Work Text:
Normal people aren’t supposed to enjoy storms. Stories that begin on stormy nights are supposed to be scary, thunder and lightning and dark things to close your windows against, but Lance is only eight and hasn’t started learning fear. Typhoon season still only means getting up early to listen to the radio with his mother, crawling into his parents’ bed with his younger siblings when the mayor’s office announces that school is out.
The rest of the house is waking up without them, those for whom the day hasn’t stopped moving—father tying his tie, big brother and sister pulling on their rubber boots. Lance grins to see them, all white teeth in a soft face. There’s some kind of unwritten law that all college students are assumed waterproof, no longer in need of protection from inclement weather, but college feels like a whole other life. He can’t even imagine being that old, or the kind of person he’ll be by then.
If it rains for the rest of the day he knows the water will rise and spill out of the gutters, turn the roads into rivers. He’s seen the kids downtown running out into the street to play. He’s watched from his windows as they jumped from the curb into the flood, knee-deep, waist-deep and unafraid.
Here, with the covers pulled up to his chin and warm bodies on either side of him, Lance is safe. The wind and the rain stay outside. The storms come and they don’t scare him, though sometimes the news does, the bits and pieces he catches over his parents’ shoulders in the evenings before they catch him staring and change the channel. Landslides, houses crumbling down the side of a mountain, floods that rise so high and move so fast it’s impossible to swim against the current.
It takes Lance a grand total of two seconds to fall in love with Blue—two seconds and as many steps into the lion’s open mouth, fast and reckless as flying. Not that he’s ever been a slow burner, really, but this is record-breaking even so.
You don’t understand, he knows he’ll say later, to no one in particular. She woke up for me, as if that makes him special.
Some thirty million light-years from the Garrison, Lance suddenly finds it difficult to believe he’d ever wanted to be a soldier. Certainly he’d never planned to even be a halfway decent killer, but it was easier, before, to pretend that they weren’t the same thing.
Keith finds him bent over the waste disposal in the kitchen the night after they down their first ship. He can appreciate the irony, even laid low like this, gripped by pain and post-battle sickness. Keith, who has fighting burned into the very marrow of his bones, standing over him, looking down.
Lance knows what he must see. Some of the upperclassmen had talked about studying trauma in class, the debriefing methods for rookie pilots who were like to fall apart after their first kill. They’d seen the photo documentation, the video footage, described it all for Lance in turn—cry-scream-puke and then nothing but silence and a red-eyed thousand-yard stare. Psychological casualties all.
Lance remembers the shivers that had run down his spine, remembers thinking, That’s not gonna be me. He wonders what he looks like, given what he knows now—an enemy may be an enemy, but they all burn the same. The sight of the fire had shocked him so much he’d forgotten all the big questions, alone in Blue’s cockpit, his finger still on the trigger. How wars start, how they end, who’s right, who’s wrong.
It’s not his first kill. It’s all of theirs. He knows they shouldn’t even be counting, if they want to live through this.
“Lance,” Keith says. Just his name—“Lance”—before he stoops down and starts guiding him into a sitting position, back braced against the wall, head between knees. One hand settles on Lance’s nape to hold him still.
He’s warm, Lance thinks. His stomach’s still in cold knots when he says, “I’m not—”
He doesn’t know what he’s about to say. Not in top form right now. Not this weak, usually.
Not a monster.
Keith doesn’t wait to find out. “What are your siblings’ names?”
Sometimes you just have to believe you can save someone. Hang on for dear life to the things that remind you you’re a person. Lance sees them, holds their faces in his head and in his heart. Keith’s hand stays on the back of his neck, at rest over the soft spot where that heart still beats.
“Lance,” he says again, when there’s no answer. “Say their names for me.”
One reason frogs are often chosen for dissection is that their bodies provide a good overview of the anatomical structure of a complex living thing. Frogs and humans share a similar body plan, which is reflected in their skeletons, and have organ systems which are broadly similar in shape, location, and purpose.
At least, that’s what it says in the badly photocopied instruction manual. Lance pulls the flap of skin back from his own frog’s midsection and thinks, vaguely, that the muscles look like chicken meat. His lab partner remarks from across the table that frog legs taste like chicken too. There had been chicken in the cafeteria lunch display less than an hour ago.
Their teacher directs them, bland and dispassionate, from the front of the room. Fastest pair to finish skinning gets bonus points. Now make a cut straight through the layer of abdominal tissue to lay bare the organs beneath. Behold—a complex living thing.
Lance is fourteen and it’s his first time watching something die.
As soon as the bell rings he makes a beeline for the bathroom, lightheaded and teary-eyed from the stench of the formalin. It’s a week, almost two, before he touches chicken again.
The Balmera has no voice; there is only Lance’s sounding over the comm, shrill and near-hysterical, so alien he can’t help thinking for a moment that it must be someone else’s.
“Goddammit, Keith, this thing is alive!”
It shouldn’t surprise him at all that the red lion spits fire, but when Keith’s shots go wide and hit the ground, Lance can’t stop seeing war wounds. The fissures left behind by the fighting run red with molten rock and he imagines the planet bleeding.
Keith fights on the training deck all the time so his body doesn’t forget what it’s been made for. When it finally surrenders, he doesn’t need to think; his head hits the pillow and it’s lights out, every time.
Lance knows he’s not as strong as Keith, though. He doesn’t even like fighting hand-to-hand, getting so close to your enemy you can see all the lines on their face. Which is a shit way to think if you’re a Defender of the Universe, he knows, but he does find that this kind of stuff becomes a lot easier to admit on nights that he can’t sleep.
It’s why he doesn’t come here half as often as Keith does. It’s why he doesn’t even know what he’s doing here now.
“Do you wanna go?” Keith asks, between breaths. His eyes are on the doorway, as if he’s been waiting.
“With the sim, you mean?” Lance cocks his head and the mask slides into place, smirky and arrogant and a hundred percent fake given the hurricanes in the pit of his stomach, but Keith doesn’t call him on it—just watches quietly, one shoulder leaning against the far wall. “Or, like, the two of us?”
“Whatever.” Absurd as it sounds, maybe this is his way of being kind. Maybe it’s the only way he knows how. “Whatever you want.”
They shouldn’t, probably. It’s after lights out, and Shiro’s going to give them both an earful in the morning if they show up at the breakfast table with cricks in their necks and shadows under their eyes. Tell them they should take better care of themselves than this.
“Sure,” Lance says. They shouldn’t, but it doesn’t matter—everything already feels topsy-turvy, twisted, like nothing is right. So he walks into the room, throws his shoulders back so the jacket can slide off them and down his arms to the floor. “I’ll dance with you.”
At sixteen, sitting at the kitchen table, blinking sleepily in the light of his rickety old hand-me-down laptop’s screen, Lance comes face-to-face with the hardest question of his life:
In this day and age, what do you think makes a hero? Discuss your answer in a concise, coherent essay of 650 words or less.
The words wobble before his eyes. His response thus far has been to switch back and forth in vague despair between the Galaxy Garrison’s institutional website and a Goodreads page—“Quotes about Heroes (442 quotes)”—before returning at last to a document that’s sat empty and untouched all evening. Then he chews his lower lip, types his name. He hits the Enter key twice, types Heroes are— and stops, the other 648 words suddenly more distant than the stars.
“Alejandro.” His mother stands at the counter, making coffee. The rest of the house is quiet under the sound of water boiling. “Do you know what your name means?”
At the question he turns to her—away from the glare, from the terrifying blankness. “Isn’t it Spanish for Alexander?”
She laughs. That, too, reminds him of water. Breakers on the shore, gentle and murmuring in the hollow of the throat. “Which means ‘protector,’ my love. ‘Defender of the people.’”
He frowns and cycles back again through the pages. The question, other people’s words, the white space that waits quietly for him.
“I’m not—”
“You are,” she says, smiling to still the tide of his protests. “You’re already somebody.”
Meaning he was named for this? Maybe. Maybe not. All he knows is that whatever he writes will be his answer to the call. He wonders if he even has it in him to find the right one, the magic words at which all doors must open. Heroes are—
“Of course you think that,” he says. “You’re my mom.”
I’m going to die, Lance tells himself, half a heartbeat before the bomb goes off.
Half a heartbeat. It can’t be much more than that, the time it takes for him to leap at Coran and throw his own body in the way of the blast. But it’s true what they say about the tricks your brain can play on you right before you kick the bucket—dragging out those last few seconds, spinning them around until they seem to go on forever.
Those were some sweet reflexes, he thinks, there at the end. Amazing what you can do when you’re trying to save someone. And now that he knows he’ll never see home again, he’s calmer about it than he thought he’d be. The finality, at least, is comforting.
Only it isn’t, because he soon finds that being dead is a lot noisier than he’d initially imagined. It’s a lot like a long dream he can’t wake up from—Sendak’s arm, Pidge flung back across the floor, loud voices and the smell of something burning. Most disorienting of all is that there’s way more Keith in this dream than he feels there should rightly be, doing weird things he knows Keith would never do in the Real World. Keith fighting, the red bite of the blade in his hand, is one thing. But Keith kneeling beside him, grasping his arm, speaking his name in his ear—
He doesn’t know what to make of it. He should be dead. That’s the last thing he remembers before everything he hears runs together and he drops down into nothingness again.
When he wakes, Shiro confirms that yes, he’d been holding the gun. His eyes had been open—he’d fired, and the shot had found its mark, straight and true. Lance feels the team’s eyes come to rest on him and knows this is his cue to laugh, to make a crack about how he’s just that good. Who else could emerge from a coma just in time to shoot someone in the back? Hot damn.
“You were screaming,” Keith tells him. “I heard you through the wall.”
That wall, Lance wants to point out, is supposed to be soundproof. It shouldn’t let you hear anything, no matter how hard you listen. What he says instead is “I can’t breathe.”
“Take it slow.” Keith’s voice is steady, but as Lance’s eyes struggle to focus his face is a blur. The image goes shaky and then comes clear, shaky then clear, like looking into water. “Pretend it’s low tide. Tell me about the ocean again.”
Breathe. That’s one thing the dead can’t do. He can’t count how many times now Keith’s woken him up in the middle of the night and made him talk about the ocean.
“Low tide. Every summer, in S-Sa—” He knows where this place is. It’s where his heart goes when it wanders. It tears him open that he’s not even strong enough to say its name. “In San—”
“In San Felipe,” Keith finishes. “The best place in the world. I know.”
San Felipe. Best place in the world. Lance backpedals, scrabbles with his memories, tries again. He says “Blue,” and thinks he sees Keith nod. Keep going. He’s been holding Lance’s shoulders since he woke up and hasn’t let go.
The colors first. The colors are always easiest. White foam. Clear water by the shore, teal further out, a true, deep blue where sky and water meet. Rosy summer mornings spent picking seaglass out of the sand. The green pieces were Sprite bottles in another life, the amber ones beer. All these colors are San Felipe. Even monsters have things they love.
Lance’s hands slide down Keith’s arms, anchor around his wrists. He closes his eyes and breathes.
Twelve is almost grown-up but it’s still too young to ride anywhere but in the back of the van, crammed in with the youngest kids and the duffel bags. Lance doesn’t mind. It’s the middle of summer, and summer means sunscreen and picnic baskets and week-long visits to his father’s hometown along the coast.
Four hours out of the city and the sky outside the windows is so golden. The others are asleep—small sister with her head wedged painfully against his shoulder, big brother snoring in the front seat—but not Lance. Lance never sleeps on the road. He’s too busy watching for the water, palms and the tip of his nose pressed against the glass as close as they can go, even if they’ve been making this trip every year, driven the same paths since before he was born.
You’ve got to be quick if you want to catch it, he knows—that first glimpse between the trees that flank the road, the sliver of blue that means they’re nearly there, they’re almost home.
In deep space there’s barely any sense of time. No mornings or evenings, no suns or moons changing to tell them how far they’ve come.
They imitate what they know as best they can. Pidge convinces Coran to let her tinker with the castle’s lighting control system, and soon the lights are brightening and dimming in something close to earth-time, at regular, measurable intervals. There’s still no sunset, no dawn, but it’s the most they can do. She tells them, matter-of-fact, that it will help their circadian rhythms normalize. It’s in their best interest to try and observe regular sleep-wake cycles—for their health, for one, and for some small measure of peace of mind.
Lance thinks he can get behind that. He remembers they did the same thing on the plane that flew him to the Garrison, that flat robotic voice announcing cabin lights will be dimmed, passengers who wish to read may use the overhead lights located above their seats, sliding his window shade down over the sun. He had closed his eyes and reclined his chair, tried not to think about that sun on the nape of his neck as he wheeled his luggage trolley up the airport driveway, walking away from a family that had made him promise not to look back.
“Alejandro,” Keith repeats, rolling the R. Rolling his eyes, too, in that skeptical way.
“Don’t be a dick.” Lance swipes at his head, aiming to cuff him around the ear, but the movement is slack and lazy and halfhearted and Keith dodges it without a thought. His elbows never even leave the kitchen counter. “It’s the name my mom gave me.”
“So why don’t you use it?”
An innocent enough question; the trouble is that he knows the answer too well. Lance knows he left Alejandro on Earth, in his hunger to be someone else. And Earth is so far behind now he doesn’t know he’ll find him when—if—he returns.
“I didn’t want people wearing it out, you know?” he says. He’s half-anticipating it when his voice cracks on the last word; he looks down, swishing the water near the bottom of his glass, scuffing at the floor with his toes.
Alejandro was the boy who climbed palm trees barefoot to be close to the sky, his eldest sister on the ground shouting Not so high as the wind whipped at her hair. Alejandro reckoned the days by a different set of stars.
Keith shrugs, like it’s all the same to him.
“Suit yourself, Alejandro,” he says.
Lance is five the first time he saves his city from certain destruction. It’s a simple Sunday morning, the kind of day when nobody’s allowed to die, and the city is a line of empty cereal boxes on the living room carpet, toppling over under his father’s feet. From where Lance sits on the floor he is not Father but Monster, immense enough to crush houses underfoot, roaring from the back of his throat because that’s how monsters sound.
Lance is only five, but he’s not afraid. With a towel around his shoulders and two plastic water-pistols in his hands, he’s ready to face down any enemy, raring to walk away a hero after a few well-timed shots to the belly. Pew pew pew. Another roar, and it’s finished, Monster falling to its knees and tumbling over onto the carpet.
After it all ends they put the guns away and stand the cereal boxes back up and Monster is Father again, sweeping Lance up onto his shoulders for a victory lap around the room. It’s the first, the last, the longest parade he’ll ever ride in, but of course he doesn’t know that yet. How could he know it?
When they down their first fleet, they don’t count how many ships. They only know that they’ve just made all of it come apart—guns, guns, guns and not one explosion but hundreds, fire spilling and blossoming shrapnel and the sky above the Balmera lit up brighter than New Year’s Eve.
It’s not murder, Lance tells himself. You don’t do things without a reason. What better reason is there, than saving the universe?
He pulls a lever, hits a button; Blue opens her mouth and an arrow of light takes the wings off one of the last stragglers. Some of the color in the flame is living flesh, breaking down.
He can almost feel the heat on his face. But it’s not killing. They’re making stars.
Lance doesn’t count the nights he wakes up to Keith’s hands.
Mostly it feels like his dreams haven’t ended; how seamlessly one thing becomes another. His father’s van becomes floodwater up to his elbows becomes explosions in the sky, becomes the mattress dipping under Keith’s weight and his voice in the dark. His hands are the last thing, squeezing Lance’s shoulders, pulling him out of the nightmare.
These weird, long, black nights Lance always comes awake aching for something to hold. And because Keith is there, he clings to him—presses his face into the warmth at the crook of his neck and makes a small, ragged sound.
The first night the shock of it had been too much. Lance had felt Keith’s heart hammering against his own chest, felt his body tense to iron the way it always did before a fight. But Keith knows now; the repetition has taught him what this is. Now he knows what to do, so he loops his arms around those bony shoulders and draws Lance close, and his hands map out the sharp-edged planes of Lance’s back in big, slow circles. It must be hours before they let go.
(In the morning—what passes for the morning—he knows he’ll pretend not to remember again. Come to breakfast late and laugh it off, throw a jaunty “How’d you sleep?” Keith’s way as though he doesn’t know the answer.)
He stops being Alejandro almost entirely after he arrives at the Garrison. Everywhere except on his official records he’s Lance now; he likes the monosyllabic snap of it, the sharpness. In other words, a name for action movies or video games, for a life he’d only ever dreamed about before he walked through those big doors.
He forgets, sometimes, to miss home. There’s enough excitement to fixate on, between being Lance and the sight of himself in the mirror, buttoned all the way up to the neck in that slick uniform. The cargo ship sims are bigger and clunkier than the fighters, slower too when they lift off into the virtual sky, but he stops being sore about it after a while, reminds himself it’s a miracle he’s here at all.
Then something small happens, and there’s that small pain, that twinge. Nearly always it’s the food, peeling back the sheet of foil over his plate in the mess hall to find rubbery chicken, soggy carrot-cubes. Sometimes it’s his mother’s face, wavering and glitching out on his computer screen, and him grinning so hard his jaw hurts when he hears her half-yell her questions in his ear.
“Yes, Ma,” he always says. Hunk likes to joke that the phrase “yes, Ma” makes up at least half of all their conversations. “Yes, Ma, I just ate. Hey, what do you want from town?”
There’s a roll of duct tape and a pair of scissors that never leave his desk these days. And maybe he hasn’t done much to be proud of yet but he can assemble and fill up a cardboard box in two minutes flat. That’s record time, faster than anyone he knows, the chocolates and bottles of liquid soap and who knows what other silly-looking odds and ends all packed and ready to be loaded onto a truck and flown across the sea, toward home.
“I’m going tomorrow,” he says, because they have Sunday afternoons off, and that means he and a few of the other more restless kids can catch a bus out. “Tell me what I can get you. What do the kids want?”
Sunday afternoons are loose, unregimented time, with no agenda to be spoken of. Most days they scatter outward from the central square, a couple to the cinema, a couple to the arcades. Anything to feel normal again, at least for an afternoon.
These past few Sundays he’s been catching this one guy in particular, looking after them. Just standing to one side in the lobby of the main building, eyes narrowed as he watches.
Lance calls out to him, finally, too unnerved by the silence to keep turning his back. “You coming, Mullet?”
The sallow, broody face hardens, armors up. Lance nearly raises his hands in surrender, palms spread to show that he isn’t hiding any weapons. Hey, man, I’m not looking for a fight or anything.
“No,” the boy says, after a pause. “I’m not coming.”
Lance shrugs—Suit yourself—and makes for the doors. The others are at the bus stop, already waiting.
Allura looks at them and sees heroes. It’s never been a question for her, and when she tells them what they are there is almost no choice but to believe.
When the five of them stand together in that big, bright control room and watch the lions made of light, when they see what they will be when they finally come together, yes is the only answer.
“Do you think it ever gets easier?”
Some nights they go up and talk on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars can shine undiminished. They sit side by side in the gloom and stare quietly out of the great glass dome, while the castle drifts on and on through space, the heavens moving so slowly around them as to seem almost purposeless.
“I don’t know,” Keith says, truthfully. He looks smaller with his knees pulled up against his chest like this, more like a human boy. It’s too easy to forget what they are, all the way out here. “I don’t think so.”
“Man.” Lance lies back, lets his long body stretch out across the floor, hands behind his head. “I’ve already puked my guts out.”
It had been easy, back on Earth, to be always looking up. The view from below was beautiful—you could look at the stars and see another world, or the eyes of someone you loved, or the lights you mapped your way home by. But Lance looks at the stars now and all he sees is those ships they shoot down, built under a different sun, by hands that aren’t completely unlike their own.
The stars are fire—his finger on the trigger, explosions in the sky. You can tell yourself all you want that your enemy is a monster. Likely they say the same about you.
“The others don’t puke, though,” Lance says, and it’s true. Hunk escapes his shadows by caring for things, fretting constantly about their eating and sleeping habits and the maintenance of speeders and engines and healing pods. Pidge keeps hers at bay with the greenish glare of computer screens and midnight oil, the arcane loops and angles of the Altean written language. Shiro is quietest about it, choosing to endure all the pain he never allows himself to talk about, locking the door to his room and waiting patiently for the next day, for the urgency that will organize him. He knows it’s the same for all of them—that it never gets any easier, even for heroes, or would-be heroes—but it’s still sickening to be the only one who falls apart where anyone else can see. Cry-scream-puke.
“You don’t puke,” he says, when Keith stays quiet, offering nothing. And that’s true too. He’s never seen Keith fall apart. He’s seen Keith put a sword through someone’s chest all the way to the hilt and not blink.
At this Keith inclines his head. “No,” he concedes, and his face looks wrong—sad and subdued in the low light. “Never have.”
Cool, Lance wants to say. Must be nice to be so strong. Trust Keith to burst and blaze through everything, to never lose his way even when it’s so dark he can’t see ahead. But Lance’s memories take him back, to Sunday afternoons at the Garrison and the boy who walked through the halls like a ghost, speaking to no one, and he can’t say it.
“I never thought about it,” Keith says. Lance can barely hear him, the way he’s talking into his knees. “Or about what it meant, until I saw you.”
He doesn’t say, But now I do.
There’s an enemy fighter in his sights, a sleek silver girl with knife-blade wings, but Keith doesn’t come out to meet her. Instead he runs—he lets her chase him, wheeling and diving between the serrated outcroppings of rock, the fire licking at his heels.
Lance stands in the observation room, pressed shoulder to shoulder between Hunk and a girl from Engineering, and he could swear they feel less real than the dance playing out before his eyes. A lower screen shows them the cockpit, the language of Keith’s body coiled tight and tense in the chair and his hands on the controls. On the upper screen the ships come clear of the cliffs and keep climbing, and then he’s taking them into the sun.
The whole room holds its breath. Hunk’s forehead is filmed with sweat and he can’t stop shifting, jostling, and Lance mutters “Hold my hand, dammit” out of the corner of his mouth.
Keith throttles up. Under cover of the searing light, he pulls the trigger—rides the burst, guns, guns, guns in a red sky.
Those shots say killer. Quicker than words, more clipped and concise even than the operational brevity code all trained fighter pilots use. Always the message is the same—we have to live, they have to die. I’m going to kill that one, yes, I killed him.
The inside of Keith’s mind is surprisingly quiet when they meditate together. There’s no resistance, no fire or ferocity as their consciousnesses meet, touch, slip through each other. All he finds on the other side is a silence as vast as the desert, old as the house he sees in his mind’s eye. Nothing else. So much nothing you could drown in it.
It’s not much. He almost thinks he can hear Keith in his head, answering the questions he hasn’t asked. But it was mine.
Lance doesn’t count the mornings he wakes up in Keith’s bed, either.
They learned in school that spaceflight is all about orbits. Up here all interactions are premised upon it, one thing acting with, against, in concert with another. Things whirl against each other, try to pull together, try to pull away. At worst, they smash each other apart, or break away and get lost in the void. At best, maybe, they hold. Come to a point of stability, a kind of negotiation.
The first night they lie down together they hold themselves stiffly to opposite sides of the bed and try their hardest not to touch. Eventually this becomes as exhausting as the nightmares they’re always trying to rescue each other from—even if they never say it—and it’s the human thing to do, anyway, to surrender when you sleep, let your body lie however it wants.
Some of those mornings Lance wakes with his head against Keith’s chest, his arm snaked around Keith’s belly. Some of those mornings he wakes and finds Keith’s eyes are open, searching the ceiling above their heads, and wonders why he hasn’t been pushed away, rolled unceremoniously in a tangle of arms and legs and blanket onto the floor.
Maybe it’s not always about being able to save people. Maybe sometimes all you can do is try not to be alone, feel the need to be near someone and remember that you’re human. He wonders if Keith ever thinks about this, even if it’s just during these hours of stasis before the breakfast bell, when neither of them are themselves yet.
Hey, he wants to say. To tell the only truth that matters, before the fighting starts again. Hey. You’re a person too.