of these days, I’m going to show you your own file, and then maybe you’ll understand why my department played hot potato with you for an eternity before I was the unlucky idiot who landed you.”

It comes out sounding a great deal harsher than Keith had intended, but Lance does not look nearly as offended by that as he feared. Instead, he offers Keith a truly sunny smile, tucking his hands into his pockets. “What can I say? I like to leave an impression.”

“And I like you alive, so maybe you’ll just have to -.”

Lance gasps loudly, pressing a hand to his chest.

“What?” Keith asks, panic burgeoning. “What are you -.”

“Oh my god, you just admitted you like me! No take-backs!”

Keith cannot believe he let himself trip into such an obvious trap, and even his most powerful glower can’t stop the sly grin from taking over Lance’s face. He could argue, lie and bicker like they always do, but he doesn’t want to rob Lance of his good mood, not when he’d taken Keith’s announcement with such grace.

He also really doesn’t want to push his luck on a day that is already looking to be exhausting and terrible.

“Just try and be careful, alright? I’ll still feel it if you’re in danger, but I’d really rather not rush out of a meeting with my boss just because you thought it’d be a good idea to toboggan down an escalator again.”

“I was four, Keith. Four. But if you’re so damn worried about it, yes, I’ll stay with Hunk until you get back.”

The relief Keith feels is palpable. “Good.”

Lance’s smile dims, just a little, and he gets that serious look in his eyes that always makes Keith tense up. “Just… don’t take too long, alright? I know you’re all - whatever, about being a good employee, but there’s no telling what I’ll do if you’re gone for too long, capiche?”

“Now who’s the one dealing out threats?” Keith says, but it’s without heat. It’s a little hard to feel anything but the slow, warm burn of fondness when Lance so openly worries about him.

Only mere months ago Lance bemoaned his very existence. And now here he is, actively chasing Keith’s company like they don’t spend enough time together as is. It’s a heady sort of feeling, and Keith can’t let himself get caught up in it or else he runs the very real risk of saying something dumb.

“I’ll be back,” he says instead.

The corner of Lance’s mouth twitches, just a little. “Oh man, we really do need to introduce you to Terminator at some point so you can understand why it’s so funny when you say that.” He waves a hand, shooing Keith. “Alright, go, go. Begone. Return to whence you came.”

Keith sighs but steps away, watching as Lance turns and returns to the garage. He doesn’t look over his shoulder once, has finally picked up on the art of not drawing attention to things that their friends really don’t need to know. Hunk welcomes him back warmly, and the both of them are back to poking at the engine and bickering like they’d never stopped.

Keith turns back to face Allura. She’s looking at him with that smile of hers that says she knows exactly what’s going on in his head, and he doesn’t appreciate it in the slightest.

“Alright,” he says. “Come on; let’s get this nightmare over with.”

.

It feels strange to be heading back to Allura’s office.

Once, he’d been in and out of here nearly every other day, not spending any more time on earth than his job demanded off him. Not so now, and the last time he had been here… he couldn’t even remember. Was it when he asked permission to truly enter Lance’s life? Was it really that long ago?

(it was strangely difficult to remember the days Before Lance. Keith is nearly a hundred years old, and those years pale in comparison to the last few months. It worries him, sometimes, how truly distant his past is becoming.)

They walk past the endless cubicles, full to bursting with interns and other guardian angels alike. From the corner of his eye, Keith catches a glimpse of one of the other guardians he knows took over the rest of his cases when Keith took on Lance, and they wave at him cheerily even though they look positively exhausted.

“Hey,” Keith says uncomfortably, “I know I haven’t asked, but -.”

“The rest of your caseload is fine,” Allura assures him. “I gave half to Gavin and the rest to some interns who are itching to earn their feathers. Well, so to speak.”

“You gave my caseload to the interns?” Keith hisses, hurrying to keep pace with her. “Are you crazy?”

“No, I’m the direct supervisor of more angels than you can count, and I’m trying to make sure that we have people ready when a spot opens up in the ranks.” The look she gives him is acid. “Like, for instance, if our most highly trained and efficient employee might be on the verge of falling, leaving behind a caseload a mile high.”

She doesn’t mean it to be nasty, but Keith is cowed anyway. He doesn’t look up as they squeeze into her office.

If walking to her office had been strange, sitting at her desk again feels positively nostalgic. He watches her sort through the files and papers patiently like it’s just another day, just another meeting. They had over fifty years like this, and in the blink of an eye it was gone. It’s bewildering how quickly things can change.

“Ah, found it,” Allura says, pulling something from a bottom drawer. Before Keith can crane his head to look at it, she drops something ancient and thick before him, sending up a cloud of dust that makes him cough.

Dubiously, he looks down at it.

The colours are faded, but it’s a shiny brochure featuring a group of cherub faced angels descending from a fluffy cloud, shrouded in glowing light. Above their spread wings it says:

FALLING: THE INS AND OUTS OF YOUR NEXT STEP IN THE GRAND PLAN OF LIFE.

Beneath that is, god forbid, the worst attempt at an acrostic poem Keith has seen on either side of his grave.

F - Feet first. Just like a cat, no matter where and how you fall, you’ll be just fine!

A - Acceptance. It’s fine to be nervous, but remember, everybody falls eventually. Your feelings are void and meaningless. Accept the fall.

L - Life. Falling isn’t a punishment, it’s a natural progression from one stage of your existence to the next.

L - Laugh. What’s the point of working yourself up over the fall? Relax, enjoy it, have a laugh.

I - It’ll be fine!

N - No going back now. Life doesn’t come with a rewind button, keep your eyes forward and everything will be fine.

G - Go, go go! Keep the momentum going, make the most of whatever new adventure falling gives you!

“I would like to meet whoever was responsible for this,” Keith says. “I’ve got some choice words I’d like to share with them, too.”

“Be nice,” Allura scolds. “This is an age old tradition.”

“So because every other fallen angel had to suffer this thing, I’ve got to endure it too?” Keith asks in distaste. Tentatively, he reaches out and flicks the cover back with his pinky.

OBLIVION OR REINCARNATION? HOW TO KNOW WHICH OPTION IS RIGHT FOR YOU!

(AND WHY THE FACT YOU DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE ISN’T A BIG DEAL AFTER ALL!)

“No,” Keith says firmly, letting it fall closed. “Allura, you cannot possibly pay me enough to read this.”

Allura gives a badly suppressed smile. “No, I thought not. I’m required to offer it though, given the sad lack of therapists in heaven.”

“You really should look into fixing that,” Keith advices. “Maybe if you had counselors available, your intern squad wouldn’t have -.”

“That was fifteen years ago, Keith,” Allura sighs. “And they failed. Let the rebellion go, okay?”

Keith has no intention of doing any such things, but he’s willing to put it aside for now. “Thanks for the brochure,” he says. “But no thanks.”

“We’ve got a short film, if you’d like.”

The mere thought of such a thing causes Keith to wince. “I’m fine,” he says. “If I survived a war, dying, and Lance McClain, I’m not too sure falling is going to be the thing to break me.”

“No,” Allura says. “I suppose not.”

She’s smiling still, but it’s not quite meeting her eyes. She’s looking at Keith like… she’s preparing to say goodbye. Keith can’t do it. He cannot have that conversation right now, doesn’t want her pity or her understanding.

“So,” he blurts before Allura can open her mouth. “Falling. Tell me about that.”

She sighs and gives him a dry look, but it’s far better than the tentative misery of before. “Keith, I’ve seen neon signs subtler than you are,” Allura says, but obligingly slides a stack of papers towards him.

Keith reaches for them cautiously, terrified of the possibility of another motivational pamphlet or poem, but it’s nothing but endless legal jargon. It’s sad, he thinks, the relief that brings him. Back when he was alive, Keith could barely be bothered to read his enlistment forms. Nowadays, he thinks he could bring a trained lawyer to tears.

“What’s this?”

“Your last will and testament,” Allura says and snorts when Keith gives her a startled look. She hands him a pen. “I’m joking, of course, calm down. The first several pages just confirms that I sat down with you, offered you resources related to your fall, explained what you can come to expect in the coming days -.”

“- you haven’t explained that,” Keith cuts in.

“Haven’t I?” Allura muses. “Oh, in that case; side effects may include: fluctuating levels of energy resulting in looser control over your powers, a decrease in the strength of your bond to your charge or charges, a general sense of impending doom, and assorted aches and pains in any place you can name and several you cannot.”

“Wait,” Keith blurts. “A decrease in my bond to Lance?”

“Surely you’ve noticed as much?”

Keith has, of course. For almost half the time he’s known Lance, Keith’s grasp on him has felt slippery at best. He’d been hoping against hope that was more to do with Lance’s personal issues than his own.

Allura must see something in his expression because she sighs, reaching out and taking his hand so she can gently wrap his loose fingers around the pen. “I don’t think it should matter too much,” she says. “You’re like a second shadow to that boy. If anything could sneak by you, I’d be surprised.”

It’s not nearly as reassuring as Keith needs it to be. He still remembers all too clearly the incident with the gunman in the mall, how very close Keith came to being able to do nothing at all. His shoulder twinges at the memory, and hours ago Keith would have played that off as psychosomatic, but he’s not so sure anymore.

He swallows and looks down, scribbling his shaky name on the first marked line he sees. He riffles through the papers. “And the rest of it?”

“Now that’s the fun part,” Allura says. “You know how much you love paperwork, right?”

“Oh no,” Keith says.

She gives him a sunny smile. “Here is where you fill out all the information on all your current, active cases - yes, including Lance. And then you transfer ownership of all files to Gavin so -.”

“No,” Keith says. He has to look down to realize he’s clutching the papers to his chest. “I worked hard on these cases, you can’t just -.”

“Gavin’s already doing the rest of your work,” Allura says soothingly. “This just makes it official. You don’t want them left hanging in limbo should something - well, expected happen to you, right?”

Put like that, it makes Keith feel chagrined for clinging. Of course he doesn’t want to lose any of his former charges in the bureaucratic nightmare that is office paperwork. But they’re also what makes him a guardian angel - what is he if he has nobody to guard?

Allura sighs. “Look,” she says, “falling isn’t a science, alright? The only person who can tell how close you are is yourself, but I think the both of us know it’s creeping in closer with every single day that passes. If you don’t want to do the paperwork, I’m not going to make you, but it’s got to get done, Keith - just as much for your sake as mine.”

Keith knows where she’s coming from. He’s clinging stubbornly to this existence with all that he has. In some ways, it makes things easier. The universe isn’t going to take him without a fight. In others, it’s harder.

He only has so much energy, and he knows he’s wasting it on being taciturn and irritable. That doesn't fix a damn thing and he knows it.

Reluctantly, he sets the papers down. Allura hands him the pen.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m sure Gavin will do a great job.”

“Gavin’s a dumb name,” Keith mumbles but begins signing anyway, sinking lower and lower in the chair with each signature he leaves.

“Gavin’s been employee of the month twice now,” Allura says.

Keith pauses to consider that. He waits for the outrage and the disappointment. It doesn’t come. “Okay,” he says.

The look Allura gives him is oddly understanding. “Keep signing, Keith,” she says. “You’ve got a while to go yet.”

.

By the time Keith returns to Hunk’s, it’s getting dark. Hunk’s gone, vanished somewhere indoors to avoid the bite of the night air, but Lance, Keith feels, is still outside.

If he catches a cold, I’m only going to laugh, he thinks, but follows the trace of his energy out back to the steps by the garage. He finds him there, sitting with his back against the door and tossing rocks at a dent in the shed wall with surprising precision.

He looks grumpy and tired. Keith winces and tries to keep quiet as he approaches but he must have lost his touch at some point, because Lance glances up immediately.

“Oh,” he says. “You’re back.”

It doesn’t sound like an accusation exactly, but Keith feels like it is all the same.

“Sorry,” he says. “There was a lot of catching up to do.”

Lance gets to his feet, tossing one last rock at the wall. He turns to look at Keith, hands tucked in his pockets, and his face is so impassive that Keith is at a loss for what to say.

He doesn’t seem angry or even annoyed, but he seems… quiet. Withdrawn. Keith is used to a far more exuberant Lance, and it makes him tense to be on the receiving end of all this silence. His day has been bad enough as it is, the last thing he wants to do is go and upset Lance as well.

“What?” Keith finally asks when he can take the waiting no longer. He folds his arms, tucking his hands into his armpits defensively.

Lance frowns and opens his mouth, but at that exact moment the back door swings open and Hunk sticks his head out.

“Oh!” He says. “Keith, you’re back! I didn’t even hear you. You should work on making more noise.”

“Yes,” Keith says awkwardly. “Uh, sorry.”

“All good. Lance told me your sister needed a hand with the baby.”

“My sister?” He catches sight of Lance’s face and everything clicks into place. “Oh! Oh! Yes, my - my sister. And the baby. She just needed me to watch him for a couple of hours while she did something.”

Hunk’s face drops into a frown. “He? I thought Lance said it was a girl?”

“He was wrong,” Keith says automatically.

Hunk looks at him, scratching his head and frowning faintly. He looks more than a little suspicious, and it’s possible that they’ve passed off one too many lies and their whole story is starting to cave in on itself.

Keith despairs at the thought. He doesn’t want to keep Lance’s friends in the dark about his nature, but strictly speaking it’s against the rules to reveal himself to anybody but his charge. Pidge had been a tactical necessity, and Keith really doesn’t want to push his luck.

“Huh,” Hunk says. Keith prepares himself for the worst. “Yeah, that sounds like something Lance would get wrong. Well, I was just coming out to let Lance know I’m going to bed. Feel free to crash if you want, but just be warned, Shiro’s room is next to the spare and he snores something fierce.”

“We’ll do that, thanks man,” Lance says without skipping a beat, and Hunk salutes them cheerfully before vanishing back off into the house.

It takes everything Keith has not to breathe a sigh of relief. Of course, that leaves Lance and Keith alone outside together, and when Keith looks up the expression on Lance’s face isn’t any more reassuring than it had been before Hunk interrupted them.

“If you’ve got something to say -.”

“Is everything alright?” Lance asks in a rush.

Keith stares. “Sorry, what?’

Lance grimaces, swatting aside a bug and doing his best not to look at Keith. “You’ve been acting off lately, man. Which is saying something considering you’re hardly a paragon of normality to begin with.”

Keith’s heart doesn’t sink exactly, but it definitely feels lower than it did a moment before. “I don’t know what you mean. You’re overthinking things.”

The look Lance gives him is annoyed and disappointed all at once. “Don’t treat me like I’m dumb, Keith,” he says. “I can take that from a lot of people, but not from you. And I think I’ve earnt better than that.”

Keith can hear the buzzing of the outside light, the distant sound of traffic far off. It makes it hard to focus. Everything feels very much, his skin is itchy and he wants to be anywhere but here, having any conversation but this one. “Sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t tell me what’s going on with you.”

“I know,” Keith says. “Sorry.”

Lance looks him up and down. The smile he gives isn’t quite bitter, but it’s far from sweet. “So it’s a secret. That important, huh?”

“I don’t enjoy keeping things from you,” Keith says, and his voice sounds very quiet. “I promise, I wouldn’t… I would tell you if I could.”

Lance considers this for a moment. “You’ve been gone a lot lately,” he says. “I know you think I haven’t noticed you sneaking off, but I’m used to having you glued to my side. It’s weird, because I’ll just be doing something, or I’m half asleep, and then I’ll get this bad feeling in my gut, and when I look, you’re gone. It’d be harder not to notice you’ve disappeared at this point.”

Keith doesn’t know what that means, but Lance is looking at him with this earnest, tight-lipped expression. He opens his mouth to say ‘sorry’ but it sticks on the way out, feels disingenuous and repetitive, and less than Lance deserves.

“I don’t like being gone,” he says instead, which a marvelous understatement if ever there was one.

“But you can’t tell me why?”

“Not… not right now,” Keith says.

Lance raises a brow. “But eventually?”

Keith has to. Because if he doesn’t, one day Lance is going to look up and Keith is going to be gone - only he’ll never come back and Lance will never know why. He’ll spend his whole life, what little of it is left, wondering if Keith abandoned him, and that's something that Keith can’t ever allow, bureaucracy be damned.

“Eventually,” Keith says. “I - I promise. Eventually.”

Lance sighs, reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck while he gives Keith a rueful smile. “Alright,” he says. “I can live with that.”

I really hope so, Keith things, far more seriously than Lance had meant. God, do I hope so.

Lance steps forward and nudges Keith’s shoulder with his own as he mounts the steps back up into the house. “Come on. It’s far too late to head home now, and Hunk offered us his spare room. You might not need sleep, but I hear a bed calling my name.”

“Who do you think snores louder, you or Shiro?” Keith asks, following him inside, and the relief of hearing Lance laugh is no small thing after the draining day he’s had.

He’ll need it too, that spark of longing and comfort, because if today had been something of a train wreck, he can only imagine how the next few days are going to go, because things are coming to a head and Keith is no longer sure whether he should be trying to stop them or just preparing for damage control.

Either way, that’s a thought for later. For the moment, Keith has Lance fluffing the pillows in the spare room, chatting idly as he crawls into bed. Shiro, snoring as loud as Hunk promised, and Hunk’s soothing energy lingering all around him. It’s enough to soothe the frantic jitters that had been making a mess of his stomach, and he sits in the corner and watches as Lance talks and talks and talks until his words trail into mumbles and then, finally, deep breaths.

It’s nice like this. Familiar. Comfortable. Keith would give anything to stay like this forever.

(Keith doesn’t even realize that ‘comfortable’ has slipped into ‘tired’ until his eyes close and, for the first time in many decades, he sleeps.)

Chapter 14

Chapter Text

Keith wakes to the feeling of hands on his shoulders. For a moment, he can’t work out what’s happened, is caught in a blissful nothingness. He has the impression somebody is calling his name, but for the first time in an eon his head feels soft and warm, a safe place instead of a warzone.

“Keith,” the voice says, more urgent this time, and somebody is shaking him fiercely. “Keith, please, c’mon man - you’re scaring me here.”

Keith frowns, an urgent feeling crawling up his spine and finally nudging away the foggy haze clinging to his mind.

“Keith,” Lance hisses, and then Keith is being jerked forward and he gasps awake.

For a second his mind is nothing but chaos; where before it had been so empty and quiet, it’s now blaringly loud, information pouring in faster than his poor brain can hope to handle it. Over the years, Keith had forgotten how to bridge the gap between wakefulness and sleeping and the abrupt transition from nothing to everything is awful.

His hands scrabble on the wall behind him, then coming up to catch in Lance’s shirt as Keith pants, eyes wide and the world lurching. Lance is crouched in front of him, fingers clenched in Keith’s shirt as well, mouth dropped in a perfect shocked o.

“I was just resting my eyes,” Keith blurts.

“Are you sure? Because I mean -.”

“- I was just tired and -.”

“- I know you told me you couldn’t, but it sure seemed like -.”

“- I thought I’d close my eyes for a second -.”

“ - you were sleeping, Keith,” Lance says, finally cutting over the end of Keith’s panicked and wild protests. He loosens his grip slightly, pulling back and staring at Keith in wonder. “You told me you couldn’t do that.”

There’s a mounting horror in Keith’s chest and he has no clue what to say. He hadn’t known he could do that. It’s the fall, of course it’s the fall, just one more failing in his being. He’s almost wishing now that he’d taken the damn pamphlet from Allura, because then he might stand a chance in hell of understanding what to expect and how to prepare for it.

“I’m fine,” Keith says, which has nothing at all to do with what Lance had said.

Lance’s mouth is small and pinched, and there’s a worried crease between his eyes that is starting to look more and more permanent every time Keith sees him.

It’s quiet, Keith notices now that he’s alert enough to pay attention. The sun has risen, but the light that’s leaking into the room is golden-red. It can’t be much later than seven, which is mind boggling because Keith doesn’t think he’s ever seen Lance rise earlier than noon of his own accord. He can still hear Shiro snoring through the walls, and Shiro seems like the kind of guy who would be a morning person.

“Hey,” Keith says, reaching up and gently detaching Lance’s hand from his shoulder. “What are you even doing awake?”

Lance drops his hands back to his lap. He still looks uncomfortable, but it’s more tired resignation than fear now. It doesn’t hurt that guilty part of Keith any less, but Lance isn’t pushing for questions, which is the best he can hope for.

(a sad thought occurs to him then; that Lance has pushed for so many questions and Keith has given him so little that Lance has finally hit the threshold where he’s given up. That’s a thought that doesn’t bear thinking, and Keith has to push it away for his own wellbeing.)

“Couldn’t sleep,” Lance says with a shrug. “I just - I had a bad feeling. That you might have… disappeared on me again.” He sits back on his heels and scrubs a hand through his messy hair as he gives a rueful laugh. “Once the thought hit me, I couldn’t go back to sleep without checking.”

“I told you I wasn’t going to vanish without talking to you about it,” Keith reminds him gently.

“I know,” Lance says. “And I trust you, I do. You’re… well, I mean, you’re kind of a dick at times, but you always keep your word.”

What a ringing endorsem*nt. Keith should get that printed on a shirt, or mailed express to Allura’s office. Lance McClain thinks he’s kind-of-okay for a dick.

“Thanks,” Keith says dryly, and the smile Lance gives him has more warmth to it this time.

With a groan Lance straightens out of his crouch, stretching like all the aches and worries of the world had crept into his bones while his guard was lowered. As he stretches his shirt rides up just that little bit and Keith glances away quickly before he can flush.

Mind out of the gutter, Kogane, he reminds himself firmly, but when he looks up the sunny smile Lance is giving him does some amazing things to whatever hollow shell passes as his heart.

“I’m awake now, anyway. I’ve got a class soon, so we might as well just try and make the best of the day while we can. Shiro’s on some kind of gluten free kick, but I’m pretty sure if we sneak into the kitchen before he wakes up we might be able to whip up some pancakes. Maybe I can even make him eat some if I try hard enough.”

“Sometimes I deeply do not understand the relationship you have with your friends,” Keith says seriously, getting to his feet. A second later he winces, barely holding a hiss back behind his teeth.

God he hurts all over. He wouldn’t have sat against that damn wall if he knew he’d wake up feeling like he’d been flattened by a runaway train. Was sleeping always this painful? Why did Lance seem to love it so much when it felt like this?

Lance catches sight of the pained, despairing, and awfully confused look on Keith’s face and he grins. “C’mon, old man,” he says, setting his hands on Keith’s sides and guiding him towards the kitchen even though the fastest pace Keith can manage is an elderly hobble. “Let’s get you sitting somewhere with a cushion. I’ll make sure that the pancakes are extra soft, so your dentures don’t fall out.”

“Watch your mouth,” Keith warns, but he’s far too used to Lance’s teasing at this point to take any real offence.

“You sound just like the cranky grandpa I knew you’d be.”

Keith shoots him a glare but it’s without any heat. He refuses to let Lance help as he slouches into the kitchen, but he can’t quite hold back a groan as he sinks into a seat at the table. He can see the barely surprised smile as Lance passes him, heading for the cupboard.

“I’m too old for this disrespect,” Keith says, pointing at him. “I fought a war for your generation, and this is the thanks I get?”

“Sorry, grandpa,” Lance says. There’s enough loud rattling as he dumps a frying pan atop the stove that Keith winces, marveling at the fact Lance hasn’t woken the whole street, never mind just the house. “I’ll try and tame my delinquent attitude.”

Keith watches as Lance empties some premade pancake batter onto the pan. It smells… well, it smells like food, which he’s sure smells excellent to Lance and other humans but does very little for him. The heat of the cooking and the intimacy of the silence as Lance begins turning the first of the pancakes over to a plate is nice though, and Keith finds himself relaxing without any say-so on his part.

He’s feeling strangely drowsy and not altogether cognizant, which is why Lance startles him by dumping a plate on the table right in front of him. Keith blinks, looks down at the pancakes and then up at Lance, but he’s already retreated back to the stove, shuffling more pancakes onto a plate and tipping more batter to the pan to fry.

He has it down to such a smooth, flawless art form that Keith can only assume he’s slipped into autopilot and forgotten that Keith doesn’t eat. It’s kind of nice though, and he can’t bring himself to complain, so he picks up a fork and begins to absently shred them, just for the illusion of normalcy.

“So,” Lance says as Keith pushes his pancakes around the plate. “Tell me something about yourself.”

Keith can’t help but snort. “Is this a job interview now? Because I’ve told you before, this job is already mine whether I want it or not.”

“Don’t be a dick,” Lance says. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, but, like, I don’t really know anything about you, do I?”

Keith sets down his fork, gives up all pretenses of ever eating what’s on his plate, and considers Lance’s back. He hasn’t turned around, hasn’t even looked up from the stove, and there’s something in the set of his shoulders that make Keith think he’s not entirely at ease. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I just said, dude. I know you’re my guardian angel. I know you’re dead. I know your name’s Keith. But how old are you? What did you do when you were alive? sh*t, I don’t even know your favourite colour. Do angels even have favourite colours?”

“Well, if you couldn't tell my favourite colour is red than you’re blind as well as stupid,” Keith says.

Lance laughs. It does something to Keith’s stomach that he can’t put entirely down to the way human food smells. Lance flips the pancake on the pan and turns around to give Keith a small, very human smile. “It was an example.”

“I know,” Keith says, far more patiently than he thinks Lance deserves when he’s being this dumb. He pushes away his plate with a rattle and ignores Lance’s affronted noise. “Look, I’ve been dead longer than I was ever alive, by a fairly sizable margin. Sometimes, I can barely remember the me who existed before. It’s as if I asked you what you were like when you were ten. You would have been an entirely different person it was so long ago.”

“Just tell me something,” Lance insists stubbornly. “Anything at all. Where did you grow up? What were your parents like? What about your friends?”

“Would it make you feel better to know?” Keith says, but then obligingly rattles off, “I grew up on a farm. I never knew my parents, I lived with my aunt and her husband until I was old enough to care for myself, and I didn’t really have any friends.” Keith thinks for a second and then says, “Saying it aloud, I’m aware of how sad my life looks in retrospect.”

“You didn’t know your parents?” Lance asks, sounding kind of winded.

Keith grimaces and holds up a hand. “It’s fine, I’m fine,” he says. “Please don’t get upset about it because I never was. It was a long time ago, Lance.”

“And you never had any friends?”

“I wasn’t as charming back then as I am now,” Keith says, trying for funny but feeling it fall kind of flat. He sighs. “Look, I knew you wouldn’t want to hear any of this. I’m not sure why you asked at all. I told you before that I’m a better person now than I ever was back then. At least I hope I am, because the alternative is kind of sad.”

Keith can smell the pancake on the stove burning, but Lance seems completely disinterested in it. Keith can foresee this going very badly, has a picture-perfect image of the whole house catching fire and taking everybody down with it. He gets to his feet and pushes Lance to the table until he takes a seat, then drops his plate of pancakes in front of Lance and turns to the stove.

“Hey!” Lance says. “I was cooking you breakfast.”

“That I can’t eat,” Keith says patiently. “The thought was nice though, so thank you.”

“I thought it might smell good at least,” Lance mutters petulantly, forking some food into his mouth.

It hadn’t, but nobody had ever considered Keith in such a strange, thoughtful way before, and it makes him feel kind of flustered and adoring all at once. It’s a confusing mess of emotions and he turns around to busy himself scraping the burnt crisp out of the frying pan. “Thank you for trying.”

“If you don’t want to tell me about your life, what about…”

Keith sighs, rolling his eyes skyward. He dumps the frying pan in the sink and turns around to look at Lance’s hunched back, leaning against the counter for support. “You want to know how I died?”

Lance’s shoulders hunch further. “Sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he means it. “Forget it, it’s a sensitive topic, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Never stopped you before,” Keith says.

“Dude, even I know when I’ve gone too far.”

“Clearly not,” Keith says. “When have I ever told you that you’re not allowed to ask?”

Lance’s fork scrapes along the bottom of his plate, and he’s doing his level best not to meet Keith’s eye. “You haven’t,” he allows, “but you’ve not exactly invited the conversation either.”

Keith thinks about arguing further, but it’s more out of habit than anything. Keith died what feels like forever ago. Sometimes it bothers him, but mostly he’s over it. It’s only when he lets himself get too wrapped up in the sense memory that it hits close to home.

He says, “I lied.”

Lance pauses and looks up, baffled. “About what?”

Keith’s lips curl, just a little bit. “I let you think I died in the war. It’s not entirely inaccurate, but it’s not totally correct either. I died because of the war.”

“You’re going to have to clarify, man.”

“By the time I joined it, the war was pretty much over,” Keith says. “I did see some battle, and I saw people die, but it was skirmishes more than anything else. I was part of the rescue efforts, not the main force.”

“And you died in one of those skirmishes?” Lance, asks, not following.

I wish, Keith thinks, which is unfair. He knows a death at the end of a bullet doesn’t always mean an easy passing, but it sure as hell would have been quicker. “We were evacuating a town,” he says. “There wasn’t even any enemy forces in the area, the whole place was desolate, what’s left after a battle is through.” Keith considers for a second and then says, “My CO was kind of a massive dick. I think he was more than a little bitter we never got to see any of the action. He had it out for me too, although I’m not quite sure what I did to piss him off.”

“So what happened?”

“He sent me into this half-collapsed mess of a building to see if there were any survivors hiding. Not everybody came running out to meet us when the cavalry rolled in. It’s hard to tell if it’s the good guys or the bad ones from a distance.” Keith gives Lance a cheerful smile. “I’m sure you can tell where this is going.

Lance evidently does not find this reminiscing as funny as Keith because he looks faintly horrified. It’s kind of nice, Keith thinks. He’d been far from the saddest of the sob stories upstairs, but down here with the human he’s practically a martyr.

“You were buried alive,” Lance says, disturbed.

“Not entirely,” Keith says. “I think I was alive for a while beneath the rubble first.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I kept track of the time for a few days before I realized nobody was coming for me. I’m not sure what took me in the end, but you’ve never known real thirst until you’ve got a mouth full of dust and a building on your back.”

“That’s not funny,” Lance says, sounding kind of faint. “Jesus christ, Keith. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever f*cking heard, and I went to my nine-year-old cousin’s violin recital last month.”

“Yeah,” Keith says. “I know. But what is it you said to me once? If you can’t make a joke about something like that, all you’re left with is the knowledge the universe wants you dead.”

“Did it sound that grim when I said it?” Lance wonders aloud. “Because man, that sounds goddamn dark.”

“There you go,” Keith says, leaning forward and brushing his hands against his pants. He knows (thinks?) it’s only in his head, but he could swear his palms feel kind of sweaty. “That’s how I kicked the bucket. Do you feel any closer to me now? Feel better for it?”

Lance abandons his plate and gets up. Keith eyes him warily as Lance crosses the kitchen towards him and then, defying all known patterns of behavior, wraps one arm around Keith’s waist and directs Keith’s forehead to rest on his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Keith asks, muffled.

“Hugging you, clearly,” Lance says. “You’re really bad at this, you’re meant to put your arms around me as well.”

Keith does, feeling no less confused and definitely far more flustered. “Okay?”

“You’re being difficult,” Lance says. “In this family, when we talk about our near death experiences, or real death experiences in your case, we get hugs to keep the trauma away, alright?”

Keith doesn’t know what to say to that, but Lance feels good beneath his hands, and Keith isn’t going to turn away the chance to have him this close without cause for suspicion. Besides, he doesn’t know how much longer they have left of this, and he can hardly be blamed for taking advantage where he can.

His hands are on Lance’s waist, and one of Lance’s is at the small of his back, the other resting in his hair. He can feel the warmth of Lance’s palm on the nape of his neck, and this right here is better than any and all intimacy he’d ever experienced in life.

It feels to him like the hug has stretched past the length of propriety, but Keith has a shaky grip on human mannerisms at the best of times, and he certainly isn’t going to be the one to break it.

Lance shifts a little under his hands, and when he speaks Keith feels his breath against the side of his neck. “Hey, I was thinking -.”

Keith doesn’t get a chance to find out what Lance has been thinking because there’s the sound of footsteps and a heartbeat of a second later Shiro walks into the kitchen. “I smelled pancakes and - oh, sorry, am I interrupting something?”

Lance extracts himself expertly and says smoothly, “Nope, Keith was talking about nearly dying.”

Shiro goes from curious to concerned in a second. “Oh, do you need any more hugs? I know I’ve only got one arm, but I’ve been told mine are pretty good.”

“It’s -.”

Keith doesn’t even get to turn him down, because Shiro’s in his space immediately, and damn he is good at this, and Keith usually doesn’t abide being touched by just anyone. It feels a lot like he’s been wrapped in a big, soothing blanket and he gives Lance a wide eyed look over the back of Shiro’s head and mouths ‘what the f*ck?’

Lance grins but he straightens his face as Shiro pulls back.

“Feel better, buddy?”

Keith hadn’t been feeling bad to start with, but after snuggling with his crush and getting a hug from the human embodiment of an impossibly large, soft blanket he’s feeling blessed and privileged just to be alive (in a manner of speaking.) “Much, thank you.”

Shiro smiles at him, eyes crinkling in the corners, and he pats Keith on the shoulder before he turns away and heads to the fridge, snatching one of the pancakes on the bench that Keith is certain must be cold as ice by now as he goes by.

“Keith and I’ve gotta go,” Lance says. “I’ve got class in an hour, but we’ll drop by later.”

Shiro’s head pops out from behind the fridge door. “Alright, stay safe.”

“It’s a university not a bomb range,” Lance says, dragging Keith to the door.

Keith waves at Shiro over his shoulder but allows himself to be pulled out to the front hallway. He watches as Lance jams his shoes on, and then asks, “What were you saying?”

“What do you mean?” Lance says, and Keith can't tell if the way he’s stomping his foot is because his sneaker won’t stay on properly or if it’s a deliberate attempt to ignore him.

“Before Shiro came in, you were saying something.”

“It’s not important,” Lance says, shrugging his jacket on properly. Keith experiences a moment of concern but the smile Lance shoots him is genuine, and Keith is distracted by his tiny dimples. “Come on, I’ve gotta call back home before we head out, I’ll fill you in later.”

Against Keith’s better judgement, he puts it aside for now and follows Lance out the door without another word.

.

They’d planned to stop back by the apartment for only as long as it’d take for Lance to pick up his bag, but they’re thrown off when they open the door to find Pidge lingering on the threshold, close enough that Lance nearly trips right over them.

“You’re back!” Pidge says.

“Dude, are you alright?” Lance says, staring. “You look exhausted, and I never see you up and out of your room this early.”

Pidge ignores him, focusing on Keith. “I need to talk to you. Alone.”

If Pidge were any subtler they might be a neon sign, and Keith is momentarily stricken with uncertainty. “Lance has class, can it wait?”

“It’s fine,” Lance says, a little too loudly, and he gives Keith a meaningful look. Clearly he thinks ‘letting Lance deal with some of his luck on his own’ extends to ‘letting him far out of range where Keith couldn’t possibly help if something went awry’. “You talk to Keith, I can head to class on my own and -.”

“No,” says Keith and Pidge as one.

Lance blinks, taken aback, and Keith shoots Pidge a curious, worried look, but Pidge is already on damage control, smiling so broadly it looks more like a grimace. “It’s fine, it’s nothing important. I just wanted his input on a … thing I’m working on. He can go with you to class. In fact, please take him with you.”

Keith despairs that Pidge is no better at the art of subterfuge than himself. He thinks it’ll be a miracle if they manage to make it another week without Lance finally cracking beneath the weight of Keith’s awfully kept secrets.

“Alright,” Lance says, slowly, eyeing the both of them. “I just came back to grab my bag. Can I at least head to my room without supervision, or are the two of you going to insist on following me there as well?”

“Don’t be so melodramatic and go get your stupid bag,” Pidge says.

Lance pulls a face but turns and disappears down the hallway. Pidge cranes their neck to watch anxiously, and the moment the soft click of Lance’s door shutting echoes, they turn around whip-quick, grabbing Keith by his arm and hauling him in close.

“Pidge, what -.”

“Don’t let him out of your sight,” Pidge hisses. Their fingers are tight enough on Keith’s arm to hurt, which is no small feat when he’s a being made of transdimensional energy. “I’m not kidding. Not for a second, no matter how much he whines. And be careful.”

Keith’s too old to have his heart stopping and starting like this. If it were beating at all, that is to say. “Pidge, what is it?”

Pidge drops their hold of him, rubbing the back of their hand along their forehead. They look more frazzled than Keith can ever remember seeing, and it’s enough to set alarm bells chiming in the back of his head.

“It’s - well, it’s not nothing, but I’m probably overreacting,” they say, which isn’t as comforting as they probably think it is. “I’m new to all this guardian angel crap, I don’t know how worried I should be for every little discovery, and I have absolutely no clue what the timeline on any of this is.” The look they give Keith is exhausted. Like this, Keith notices that the bags beneath their eyes are heavier than he remembers. “How do you stand this?”

“Stand what?”

Pidge makes an awkward waving motion that conveys absolutely nothing at all. “All this… mystery? Uncertainty? How do you know what’s urgent and what can wait another six decades or so?”

“Practice,” Keith admits. “And a lot of guessing.”

Pidge’s face looks pinched. “Well, that’s real comforting.”

There’s the creak of Lance’s door opening and they step away from each other automatically a mere second before Lance appears back in the room, shrugging his bag over his shoulder. If he can feel the awkward tension between them he doesn’t let on.

His poker face never used to be this good. Keith supposes it’s just yet another thing that Keith has inadvertently taught him.

“Alright, we’re off,” Lance says, clapping Pidge on the shoulder as he passes by. “I promise I’ll bring Keith back in one piece for your date, or whatever it is you nerds are doing.”

“I don’t want to date your dumb boyfriend,” Pidge says, and then, before either of them can as much as splutter, “but don’t take too long after class, alright? Come right home, don’t stop anywhere, don’t get distracted, and don’t guilt Keith into doing whatever you want just because he’s a pushover.”

Lance pulls a face, rolling his eyes. “Yes, mom. God, you’d never think I was a grown adult with bills and responsibilities the way you lot talk to me.”

It was said without bitterness though, an old gripe that had lost any sting it had somewhere in the long years shared between them.

Lance heads to the door without another word, but Keith hesitates for a second, looks to Pidge for guidance. Pidge waves him to the door. “Go,” they say, “keep him safe, don’t let him out of your sight. But you and I need to talk as soon as you get back.”

“Alright,” Keith says. “Just… message me if anything changes.”

The look Pidge gives him is exasperatedly fond. “You don’t have a phone, dumbass.”

Oh. Keith certainly does not. At this point, he’s just grown so used to hearing Lance say it that it had seemed second nature.

“Message Lance if anything changes?” He offers.

“Message Lance about the top-secret information, concerning him, that we’re hiding?”

Keith hadn’t thought of that either. “Just -.”

“Go,” Pidge says, pushing him hard towards the door. “Get, be gone, he’s going to get suspicious if you linger much longer. If something changes, I’ll find a way to get hold of you. I’m not a genius for nothing, you know.”

Keith spares Pidge one more glance but then he’s gone, following Lance out the door and ignoring the prickling feeling along his shoulders like he’s turned his back on something far too large to leave unguarded.

It’s not the first time he’s felt the urgency of the universe crashing down upon him, and it’s amazing what being buried alive beneath several tons of concrete can prepare you for. Keith’s used to carrying far worse things than the weight the world upon his skinny shoulders.

Chapter 15

Chapter Text

Keith half expects to be swept away in front of a bus on the way to Lance’s college. Pidge’s anxiety put a bad taste in his mouth and left him on edge something fierce. He’s immeasurably tense, preparing for the worst-case scenario every time they round a corner.

The worst-case scenario never comes. The trip is about as uneventful as can be. They don’t get flattened at the pedestrian crossing, nor sideswiped when their bus is waiting at a red light. No guards tackle them as they enter the school grounds, and the elevator creaks but doesn’t plummet.

By the time Lance slips into his classroom Keith is forced to conclude he might be just a touch paranoid. All the same, he lingers by Lance’s side as he settles into his chair, near enough that he might elbow him in the gut if only Keith were tangible.

After so long it's something of a relief being invisible again. Since meeting Lance, he’s learnt to enjoy interacting with the world at large, but it had been taxing back when he had the energy of the universe at his fingertips, and now it’s something else entirely. He’s grown so used to passing himself off as human that he’d forgotten how much of a drain it is.

He feels a little guilty for taking comfort in it, but he’s got so little comfort available to him these days that he really cannot afford to pass up what little comes to him.

For a time, there’s nothing but the drawl off the elderly professor lecturing on and on about engineering nonsense Keith isn’t nearly equipped enough to understand. Ever so slightly, Keith allows himself to relax, watching Lance fondly as he taps the tip of his pen against the tabletop in between notes, slowly driving his neighbour crazy.

If the kid snaps and tries to murder Lance, Keith supposes he can’t say Lance didn’t have it coming, but the possibility seems remote enough that he doesn’t dwell on it. For once, it seems like they might get through a full day without incident.

He should have known better, of course. The only reason Lance’s life is ever quiet is so that the shock of the unexpected can sweep you off your feet.

They’re maybe half an hour into the class when an alarm cuts through the air, wailing louder than a grieving widow.

“Oh, what now?” Lance mutters, sounding far more exhausted than afraid. He throws down his pen violently as the professor at the head of the room rouses the students to their feet.

“Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the emergency evacuation point,” he says, wizened hands fruitlessly motioning for silence. “I don’t know the situation, but panicking isn’t going to help anybody. Everybody, please stay calm.”

It’s a good speech, but nobody besides Keith seems to have even heard it, too busy anxiously shouldering their way to the door, looking like for all the world they’re barely refraining from stampeding.

Lance is slightly slower getting to his feet, expression resigned like somebody long used to the world around them going to sh*t.

“Keith,” he says under his breath as he shrugs his bag over his shoulder. “Buddy, you there?”

Given the situation there’s no real subtle way for Keith to pop back into existence, so he settles for touching Lance’s elbow ever so gently, frustrated he can’t do more. The static jumps between them and Lance barely holds back a flinch.

“I forgot how much that goddamn hurts,” he hisses, rubbing at his elbow like a big baby. This time when Keith touches him it’s between the shoulders and far less gentle, an almost electric push towards the door.

“Alright, alright, I’m moving,” Lance says, joining the throng of students pouring out into the hall.

If Keith had thought that leaving the room might have illuminated the situation at all, he’s sorely mistaken. Dozens of classes worth of students are crowding about in the corridor, looking as confused and lost as the rest of them. The anxiety in the air is so thick that Keith feels like he might choke on it; too many human emotions crammed into such a small space is making him almost faint, ramping his own dread up sevenfold.

“Hey,” Lance says, catching the arm of a passing classmate. “Do you know what’s happening?”

The classmate shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know, but that sounds like the fire alarm.”

“Is it a drill?”

“I -.”

The classmate doesn’t get to finish, is cut off by a deafening shriek. Keith whips around to see a terrified looking girl pointing further down the hall, where acrid smoke is pouring out from around the corner, thick and black and decidedly deadly looking.

“I don’t think it’s a drill,” Keith says, even though nobody can hear him.

The reaction is instantaneous; if Keith had thought it was a stampede before, it’s nothing compared to now. Students are shoving each other aside, racing for the door like the devil itself is chasing the click of their heels. Lance stands to the side, jaw tight and shoulders tense as he waits at the back of the throng vying for exit.

Keith so very badly wants to push him forward, further away from the threat of the smoke and much nearer to the safety of the outside, but he knows that challenging the eb and flow of a terrified crowd is perhaps the last thing he should be encouraging.

Now that he’s aware of it, he can feel an unnatural warmth in the air, and faintly he thinks he hears crackling. Somebody has propped the narrow door open with a sad looking brick, and through the windows he can just see fire trucks pulling up on the college lawn, lights blazing and the sirens almost as loud as the fire alarm.

Keith knows it’s only minutes, but it feels like the evacuation takes hours. Lance is stuck at the very back of the crowd, bringing up the rear, and at this point Keith can’t tell if that’s just his typical luck, or a conscious choice on Lance’s part.

There is a threat, and there are innocent bystanders; it would not be outside the realm of possibility for Lance to subtly put himself between the two.

Eventually though, the last of the students trickle through the door. Lance hurries towards it but hesitates at the last second, glancing sightlessly right through Keith. It takes Keith a moment to realize what he’s looking for, but when he does warmth sparks in his gut.

Gently, he brushes a hand over the tense line of Lance’s shoulders.

Although he knows the static must hurt, Lance relaxes almost instantly. The situation is still far too dire to warrant a smile, but the tight line between his eyebrows disappears.

He turns back to the door just as it slams shut in his face.

It’s so unexpected that Keith cannot wrap his head around what’s happened. The students are milling about outside, the nearest ones staring through the planes of the glass door in horror at Lance’s shocked face.

The brick that had been holding the door open is askew, and although Keith cannot be certain he’d put money on whoever was last through that damn door knocking it with their heel on the way out.

This wouldn’t have necessarily been a problem if Keith hadn’t heart the telltale little click of the door locking.

Lance seizes the handle, wiggles it back and forth forcefully, but the door doesn’t so much as rattle in its frame. It’s sturdy, built to bear the weight of a building almost as old as Keith and Lance’s tiny, human strength isn’t going to move it an inch.

“No, no, no! Come on, you’ve got to be kidding me! sh*t.” Lance kicks the door and the glass shivers but does not show any sign of breaking. Behind it, other students are rallying, grabbing at one another and shouting behind them for what Keith can only assume are the firefighters.

The crackling is louder now, and although Keith doesn’t exist on the same plane of reality as Lance, he doesn’t need to in order to taste the sluggishness of the air. The smoke is thick now, wreathing the ceiling and turning Lance’s face a pallid shade of white.

Keith turns, heart in his throat, to see the flames licking around the corner the smoke originates from, creeping along the roof in bright, angry tongues of red.

“Keith,” Lance wheezes, one hand holding himself upright with the wall and the other covering his mouth. He looks like he’s going to say something else, but whatever it is gets lost in a hacking cough that sounds dryer than a desert. “Keith.”

I’m right here, Keith thinks, furious that it always seems to be the moments where Lance needs him the most that he can’t offer him any reassurance. You’re going to be fine.

Months ago now, when they’d first met, Keith had opened Lance’s locked bedroom door like it was nothing more than a parlour trick. Lance has been impressed and faintly intimidated, and Keith had been unbearable smug.

Back then, it’d been nothing to him; an almost showy display of excess energy. Now, when he places his palm against the door, it feels like he’s trying to move a mountain. Keith should know how that feels, too; in his youth, when the universe had been fresh in his blood, he’d moved things far larger than that.

For a second, he’s terrified he doesn’t have enough energy for something even this small, and that’s a greater weight than he thinks he can stand right now, but, after a moment that stretches far longer than he’s comfortable with, the door finally clicks.

He doesn’t waste time, flings it open so hard it bounces off the side of the building. People are there instantly, dragging Lance out through the doorway and away from the encroaching flames. Keith is helpless but to trail after him as a paramedic takes him by the shoulders and leads him over to an ambulance surrounded by pale faced students, oxygen masks held to their faces.

“The door just shut,” Lance is saying weakly as he’s pressed to sit at the back of the ambulance. “It scared me more than anything, but I’m fine.”

“It was terrifying to see from this angle too,” the paramedic says sympathetically, tossing a bright orange blanket around his skinny shoulders. “I can only imagine what it was like for you. I’m just going to do some tests, okay? Then we’ll put you on oxygen and see if we need to take you to the hospital for smoke inhalation.”

“I’m fine,” Lance repeats, ever stubborn, and Keith, frankly, wishes he were human right now so he could scream at him.

“That’s what we’re here to make sure of,” she says reassuringly, her fingers pressing to his pulse.

While Lance obediently sits on oxygen, Keith sneaks away momentarily and wills himself back into existence. There’s a shaky moment there where he can feel himself flickering, but ultimately he manages it.

Not a good sign, but a problem for future Keith to deal with.

Lance’s face when he walks casually back into sight is worth all the trouble. He plucks the mask away from his mouth and grins. “Oh boy,” he says. “You have no idea how good it is to see your ugly mug again.”

“And you have no idea how stressful the last hour has been for me.”

Before Lance can say anything back, the paramedic is there, smacking his hand and settling the mask back over his mouth. “You leave that there,” she says, sounding almost as threatening as Allura in her worst mood. “You’ve been through enough today without tempting the fates. Ten more minutes and then you can go.”

Lance gives her a mulish look, but she just pats his shoulder and vanishes out of view again.

Keith smiles at him. “Wow, it must be killing you not to be able to speak, hey?”

Lance says something muffled, but the way he flips Keith off conveys the general meaning efficiently.

Keith laughs and settles onto the back of the ambulance beside him, shoulders knocking together companionably. Lance immediately leans into the contact, completely unselfconscious, and Keith’s gut pangs fiercely.

Even with the shock blanket over his shoulders, Lance’s skin feels far too cold when their arms brush together. It seems completely illogical to Keith, honestly speaking. Surely, if anything, the fire should have warmed him up instead? He does not understand human biology at the best of times, and this certainly isn’t that. It baffles him to think he used to be just like this.

He throws an arm around Lance’s shoulder, and although he feels fantastically awkward about it, he can tell Lance is laughing, the up-and-down of his broad back beneath Keith’s hand comforting and relaxing.

“You’re so bad at this,” Lance says, or Keith thinks he says, but he leans in, rests his head against Keith’s shoulder and closes his eyes.

Keith’s senses are still a little fried from the overwhelming panic of earlier, and the anxiety still rippling thick through the campus, but this close he can almost taste Lance’s energy on his tongue. He feels tired, not just physically but emotionally; exhausted in every way a human can possibly be.

He’s tired of this, Keith thinks. And so am I.

.

The return trip is slow, mostly on account of Lance’s desire to fall asleep against Keith’s side whenever he closes his eyes. Keith feels like a monster waking him every time, but missing their stop is the last thing either of them want today, and Keith does not have nearly enough familiarity with the human public transport to put them at risk.

By the time they make it back to the apartment, they’re both miserable. Lance has some soot on his face, although Keith cannot fathom where form, and there’s faint lines around his mouth from the press of the oxygen mask.

“Have you got your keys?” Keith asks.

“Yes,” Lance says, but makes absolutely no move to retrieve them, leaning forward and banging on the door instead.

It swings open instantly, revealing a tense Pidge who looks like they’ve spent the past two hours wringing their tiny hands together while waiting for the worst.

“Hey, Pidge,” Lance says, exhausted. “There was a fire at the school. I was there. I’ll fill you in later, if that’s cool, because right now I really just wanna crash.”

Pidge’s eyes go wide, darting between the ash smudged on Lance’s face to Keith’s grim expression. “Yeah,” they say, stepping to the side and letting Lance shuffle past. “Go get some rest.”

“Thanks, man,” Lance says, ruffling their hair.

Pidge makes an annoyed noise, but before Lance can disappear down the hallway they grab his wrist, jerking him to a standstill. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

Lance quirks a brow, quizzical. “Thanks, I guess? Me too.”

Pidge rolls their eyes, letting him go. “Hopeless,” they mutter, but Lance is already lumbering down the hallway to his room.

He turns for a second, glancing over his shoulder at Keith. “You coming?”

“In a minute,” Pidge and Keith say as one.

At any other time, it might have aroused suspicion in Lance, but right now it’s apparent he’s just far too tired to comprehend anything but the proximity of his bed. Keith cannot blame him, honestly. Lance might protest, but he thinks the shock of it all is catching up, hitting him harder than he likes to admit.

Lance shrugs and turns, disappearing into his room without another word. Keith and Pidge stand there for a second, listening. Silently, Pidge beckons for Keith to follow, and leads him past Lance’s door and into their own room.

It’s much the same as the last time Keith had been here; an organized kind of chaos, all of Keith’s pilfered files spread over any surface that will take their weight, and hasty notes scrawled over scraps of paper littered all about.

“What’s this about a fire?” Pidge asks, making a beeline to their desk and collecting a pile of folders haphazardly together.

Keith sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Apparently somebody was smoking in one of the bathrooms and left a lit cigarette in the bin. Things escalated from there, and the whole building basically went up in flames.” He hesitates for a second, looking for a gentle way to share this next bit and finding none. “Lance got caught in the building just as the fire begun to take. The door closed and, of course, locked itself on him. It probably felt like a closer call than it actually was, but it was a minute or so before I could get him out.”

Pidge turns, and their face is pinched. “Yeah,” they say. “That’s about what I thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“Here,” Pidge says, stepping forward and upending their armful of folders into Keith’s surprised hands. “This is what I wanted to show you earlier.”

“What’s this?” Keith asks, fumbling.

“This is all of Lance’s bad luck,” Pidge says.

“I already know all of Lance’s bad luck,” Keith says helplessly. “I could recite you his case from memory alone.”

“I know you could,” Pidge says. “But actually look. Do you see the pattern?”

“Pidge, what -.”

“It’s getting worse. Every time Lance experiences a misfortune, it’s twice as bad as the last. You told me when you first got here you were mostly stopping him from eating expired curry and locking himself in rooms.”

“What’s your point?”

Pidge pats the files and looks up sharply, meeting Keith’s gaze. “What’s the major change in Lance’s life since then? About when did things start really going downhill?”

“I don’t know what you meant? It’s -.”

Realization hits. Keith would say it’s like a punch to the gut, but he thinks that might be far kinder.

“Me?” He chokes out. “Am I the reason this is happening to Lance?”

“I don’t know! I’m not like you, I’m just taking educated guesses here. But things really started spiralling not just when you showed up, but when you and Lance became close. You told me that the reason Lance is like this is because he absorbs our misfortunes, and it got me thinking - we’re human, our misfortunes are usually small. Sure, sometimes they’re big - like the car crash, like the gunman - but they’re still human. But you, Keith, you’re an angel - and if Lance has started trying to absorb your misfortunes too, then…”

Pidge trails off. Keith thinks he should say something, but he’s run dry of words.

“What I can’t figure out,” Pidge says, continuing when Keith offers nothing in response, “is what your misfortunes could possibly be? You’re an angel, and I might not know a lot about you guys - my gay little fingers haven’t touched a bible all their life - but I always kind of thought you were meant to be made of tougher stuff.”

Keith’s brain is whirring now, chugging along so fast he thinks he’d be surprised it didn’t break down entirely. Pidge had been half right; things for Lance had started going downhill when they’d become closer, but there was something else that started deteriorating - Keith himself.

Lance isn’t just absorbing common misfortune; he’s also making a valiant effort of taking on the brunt of Keith’s fall.

He can’t stop it - even Lance doesn’t have that kind of power - but he is perhaps slowing it, taking the edge off. Lance may be half the reason it took both Keith and Allura so long to even realize he was falling at all.

Only he’s a human, and Keith’s an angel, and he is nothing more than a drowning sailor frantically trying to stem all the leaks as their sinking ship takes on water. It’s too much for him; he can’t possibly hope to contain the strength of Keith’s fall, only the spark in Lance doesn’t know that, and it’s stubbornly trying its best, and it’s going to kill him.

“Keith?” Pidge’s fingertips graze his cheek and Keith rockets back to awareness. Pidge looks anxious and intensely worried. “Are you alright? You look - well, ‘like sh*t’ might be generous.”

“I’ve gotta go,” Keith says, shoving the files back into Pidge’s chest. “I have to - I have to talk to Lance.”

“About what?”

“He has to stop,” Keith says. “Maybe if he knows what he’s doing, he’ll listen to reason and -.”

“Keith, can you hear yourself? You specifically told me you didn’t want to tell Lance because you were scared he’d fight you on this.”

“It’s different now,” Keith says. “Something has to be done. He’s going to kill himself like this.”

The corners of Pidge’s mouth turn down, and Keith doesn’t think he’s even seen Pidge so unhappy. “Alright,” they say, sounding reluctant. “You’re the guardian angel. You know what’s best.”

Keith doubts that very much. These days, it feels like he knows nothing at all. But he promised himself, and he promised Lance, and if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s keeping his word.

Chapter 16

Chapter Text

Deciding to tell Lance and telling Lance are two very different things.

It’s not that Keith thinks Lance will be angry at him, exactly, because Lance’s anger tends towards transitory at best, and it’s not that he thinks Lance won’t believe him because when it comes to his friends, Lance trusts as easy as breathing.

What Keith is scared of are two very specific things.

The first is that this is a secret Keith has been keeping for months now. His reasons are solid and, he thinks, reasonable. In the end it doesn't really matter though, does it? Lance asks for very few things from him, and he’d asked for Keith’s trust, had made it clear he didn’t like secrets about him being kept from him.

Secondly, that the talk would backfire terribly, and Lance would wind up even more stubborn. Going by past history, Keith would be a fool to dismiss the idea.

(His third, secret fear is that Lance might be just perceptive enough to ask what kind of misfortunes he can possibly be taking from an angel. That’s not a bridge Keith is ready to cross, and he files that fear deep away where it won’t smother him.)

Overthinking it does Keith no favours though. He can’t sit quietly anymore, is running out of time, and the alternative is standing by and watching Lance slowly destroy himself which is no alternative at all.

Keith knocks on his door gently but doesn’t await an answer. Lance is curled on his bed in the dark, covers pulled up to his chin and facing away from the door. He’s not asleep though, Keith can tell, because Lance is never this still when he dreams.

“Hey,” Keith says awkwardly, slipping into the room and closing the door. “How are you feeling?”

It’s silent for a second, and then Lance moves, rolling over to look at Keith. His hair is a right mess, and the ash is smudged on his face like Lance had made a halfhearted attempt to wipe it away. His eyes are incredibly tired, and his expression is impressively blank.

“If we’re being honest here, I’ve been better,” he admits.

Keith’s stomach flips nervously. It’s a turn of phrase, a figure of speech, but anxiety prickles unpleasantly along the back of his neck. “Can I sit?”

“Since when do you ask my permission for anything? Maybe I should be the one asking if you’re feeling okay.”

Keith ignores that, creeping closer until he can settle down tentatively on the edge of the mattress. Lance watches him quietly from beneath his bundle of blankets. Keith knows that human eyes aren’t as adjusted to the dark as his own, but right now it feels like Lance can see every secret he’s tried very hard to hide.

He glances away, down at his hands folded in his lap. “We need to talk.”

“Yeah,” Lance says tiredly. “I’ll bet we do.”

There’s a lump in Keith’s throat and he links his fingers together hard enough that his knuckles flush white. “I don’t like keeping secrets from you.”

There’s a rustle beside him and he glances up just in time for Lance to sling an arm around Keith’s middle, dragging him back down onto the bed with enough force that they bounce.

“I don’t wanna have this conversation when you look like you’ve already got one foot out the door,” Lance says, and his mouth is warm against the side of Keith’s neck. He squeezes Keith’s waist, and shuffles them around so that they're buried beneath the blankets, curled up tight together.

“You’re going to be angry at me,” Keith warns thickly.

Lance snorts. “Probably,” he agrees. “But only for a little bit.”

Keith breathes in, breathes out, and gathers all his courage. He slips a hand down to curl over the back of the one Lance has resting on his hip. “I know what’s wrong with your luck.”

Lance sucks in a sharp breath. For a second, he doesn’t say anything, and Keith can feel the thunder of Lance’s heartbeat against his back. It’s frightening and reassuring all at once.

“For how long?”

Keith licks his lips. “A few months,” he admits. And then, feeling brave, “Pidge knows, too.”

Lance sighs. “Of course they do,” he says, resigned.

“I’m sorry.”

“For telling Pidge or for keeping it from me?”

“Neither,” Keith says. “If I had to do things again, I don’t think I’d change my choice. I’m sorry for the fact I had to keep it from you - and I’m sorry for the fact I know that hurts you.”

“I don’t ask a lot,” Lance says, echoing Keith’s earlier thought. “I don’t think I do, anyway. It’s not your right to make choices for me, Keith, even if you think it’s for the right reasons.”

Keith disagrees, but knows better than to say as much. Lance is taking this better than he’d hoped for so far, and he’s reluctant to turn this into an argument, test the grace of Lance’s good will.

Lance, he’s found, cannot be trusted to know what’s best for him. If he refuses to look out for his own interests, than that’s a weight Keith will gladly bear on his behalf.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

Lance squirms closer, pressing his sweaty forehead against the back of Keith’s neck. Keith is incredibly conscious of the way Lance’s hair brushes against his bare skin. “Tell me,” Lance says.

Keith has thought for months on how he would break the news, has formed and discarded more scripts than he can ever hope to count. He’s rehearsed this a thousand times, played out every possible reaction Lance could have, and yet he feels overwhelmed, completely unprepared.

He’s terrified of messing this up. He’s terrified of a lot of things, he’s finding.

“It’s not your luck that’s killing you,” he says. “It’s the luck of everybody you love.”

Lance is quiet for a second. “You’re going to have to explain. I’m too dumb for your riddles, you know that.”

“You’re not dumb,” Keith says fiercely, even though it’s not the point. He pulls away from Lance, feels the thrum of panic darting along Lance’s aura, but all he’s doing is finding the room to roll over, bring them face to face. Lance blinks as one of Keith’s hands lands on his cheek. “You’re kind of stupid sometimes, and you like to play the idiot, but don’t you dare believe that makes you anything less than exactly what you should be.”

Lance snorts. “You’re kind of sappy for an old man,” he says, but he reaches up and the warmth of his palm along the back of Keith’s hand is wonderful. “Far be it for me to argue with you though.”

“Good,” Keith says, and then, while Lance is distracted, says, “Do you remember when you were in that car crash with Pidge?”

Lance frowns. “I never told you about that.”

“You didn’t have to. I have a folder heavy enough to count as a legal weapon on your whole life, Lance.”

“Yeah, I remember the crash. I don’t wanna talk about it though.”

Keith bets he doesn’t. He knows a thing or two about the frightening moment of thinking with iron certainty that this is how you’re going to die. “We’re not,” he says. “I want to talk about Pidge.”

“What about them? They barely got a scratch.”

“Exactly,” Keith says. “I’ve seen photos, Lance. The car that hit you collided with the passenger side, where Pidge was sitting - yet Pidge walked out of the wreck, and they had to patch you back together.”

Lance’s expression clouds, and Keith can see the gears turning in his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Keith says, smoothing his thumb tenderly along the high of Lance’s cheekbones, “that Pidge was never meant to walk out of that crash; you were.”

“Are you - are you saying that I somehow… changed the future?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Keith answers softly. “You care too much, Lance. And when you care, there’s a part of you that puts itself between your friends and anything that would do them harm. You absorb their misfortunes, take the fall for them.”

Lance stares at him. “I’m saving my friends lives?”

And there it is, exactly what Keith had been worried about. Keith saying one thing, and Lance hearing another entirely.

“No,” he says, reaching up to tug at Lance’s fringe. “This is important, listen to me, okay? You’re not just taking the big things, you’re taking the small things as well; and it’s too much for you.”

“I’ve lived this long,” Lance argues, pulling away from Keith and pushing himself upright. “If I can stop them from hurting in any way possible, I should -.”

“You’re taking my misfortunes too,” Keith says sharply. “I’m an angel, Lance, and you’re just a human - my misfortunes aren’t meant for you. It was bad enough when you were just trying to keep your friends safe, but this is different. This is going to kill you, and I can’t stop it on my own.”

“But if I just -.”

“There’s no just,” Keith snarls, hoisting himself up and crowding into Lance’s space, forcing him back against the headboard. “This is going to kill you, I promise you that. And your friends aren’t going to thank you for it - I’m not going to thank you for it. There’s a point where your caring becomes selfishness, and you’re toeing that line, Lance. Be careful not to cross it.”

Keith’s venom had startled Lance, he can tell, but he meets Keith’s hot gaze. “What if I control it? Just… take the small things.”

“And what about the first time something big happens?” Keith asks meanly. “The first time it looks like somebody you care about is in danger; do you really think you’ll be able to hold yourself back?” Lance opens his mouth to say something, but Keith holds up a hand to cut him off. “Be honest with me, Lance.”

Lance pauses, hesitation flickering in his gaze. Keith wishes he felt more victorious. “I... can’t promise that.”

Keith pulls back, sighing. “That’s what I thought.”

Lance glances down, picking at the blanket in his lap. “So where does that leave me?”

“You have to try and stop,” Keith says firmly.

“How? I’ve apparently been doing this my whole life without even knowing it - and now you want me to learn to control it? I don’t even know where to begin.”

“I’ll help you,” Keith says. “Pidge and I both. We can figure it out. There’s got to be a way.”

Lance looks up and smiles weakly. “If anybody can figure it out, it’ll be Pidge.”

“I’m reasonably certain that they’re going to break the known laws of the universe one of these days,” Keith agrees.

The relief in him is almost crushing. There aren’t words to describe how he feels right now; over-full of fondness and near consuming exhaustion. He’d been so prepared for this conversation going downhill quicker than he could hope to contain, but instead Lance had listened to him - argued, yes, but he wouldn’t be Lance if he didn’t. Ultimately though, he’d let himself be convinced, and that is more trust than Keith knows what to do with.

Feeling remarkably tender, Keith reaches up and finally wipes the ash off Lance’s cheek. Lance goes very still, and Keith gives him a smile that feels unfamiliar on his face. “Thank you,” he says. “For listening to me.”

“I wouldn’t get used to it,” Lance says, but the laugh he gives is rather shaky. He reaches up and catches Keith’s wrist, thumb pressing gently against his silent pulse point. “I’m still mad you kept this from me for so long, but I get why.”

“You’re kind of a self-sacrificing disaster,” Keith tells him.

Lance quirks a grin. It goes silent for a second, and Keith is very aware of his hand on Lance’s face, the blue of Lance’s eyes. The shadows the dark paints along Lance’s skin makes him seem younger, softer.

Keith swallows, throat dry. “Knowing you has changed my life,” he says honestly. “I don’t think I can ever thank you enough for that.”

Lance’s smile turned crooked. “Are you just saying that because you think I’m going to be dead come morning?”

Not you, Keith thinks. You’re not the only one living on borrowed time.

Instead, he says, a little desperately, “Can I kiss you?”

He’d thought he’d shock him, burn that fondness from Lance’s gaze with the strength of his request. Instead, Lance looks as if he’s been waiting his whole life to answer.

“If you don’t, I’m going to be pissed.”

Keith’s other hand reaches forward to tangle in Lance’s shirt, and he uses the fingertips he has on Lance’s cheek to pull him forward.

When Keith had thought about this before - often and obsessively - he’d thought it’d be unbearably awkward. He only has one kiss half a century ago to base his experiences on, and he knows Lance’s romantic history is just as barren. They’d fumble it, he was sure, and ruin the moment irreversibly.

They do not. Lance’s mouth is very warm, his lips soft, and the hand he sets on Keith’s cheek welcome. He tastes like smoke and soot, the reminder that only hours ago Keith had pulled him from a fire, given him permission to keep on living.

Keith can feel him, too; just how much this kiss means. There’s fondness, longing, hope. Lance’s aura is like gazing into a mirror, and Keith is so overwhelmed with the way their emotions are catching and mixing that he feels like he could choke.

Once, he’d likened Lance to a star, and now he’s close enough to feel the hungry burn of it.

It’s too much, and Keith pulls away before it can go any further.

“You look like you’re thinking too much,” Lance says. “It’s just a kiss, Keith.”

“Is it?”

“It is if that’s what you want it to be.”

Keith can’t think about what he wants it to be right now. That’s too much to ask of him after their talk, after the kiss, after Lance’s fingertips on his skin. They’ve done enough sorting through heavy emotions tonight, and he thinks the universe can at least grant them the grace of a quiet moment.

Lance must read whatever is in his expression, because he sighs, slumping back down on the mattress. He beckons for Keith to join him. “Come on,” he says. “It’s been a long day and I’m exhausted. Nearly getting burnt alive takes a lot out of a guy.”

“You weren’t nearly burnt alive,” Keith says. “I had you.”

“I know you did,” Lance says. “Let me be dramatic. I’m trying to defuse the tension.” He pats the bed beside him.

Keith resists. “If you need to sleep, I can -.”

“I sleep better when you’re here,” Lance says without so much as blinking. “I don’t have to worry so much about waking up to find you gone.”

Keith’s heart aches. Slowly, he lowers himself back down beside Lance. For a moment, he thinks about maintaining a pretense at distance, but he thinks they’re probably past that now. He’s made no secrets about what Lance means to him, and he’s always been a poor actor even at the best of times.

He crawls in close, tossing an arm around Lance, and setting his head on his chest so he can hear the calming thud of his heartbeat.

Lance chuckles, running his fingers through Keith’s hair. “You’re such a weird guy,” he says, but he says it fondly.

“Enough talking. Go to sleep.”

Lance laughs one more time, but settles against the pillow. He doesn’t stop running his hand through Keith’s hair. For several minutes, Keith savours the feel of it, listening to Lance’s even breathing. Eventually, his hand goes still.

For a long time Keith lays against Lance’s chest, staring at the opposite wall and thinking of the phantom feeling of Lance’s fingers on his skin. He feels like he should be doing something, talking to somebody, making progress on the convoluted mess that has become his and Lance’s shared life.

He doesn’t want to. He wants to lay here and pretend for just one single night that what he and Lance have stands any chance at all of lasting. It’s a sad, pathetic kind of thought, but Keith has resigned himself to the fact he’s occasionally a sad, pathetic kind of man.

This time, when sleeps crawls through the trenches of his mind, he’s ready for it, more prepared to recognize it. It still scares him something fierce, but he’s fought enough hard battles today that he can’t bring himself to add one more to the list.

He closes his eyes. He sleeps.

Keith thinks, although he cannot be sure, that he dreams.

He wakes before Lance, just as the sun begins to pour through the window. It’s peaceful and quiet, and Keith watches him for several long minutes, remembering the way Lance’s skin had felt underneath the push of his palms.

It’s a good way to wake. Something he could get used to.

He’s just considering waking him when Lance stirs, groaning and scrunching up his nose. Keith smiles, watching as Lance’s eyes flutter open, looking right at him.

“Good morning,” Keith says.

Lance does not say anything back. His tired expression falters, and then his brows narrow.

Something about his face alarms Keith. He reaches out to touch him, set his fingertips on Lance’s cheek, and when they connect Lance hisses and jumps like he’s been shocked.

There’s a dawning horror rising so thick and awful inside of him that Keith feels as if he’ll choke.

“Keith? Is that you?” Lance asks, and when he reaches out, his hand passes right through Keith’s chest. “I can’t - I can’t see you.”

Oh.

Oh.

Chapter 17

Chapter Text

Watching Lance’s cautious concern tip into straight panic is one of the worst moments of Keith’s life. Given his life had included his own death, he thinks that’s probably quite the accomplishment.

“Keith. Keith!”

Lance stumbles out of bed, eyes frantic and face pale. Fruitlessly, Keith tries to reach for him, but Lance is already tearing out of the room, very nearly tripping over his own feet in the rush. Keith winces as he hears Lance collide with the hallway wall, and hurries after him.

Keith rounds the corner just in time to see the door to the second bedroom swing open, Pidge peering out with their glasses askew, bleary eyed and irritable. “Lance? What are you -.”

Lance rounds on them. “Have you seen Keith? Did he leave my room last night?”

“Have I seen - he’s not with you?”

Lance runs his hands frantically through his hair, sending it spiking up in all directions. “I don’t know! I could have sworn - he told me he wouldn’t leave without saying anything.”

Keith’s gut turns fiercely. For a moment, he thinks he’s about to be sick, physical capability for it aside. The only time he’s ever seen Lance like this had been all those weeks ago when they’d discovered that Keith was just as capable of hurting as any mortal man.

“Lance,” Keith says, and nobody in the hallway so much as blinks. Despair floods him thick and angry, pooling all the way down to his fingertips and choking him viciously. It tastes an awful lot like blood.

“Lance,” Pidge says in the voice of somebody trying very hard to be calm. “Slow down, tellme what happened.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Lance says. “He was there when I went to sleep, and he was gone when I woke up. I don’t know where he is.”

“Are you sure he didn’t just leave?”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Lance insists, and Lance’s blind faith in him is as ill-deserved as it is gratifying. “He said he wouldn’t just take off without telling me, not after last time. And I believe him.”

“Take a deep breath,” Pidge says, laying a tiny hand on Lance’s shoulder. “Panicking isn’t going to solve anything.”

Lance’s answering laugh is incredibly strained. “I don’t know what could solve anything at this point.”

Pidge’s eyes flicker behind Lance to the empty corridor where Keith is standing forlorn and lonely. For a second Keith experiences a ridiculous flare of hope that Pidge can see him, but their frown deepens and their gaze ticks to one side and then the other. Keith’s heart sinks.

Pidge can’t see him any more than Lance can; they’re just smart enough and calm enough to understand that Keith would never have left Lance under his own volition.

Keith watches as Pidge takes in a small breath and then turns back to Lance. “Lance,” they say, squeezing the hand on his shoulder. “There’s something I think I should probably tell you.”

Lance snorts. “If it’s about you being in on the big secret, you don’t have to worry. Keith filled me in.”

Pidge smiles thinly. “At least that’s one less secret weighing us all down,” they say. Then, to the corridor at large, “Keith, are you there?”

Keith closes his eyes for a moment, wishes for a universe where anything at all went according to his desperate plans. He opens his eyes, pulls at the tiny puddle of his energy, and sets his hand between Lance’s shoulder blades.

For a second, he honestly believes that he’s not going to be able to do it. That his energy has taken more than just his tangibility from him, but, after a very long moment, he feels the answering spark in his fingertips.

Lance yelps, pulling away at the exact same time that Keith’s energy loses its battle and his hand phases straight through his shoulder.

“What was -.” Realization dawns. Spinning around, Lance hesitantly asks, “Keith?”

“Yeah, buddy,” Keith says, full of useless, directionless affection. “It’s me.”

Nobody can hear him, but they’re smart people and they don’t need to. Pidge lets out a breath that sounds bigger than their lungs have the space to contain. “Oh,” they say, momentarily burying their face against their palm. “Thank god.”

Lance turns, one hand still pressed against the warm spark in his skin where Keith had touched him. “Pidge,” he says, “what do we do now?”

“I think,” Pidge says, “it’s about time we told the others.”

.

Keith feels strangely disconnected as he watches Lance’s friends settle into place in the living room. Lance is tucked in between Hunk and Shiro, like the combined force of their affection could fight off the miserable slump in his shoulders.

Keith is aching conscious of the fact he put it there, whether directly or not. He’d never wanted to be the reason for Lance’s misery, and yet here they are. He thinks if there is a god, they’re in the habit of refusing him anything and everything he dares to want.

“Okay,” Pidge says, standing at the front of the room, wringing their hands uselessly and with a slightly manic look in their eyes. “So, there’s not really a gentle way to start this so I’m just going to come out and say it.”

“Go on,” Shiro encourages. “We’re listening.”

“Keith’s an angel,” Pidge says with barely a breath. “More specifically, he’s Lance’s guardian angel, and the both of them are in a lot of trouble.”

Silence. Shiro opens his mouth, thinks for a second, and then closes it. Leaning back into the couch, he scratches the faint scruff on his chin bemusedly. “Well,” he says. “That’s a new one for me, I gotta admit.” He looks to Lance. “You knew about this?”

“From the very start,” Lance admits with a weak smile. “It was my choice to introduce you to him.”

“Hold up, wait a second. Can we go back a step? Keith is an angel.” Hunk laughs, and it sounds faintly high. “Like, an honest to god angel.”

“God doesn’t have much to do with it,” Lance says. “He was pretty firm about that point.”

“An angel,” Hunk says again, like he’s not hearing a single word that comes out of anybody’s mouth. “A guardian angel.”

“Yeah, I know it’s a lot to take in, but we need you to hurry it up because we’ve got bigger problems right now,” Pidge says impatiently, which Keith thinks is rich considering he very clearly remembers the way Pidge’s legs completely gave out on them when they found out the truth.

“Keith’s energy is failing,” Lance says. “When we woke up this morning, we found out that he doesn’t even have the strength to remain visible anymore. It’s hard to communicate with somebody you can’t see or hear, but Pidge and I get the impression that means the situation isn’t good.”

‘Isn’t good’ is perhaps a vast understatement if ever there was one, but Keith isn’t in a position to correct them right now. For a moment, he almost wishes he’d had the forethought to write all his secrets down before it came to this, so there was something to guide his friends in his absence.

He wouldn’t have though. He knows he wouldn’t have. Keith is aware of his failings, and a fierce independence has always been among the forefront of them.

Angel, Hunk mouths one last time, sinking back into the couch and staring blankly at the ceiling as if searching for the clouds beyond it, and the truth he imagines they carry among them. Keith feels a pang of fondness for him so keenly it momentarily brings him up short.

“You said he’s no longer visible,” Shiro says. “Does that mean he’s still here?”

“We think so,” Lance says, sounding uncertain.

Keith can’t abide by the despondent tone of his voice and so he lays a hand against Lance’s skinny wrist and pushes with his flickering energy.

“f*ck – Jesus, Keith. I get it, you’re here. I’m sorry, alright?” Lance snaps, rubbing at his slightly red skin.

“What the f*ck was that?” Hank yelps, bunching himself against the sofa arm.

“Just Keith being petty,” Pidge says, and Keith feels unfairly thrown under the bus. “Look, it’s not just Keith that we’re worried about though.” Pidge casts an uncertain look at Lance. “There’s something else.”

“Of course there is,” Hunk sighs.

Lance clears his throat and the attention in the room jumps to him. “It’s me,” he says. “Keith was my guardian angel because chances are I’m not going to survive without one.”

The silence in the room is piercing sharp and as cold as ice. Keith, in the metaphysical plane of reality he lingers in, shivers.

“What,” Shiro says, “does that mean?”

Lance holds up his hands, looking everywhere but at his friends. “Okay, before I say anything, I want to preface this by saying it’s not my fault -.”

“Oh boy,” says Hunk.

“– and also, you’re welcome.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shiro demands again. “Lance, what did you do?”

“All his damn f*cking life,” Pidge says, “Lance McClain has been absorbing the misfortunes of the people he loves, and that includes us.”

“You’ve what?”

Keith has never heard Shiro sound so close to genuinely angry before. What little of his aura Keith still has the perception to pick up is taunt and anxious, fraught with guilt and horror and – buried ever so deeply – gratitude.

He knows, Keith thinks, staring at empty sleeve Shiro has folded and pinned out of the way. He knows that he wouldn’t have survived without Lance.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Lance protests. “Until exactly last night, I had no clue. Keith didn’t exactly tell me, okay?” Then, slightly more bitter, “Keith had a habit of not telling me anything at all.”

The guilt that blossoms in Keith’s gut is hot and furious, unfolding and growing until he feels like it might consume him.

“You’re wrong,” Keith says. “I wanted to tell you everything so badly, I really did. I just…”

Keith is one man trying desperately to keep the center of a very small but incredibly important universe from burning out, and sometimes the weight of his mistakes feels so much heavier than his victories.

He’d wanted to tell Lance, but Lance was right – he hadn’t.

“In Lance’s defense,” Pidge says, “Keith told me that Lance’s ability is rare but not necessarily unique.” They pause for a second, thinking over their words, and then add, “Although the records he gave me all say that the strength of Lance’s ability is unprecedented.”

“Wait, I don’t want Lance to die,” Hunk says, sounding close to distraught. “This whole conversation is happening way to quickly. Can’t he just… stop?”

“I’d stop if I knew how I was doing it in the first place,” Lance says, frustrated. “How am I mean to stop something I have no control over?”

“Maybe it’s like breathing,” Hunk suggests, mimicking the in-and-out of a breath with his hands. “Maybe it’s only automatic so long as you’re not paying attention to it. You know how if you actually stop to think about breathing, you become, like, super conscious of making sure you’d doing it right?”

Lance purses his lips, considering. “I mean, it’s worth a try,” he says. “I don’t really want to die either, if we’re being honest here.”

Keith feels the automatic, furious spark that thought generates in each and every one of his friends. For a second, the aura of the room is as bright and blinding as a solar flare, and Keith can barely see past it.

“The problem is,” Pidge says, “what happens the first time that you’re not actively thinking about it? This isn’t sustainable.”

“It isn’t a perfect solution,” Shiro admits. “But right now it seems like the only solution we’ve got.”

The frustration on Pidge’s face is unparalleled. Keith knows they’re unused to facing a problem they can’t beat back down with the formidable fact of their intellect. They’re unused to playing with high stakes though, and Keith thinks there’s probably no higher stakes that they could be faced with than Lance’s life.

“Hey, hey,” Shiro says, alarmed. He gets to his feet and crosses to the front of the room, pulling Pidge into a warm hug. “You don’t have to figure it out on your own right this second, okay? We’re all going to figure it out together.”

“I know,” Pidge says, voice tight and shaky. “I know, it’s just…”

“Yeah,” Shiro says. “I hear you.”

“I’m the one dying here,” Lance points out. “Seems unfair that Pidge is the one getting the hug.”

Shiro steps back and fists a hand in Lance’s sweater, dragging him up from the couch and all but slamming him into Pidge, wrapping his arm around Lance’s shoulder and setting his cheek atop Pidge’s hair. “Hunk, I’ve only got one arm. I could use a hand here, so to speak.”

Hunk is on his feet before Shiro has even finished speaking, throwing himself at the group with enough enthusiasm to make up for any number of missing limbs. “Nobody speak or I’m going to cry,” Hunk warns, sounding a little watery.

“I was kidding guys,” Lance says.

“This is as much for us as it is for you,” Shiro says. “Be quiet and let us hug you.”

Keith watches from the doorway, breathing in the atmosphere of warmth and family that he’d never felt so strongly until he’d had the incredible fortune of Lance’s misfortune. He can feel their affection and their adoration as clearly as if it were his own, and Keith aches from the strength of it.

He wants so badly to step closer, to wrap an arm around Lance’s waist and rest his head against Hunk’s shoulder, to wrap himself up in the seamless emotion of the moment.

He doesn’t. He can’t. The weight of his intangibility is so heavy that he can’t so much as force himself to step forward, to close the gap between himself and the others.

So he stays in the doorway, watching and aching, and then closes his eyes and wills himself away before he spoils this too.

.

If Allura is at all surprised to see him in her office, she does an excellent job of hiding it. Without so much as looking up from what she’s writing, she says, “Hello, Keith.”

“Allura.” Keith crosses the room and sinks into the chair in front of her. “I suppose you were waiting for me, huh?”

The scratch of Allura’s pen is very loud in the quiet office. Keith waits patiently while she finishes her writing and sets her pen down. When she looks up, she offers him a tired smile. “It crossed my mind I may be seeing you soon.”

“I’m glad you can see me, because Lance can’t.”

“Ah.” Allura looks genuinely sympathetic. Keith wishes it made him feel better in the slightest. It does not. “It was only a matter of time, Keith. You knew that.”

“I did,” he says. “I do. Knowing it and experiencing it are turning out to be two very different things, however.”

Allura sighs and gets to her feet. “Come on,” she says, rounding the desk and holding out her hand to Keith.

Keith gives her a curious look but takes it and allows himself to be pulled to his feet. “Where are we going?”

“To see Coran. I don’t think you came here just to talk about yourself, did you?”

No, he had not.

“The fall is close,” he says. “I can feel it. It’s like…” he hesitates, searching for the words to describe it. “When I was human, I used to suffer waking nightmares. I’d lay there trapped in a body that wouldn’t move, wouldn’t listen, while my mind taunted me with all sorts of awful things. It’s like that, Allura.”

“Helpless,” she says. “You feel helpless.”

“I feel like my body isn’t mine anymore,” Keith corrects, even though she is not wrong. “I remember more about being an angel than I ever knew about being human, and all that is being taken from me. I’m losing part of myself bit by bit and I’m…”

Allura lays a hand on his cheek and gives him a smile. “You’ll be fine, Keith,” she says. “You’ve already gone into the unknown once, and that didn’t work out too bad for you. This time you’re practically a professional.”

Surprisingly, that actually draws a laugh out of Keith. “Alright,” he says. “You were right anyway. I don’t want to talk about myself. Lance’s human friends are trying their hardest to help him, which is nice, but that’s my job. I can’t be shown up by a couple of young upstarts.”

Allura pats his cheek. “That’s the spirit,” she says, and leads them both down to the Records Room.

Coran is sitting behind his desk, sorting absently through his files, and he looks up with a fond smile when he hears them approach. Keith would be flattered by the attention, but Coran doesn’t get many visitors and he wouldn’t be surprised if an encroaching army got the same attention.

“Keith,” Coran greets. “I haven’t seen you lingering about in days now. I was beginning to worry.”

“I think I already checked out all the files that might be even a little helpful to me,” Keith says with a weak smile.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Allura says. “This is the archives of heaven, not a library, Keith Kogane. Files aren’t meant to leave the room, let alone wind up in the hands of mortals.”

“This isn’t a room,” Keith says, a useless misdirection. “It’s a labyrinth.”

Allura sighs, as if she cannot possibly fathom why she puts up with him as she does, but it’s offset by the amused look on her face. “Have fun in the labyrinth, Keith,” she says, her hand momentarily passing atop the shine of his hair as she heads back to the stairs. “You know where to find me if you want to speak about you for a change.”

Keith rolls his eyes but lets her go, turning back to Coran. “Tell me you’ve got something I can look through that I haven’t already seen,” he begs.

Coran smiles and sweeps a stack of files off his desk and loads them into Keith’s waiting arms.

“They’re only as useful as you make them,” he says. “But of all the things people have accused you of over the years, a lack of ingenuity is not one of them.”

Keith huffs out a small laugh. “I don’t know about that.”

Coran’s expression flickers for a moment so small that Keith almost misses it entirely; a strange, grieving wistful that is covered by a strained grin immediately.

He slips a hand from the files down so that his fingers can briefly encircle Keith’s wrist, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“Keith,” he says, “if there is anything in those files that may save Lance, I’m confident you will be the one to find it.”

.

Keith spends the better part of the rest of the day poring over the new files. In his current state, he barely has the energy to take himself in and out of heaven, so unfortunately there’s no chance of smuggling them back to Pidge, or even just to Earth to read at his leisure.

No, if there’s a discovering to be made it’ll be made alone in the Records Room with only the ghost of Coran’s pitchless whistling for company.

Still, Keith does not find any new information. Most of the files seem to be distant companions to the ones he’s already read, with the exception of a thin, bullet-pointed list alone in its own ancient folder.

Keith spares it a cursory glance, but one look at the first line is enough to kill any spark of interest.

A fall is triggered when –

At Keith’s best guess, he’d say it’s the origin of the pamphlet living in Allura’s desk, a list of the trials and pains of falling but stripped of the cherubs and poetry. He’d had no interest in it before, and he most certainly has no interest in it now.

Eventually, the desire for Lance’s company outweighs Keith’s desperation to be useful, and he escorts the files back to Coran’s desk.

Coran accepts them easily, studying Keith’s face with a keen gaze. “Did you find anything?”

“Not today,” Keith says. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Coran’s fingers drum against the top of the files. “Tomorrow,” he agrees, and Keith takes that as permission to leave.

Returning to Lance takes all his focus, the link between them stretched thin. The relief when he manages it is greater than he’ll ever admit to. When he opens his eyes he’s back in Lance’s room, and it is once again dark outside the window.

Lance is curled on his bed, blankets kicked back by his feet and his arms loosely crossed over his chest. For a second Keith thinks he’s asleep, but when he rounds the room he sees that Lance’s eyes are open.

Gently, although Keith knows it does not matter, he crawls onto the free side of the bed, sliding up against Lance’s back. The mattress does not so much as dip, nor the sheets rustle. The silence is alarmingly lonely.

Keith wraps an arm around Lance’s waist and very carefully brushes his fingertips along the skin bared on his stomach where his shirt has ridden up.

Lance starts but does not scramble away, and when he speaks his voice is hopeful. “Keith?”

Keith skates his thumb along Lance’s skin in confirmation, trying to be sparing with the energy he gives his spark. He feels Lance’s stomach leap beneath his palm.

Lance laughs weakly. “God,” he says. “Even your shocks are getting weaker. I barely felt that one at all.”

Keith wants to shock him again for the cheek of his comment, but just barely holds himself back. He knows if he tries, he’ll use up the last of the limited energy heaven had returned to him, and then he wouldn’t be able to so much as feel the pale warmth of Lance’s skin.

They lay quietly together and Keith wonders if Lance knows, even if he cannot feel, the mimicry of their position from last night. Quickly, Keith shuts down that line of thought. He cannot bear to remember how it’d felt to finally kiss Lance beneath the iron certainty that he will never get to do it again.

Eventually, Lance says into the quiet, “This has all gotten so f*cked up.” Keith has his forehead resting on the back of Lance’s neck, so he can feel it when Lance swallows thickly as if trying not to cry. “f*ck, it’s just… f*ck. I wish I could see you right now. I wish I could talk to you – touch you.”

Me too, Keith thinks, and then – because the strength of the impulse feels too important to ignore – he bends his head and brushes his lips on the back of Lance’s neck. This time he does not try to conserve his energy, pushes with all that he has.

Lance gasps and shivers and Keith hopes uselessly that it had felt as soft to Lance as it had to him.

A second later the arm Keith has over Lance’s waist sinks through him – Keith had wasted the last of his energy on a pointless kiss.

Lance doesn’t talk. Keith cannot. The lay on the bed, curled together but a world apart and watch the moon climb.

This time, they do not sleep.

Chapter 18

Chapter Text

The next few days are some of the most stressful in all of Keith’s life. Considering he starved to death after a solid week trapped under a collapsed building, he’d like to think that says something.

It seems impossible to him that there was ever a time where he existed like this in Lance’s life; unseen and untouchable, a ghostly spectator in his own existence. The early days of their acquaintance seem further away than Keith logically knows they are sometimes, and he can’t help but look back on them with puzzlement.

He could never have known then what he knows now, but to have ever considered Lance something as simple as another project seems all but heresy. The only relief is that Lance’s friends well and truly step up to fill the mantle that Keith has left behind.

“Lance,” Shiro says, in the patient voice of a man long used to winning arguments through sheer persistence, “you know the new rules, buddy.”

“Jesus, Shiro. I just want to go down the street to pick up dinner, I’m not planning on going on a sabbatical here.”

“You can go down the street, nobody’s saying you can’t.”

“Yeah, but you’re saying I need somebody there to hold my hand like a toddler.”

Pidge, who’s been listening to the argument from the couch, doesn’t look up from the folders sprawled over their lap. “Stop being a dick, Lance. We’re just trying to keep you alive. This isn’t exactly fun for us either.”

All the fight drains out of Lance. It’s almost impressive to watch, actually. Keith hadn’t had the time to quite perfect that trick the way Pidge and the others had. Lance is happy to complain about everything and anything but only until it borders on inconveniencing a loved one, and then it’s a total shut down.

Sometimes it’s endearing - sometimes it’s annoying. Right now, Keith is feeling an incredible mix of the two.

“I know,” Lance says, folding his arms up tight, and managing to sound only a little bit like a sulking child. “It’s just…”

“This is Keith’s job,” Shiro says, “and you don’t want us taking it. We understand.”

Lance very deliberately does not meet anybody eyes. “Yeah, well. Somebody walk me to 711 to get my damn burrito.”

Shiro takes him, and Keith trails uselessly after them, strangely enamoured with the fact that even when he’s not there to remind them of his existence, they persist in talking about him as if he’s a permanent fixture in their lives and not a transitory presence at best.

The walk is uneventful, as is the rest of the evening that they spend watching reruns of old cartoons in the living room. Shiro passes out on the sofa some time just past eleven and Pidge turns off the TV before tossing a blanket over him just as Shiro beings to snore.

“You’re not going to make me sleep out here, are you?” Lance asks.

Pidge looks like they’re seriously considering it for a second, but holds back by the skin of their teeth. “So long as you don’t do anything dumb, I don’t see what I can really protect you from in your own room, I suppose.”

“I promise to be on my best behaviour. I won’t even open the window, even though it feels like a goddamn sauna in here.”

“Your sacrifice is appreciated,” Pidge says dryly, lifting Shiro’s feet from the sofa and claiming the tiny square of space they reveal. They settle his feet on their lap, and immediately set about turning him into a makeshift table for their numerous folders and files.

Lance hesitates in the doorway. “You’re not going to stay up reading all night again, are you?”

“No,” Pidge lies, scribbling on something with a pen. Keith winces, just a little, because he can just see Allura’s expression now when she realizes he let a mortal deface her sacred scriptures like that.

“C’mon, get some shut-eye. You look like crap.”

Pidge glances up and Keith has to admit they do indeed look like crap. Their eyes are black-rimmed and heavily manic. Their hair hasn’t seen a comb in days. If Keith saw them on the street, he’d probably cross over to avoid them.

“I’m fine, Lance. Don’t worry about it.”

“If there was something to find in there, Keith would have -.”

“Keith,” Pidge says firmly, “is a good guy, but he’s not me. Goodnight, Lance.”

Helpless in the face of such a poignant dismissal, Lance goes. Keith goes with him, feeling vaguely insulted even though he knows quite well that had not been what Pidge meant.

In his room, Lance makes a beeline for the window. Keith watches with helpless affection as he makes a grand show of opening it, even though his only audience is half present at best, and suitably unimpressed with his devil-may-care attitude.

“You know,” Lance says as he thrusts open the curtains, “I blame you for this. They wouldn’t be babying me so much if you hadn’t given Pidge the impression my bad luck was terminal.”

“It is terminal,” Keith says. “Don’t play dumb just because you know I can’t argue with you right now.”

Lance cups a hand over his ear and waits theatrically. “What’s that? You think I’m right? And that I’m the most handsome man to ever walk the planet too?”

“You’re insufferable,” Keith sighs.

Lance walks right through him on the way to his desk. Keith flinches in anticipation, but the sensation is… weak.

“They’re not letting me go to classes either,” Lance grumbles as he throws himself into the chair. “One little fire and suddenly school is the most dangerous place in the world. I’m paying for that education, you know? And what am I getting out of it?”

“Hopefully, you’ll live long enough to use it now,” Keith says.

Lance flicks idly through the papers on his desk, but Keith can tell he’s far too unsettled to be able to commit that much focus to any one thing right now. His eyes are distant, and his face expressionless. He looks a million miles away.

With a sigh, he leans back, desk chair squealing alarmingly beneath him. “I don’t even know if you’re still here,” he says. “I could be talking to myself like a lunatic. You haven’t even zapped me all day, and I know just how much you enjoy that.”

Keith grimaces. He’d tried. Goddamn, had he tried. He’s felt… not necessarily weaker, exactly, but off all day. Another symptom of the fall playing havoc with his powers, he knows, but it doesn’t make it any better. He’s putting honest thought into caving and reading Allura’s dumb pamphlet.

He reaches out, laying a hand to the nape of Lance’s neck out of habit, trying for a shock like it’d really change anything and expecting nothing.

Lance jumps, cursing so loudly that Keith steps back in alarm at the same time Lance leaps to his feet and whirls around, looking right at him. Not through him; at him .

For a moment, Keith isn't certain that he’s not imagining the whole thing, wistful thinking encroaching on his senses. But Lance's hands fisting in his shirt feel far too real, and Lance is looking at him with open mouthed shock.

Keith's imagination is good, but it's not that good.

"Keith? What -."

"I don't know," Keith says, slightly panicked. The burgeoning hope in his stomach is enough to nearly make him feel sick. "I didn't do it on purpose."

Lance's fingers encircle Keith's wrists, gently at first, as if he's worried Keith will crumble beneath his touch, and then tighter once he realizes that this is real; that Keith is actually here. "Holy sh*t," he says, and then he yanks Keith forward and kisses him.

Their first kiss had been soft and new. This one is nothing like it. Lance is holding him hard enough to hurt, and his mouth against Keith's is frantic and hungry. It's all Keith can do it to keep up with him, dragging Lance closer and allowing himself to be swept along in the pace of it all. He can feel Lance's breath harsh against his mouth, the nick of his teeth at his lips, and Keith has the sudden absurd thought, wow , Lance really actually wants this.

It is not that Keith had doubted that Lance liked him, or even that their shared feelings had long since crossed over plausible deniability. It's not that he has no confidence, or that he feels undeserving, although perhaps he does, or even that he hadn't seen this coming. It's just that it is difficult to adequately grasp the intensity of somebody's feelings for you until you're faced with the irrevocable proof of it.

Keith very easily could have wasted all of eternity like this, but after what feels like far too short of a moment, Lance pulls away. He's red faced and breathless, hair a mess although Keith cannot quite remember running his fingers through it. The smile he gives Keith makes him kind of weak in the knees.

"Sorry," Lance says. "I know we've got things to talk about, but I couldn't waste the chance. I don't know if I'll get to do that again."

Keith doesn't know why he's apologizing. It feels safe to say that Keith had been more than an active participant. Reluctantly, he steps back, putting some much needed distance between them. Keith is going to need a clearer head than Lance's touch grants him if they're going to discuss anything at all. "I don't know what's happening," Keith says, "but I don't think this is going to last."

Already, he can feel it fading. The intensity of the power inside of him is withering, as if the bright flare of its abrupt arrival had been all it was capable of.

"Yeah," Lance says. "I thought as much."

Despite his best intentions, Keith can't help but reach out and drag him in to kiss once more.

“You know what’s stupid?” Lance mutters against his mouth.

“Is it you?”

Lance pinches Keith in the side, and Keith squirms away.

“No, you ass,” Lance says. “That we could have been doing this ages ago if we hadn’t…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Keith knows what he means. They’d taken everything for granted, had grown too use to their closeness and the easiness of their connection. It hadn’t even occurred to Keith to think that their time was limited and out of his control.

Keith can’t think of anything to say back. He steps away, sinking onto Lance’s mattress. It bounces beneath him, and Keith is momentarily choked up by such a stupid thing. It’s amazing how much he’d missed the little physical proofs of his life.

Lance steps closer, folding his arms and watching Keith carefully. “How are you… how are you feeling?”

Keith shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

Lance’s brow creases. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter? One moment you’re sleeping beside me in bed, and the next you’re just - a goddamn ghost.”

Keith cannot have this conversation with Lance standing so far away. All the things he needs to say feel unbearably heavy in his chest, and he doesn’t know if he has the strength to share them. Tentatively, he pats the cool bed beside him. “Come here.”

Lance eyes him dubiously. “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea.”

Despite himself, Keith smiles. He pats again. “Lance.”

Lance sighs, shuffling in and taking the spot beside him. The mattress bows slightly beneath them, knocking their thighs together, and almost immediately the closeness, the familiarity, loosens the tight knot of Keith’s insides.

Summoning up what little remains of his courage, Keith says, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

Lance is quiet. “You… you knew this was going to happen?”

Keith is just brave enough to take his hand but not quite brave enough to look him in the eye. “Not this exactly,” he says. “But something like it, yeah, I did.”

For a moment he’s worried Lance is going to pull back, but his fingers just squeeze tightly around Keith’s own. “I knew there was something wrong. I knew you were acting off.” He sighs, tilting his head back to look at the ceiling. “I’m so angry at you.”

“You usually are,” Keith agrees.

Lance elbows him in the side but it’s gentle, as if he’s worried Keith will crack beneath the pressure. “Will you tell me now ? What’s really happening?”

It goes against every instinct Keith has to say yes. He’s spent so stupidly long holding this secret close to his heart that the idea of letting it go causes him to ache. But Lance deserves better than that, and Keith had promised himself in the last few days that he wouldn’t keep things from Lance that he really ought to know.

“It’s…” he pauses, sucks in a breath, and clutches at Lance’s hand. Tentatively, he says, “It’s called falling.”

“Falling?”

“It’s kind of like dying,” Keith says. “But also kind of not.”

“Kind of like dying and kind of not like dying are very different things,” Lance says. “Which one is it, Keith?”

Keith shakes his head, and he goes to pull away but Lance yanks him closer, Keith’s face crushed against his shoulder.

“Don’t do that,” Lance snaps. “We’ve got god knows how long left of this, don’t try and be difficult now.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” Keith protests. “It’s just - it’s complicated.”

“Uncomplicate it,” Lance says, unrelenting. “Tell me how I can help.”

This time when Keith makes to push away, Lance lets him, his arm slipping from Keith’s shoulder. The distance grants Keith clarity and he manages to say, “Look, it’s not important. You’re -.”

“If you tell me you’re not important one more f*cking time, Keith, I swear -.”

The door to the bedroom flings open. “Lance, who the hell are you…” Pidge trails off, staring blankly at Keith with wide eyes.

While a part of Keith is, of course, overjoyed to see Pidge (and be seen by Pidge) a bigger part can’t help but be frustrated that their limited time continues to slip down the drain, wasting away on unimportant things.

“Keith, you’re...” They wave a hand blankly at him. “You’re here.”

“Yes,” Keith says, “and I’m glad, but -.”

“Pidge,” Lance says, getting to his feet and snatching his coat from the back of his door. “Keith and I are going out for a bit.”

“We’re what ?” Keith asks, turning to blink at him. “Are you crazy ? What makes you think we have time for that?”

The look Lance gives him is deeply indecipherable but unyielding. He adjusts the collar of his coat and grabs Keith by the wrist, dragging him past Pidge and out into the hallway. Between his confusion and the jolt in his stomach at Lance’s touch, Keith is just distracted enough to let him.

Pidge trails after them to the door. “Lance! Do you think I could maybe have two seconds with Keith before you go careering off into the distance? With your luck, Keith will probably vanish again before you even make it back.”

The impatience on Lance’s face is only matched by what Keith feels. “Two minutes, max,” Lance says. “Keith and I really have to talk.”

“And I really have to keep you alive,” Pidge says bluntly, shoving Lance out the door and slamming it behind him. Pidge hesitates for a moment before opening it again and saying, “Don’t you dare walk more than two feet in either direction, okay?”

They close it again. Keith winces as Pidge turns to face him.

“I’m sorry,” Keith blurts, because it feels like a safe thing to say.

“What the hell are you sorry for?” Pidge snaps, and then yanks Keith down into a crushing hug.

The suddenness of it is the only reason Keith doesn’t manage to hug them back. It’s over almost as soon as it started, but the warmth of Pidge’s skinny shoulders pressing against his chest runs deep.

“Look,” Pidge says gruffly, shoving Keith back and adjusting their glasses. “You scared us all - mostly Lance though.”

“I know,” Keith says softly. “I was still there.”

Pidge lets out a breath. “I thought so,” they say. “Look, I’ll be quick. Lance really will kill me if I hog you for too long. Just…”

“I’m listening,” Keith says, prompting.

Pidge runs a harried hand through their hand. “Right now, I don’t know how to save Lance. I haven’t figured it out yet. But all your notes, all the things he does to keep the rest of us breathing, it’s basically an outpouring of… something, yeah?”

Keith can tell Pidge is shuffling around the word ‘love’ and he kindly ignores it too. Sometimes, he’s learnt, the weight of what one person will do for you is heavier than you have the strength to bear. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well,” Pidge says, “what if you had a way to just…” They make an indecipherable gesture with their hands. “Stopper it? Dam it up or something?”

Keith raises a brow. “Then where would your metaphorical ‘outpouring’ go?”

Pidge looks at him like he’s stupid, which is not an uncommon expression to receive from Pidge. “Back to Lance, where it belongs. Think about it, it’s practically recycling. Hypothetically, it’d cancel each other out.”

Keith’s mouth pinches. “Hypothetically,” he agrees cautiously. “But Pidge, I don’t think…”

“It’s just a theory,” Pidge says. “It’s something, which is more than nothing. I’m working with what I’ve got here, and what I’ve got isn’t a lot.” They pinch the bridge of their nose and the breath they let out sounds like it carries entire galaxies behind it. “I just… I feel like we’re running out of time.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m not an idiot, Keith,” Pidge say tiredly. “You’re… going, aren’t you? Somewhere else. You won’t be here for much longer.”

The careful, precise way Pidge phrases their question strikes Keith deep. There it is again, Pidge’s stubborn insistence to skirt the edges of any cliff they’re worried they might fall off of. Keith can’t blame them. Right now, that’s not a conversation he’s prepared to have either.

“I’m trying,” he says instead. “To be here for as long as I can.”

Pidge looks up at him, unblinking and unhappy, and Keith meets their stare. “Thank you,” Keith says, “for everything you’ve done.”

The face Pidge pulls is too ugly to be deliberate. It occurs to Keith like a shock that they might genuinely be trying not to cry. “Yeah, well…” Pidge punches him weakly in the arm. “Take care of Lance, yeah?”

“For as long as I can.”

There’s a rap at the door behind them and they both jump. “Come on, I’m freezing out here. Let’s get going, please.”

Pidge rolls their eyes. “Go,” they say, shoving Keith towards the door. “Before he really throws a fit.”

Keith casts around, looking for anything to say, and comes up blank. “Goodbye, Pidge,” he says, and slips out the door before either of them are forced to say something else.

Lance is waiting for him, hands in his coat and scowling. “Finally,” he says. “I thought you guys wanted to talk, not plan an entire dissertation.”

Keith rolls his eyes but doesn’t take the bait. “Come on,” he says, nudging Lance with his shoulder and heading for the stairs. “You wanted to go for a walk? Let’s walk.”

.

At this time of night, the streets are mostly empty. They stay close enough that their shoulders brush, and every time they do Keith is half convinced Lance’s touch is going to slip right through him. It doesn’t, but the fear does not abate.

“Lance,” Keith asks after they’ve been walking for some time in silence. “Where are we going?”

Lance shrugs. “Out of the house,” he says. “Somewhere alone.”

Keith can’t argue with that. Although he doesn’t feel the cold, he stuffs his hands in his pockets and follows after Lance.

Eventually, Lance’s footsteps slow. There’s a bench pressed against the wall of one of the nearby stores, and when Lance sits down Keith cautiously takes the spot next to him. Keith can feel the icy press of the metal even through his jeans.

Lance has his legs kicked out, head back like he’s observing the stars. Keith wishes Lance had brought a scarf.

“I don’t get it,” Lance says.

“Get what?” Keith asks, because it seems like an abundant list to choose from.

Lance’s head falls to the side, his dark eyes looking at him. “It’s like you’re the dumbest person I know, sometimes. ‘It’s not important’ - really, Keith? How many goddamn times.”

“That’s what you wanna talk about right now?” Keith asks, disbelieving.

“It’s important,” Lance insists. “You have this thing you do where you refuse to talk to me about things that matter because you’re too focused on whatever’s happening with me.”

“Because whatever’s happening to you could kill you,” Keith snaps. “You understand that, right?”

“Well, it sounds like whatever’s going on with you could kill you,” Lance replies, whip quick. “And maybe that doesn’t bother you, but it bothers me.”

Keith stares at him. He’d had so many things he wanted to say, but right now they all seem to fizzle on his tongue. “I don’t want to argue about this with you,” Keith says. “We don’t know… how long I’ve got.”

Lance sighs, head falling back again. “That’s true,” he says. “But it’s important, okay? It’s important to me that you know you're important. Are you listening?”

“I’m listening, Lance, I swear, Jesus,” Keith says scrubbing a hand over his face.

“You’re important,” Lance says again, stubborn to a fault, and Keith’s heart just about breaks with the intensity of how much he loves this stupid, pig-headed human.

“Lance,” Keith says, aiming for exasperated and falling far short if the charmed smile Lance shoots him is anything to go by. When Lance reaches out to him, Keith leans in as easy as if they’ve done this a hundred times.

Lance’s mouth is warm and his hands on Keith’s cheeks are cold. Keith welcomesboth, unrepentant, hands fisted in the front of Lance’s jacket. His head hurts faintly, and he pulls back, wincing.

“What’s wrong?” Lance asks, brushing Keith’s hair back. “You look... I was going to say pale but honestly I don’t really have words for it.”

Keith tries for a smile that doesn’t fit his face. “Do I look like a ghost?”

Lance expression draws tight. His thumb passes over Keith’s cheek. He doesn’t say anything but the silence is louder than words ever could be.

Keith doesn’t need Lance to tell him the truth. Keith can feel it, the flickering awfulness in his gut. He feels unstable, like a fusion reactor waiting to explode. He’s felt like that for days - weeks - but now it’s really something else.

He probably doesn’t have long. Not just to be like this, but to be at all.

“Lance,” he says, or he intends to say. Instead, he’s cut off by the sharp blare of a horn.

When Keith looks up, it’s to see a car coming at them at roughly the speed of light.

The headlights are blinding. Keith feels frozen, can do nothing but stare them down as he struggles to get his body to do anything but stay exactly where it is.

Lance is the one who actually saves them in the end. His hand closes around Keith’s collar, and he jerks him off the bench so fast that Keith almost chokes. They stumble one step, two, and the sharp ripping sound of tires scraping pavement is deafening.

“Keith -.”

The car hits the wall beside them. Rubble explodes like a bomb, and Lance cries out as something hits him in the leg. He goes to the ground before he can take so much as another step, and he drags Keith with him.

Keith can hear the choking rumble of the car’s engine from where it’s lodged deep in the store. When Keith looks, he can see they’re inside now, sprawled on shattered tiles and sharp shards of glass. Dirt trickles down to hit his cheek.

The roof, he thinks, dizzy with memories of another life and death entirely. The roof is going to fall any second.

Reality returns to him like a gunshot. He can already see the cracks in the ceiling webbing wider, can feel the rubble hitting their shoulders like a precursor to an avalanche. Somehow, he finds the energy to shove Lance flat to his back, sheltering him as best he can, staring down at Lance’s shocked, horrified expression.

There’s a moment before the roof falls where Keith can feel Lance’s aura like he hasn’t been able to in weeks, clear and unobstructed.

There’s a lonely tang, and something sweet and warm like yearning. Keith can feel the way it gravitates towards him, seeking for something Keith’s dead soul doesn’t have to give. It’s besotted, and it’s terrified - and when Keith’s eyes catch Lance’s, he can see the exact same feeling there.

How did I miss this? Keith wonders as the debris start to hit his shoulders. How did I ever f*cking miss that?

The roof falls.

The sound of it - creaking, groaning, awful - feels like it goes on for an eternity. Lance’s fingers are knotted in Keith’s shirt, trying to move him out of the way, but Keith’s powers are the strongest they’ve been since his fall started, and Lance couldn’t move him an inch even if he had the power of a thousand man.

Lance is saying something, shouting at him. Keith can’t hear the words, but going by the furious, frightened look on Lance’s face they’re not kind.

“Lance,” he says. “It’s fine. You’re fine. We’re fine.”

They’re not both fine. Keith feels like a star splintering, ready to explode, and he doesn’t need any of Allura’s self-help books to tell him what that means.

Eventually, the building stops falling. The space surrounding them is full of brick and metal and other trash. Keith has to give the universe credit: when it wants to bury Lance alive, it really does go the extra mile to make sure.

Beneath him, Lance looks breathless and stunned. There’s blood on his face from where something had nicked his cheek, but he seems to be more or less in one piece, which is a better outcome than Keith could have ever hoped for.

Slowly and carefully, as if terrified moving so much as an inch would cause the wreckage to shift and crush them, Lance lets go of Keith’s shirt, pressing his hands flat to his chest. “Keith,” he says. “Keith, buddy, are you okay?”

Keith feels fantastic. It occurs to him that he could probably move this whole building right now. He could use the last of his powers to dig them free before the boil in his blood faded away to nothingness.

But.

But.

A stopper, Pidge had said. A dam. Something strong enough to stand against the unending outpouring of Lance’s goodwill, to hold it at bay and send it spinning back where it really belonged.

Keith feels like an idiot. He can’t believe it’s taken him so long to realize it. It’s been right in front of him the wholedamn time.

“Keith,” Lance says again. “Keith, man, you’re scaring me. Say something.”

“It’s fine,” Keith says.

Lance lets out a shaky breath that sounds very close to a laugh. “Should never have thought we could manage something as simple as a walk,” he says. He lets his head fall back, looking about cautiously. “I guess we should start screaming for help or something.”

Again, Keith says, “It’s fine. I’ve got it. I’ve figured it out.”

“You have? Keith, what -.”

Lance lets out a surprised noise as Keith kisses him, hands skating up to rest on Keith’s shoulders. He tastes like blood and dirt. Keith wonders if that had been what he’d tasted like too, when the universe had tried to do this to him.

When he pulls back, Lance is staring at him. “You’ll be okay,” Keith says, with as much authority as he can work into his voice. “You’re lucky, Lance.”

“Lucky? This whole thing -.”

“You’ve got Pidge and Hunk and Shiro,” Keith says. “You’ll be fine. You won’t be on your own.”

Something seems to dawn on Lance. The confusion on his face morphs into fear. “Keith, what are you talking about?”

Keith lets out a breath. Somewhere outside he can hear shouting and the faint wail of sirens. Help isn’t too far away. Lance won’t be buried here forever, just for a little while. He’s strong enough to survive that. He’s not like Keith that way.

Keith leans down, gently resting his forehead against Lance’s so he won’t have to look at his face. Lance’s hands come to his back, fingers catching in his shirt. “Hold still, I need to focus for this.”

“Keith, don’t -.”

Keith is good at his job. Great at it. Legendary, even.

Angelic energy is a whimsical, fumbling thing, but he manages to wrangle it anyway. It pulses like a bomb in his hands, and when he reaches for Lance’s aura it shivers at his touch.

He can feel it - the way Lance’s intentions pour out of him like a storm. It’s kind of an awesome thing to behold, and Keith thinks that even if he’d realized this earlier he wouldn’t have been able to do much about.

The fall has been good for something, at least.

Keith presses every bit of energy he has left into the hole Lance had torn in his own aura, packs it like gauze to a wound and smooths over it to keep it in place. For a second, he waits, feels it fighting with the urge to burst but -

It holds.

The smile Keith gives is dizzyingly victorious. “I guess this is goodbye.”

Beneath him, Lance says, voice cracking, “What did you do?”

Keith doesn’t get to answer. Above, there’s a loud thump and the debris move. The harsh brightness of floodlights hit them and a voice calls, “They’re in here!”

The last thing Keith sees is Lance’s horrified face, his hands reaching for him like they can call Keith back from the edge of the void. Maybe he could. It would not be the first time Lance managed such an impossible thing.

Keith does not let him.

The fall hits. Darkness comes.

And Keith - the angel, the person, the being - goes into it gratefully.

Chapter 19

Chapter Text

Keith awakens to a familiar ceiling, a familiar bed, and a familiar feeling that he should not be here. For a moment he lies there, barely daring to breathe.There’s the faint sound of movement at the bedside. Keith stays perfectly still. Beside him, Allura sighs, “Oh, Keith.”

Everything feels quiet. Everything feels peaceful. The low-level hum of the universe that his existed in his bones for over fifty years is silent. For once, Keith is alone in his own head, in his own body.

The world is not as his fingertips. No matter how hard he presses, he cannot feel the shape of it at all. It’s a wonder he never thought he’d ever behold again.

Slowly, as if in a dream, he rolls his head to look beside him.

Allura looks - she looks exhausted. Her usually perfect hair is a mess and there are faint smudges beneath her eyes. Her suit is rumpled. Keith has known this woman for a very long time, and he’s never seen her any less than perfect. It stuns him into silence like a blow.

Her small fingers fold gently around his own. “I should have known better,” she says, “than to expect anything other than something completely and impossibly extraordinary from you.”

Keith stares. He cannot speak. He feels lethargic, dangerously detached. He’s watching this from ten paces away from his being, only lightly present in the moment at best. Allura smiles at him, soft and far too close to tender for somebody who claims not to play favourites. Her hand passes over his temple, sweeping and cool.

“Go to sleep, Keith,” she says. “Go to sleep, and when you wake up it’ll all be okay.”

It’ll be okay. It is okay. Keith believes that much.

He goes to sleep.

It feels, he thinks, nothing at all like dying had.

.

Next times Keith wakes it is not quiet. It is not peaceful. It is terribly, horrifically loud.

Somebody says his name, but it’s like hearing from under water. The ceiling he is staring up at is not familiar in the slightest; it’s cramped and sloping, moving with every uncomfortable rattle of his body. He can hear sirens and there’s something over his mouth, making every breath he takes taste foul.

“Keith,” Lance says, more urgently this time.

When Keith rolls his head he is surprised to find Allura gone. Lance is there, his hand so much bigger than hers had been as it squeezes his fingers.

With a shock that feels like a bullet, Keith realizes that Lance shouldn’t be here. Keith shouldn’t be here. Something is wrong. Something has gone wrong.

He tries to say that, say anything, but his mouth won’t move and the mask cupped over his face smothers any noise but a groan. His head is pounding and it feels like somebody has pumped his veins feel of lead. The world is no longer at his fingertips; it’s bearing down on him, crushing every inch of his body to dust.

The sharp bitten edges of Lance’s fingernails cut into Keith’s wrist. “Keith, I’m here. You’re okay. Keep breathing, keep breathing.”

Keith can’t respond. He can’t do anything but stare at him, the filthy dirt on his cheekbones and the grim set of his face, until somebody else nudges Lance out of the way, speaking to him in low soothing tones.

Lance’s hands slips from his and Keith slips back to sleep.

.

(“I don’t understand,” Keith says, back in the familiar room on the familiar bed. “What’s happening?”

“What do you think is happening?” Allura asks. She’s still sitting beside him, kitting something quietly as they talk. Keith hadn’t even known she could knit.

“Am I falling? Have I fallen?”

“Keith,” Allura says fondly, deftly slipping a stitch, “you always think so small.”

“Did you do this?” Keith asks. “Was this you?”

Allura does not look up from the chatter of her needles. “Not as much as I would have liked.” Then, again, quieter, “I never could help you like I wanted to.”)

.

Another ceiling. This one doesn’t move. Keith has enough self-awareness to realize that he’s in a hospital. A human hospital with their medicines and doctors; some place that should not have any right to touch him.

Lance is still there, which is good, because Keith barely is.

There’s a clock on the far wall and every time Keith’s eyes flutter closed the hands seem to jump, eating time like a starving creature. At some point the harsh edges of the pale hospital lights soften; sunlight cuts through the window, bathing the itchy white of his blankets amber.

Lance stays with him. More often than not he holds Keith’s hand.

Keith still cannot speak. He feels like he’s scrabbling for a hold on something that refuses to stop and let him, racing by and leaving his fingertips empty.

Lance stays, and, again, Keith goes.

.

(“This is real,” Keith insists. “I know what heaven feels like. I know what I feel like in heaven. This isn’t a dream.”

Allura’s not knitting this time, but there’s a half-finished scarf folded atop a basket full of yarn near her feet. “You’re not dreaming,” she says. “Well, not in the way you mean it anyway.”

“So I am dreaming?”

“This is real,” she says, “but you’re not here. I think you know that.”

Keith does know that. He’s laid in this bed before, and the blankets have never been this scratchy. He can hear the sound of a cheap clock ticking across the room even though the opposing wall is blank. “Why am I here?”

“We’re waiting,” Allura says.

“For what?”

“For a miracle.”)

.

Keith wakes again. Lance is gone. He closes his eyes. He opens them and Lance is there, head tilted back and breathing softly. He looks even worse than Allura does, on the other side.

It’s dark outside again. Keith has no clue how much time has passed. It could be a day, it could be a thousand years. It’s slow, but it feels like he’s here more than he’s there now. Keith hopes that’s a good sign. It has to be a good sign.

Across from him, Lance continues to sleep. Keith wants to reach out and touch him, to reassure himself that Lance isn’t just another thing passing him by, a transient entity he cannot seem to grasp. His hand will not move.

Soon, he thinks. Soon.

.

(“Instead of waiting for a miracle,” Keith asks, “can’t you just grant me one?”

The look Allura gives him is wry. “Keith,” she says, gesturing around them to the tiny pocket of space that has become Keith’s prison, “I already have.”)

.

He wakes, he sleeps, and then he wakes again. He’s here and he’s there. He doesn’t know where he is during the in between moments when he’s in neither place.

Lance waits for him at the hospital and Allura by his bed in heaven. Keith feels caught, like he has one foot in each room, straddling a boundary he can’t seem to cross. In heaven, he can talk, he can move. He exists as an idea more than a reality. In the hospital, he’s a prisoner in his own body; alien to him now, and unwelcoming.

Keith wants it to be over. He wants to wake up. Allura wants it too, and so does Lance. They both tell him as much, even if Keith can only speak to one of them. He’s growing quickly tired of being a passenger in his own life.

“You gotta stick with me, buddy,” Lance says, hand gently stroking through Keith’s hair. “You gotta pull through. We’re so close.”

(“This is just like you,” Allura says. “Taking your damn time, like the whole world should stop on your whims.”)

Keith wants to wake up.

He wants to exist.

.

This time - this time when Keith wakes something feels different.

He opens his eyes. The same hospital room; the same ceiling, bed, blankets. The same clock ticking on the wall, the same quiet sounds somewhere further than he can reach right now.

It isn’t the room, it’s Keith. He feels different. With a dawning realization it occurs to him that, for the first time, he feels awake. He’s here. He’s present.

Slowly, terrified that this will slip from him too, he turns to look beside him.

Lance is leaning on the bed, a magazine fanned out on the blankets. He looks even more exhausted than the last time Keith had been cognizant enough to pay attention. The uncareful way his elbow is digging into Keith’s arm tells him that however much time has passed it’s been enough that Lance has grown well and truly used to the new status quo.

Keith licks his lips. His mouth tastes awful and his lips feel like rubber. “Lance,” he croaks.

The reaction is instantaneous. Lance’s head snaps up, his dark eyes locking onto Keith’s in a heartbeat. He can’t believe it. He thinks he’s misheard. Keith can read it so clearly in his floored expression. Keith wants to smile but all he can manage is an unpleasant grimace.

“Holy sh*t,” Lance says, and he flies to his feet.

The magazine winds up halfway across the room, and Lance is leaning over him, jamming the call button like his life depends on it, one hand resting on Keith’s shoulder gently. Keith makes a face as Lance’s jacket gets in his way but he pulls back quick enough.

“Keith, holy f*ck.” Lance’s hands cup his face gingerly, and he leans in to kiss Keith’s cheek before Keith can stop him, and then again like he can’t help himself. “You’re awake.”

He says ‘awake’ as if he means ‘alive’ and Keith cannot begrudge him.

“I hope so,” Keith says, voice hoarse. “God, I really hope so.”

Lance’s thumb strokes his cheek. He looks almost feverish with relief and Keith feels even worse. “How do you feel? You sound okay.” He pauses and then laughs. “You sound more than okay. You should have heard the things they were telling us to expect.”

“I feel…” Keith doesn’t know. Mostly, he’s still caught up in being allowed to feel at all. None of this makes sense. None of this should be happening. For the first time he has a clarity that he only just now realizes was missing.

He’s saved from answering by the rattle of the door opening. Lance and Keith look up at once to see a nurse poking her head inside. The polite smile on her face drops the second she sees Keith half sitting up in bed, awake and clearly functional.

“Oh my god,” she says, which strikes Keith as distinctly unprofessional, and she runs back out, presumably for somebody more qualified. Keith watches her go, tired and amused.

“Well,” Lance says, “I can take that to mean you’re definitely a modern medical miracle.”

Abruptly, Keith thinks of Allura sitting beside him in the other room. He swallows. “It’s some kind of miracle alright,” he says.

Lance eyes him for a moment and Keith fully expects him to push, to ask for how and why. Lance can’t have any more clue about what’s going on than Keith does - less, probably. He’s been the one sitting by Keith’s bedside this whole damn time, waiting for something he couldn’t even be sure was going to happen. The amount of questions he has would be enough to sink a ship beneath the weight of them.

Instead, he says, “Do you want me to get you some ice?”

“Some - what?”

Lance steps back, hands falling from Keith’s person, reaching for the jug on the bedside table. “I’m pretty sure I read somewhere you’re not supposed to give people in your position water right away, but ice is okay. I mean, you look rough man, I bet you need it.”

Keith’s first thought is that he’s fairly certain there’s not a precedent for Keith’s ‘position’. His second thought is that of course he looks f*cking ‘rough’ - he’s just woken up from what he’d been certain would kill him, in so much as angels die. Something that would ‘fall’ him, he supposes.

He doesn’t have it in him to pick a fight right now, not even for the familiar ground it’d grant him. He graciously accepts the ice cup from Lance with a shaking hand. Lance hovers, preparing to step in and help if necessary, but there’s only so much indignity Keith can stand right now. He manages it on his own.

The ice is the first thing he has consumed in sixty-odd years that does not taste like ash. Keith lets it melt in his mouth, quiet and overwhelmed.

“Hey,” Lance says, sitting back in the chair by his bed. His hand fumbles along the sheets, taking Keith’s. “You doing okay?”

Keithshakes his head. He doesn’t have an answer. Truthfully, he doesn’t even know that he can speak right now. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand.

He was supposed to be gone. He’s not supposed to be here.

Lance’s hand squeezes his. He doesn’t say anything else. They sit in silence for a long moment, clinging together and listening to the faint click of the clock on the far well. The sun paints brilliant shadows all throughout the room.

The door rattles open. The nurse from before is back, lingering anxiously in the background as a stern-faced doctor peers in. The doctor’s eyes land on Keith. Keith straightens, waiting to hear her assessment.

“Holy sh*t,” she says.

.

Recovery is a slow, awful process. The hospital insists on keeping him for another three days after he wakes, even though all tests show Keith is a healthy and spry young man with no outlying concerns whatsoever.

Given that Keith has not been human longer than most of the doctors checking his charts have been alive, he thinks that there are probably some outlying concerns after all, actually, but he keeps his face straight and answers yes and no as he needs to. Anything at all to be out of the hell that is mandatory bedrest quicker.

Lance is an absolute godsend during the whole thing. He’s the one who really talks to the doctors, the one who walks Keith through what is a normal ache to feel in a human body and what is, perhaps, something that might be addressed and seen to. When they’d first met, Keith never would have thought Lance would have the patience for hand-holding a fallen angel shuffling through the baby steps of humanity once more, but, as he does with most things, Lance well and truly exceeds his expectations.

“It’s really not so hard,” Lance says, when Keith tells him as much. “What I really want to know is how you seem to have a goddamn social security number and health insurance when you’ve been dead for sixty years.”

Yeah. That’s something Keith would really like to know too.

He hasn’t dreamt of heaven since he woke up - properly woke up - and for the first time in his very long existence, he wishes he would. In this body, with these human failings trapping him, Keith can’t visit heaven. He knows that. That’s a door closed to him now. Allura though, there’s nothing stopping her from finding him. And if she knows what’s good for her, eventually she will.

Keith is not stupid. However it is that he came to be like this - to be human - he did not do it to himself.

On day four of his extended hospital stay, he’s finally discharged into the welcoming arms of his friends. Signing the release papers is the greatest relief Keith has felt since he opened his eyes to see Lance waiting by his bedside.

“Now remember,” says his nurse sternly, “you’re to come back immediately if anything feels even slightly amiss.”

“I promise,” Keith says dutifully as he scribbles his name, intending to do no such thing.

“I mean it,” the nurse says, pulling back the clipboard. “You were in a coma, young man. That’s not something to take lightly.”

Keith cannot very well explain to her why a ‘coma’ had really been the best-case scenario of the whole thing, but he gives her his most reassuring smile. The side-eye she gives him tells him it isn’t very successful. In Keith’s defense, it has been immeasurable years since he’s had to deal with normal, everyday people on a basis like this, and it is nothing at all like riding a bike.

“Thank you,” he says, and beats a retreat to where Lance and the others are waiting by the doors.

The minute he’s within range, Hunk slings an arm over his shoulders, dragging him stumbling into a deep, warm hug.

“Oh man,” Hunk says, patting Keith’s back. “You don’t know how good it is to see you out of that bed.”

“I have some idea,” Keith says wryly, gently extracting himself. After an awkward second, he says, “You didn’t all have to come.”

Pidge punches him in the arm. “Shut up, of course we did,” they say. Then, before anybody could get any more emotional, “Shiro’s waiting with the car. I think he’s double parked, and none of us can afford the ticket so we better get a shuffle on.”

Lance’s fingers slide around Keith’s wrist. “Come on, grandpa,” Lance says. “You heard the boss. We’ll only go as fast as you’re able though. Wouldn’t want you to break your hip.”

Keith rolls his eyes and elbows him gently in the side, but doesn’t pull his hand from Lance’s grip. The four of them shuffle out the doors, Hunk pausing only briefly to look yearningly back at a passing dog. Shiro is indeed with the car, leaning against the side with his hand tucked in his pocket and chatting amicably with a passing old lady. His eyes catch on Keith and the others, and he excuses himself politely, hurrying forward to meet them.

“Keith,” he says warmly. “You’re looking… well.”

“You can say alive,” Keith says. “I won’t be offended.”

Shiro laughs softly, stepping back to open the passenger side door for him. “You looked well even when you weren’t alive,” he said. “It’s just that I think we all have a preference on which way we prefer you.”

“Why does Keith get shotgun?” Lance complains, rounding the car to the backseat. “By rotation, shouldn’t it be my turn?”

Keith climbs gingerly into the seat as Shiro says, “The one who’s been in hospital for a whole week always gets shotgun, Lance. I can make it an official rule if you need it to be.”

Lance’s small smile in the rearview mirror says that he doesn’t really mind, but he opens his mouth to complain again, louder, and Keith lets his eyes fall closed, leaning back into his seat, warmed by the familiarity of the bickering, the cramped confines of Shiro’s car, the way Pidge’s skinny knees press into his back.

Beside him, Shiro starts the car. The ignition is a quiet roar. Then, so softly that Keith almost misses it, Lance says, “Hey buddy, welcome home.”

.

Keith’s homecoming is celebrated by a hearty Hunk cooked meal, of which he can only eat several bites of, and more whirlwind enthusiasm than Keith has ever been subjected to at any point in either of his lives.

Lance’s friends - Keith’s friends - hover around him, a hand always glancing off his wrist, a shoulder snug to his own. He expects to feel overwhelmed by the attention, and to a degree he is, but he thinks that might just be down to a lack of practice more than a general dislike of the situation.

He likes being smiled at like this, likes the way his mere presence makes the others light up like a star. Being pulled into the orbit of such a close-knit dynamic is addicting, even though Keith can’t help but wonder if he truly deserves his place here. For a moment, he misses his ability to feel auras with a keenness that nearly lays him flat.

It’s just that… as something that might passably be called a human now, he would have liked to see how they all fit.

“Alright,” Shiro announces as the sun starts to sink. “I think that’s enough for now. The man of the hour looks exhausted.”

“I’m fine,” Keith protests, but it’s weak. Shiro’s not wrong. Keith feels wrung out and spent, which is ridiculous when you consider he’s spent the past week stuck in a bed. “I can…”

Shiro shakes his head and claps Keith’s shoulder. “Don’t push yourself,” he says earnestly. “What you’ve been through? Seems like that’s the kind of thing that might take some time to get over.”

Keith doesn’t even really know what it is he’s supposedly been through. None of them f*cking do. It’s infuriating, and yet somehow Shiro’s not wrong.

“I’ve got him,” Lance says, and his elbow wiggles through Keith’s. “Don’t worry about it. He’ll get some rest if I have to knock him out first.”

Keith levels him with an exhausted look. “That doesn’t seem like it’d give me any rest at all.”

“We could find out,” Lance suggest cheerfully, patting Keith’s hand.

“Hunk and I have to go anyway,” Shiro says. “Hunk’s got class tomorrow morning, and I’ve got work. Lance, don’t knock Keith out. Pidge, make sure neither of them get crushed underneath a falling building again, please.”

Pidge snorts, looking up from the dirty dishes they’re haphazardly stacking by the sink. “You think either of them are going to listen to me? If the dream team wants to go play in rubble, who am I to stop them?”

Shiro rolls his eyes, but it’s incredibly fond. He ruffles Lance’s hair and then, without missing a beat, slings his arm around Keith’s shoulder and yanks him into a hug, warm and tight. “I don’t know what happened,” he says, whisper quiet against Keith’s forehead, “but thank you for saving him. Thank you for coming back.”

Keith leans against Shiro’s chest, stunned, and, after a tentative moment, hugs him back. He doesn’t know what to say, how to respond to something like that, so he doesn’t say anything at all. Shiro hugs him tighter for a second and then steps back, smiling ruefully.

“Be good, boys,” he says, in the voice of somebody who expects no such thing. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

.

After Hunk and Shiro leave, Keith slips from the apartment and down to the tiny residential yard attached to it. Lance doesn’t follow him, watching Keith go with understanding eyes, before turning back to Pidge at the sink and distracting them with conversation.

Keith is more grateful than he will ever admit. It’s not that he wants to be away from Lance, because even being out of his line of sight makes his gut twinge painfully, but some things, he knows, are more important than what you want.

Outside, it’s pleasantly cool, and Keith wraps his arms around himself, settling onto the creaking wooden bench pressed to the wall of the apartment complex and waits.

He doesn’t have to wait long. Allura is, as always, on time.

“Hello, Keith,” she says, settling onto the seat beside him. “How are you feeling?”

Keith shrugs. He doesn’t have a good answer. He’s cold and tired and hungry and a thousand other contradicting things. He’s alive. He’d forgotten how this felt. “I’m here,” he says. “Which is really not how I thought this was going to go down.”

Allura smiles at him. She looks better than he’d last seen her, when she’d stood watch over his half imagined bedside. “I don’t think you’re the only one.”

“Yeah,” Keith says. “I wanna talk about that.”

“Or,” Allura suggests, “you could simply be grateful for your good fortune?”

Keith gives her a flat look. “I fell, Allura. I felt it. I was - with Lance, in the rubble. That was supposed to be it. I made a choice, and it was going to be over.”

“Is that what you wanted? To be ‘over’?”

“No,” Keith says, appalled. “Of course not. I didn’t want to - to die, or whatever. But I was prepared for it.”

“You may have been,” Allura says, “but Lance wasn’t.”

Keith stares at her. His stomach flips, twisting tight. He’d thought - he’d suspected… But he hadn’t been sure. It’d been so hard to be sure of anything. He’d been so distracted just by the fact he was alive. “Lance did this?”

“Lance helped,” Allura corrects gently. “Both of you did this. You pushed all of your power towards Lance, to try and stop the bleed in his aura that let him do the things he could do, and Lance -.”

“He’d been trying to stop my fall,” Keith says distantly, mind a whirlwind of thought. “And at the last second, he succeeded.”

“You canceled each other out.” Allura smiles. “You pushed, Lance pulled - and you more or less saved each other as a result.”

She’s right. Keith can feel it. In that moment where he’d soothed his hands over Lance’s aura he’d felt the tumultuous power of it, the sheer force of will that governed all things Lance. It hadn’t occurred to him then that it was still at work, feverish and untiring, to save Keith up until that very last second.

“I…” Keith doesn’t know what to say. “And it made me human?”

Allura’s smile goes soft and small. “It stopped your fall,” she says. “And to do that it took away all your angelic abilities. But your angelic abilities are also what allows you to exist after death and…”

“I died,” Keith summarizes, thinking of the ambulance, the hospital. Lance at his side and the never-ending hell that was the coma he couldn’t wake from.

“You did,” Allura says. “For a little while.”

She’s looking right at him, more open than she usually allows herself to be. Something twinges in the back of Keith’s mind; a kind of recognition he hadn’t realized he’d been looking for. “If I died, what brought me back?” he asks, and even as the words leave his mouth he realizes he knows the answer.

“I did,” Allura says.

Keith stares. Somehow knowing it and hearing it and very different things, and neither of them help him believe it to be true. He likes Allura. He’s always liked Allura. And he thinks that after so long working together, she’s grown to like him too, at least a little bit. But Allura is also his boss, and the most professional angel he’s ever met. She’s kind, but she has the morality of a woman built for leadership, and never in over half a century of working together has he ever seen her feelings prevent her from doing her job.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “If I was dead, why didn’t you just leave me be? You told me before that you couldn’t stop it.”

“I told you I couldn’t stop the fall,” she says, whip quick. “This wasn’t a fall. This was death. Death is human domain, and I have the last word over that.”

Keith frowns. “No, you don’t,” he says. “You can’t interfere with matters outside of your jurisdiction.”

Allura sighs. It’s fond and exasperated. Before Keith notices what’s happening, she reaches out and takes his hand, squeezing it tightly. “Keith,” she says. “You are my jurisdiction.”

“I’m not,” he argues, reeling. “I’m your - I was your employee. That’s not the same thing.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Frustrated, Keith says, “Then what did you -.” Realization dawns. Keith’s already precarious world teeters on unsteady foundations.

“For the best employee I’ve ever had,” Allura says, “you can be very dumb sometimes, Kogane.”

Keith barely registers. He’s gaping at her. “Me?”

“Yes, you,” Allura says, ruefully. “You were the only charge I’ve ever had who I just couldn’t save. I thought, once I lost you in the aftermath of that stupid war, that maybe it was for the best. Maybe you were meant to be one of mine. For a while, I believed it. You did make a fantastic guardian angel.”

“I was the best,” Keith says, but it’s automatic, a reflex.

Allura laughs. “Yes,” she says. “But were you happy?”

Keith’s throat is thick. He can’t get a single word out and he just looks at her stupidly.

Allura shakes her head. “You weren’t,” she says. “I could tell.”

“Because you were my guardian angel,” Keith says, like hearing it aloud might help solidify the reality of it. It does not. How many times had he sat across from Allura at her desk, passing reports back and forth, completely unaware that the very thing that had become his entire existence was something Allura had once done for him.

“Did I break you?” Allura asks, sounding more amused than before.

“I’m fine.”

“Well,” Allura says, “my hope is that now you will be. More than fine, hopefully.”

“Is this why you assigned Lance to me?” Keith asks, baffled. “Because you thought I was unhappy and…”

“You were unhappy,” Allura says bluntly. “Although you were probably too much of a workaholic to recognize it. And I assigned Lance to you because it felt right.” She pauses briefly and flashes him a smile. “Besides, if I was wrong, at least you’d have a challenge, and I know how much you love those.”

“I can’t believe this,” Keith says, voice thin in the night air.

Allura gives his hand a consolatory pat before returning it to his own lap and getting to her feet. “I don’t regret how this turned out,” she says. “For a while, I was worried, but I should have known better. You, Lance, and I - I think we make a good team. Tell him that for me.”

“I’m going to need approximately a hundred years of processing this before I feel ready to tell anybody at all,” Keith says. And then, because he can’t help himself, “No regrets? Not one?”

The expression on Allura’s face tells him his deliberately casual tone isn’t fooling anybody, but, as she always has, she indulges him. Now at least Keith knows why. He’d have never thought Allura of all people capable of getting attached to one of her charges, but here he sits; actual living breathing f*cking proof of it.

He wonders if she’d felt nostalgic watching him and Lance fumble over each other in the early days, seeing ghosts of the camaraderie they shared. He wonders if, when the weight of the secrets he was keeping from Lance threatened to drown him, she could see herself in those too.

Keith has always believed that at the end of the day life comes full circle. The universe likes to feel complete.

Allura reaches out, pressing her cool palm to Keith’s cheek. “Well,” she says, “maybe one regret. It’ll be rough to lose my favourite employee, but I suppose I can pull through.”

Keith breathes out slowly. His heart is pounding very hard in his chest. Tentatively, he asks, “What about losing a close friend?”

Allura’s blue eyes are full of fond warmth. “I wouldn’t say I’m losing him,” she says. “After all, I know exactly where I left him.”

She’s smiling, but this is a goodbye. Keith can feel it in his bones. He wants to say something deep, something she’ll remember for decades to come, but Keith has never had those kinds of words in himself. Instead, he reaches up, closing his hand over hers, squeezes tight, and says, “Thank you. For everything.”

Allura looks at him quietly for a moment, seeming every bit the impossible, powerful being she is, and then she leans forward. Her lips brush Keith’s forehead. “Good luck,” she whispers. “This time, I want you to live a long and happy life.”

Then she’s gone - back to atoms in the universe she governs.

Keith stays there for long, long moment; eyes on the stars, and Allura’s parting kiss cool on his skin.

Chapter 20

Chapter Text

Keith had not anticipated how hard it was to be a person.

He doesn’t know why that had not occurred to him. Hubris, probably. Half his job is - was - understanding what makes humans tick and swooping in at the very last second to avert the course of their fate. Simple stuff when compared to existing on the other end. He’s been watching humans for so long he’d forgotten how to emulate them.

His first week as a flesh and blood human seems to speed by. Every moment he’s terrified that he’s going to open his eyes and find a different fate all together waiting for him - back in the awakening room, caught between heaven and earth with two of his dearest people. The fear makes him snappy and short, taking every comment, every question, as bait for conflict. He’s not proud of it, honestly speaking, but his friends barely flinch at his fresh sharpness.

“We’re not trying to catch you out here,” Shiro tells him gently after Keith and Lance snip back and forth for the better of half an hour before retreating to opposite ends of Hunk’s garage like sulky toddlers. “You’ve got a place with us for as long as you want it, Keith. You don’t ever have to worry about that.”

“I know,” Keith snaps, and then winces. He sneaks a glance to the side where Lance is leaning against the tool bench, bickering good-naturedly with Pidge in a way that lacks the prickliness of their argument only moments ago. He looks back to Shiro before he can get caught staring and says, voice softer, “I know that. I’m just…”

Just a lot of things. Overwhelmed. Underwhelmed. Ill-suited to living out the stretching decades of the life that had been taken from him all those years ago, but wanting it desperately all the same. Wondering in a small, fearful part of his mind that without Keith’s status as Lance’s guardian what remains to keep him tied to this group of wonderful, baffling people.

Keith shrugs, tucking his hands in the pockets of his jeans and kicking mulishly at a loose screw on the oil-stained concrete beneath his feet. “Sorry.”

“Hey.” Shiro’s hand lands on his shoulder, squeezing. “Take all the time you need.” He pauses for a second and then adds sheepishly, “But I think we’d all appreciate it if you could ease up on Lance a little bit. I know you guys bicker like you breathe, but a moment of peace every now and again never goes amiss.”

Keith looks up into Shiro’s warm eyes and then to the side again where Lance and Hunk are hunched over the car engine, talking enthusiastically as they jostle one another back and forth. Behind them, Pidge sits on the bench, pelting them with tiny nuts and bolts whenever they’re distracted and looking hurriedly back to their phone the moment somebody thinks to look up.

The heart in Keith’s chest that has only recently reclaimed its beat feels unnaturally tight and the air Keith is still adjusting to needing catches in his throat.

Being a human isn’t so hard, he tells himself sternly. If Lance f*cking McClain can manage it, so can you.

Keith makes that something of his mantra, and after that things get easier. The world seems less vast, his friends less alien, time less immediate. A week as a human passes. He’s still there. Two, three - and Keith still wakes in the morning crammed into Lance’s bed with a skinny elbow lodged in his ribs and an equally skinny arm tossed over his waist, Lance snoring cotton-soft into his ear.

Keith rolls his head to the side to look at him; his messy bed hair, the sleepy creases on his handsome face. When he’s feeling particularly brave he reaches out and sets his palm atop Lance’s chest to feel the soft beat of his heart. When Keith closes his eyes he can feel the echo of it in himself.

Alive, he thinks, still a wonder after all this time. We’re both alive.

(Allura does not visit him again. Keith is surprised to find he doesn’t mind. She’s still out there, he knows, watching over him the way she always has. If he needs her, he’s sure she’ll come.)

Over breakfast a month after Keith’s magical resurrection, Pidge says, “So, like, does Keith just live here now?”

Keith and Lance pause, glancing across the table at one another; Keith’s toast hanging unattractively out of his mouth, and Lance’s coffee frozen in his hand.

Pidge flips a page in the textbook fanned open in front of them which is somehow taking up more space than their perilously full bowl of cereal. “Not that I care,” they say, utterly blasé, “but this apartment wasn’t really built with three people in mind.” They pause meaningfully, glancing up. “It’s kind of old. And the walls… they’re pretty thin, you know?”

Keith chokes on his toast and Lance slams his mug down on the table, like if he just makes enough noise Pidge’s words will retreat right back where they came from. “Now that you mention it, yeah - I guess this place is kind of a sh*thole. We could probably afford to move up in the world now.”

“I dunno,” Pidge says, flipping a page. “Is Keith planning on getting a job?”

“Hey,” Lance says sharply. “Back off, alright? He’s still -”

Keith finally manages to swallow the last of his toast and says, “No, it’s alright. I’ve been thinking about that anyway.”

Lance frowns. “You have?”

“Well, it’s not like the… starting funds Allura seems to have left me in the unexplainable bank account in my name are going to last forever,” he says. “Besides, I don’t really want to just sit around the apartment all day doing nothing when you finally go back to school.”

Lance’s frown grows and he twists in his seat to look at him. “I can afford to take some more time off,” he insists. “The school’s been real good about letting me do most of my classes online. I can -”

“It’s an engineering degree, Lance,” Keith sighs. “You have to go back sometime. Besides, I’ve been thinking…” he wavers for a moment, feeling inexplicably embarrassed before he rallies. “I think I want to go to school too.”

That’s finally enough to draw Pidge out from their book. They look up, surprised, and ask, “For what?”

“To graduate,” Keith says wryly. “I never did that the first time around. There was kind of a war going on and the world was a very different place.”

“You wanna get a GED?” Lance asks.

“To start with,” Keith says, reaching out to steal Lance’s abandoned mug. It had taken weeks of cajoling before Keith would dare try it again, but he has to admit, now that he has, you know, functioning taste buds, coffee is not nearly as awful as he’d feared. “And then… I don’t know. I guess I’ll figure it out.”

Pidge and Lance exchange a look. “You’ve thought of this a lot, clearly,” Lance says.

Keith shrugs. “Hasn’t really been much else to do when you’ve been busy with your classes,” he says. “I’ve got to think of it sometime.”

Thefrown on Lance’s faces eases out to something softer, warmer. Beneath the table, his hand lands on Keith’s knee, squeezing it gently. “Yeah,” he says. “There’s no rush. You pretty much held a steady job for like fifty years; I think you can get away with doing whatever you want now.”

Truthfully, Keith doesn’t know what he wants, but he’s excited to figure it out.

Across the table Pidge sighs, flipping another page as they turn back to their book. “Well,” they say, “I guess we better start apartment hunting then.”

.

Six months and two weeks after Keith becomes human, he signs a lease for his very first apartment, in this life or the one that came before it.

It feels surreal honestly, seeing his name there in uneven scribble alongside Pidge and Lance’s. For most people, he supposes it wouldn’t be a big deal. Keith is not most people. Keith is a man who until very recently was a concept more than a being - every little hint of a genuine life lived still knocks him clear off his feet.

“Sir,” the realtor asks, holding out a hand. “The pen, please?”

“Oh.” Keith clears his throat and hands it back. It’d probably be weird to ask if he could keep it as a memento, but he’s sorely tempted. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine, I know all the paperwork can be a bit tedious.” The realtor smiles winningly. “It’s all done now though. The three of you are free to move in this weekend. Do you have any more questions?”

“Yeah, actually,” Pidge says. To Lance and Keith, they say, “Go ahead, I’ll be right there.”

Bemused, Keith allows Lance to lead them out of the building, the rise and fall of Pidge’s voice in the background left behind as the shabby office door swings closed behind them. Outside, the sun is bright, and Keith glances up, squinting past it to the vibrant blue of the sky. Not for the first time, he wonders where he’d be now if he hadn’t met Lance and the others - where he’d be if -

“Keith?” Lance’s hand on his elbow pulls his attention back, and he turns to find Lance looking at him, eyebrow quirked. “You doing okay there?”

Keith nods, shaking loose the last of the fog crowding his mind. With no reason not to, he reaches up, threads his fingers in Lance’s hair and guides him into a kiss. It’s short but lingering, and when Keith pulls away Lance is smiling at him, a little confused but clearly pleased. “I’m fine,” he says. “Just thinking.”

“Seems like they’re faraway kind of thoughts.”

It’s a pretty thinly veiled way of referring to heaven, but Keith smiles anyway. “Not really,” he says. “Just…” Six months, three weeks. Lance’s name in his messy scrawl right beside Keith’s. An apartment with their best friend. A future that not all that long ago seemed absolutely f*cking impossible. Keith shakes his head again, reaching out to gently hit Lance on the arm. “Mind your own business.”

Lance grins, swaying with the blow. “Make me.”

Before Keith can make good on that taunt, the office door swings open again and Pidge plods out. “Please don’t start making out in the middle of the street.”

“You’re not the boss of us,” Lance says, seizing hold of Keith’s hand. “We can do whatever the f*ck we want.”

“Not if you don’t want to get arrested for public indecency.”

To defuse the budding argument, Keith asks, “What did you want to talk to the realtor for?”

“I didn’t,” Pidge says, and then before Keith can press Pidge tosses him something. “There. To commemorate the occasion.”

Keith barely catches it out of the air. It’s the pen. The stupid pen that he’d been so reluctant to hand back. He hadn’t even realized either of them had noticed him pathetically yearning for it.

Beside him, Lance laughs, tossing an arm around Keith’s shoulder and reeling him easily into his side. “Probably can’t frame something that thick, but I bet we could get a stand for it.”

“We don’t have to do that,” Keith says awkwardly, but takes great care tucking the pen into his jacket pocket. “It’s just -”

“Place of honor on the mantelpiece,” Pidge suggests.

Lance clicks his fingers and points. “You’re right! The one over the fireplace! I knew we went with this apartment for a reason.”

“It’s really not -”

Pidge cuts him off with a solid punch to the arm that makes him wince. “Shut up,” they say. “Nobody asked your opinion.” To Lance, they say, “Let’s go get something good for lunch to celebrate.”

“Pizza?” Lance suggests, arm still around Keith’s shoulders as they begin to walk down the street like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“I said good.”

Keith listens to them bicker, savoring the warmth of Lance’s touch even if the embarrassment of casual intimacy being so public makes him feel hot all over. Above, the sky is empty and blue and vast, and as he watches the faint wisps of clouds drift by Keith steadies himself to feel a familiar bout of homesickness for a place he willingly chose to leave behind.

His breath is steady, his heartbeat even, the brush of Lance’s arm at the back of his neck warm. The feeling does not come.

“Keith?” Pidge prompts, drawing his attention with a start.

“What?”

Lance gives him an odd look. “Sushi or pizza? Pidge wants to go that place across town, but I think we should celebrate by going home and enjoying the last few days in the apartment while we can.”

Home.

Oh. Keith wonders why that hadn’t occurred to him before. If an angel can become a human, surely something like home can leave its place among the clouds and settle far closer to earth - a pen in his pocket, stained floorboards and textbooks scattered atop all the furniture, the gentle encouragement of his friends and the unfailing presence of Lance at his side.

“Let’s go home,” Keith says, and Lance grins at him; bright enough to burn and just as tender to match.

“Yeah,” Lance says, squeezing Keith tight. “Let’s go home.”