Chapter Text
Keith and Lance had been in a one-sided rivalry for years at the Galaxy Garrison. It might not have been so one-sided if Keith wasn’t as oblivious to social cues as Lance’s abuelo who was as blind as a bat and deaf in both ears, but alas — so are the consequences when you grow up most of your life going from home to home in the foster system. Not that Lance knows quite that much. No, all he knows is that Keith is a troubled kid with little parentage, if any. Actually, he’s never even really thought about Keith’s home life. He’s been too focused on how much skill Keith has in every single subject Lance wants to excel at. Too busy being jealous of Keith, who always seems to make him second-best. And not a great one, as Commander Iverson keeps mentioning. God, he was a dick. Which is why Lance is currently opening the door to the wing of the Garrison that houses all the air and spacecraft hangars on his way to “borrow” his favorite jet in an attempt to prove himself to everyone at the Garrison who doubted him. Alone.
He’d asked Pidge and Hunk if they’d wanted to come — in truth he was more than just nervous to do this alone, without his crew — but Pidge had sharply declined without even looking up from his laptop (he seemed really invested in it ever since the news about the Kerberos mission broke out,) and Hunk had looked especially queasy. So after many failed attempts at convincing them it would be fun, he left it alone. He slipped through the door into the hangar that the jet he would be temporarily hijacking was in, his backpack slung over one shoulder, with a half nervous, half bitter scowl on his face. He mocked everyone he was mad at under his breath, muttering about how he’d prove everyone wrong. Somewhere deep down he knew he would sit down in the pilot’s seat of the jet and just sit there staring at the controls until he came to his senses, but it didn’t matter, because right now all he cared about was proving himself. Screw safety.
Lance was about halfway to the jet when he saw something in the corner of his eye: on the other side of a large window that acted as one of the interior walls, was a shadow moving around in the darkness. Lance immediately crouched down to avoid being seen tucking himself behind a wheel of one of the smaller planes. The window looked onto a cavernous room which housed the Garrison’s, and possibly the world’s, most advanced piece of spaceflight technology: the Eclipse Sentinel. It was the finest piece of machinery he had ever seen, and he’d studied it several times — well, as much as he could study a locked up spaceship with the tightest security the Galaxy garrison had to offer (though Lance was learning more and more how low security that really was every day he stayed friends with Pidge.) Even in class, his commanders only ever brought them to study the ship’s exterior. It had always seemed a little strange to Lance that they kept so much from even the cadets, but the Garrison did stuff he didn’t understand all the time. Which is why it didn’t surprise him, at first, when he saw whoever it was in the Eclipse’s hangar. It wasn’t unusual for the faculty to be up working all hours of the night. What was unusual, was that this particular person was in there with the lights off. Lance peered through the glass, eyes narrowing until he basically had tiny slits for eyes. He couldn’t make out who it was, but they looked shorter than most of the Garrison faculty he knew, and they were definitely sneaking around. He glanced once at the jet he’d been planning on “borrowing,” and decided that this would be the perfect time to see if the homemade decoder thingy that he’d snagged from Pidge’s room worked on the higher security doors.
He swung his backpack around and took the device out, before jogging as stealthily as he could in the wide open space to the door with the words Eclipse Sentinel: authorised personnel only engraved onto the plaque. He lifted Pidge’s gadget to the keypad beside the door until it emitted a soft “beep” and the code to get in popped up on the tiny screen. He grinned and crept inside, shutting the door as softly as he could behind him. His brother Marco would be so jealous if he knew he’d gotten in here.
He had to sneak around in the dark for a little bit before he caught another sign of the Sneaky Susan but he came around the side of one of the massive metal posts supporting the thrusters on the ship just in time to see the hem of a jacket whipping around the corner in the direction of the elevator that led up to the entrance to the ship. Lance bounced on the balls of his feet, a flurry of excitement erupting in his stomach in the form of butterflies as he secured his backpack and ran after them. By the time he reached the elevator on the other side of the room, the person he was following had already gone up, so he waited anxiously for the elevator to come back down, pressing the button over and over again until his finger got stiff and the elevator doors opened in front of him with a ding! When the doors slid open again, Lance was hundreds of feet off the ground, being faced with a metal grate bridge that looked a little unappealing even by his adventurous standards. He forced himself to walk slowly across the bridge to the door, which — lucky for him — hadn’t properly latched when it was closed. When he pulled the door open as quietly as possible, he was so awestruck by what he saw that he almost didn’t even notice that the person he’d been following was standing a few feet in front of him, with his back turned, as he fiddled with one of the several holographic control panels that lined the walls in a U. But when he did he was arguably even more surprised than he’d been before. “Keith!?”
The word slipped out of Lance’s mouth before he had a chance to stop himself, his voice at least an octave higher than normal. Too stunned to do anything, he watched as Keith whipped around and pinned him against the wall, arm pressing into his collarbone. He had a dark red bandana hanging loosely around his neck, and his bangs hung in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t had a haircut, or a decent sleep in a while. Lance yelped, crying out “It’s me! Lance! From class!” He saw the simmering anger and bitterness (which wasn’t unusual for Keith in the slightest,) drain from Keith’s eyes as it was replaced by confused recognition. It was one of the rare moments when Lance could say he felt the same as Keith. He knew Keith was a rebel, some might even go so far as to say he was a bit of a delinquent. But breaking into a highly classified spaceship seemed out of sorts even for him.
Lance waited awkwardly for Keith to release him, his heart going a mile a minute in his chest. He seemed to be jumping between several emotions, which Lance found odd because the only emotions he was feeling were shock and confusion. Finally Keith seemed to realize that he was still pressing Lance against the wall and quickly stepped back, looking a little flustered as he ran his hand through his hair. Lance frowned. This guy needed a haircut.
“What the Hell are you doing here!?” Keith hissed after a moment. He looked incredibly irritated, which Lance couldn’t say made him feel too great, but it also wasn’t unfamiliar, so. Lance opened his mouth to ask him the same thing, but Keith cut him off before he could. “Nevermind. Just —” he paused, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just be quiet. And close the door, would you?” Lance made an indignant noise and opened his mouth to reply, but Keith had already turned back towards one of the many different control panels in the room. He scowled, grumbling about “damned emos,” as he turned and did as Keith asked. He’d like to say he wouldn’t normally have put up such little fuss, but he simply didn’t find it worth it most of the time. Besides, in this case following Keith’s orders benefited him as well.
He turned back to face Keith, hands on hips. He narrowed his eyes at Keith, but since he wasn’t looking at Lance anymore, it had little effect. “I was going to hijack a jet, but then I saw you, Mullet-brain, and decided bringing a young delinquent to justice would get me a higher grade.” He paused, looking for any type of reaction from Keith, but either he wasn’t listening, or he didn’t care. Lance let his arms drop, curiosity beginning to creep in. “What are you doing?” Keith answered almost immediately, but to Lance’s resentment, all he said was, “none of your business.” He didn’t even have the decency to look at Lance when he said it! If Keith wasn’t the biggest piece of work he’d ever met, he didn’t know who was.
“I told you what I was doing!”
“So?”
“So, now you have to tell me what you’re doing!”
“Oh yeah? Says who?”
“Says — says the laws of common human decency!?” Lance sputtered, looking as bewildered at the thought that Keith was being serious, as one of Santa’s elves at the thought of Santa not being real.
“Huh. Really?” Keith said, once again without looking up.
Lance looked around as if there had to be hidden cameras somewhere. “Yes!”
Keith actually looked up for once this time, and to Lance’s surprise he looked mildly surprised at the whole concept. For a second, Lance thought that maybe Keith would tell him what he was doing, but then Keith shrugged and went back to doing whatever he was doing on the panel, and Lance felt silly for even considering that idea.
“Oh come on! You realize I could go and tell Commander Iverson that you’re here right now and you’d be expelled in an instant right?” Lance said as he walked over to Keith trying to get a look at what he was doing. Keith glared at him with the fury of a thousand suns, “are you threatening me?” Lance’s eyes widened and he decided that maybe he didn’t want to have to explain why he was also out past curfew.
“Alright, fine.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the panel beside Keith, looking around the room. He wasn’t really sure what he was doing just standing here, but he wasn’t sure what else to do. His curiosity was becoming harder and harder to ignore the longer he stayed in the room. Keith’s presence was incredibly hard to ignore; it was as if there was a magnet drawing Lance to him, fueling the growing curiosity in his chest. It didn’t exactly help that Keith was practically oozing with contempt. After what he wished had been longer, he couldn’t help but break the silence.
“So, how did you even get in here? This is restricted military property; some of the staff aren’t even allowed in here.” He tried to avoid eye contact as he said it, to pretend as if he didn’t really care. Keith stopped moving his hand around the screen for a second and sighed irritably. “I borrowed Officer W.’s pass.” Lance looked at him. Keith was looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and if Lance didn’t know any better, he would have thought he saw a tiny bit of guilt in Keith’s eyes.
Aside from the perceived guilt, he was a little surprised to hear that from Keith. He knew Keith had a bit of a closer relationship with Officer W. than any of the other cadets, and obviously he knew that when Keith said “borrowed,” he didn’t mean that he’d done it with permission, or that he was necessarily intending to give it back, but still. He didn’t think him and Adam were so close that Keith would be able to pull that off at all. The tension in his chest and stomach eased the tiniest bit. “Borrowed?”
He saw whatever it was that he’d seen in Keith’s eyes wash away as he refocused on the control panel. Lance had to fight down the curl of fierce vexation that started to wind its way into his chest.
“Well, I’m going to return it.” Keith said indignantly, not bothering to hide his own frustration with the accusation. Lance raised a disbelieving eyebrow and shifted his weight onto one leg. “Uh huh.” He watched Keith for a few more seconds to see if he would say anything else before getting bored and going to look around.
For one of the most revered and technologically advanced spaceships of all time, Lance was incredibly disappointed to find that the main control room was not that different from every other cockpit he’d seen while at the Garrison. So instead of taking his time looking around, distracting himself from whatever Keith was doing over in the corner, he found himself drifting closer and closer to Keith until he was bending his neck at a very odd angle to get a good look over Keith’s shoulder. At first everything on the screen just seemed like gibberish until he started recognizing the words that Keith was scrolling through as file names. It made sense that the ship was linked to the Garrison’s main hard drive, all of the Garrison’s vehicles were — but it seemed like this ship in particular had much more access than all of the others. Lance was just wondering what Keith was looking for, when he clicked on a file entitled Kerberos Mission — Results.
That was when it all clicked. Keith was here to search for information on Shiro, the pilot for the ship that led the mission to Kerberos. Shiro had also been the only thing stopping Keith from being expelled several times, to Lance’s frustration, and also Lance’s hero. A few weeks ago, it had been announced that the Garrison had lost contact with the ship and its crew, and he had been pronounced dead. Him and Keith must have been closer than Lance initially thought.
Lance saw Keith click play on a video attached to the file. It was incredibly low quality, freezing and buffering at times, but Lance could feel the aura around Keith change. He was so tense he could see the muscles in his back clenching even through his shirt and jacket. Lance blushed when he realized how close he was to Keith and moved to stand beside him instead.
Seeing Keith’s side profile was worse. He could see how intently Keith was watching the footage, the sweat dripping from his temple. It was a little unsettling to be honest — he wasn’t used to seeing Keith distressed in any way whatsoever. He always seemed so stoic, so nonchalant so….emo.
Suddenly Keith seemed to notice Lance’s presence and glared at him out of the corner of his eye. “Is there maybe something else you came here to do? Study the engine maybe? I hear that’s pretty cool.” His tone was dripping with sarcasm, a very sharp wake up call that reminded Lance who he was really dealing with. He could tell Keith was only trying to get rid of him. “Yeah, I bet it would be, if I wasn’t more interested in why you’re looking for information about the Kerberos mission.” Lance said, rolling his eyes. He wasn’t quite sure why, but knowing it was about Shiro made him a lot more curious, and maybe even a little jealous — though Lance had no idea why. Certainly not. There was no reason to be jealous of Keith, especially when it came to his relationship with Shiro. It wasn’t like Shiro was the person he admired most in the world. It wasn’t like Keith had gotten everything Lance had ever wanted, when he didn’t even try to not be a brat. Not at all.
Oh for crying out loud, who was he trying to fool?
“Can you please just tell me why you’re here!? I told you why I was out past curfew!” Lance continued whining, too absorbed in his own curiosity to notice when Keith’s eyes widened. And almost too absorbed to notice when Keith muttered something mildly alarming under his breath.
“That’s impossible…” Keith had turned pale, paler than normal. His eyes were so wide, Lance thought his eye sockets might become loose when they returned to normal again. That was a rather disgusting image. But luckily Lance didn’t have to focus on that because there was something much more interesting, or maybe concerning, going on.
“Are you even — ? Huh? What’s impossible?” Lance craned his neck to try and get a decent look at what Keith was seeing, but he was too far away to make anything out properly.
Suddenly, Keith turned to him, and his usually avoidant eyes locked so intensely on him, he was actually too stunned to speak for a moment. They had a surprising amount of depth for an emo mullet-having douche. “You said you were stealing a jet right? Was it air or space class?” The question took Lance by surprise, and it took him a minute to process what Keith was actually asking. “I wasn’t stealing it, I —” Lance cut himself off when he saw the grave warning on Keith’s face. “Space class. Why?” Lance raised an eyebrow, at first with curiosity, and then with suspicion.
“Give me your bag.” Keith said, gesturing to the single strap on Lance’s shoulder with his eyes.
“What!? No!” Lance’s eyes widened in alarm, his hand going defensively to the strap of his backpack.
Keith took a step closer, his hand outstretched, and although Lance felt an inexplicable bit of guilt for it, he couldn’t stop himself from taking a defensive step back in response. “Lance, please just give me the bag.” There was a weird look on Keith’s face, like he was trying to coax a small animal or something, but he was failing miserably. Lance actually just thought it unsettled him more. Despite that, he could tell Keith was sincerely worried about something, so he forced himself to loosen his grip on the strap of his backpack a little bit.
“Why do you want it?” Lance asked, voice filled with hesitation. He was eyeing him cautiously, like a stray cat wondering if it could trust the piece of food a stranger was holding out to them. There was a silence that was much too long for Lance’s comfort, though he’d been told that his tolerance for silence was very low, so it really could’ve been any time between thirty seconds, to five minutes. Keith’s eyes had jumped back and forth between Lance’s backpack and Lance several times already, which was filling Lance with the dreadful sense that he was about to have to fight for the right to his own backpack.
Just as Lance was starting to think that maybe he was in the clear after all, and they’d reached a stalemate, Keith lunged for the strap of Lance’s bag, forcing Lance to jump back until he could no longer go any farther.
And that was how, once again, he’d ended up pinned against something by Keith Kogane, the legendary Mullet-Brain. He curled in on himself in protest, trying to keep the bag away from Keith’s greedy little fingers, stumbling as Keith tried to pry the strap out his hands. He reached behind him for support, but the second his hand hit the console behind him, the whole room (and by extension, ship) started shaking as if there was an earthquake.
Both of them froze. Lance looked behind him to see what he had hit, and quickly lifted up his hand as though it had burned him, only to reveal a big red button reading Launch. Guess the Eclipse Sentinel was designed with user friendliness in mind.
Very abruptly, they were both knocked off of their feet and had fallen into chairs which had seemingly risen out of the floor, and were whisked away to opposite sides of the room.
“What the Hell did you do!?” Keith yelled over the growing noise of what they both knew was the thrusters getting ready to launch them into space. Lance couldn’t believe what was happening, but it was arguably harder to believe that Keith thought this was his fault. Keith was the one who would rather be reckless than use his big boy words.
“What did I do!? You’re the one who pushed me into the panel, dipshit!” Lance shouted back to him. The vibrating and shaking of the ship was getting worse, and Lance was already starting to pray for their lives; he might have hated Keith, but he didn’t wish death upon him. Or anybody, really. The sound of Keith’s voice actually sounding something other than sarcastic and rude was the only thing that was able to interrupt his prayers. “Lance! The helmet!”
Lance turned to face Keith and blinked at him, confused. The look in Keith’s eyes was getting progressively more urgent as precious seconds ticked by, and Lance wished he knew what Keith was talking about. He’d passed the stage of anxious butterflies long ago, and was now trying to keep himself from barfing from pure nerves. He felt like Hunk. When Lance continued to just stare blankly at Keith, he scowled and pointed aggressively at the backpack he’d tried to steal from Lance just seconds ago. Lance realized what he meant, and his stomach dropped. He’d left his helmet in the jet so it didn’t take up so much space in his bag.
“I don’t have one! I left it in the jet!” Lance cried, hoping to dear God those wouldn’t be his last words. Keith looked furious, though Lance hardly thought it was fair that Keith blamed him for not bringing his helmet everywhere he went. Also, even if he did have it, he didn’t carry around an extra one like some over-cautious worrywart — and he most certainly would not have given his only form of protection to his rival, no matter how much he didn’t want him to die.
The room was violently shaking now, and both boys could tell that the ship had started rising. Lance frantically buckled his seat belt, muttering to himself that he would be okay in an attempt to calm himself down, forcing himself to take deep breaths. He was just about calm, (well, as calm as a person could be when they were about to be launched into space against their will, with no protective gear,) when Keith threw his bandana at him. Lance turned to him, bouncing back and forth between anger at Keith and panic from his probable death.
“Lance! The roof of the Hangar hasn’t been opened!” Lance’s eyes widened and he scrambled in his seat trying to find a button that could open it from within the ship. Ideally in hangars like this the roof would be open from a communications room, or something similar, by whoever was leading the mission from Earth, but since neither of them was authorized to be on this ship, and since this ship wasn’t even authorized to launch on a whim like this, there was nobody in that room. Lance just had to hope that the Garrison had equipped the ship with the ability to open it from inside.
The longer Lance looked, the more he thought he might have a heart attack, and the more he wished he’d just ignored Keith sneaking around this stupid ship. But even he knew that never would have happened. He never could just ignore Keith, no matter how hard he tried, or how much he wanted to. He was too….ugh, he was too Keith. And now Keith was gonna get him killed.
No, don’t think like that. It’ll be fine.
But even as he told himself that, he knew it wouldn’t be. And he was proven right when they crashed through the roof of the hangar seconds later.