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Keith itches all over, like his skin wants to crawl off his body. Way worse than the time someone put itching powder in his clothes out of revenge in his first group home.
For a moment, he leans against the wall, desperately hoping no one decides to use this hallway in the meantime. He squeezes his eyes tight in desperation to not scratch his skin. He knows he will scratch it raw if he gives in. Opening his eyes, he peels back the bandage on his arm. This is for sure where the itchiness stems from. The bite wound has already started to close, light pink and less swollen than before—something to do with the healing properties of the aene animal’s spit from the Zuxen planet. It had been nasty when it happened but didn’t warrant a full trip to the healing pod once they were able to return to the ship. The team had been patrolling the jungle only for Keith to accidentally step into the creature’s den. Lance pulled him back before he could get mauled, thankfully, but not before he got bit, less than idle.
“What the hell?” Keith grumbles to himself as he drags himself to his room.
He’s had a headache all day, lights too bright and voices too loud. He may have snapped at Lance more than he meant to but he couldn’t get the pounding out of his skull and Lance had been commenting on his hair again. Throughout the entire day, he has felt hungover but even worse than the couple of times he’s actually been hungover.
Stumbling into his bedroom, Keith braces a hand on the wall. A pained growl catches in the back of his throat. He slaps a hand over his mouth so no one hears. He shut his eyes, the pressure building in the back of his brain. He tries to reach his bed, but his steps become increasingly off kilter when he walks forward. Opening his eyes for a moment, his bedroom swims in front of him.
His vision goes dark, and he collapses on the ground.
Something scratches at Lance’s door. It startles him awake. He bolts up in bed, eyes wide in alarm. He waits, heart pounding against his chest, hoping it was a leftover memory from one of his dreams. It’s quiet for a few seconds, and breathing a sigh of relief, Lance starts to flop back onto his pillow.
Then something claws at his door again—loud and ear splitting in Lance’s sleep fuzzed brain.
His eyes snap open.
That one was real.
Grimacing, Lance climbs out of bed, the bottoms of his feet screaming on the cold floor, and cautiously walks towards the door. Whichever Altean decided that not adding a peephole to the door was a good idea deserves to be fired. Counting down from three, Lance presses the control to open the door and flattens himself on the wall as it slides open.
A lavender furred wolf rushes in. Lance shrieks, jumping back against the wall. Immediately spotting him, the wolf’s entirely yellow eyes glare at him or maybe they just stare at him. It’s difficult to tell a wolf’s facial expressions apart. Bigger than a golden retriever, the wolf remains in front of him, taking up a good portion of his already small room. Lance swallows, unable to move. Luckily, he doesn’t have to worry for long.
Apparently bored of watching Lance, the wolf leaps onto his bed. It sits comfortably in his nest of bedsheets, its tail wagging behind it, clearly quite pleased with itself. The fact that the wolf doesn’t seem to be interested in maiming him (yet) calms Lance down significantly. But he stays a safe distance away from the alien animal—no matter how cute it’s acting right now, despite the fact that it takes up most of the space on Lance’s mattress.
“Hey, I was sleeping there,” Lance grumbles only to watch in dismay as the wolf flop sideways. “Get off.” He tries a command, hoping that the wolf is trained. Which is crazy because it’s without a doubt a wild animal.
The wolf refuses to listen to him, much like one of his teammates. In fact the wolf seems to bury his nose further into Lance’s pillow. He should have bought that lint roller he saw at the space mall. He can’t have Allura thinking he smuggled a stray animal on board again—how was he supposed to know kagirs were extremely poisonous to the human nervous system? It looked like an Earth rabbit; Lance had assumed it would act the same. In case of a similar situation, he’ll try not to get onto the wolf’s bad side. He likes to keep his healing pod stints to once a month, though that goal never seems to work out.
Cautiously walking closer, he eyes the wolf as he holds out his hand in a friendly gesture. Those piercing eyes track his every move. “Don't you dare pee on any of my stuff. This isn’t your territory, buddy.” Hand an inch away, the wolf meets him in the middle and presses its head against Lance’s palm. Oh. The wolf is warm, rather fluffy under the outer layer of thick fur. Lance still scowls as he tries to make room for himself on the bed. A more difficult task than it should ever be.
“God, please shove over.” Instead of listening, the wolf flops on top of him out of revenge. Lance releases an ‘ooof’ as all the air in his lungs is pushed out at once. He lays there for a moment contemplating his life choices—why didn’t this wolf bother someone else? Like Keith. They probably have a lot in common, with Keith being such a lone wolf and all—before he realizes it’d be best to get air back into his lungs. “Ok, ok,” he says, struggling to breathe, “this isn’t going to work.” The wolf doesn’t budge. Lance crams his hands into the wolf’s fur to try to push him off but the animal refuses to humor him. But wow is its fur soft . Without realizing it, he absently starts to stroke the wolf’s back.
After a few moments, Lance begins to accept his animal companion for the night. He peers at the wolf; it stares back at him in wait. “Are you secretly a Galra agent sent to assassinate me because you’re doing a fabulous job, I must say.”
Galra agent or not, the wolf remains silent. Truly the mark of a great operative.
“Alright, let’s make a truce. You can stay right next to me but on the floor, not in my bed.”
Something must get through because after a long moment, the wolf walks directly on top of Lance to leap off the bed. He sees stars before he regains some life back in him. He really hopes a rib didn’t crack in the process.
“Good space wolf,” Lance mutters, breathless, but falls into a quick sleep soon after.
By morning, the wolf has already vanished, the space beside Lance’s bed spartan as if nothing had ever been there at all. Lance assumes he dreamed the entire thing until he rolls over and is greeted by a lining of shedded fur clinging to his blankets.
Keith can't show his face around Lance anymore. In fact, he rapidly spins around and rushes to somewhere else whenever he hears that loud, familiar voice spilling around the corner.
What the fuck is wrong with him? He transforms into a wolf once and can’t stop himself from heading straight towards Lance’s room like he sensed his way home? It was as if someone else, or more likely something deep inside, was controlling him when he transformed. As much as he urged himself to run when he realized where he was headed, his own body didn’t listen. Attempting to control himself as a wolf works as well as trying to breathe in space. He was right there at the edge of the wolf’s consciousness, unable to do anything useful.
Keith has been doing so well with keeping his crush on Lance at bay, and this werewolf situation is going to blow all that hard work to hell. No one can know he was bitten by a space werewolf; no one can know of his most embarrassing moment. He hopes this was just a one night occurrence; he hopes that Lance thinks he hallucinated the events from a few nights ago.
Either way, he avoids Lance, finding it easier to train more than usual—the training room being a place he knows Lance will never willingly go—and staying in his bedroom whenever possible. He hasn’t become a wolf since that first time. Sometimes, late at night, he wakes in a cold sweat, his skin itching and crawling, but the change hasn’t returned yet.
Luckily, he doesn’t think his avoidance of Lance is noticeable to anyone.
“Hey, Mullet,” Lance snaps and Keith’s shoulders stiffen. Shit. Caught, he slowly turns to find Lance with his arms crossed, for once serious. “What's wrong with you lately?”
Or maybe it is.
Maybe Keith is not as subtle as he thinks he is, in any aspect of his life.
“Nothing,” Keith finally replies. He can’t look Lance in the eyes and crosses his arms as if hoping that will create some barrier between them.
Lance continues to glare at him, unimpressed. “You’re avoiding me.”
“No.”
“You’re backing away right now.”
There is a five foot extra gap between them that wasn’t there before; in all honesty, Keith hadn’t even noticed what he was doing. “I have to see Coran about something.”
“Sure you do.”
Keith can’t get Lance’s sleepy, bed-headed appearance out of his mind. Or how comforting it was to lie next to him, pretending he wasn’t a space werewolf for a second. Or how much he wishes he could just stop being a coward as a human and actually do something about these suffocating feelings. But Lance might reject him and then things would become awkward and Voltron would be affected and they would lose the war. All because Keith couldn’t contain his romantic feelings.
Yes, best to leave them buried deep.
“Keith?” Lance asks quietly after Keith realizes he’s been silently glaring for too long. No nicknames, no teasing remarks, Lance looks at him with open honesty, clearly confused and maybe even hurt by Keith’s sudden change in attitude.
That doesn’t help matters.
“Sorry,” Keith apologizes too quickly. And he bolts.
He really hopes this space werewolf issue is a one time deal.
Keith hadn’t been lying. Coran did need to do a follow-up check on his injury. The intelligent part of his brain says he should tell Coran what’s been happening, but not wanting interrogating questions flung at him, Keith just prays the side effect will go away on its own. It has to work its way out of his system at some point, right? Like a virus? He doesn’t want to be a lab rat for medical experimentations while they try to find a cure, if one is needed.
"Any side effects to being bitten?" Coran asks him casually, checking the monitor for his vitals. Everything is in perfect working order. Apparently, nothing screams werewolf in big, bright, flashing letters.
“Not one,” Keith lies through his teeth and hopes it doesn’t show.
“Here, wolfy wolfy wolfy,” Lance calls as he snaps his fingers. It always worked with his cat back home but maybe a similar pitched call doesn’t work on dog-like animals. Specifically alien dog-like animals.
He has no idea where that wolf ventures to at night. Unless he’s severely hallucinating, twice now—he’s seen the space wolf at night two more times throughout this entire week. He’s been searching all day and has come up empty handed, all efforts in vain. He hasn’t dared to ask anyone else if they’ve spotted a wolf-like creature—mostly because he’s starting to doubt his own self. He doesn’t need the others to get roped into his craziness.
“What the hell are you doing?” That voice startles Lance. Enough that his shoulders jump in place.
Slowly turning, he discovers that Keith stands behind him, arms crossed.
Over the past year of fighting in a 10,000 year old space war, they have grown closer as friends, despite what others may think. Close enough that Lance knows most of Keith’s ticks and quirks and even some embarrassing childhood secrets; that the late nights on the observatory deck, when insomnia has crept on them with a vengeance, mean more to both of them than either of them will probably ever admit to. But the past few days have been weird . Keith has been more grouchy than usual, easier to piss off. It’s almost like they’ve reverted back to their first couple of days in space, and Lance hates it.
So yeah, Lance is slightly surprised that Keith is here. He knows Keith has been avoiding him for whatever reason, and part of him already expected to see Keith darting away… again. But when Lance blinks, Keith still takes up most of the view.
“Nice to see you too,” Lance mutters, barely looking at Keith when he turns back to the hallway.
He has one theory as to what’s going on with Keith. And that’s that Hunk accidentally spilled Lance’s secret that he has a giant crush on Keith—he hasn’t found the right time to confront his best friend about it, where they’ll have a loving conversation about privacy, even though he knows Hunk wouldn’t have done it on purpose. It’s the only possible explanation Lance can think of as to why Keith suddenly started avoiding him. Clearly, he doesn’t like Lance back and doesn’t know how to kindly reject him yet.
He ignores Keith, knowing the other will leave soon, but if he thought Keith was going to drop the conversation, he was wrong. In fact, Keith walks even closer to him and leans down to stare at the empty part of the floor Lance crouches near. Keith raises one eyebrow that disappears under his bangs. “Did you lose something?”
Taking a moment to reconsider sharing the mystery wolf with someone, Lance decides that it’s probably better to have a partner in crime in this search. His previous thoughts on the matter are immediately overturned. Two sets of eyes are better than one. And maybe it will make him feel less crazy about the whole thing. Though, he highly doubts Keith will be much help at all.
“Alright, don’t laugh at me,” Lance starts as he stands up to his full height. He places his hands in his pockets and slightly slumps his shoulders. Swiveling his head from side to side to make sure no one else pops up on him in surprise, Lance says in a low voice, “I think we have a stowaway wolf on the castle-ship.”
Keith’s mouth ticks, as if he wants to laugh, but his eyes remain void and expressionless. “Uh huh. Wouldn’t this ‘wolf’ have shown up on the sensors by now?”
“You’d think,” Lance agrees, a frown on his face, before he admits, “I’ve only seen it at night.”
“So you dreamt it.”
“A possibility,” Lance replies. He considered the idea as well. “But my pillow covered in fur suggests otherwise.”
Keith genuinely ponders that bit of information for a second before responding with, “Allura’s mice may have snuck into your room again.”
They do like to do that on occasion—probably because Lance is the only person besides Allura who’s willing to pamper them—but Lance shakes his head. “This wasn’t mice fur.”
Keith scratches at his elbow, fingers flexing at his side. Catching himself, he immediately drops his hand from his arm. “You’re probably just getting space madness or something.”
Lance grins too large to be anything other than ridiculous. “I knew I could count on you to be helpful,” he bites back sarcastically. He throws his arm over Keith’s shoulder and tugs him close enough that he catches the Altean shampoo clinging to his hair. Keith stumbles into him. “So since you’ve suddenly stopped avoiding me, do you want to play some video games so I can beat your ass?”
Keith opens his mouth to weasel himself out of the invitation, but in the end, to Lance’s surprise, he says, “Fine.”
Turning his head so Keith can’t spot it, Lance grins for real.
After that, as if knowing Lance was searching for it, the space wolf begins to appear more often. For the fourth night in a row, the wolf returns to Lance’s room. It has the same soft violet coloring to its fur, darker near its paws, and the same striking yellow eyes.
“You again?” Lance comments the wolf pads into his bedroom. He heard scratching at his door, and like an idiot, opened it without a second thought. At least the wolf didn’t pounce on him. “Aren’t you bored of my room by now?” Lance asks even though it’s useless to do so. He has to talk to the animal or else he’ll feel like he really has come down with space madness. If he is hallucinating this whole thing, he should probably go see Coran. “There’s a whole castle-ship to explore; though I guess that’s what you must do during the day?” He pauses, frowning in thought. “Where do you go, by the way?”
The wolf, predictably, doesn’t answer. Which Lance should be grateful for because it would be a hell of a lot creepier if it did.
It’s been four days of this. The wolf scratches at his door, Lance lets it in, and the wolf proceeds to take up a large portion of his bed like the space-hog it is. Lance has stopped trying to get it to stay on the floor. That was a lost battle after the first night. So Lance decided the next best thing was to curl up with the wolf, hope it doesn’t spazz and try to eat him, and watch a movie to pass the time. It’s a wonderful space heater if nothing else. Lance has never woken up with the wolf still in his room; sometimes it even leaves before Lance falls asleep.
Lance slides onto his bed right next to the wolf. Propping his pillow against the wall, he leans towards his nightstand for his tablet. “Alright, what movie do you want to watch tonight?” He turns to the wolf who is no help with picking out movies. Its tail whacks against the wall in what Lance hopes is happiness. “And belly rubs only happen halfway through the movie, no whining at me five minutes in, okay?”
The wolf whines not even a second after he hits play, and with a sigh, Lance gives in that easily.
Keith is utterly and completely humiliated by this whole situation. But at least he learned to stop avoiding Lance—that was eventually going to cause more problems where Keith would not have been able to provide the decent explanation Lance deserves to have.
It’s become so embarrassing that Keith has to embrace it at this point or he’s just going to end up dying young from mortification. He hates that he craves the attention Lance gives him. He hates that he knows the reason why he always searches out Lance when he’s a wolf.
He puts all that behind him for now. Because at this moment, he ducks behind a boulder, narrowly missing being blasted by a Galra soldier. The air next to him still fizzles from the laser shot. He pushes back his sweat soaked bangs while he gathers his breath. He rolls out from his cover and returns to the fray. He kicks the Galra who almost shot him in the knees and stabs him. Whirling around, he scans their area for any more opponents.
At times, he catches himself tracking Lance’s movement. They’ve been separated from the rest of the group—a trap all of them fell into too easily—so currently, it’s just him and Lance and a couple remaining Galra. He forces himself to look away, to not be distracted, but in the end, watching Lance at this exact moment turns out to be fate.
A Galra sneaks up on Lance’s blind spot. Lance hasn’t noticed, too busy focusing on the other soldier in front of him. Keith is too far away for his voice to be heard over the sound of laser blasts.
Not Lance, hollers in his mind.
There’s really only one thing he can do.
He sprints and dodges another soldier trying to intercept him. His ankle twists sharply but he ignores the flaring pain. His feet pound against the hard-packed ground, so close now. The Galra lines up the shot. Leaping with only a second to spare, he bodily shoves Lance out of the line of fire. The shot hits Keith in the back instead. He cries out as the pain sears into him.
“ Keith! ” he hears Lance scream as he slams into the ground, and his vision crashes into darkness.
While the shot initially appeared fatal—Keith lying unconscious in the dirt, his flight suit quickly soaking in blood, Lance desperately trying to keep pressure on the wound while also making sure to take care of the remaining soldiers and checking that no other Galra snuck up on them—Keith only had to be in the pod for a few hours at most. But Lance couldn’t even find it within himself to be there when Keith woke. The team told him Keith did about two hours ago. He just can’t face Keith right now. Lance can’t even face himself right now. If he was more aware of his surroundings, none of this would have happened.
He knows he should go to sleep and give his mind a chance to relieve the stress. Instead he sits on the floor with his back to the bed, head resting on his knees, as he tries to practice a breathing exercise his therapist from years ago taught him. It only works to some extent.
When he hears scratching at the door, his head pops up, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He almost asks who it is before he realizes that only one thing on this castle-ship would scratch at his door like that. So he lets the wolf in, not surprised anymore.
“Hey, buddy,” he greets the creature but returns to his place on the floor. He eyes the wolf who lingers a few feet away, as if having sensed the gloomy atmosphere of the room. “I’m not really in the mood to watch anything tonight. You should explore the castle if you want.”
Like always, the wolf refuses to listen to him. Its paws pad across the floor, nails clicking on the surface with a slight, almost unnoticeable limp to its step. However, instead of being its rowdy self, the wolf quietly lays its head on Lance’s lap, whining slightly, and Lance immediately curls his fingers into its fur, scratching behind its ears.
Oh, he knows what this is. He’s been around therapy dogs before.
For the first time that day, a small smile appears on Lance’s face, but it disappears just as quickly.
His body aches from the morning’s battle. He bandaged up the small cuts scattered all over him and takes care not to aggravate any of his new bruises. He’s both mentally and physically exhausted and doesn’t even have the energy within himself to cry the stress out of his system.
Fuck Keith, honestly, and his stupid, brave, selfless self-sacrificing tendencies. Lance would have died if Keith didn’t push him out of the way. Yet, Keith almost died pushing him out of the way. There’s no alternate universe where that situation ended with both of them unharmed.
As if sensing his distress, the wolf nudges its nose into Lance’s chin. He weakly laughs.
“You know, you're a lot like him,” he comments. The wolf’s yellow eyes stay trained on him, attentively listening. It probably doesn’t even understand what he’s saying but Lance needs to talk. “You never listen and are a thorn in my side yet you always know what I need.” A hiccup lodges in his throat; he squeezes his eyes tight. He can hardly breathe. “I was so scared. I was so fucking scared that he was going to die because of me. Why would he do that?” He drops his head onto the wolf, its fur strangely smelling of Altean shampoo and he offhandedly hopes it didn’t get into something that wasn’t good for its stomach. “Doesn’t he know how much agony I’d be in if he died? He’d never know how much I care about him, that” —Lance’s voice cracks with a brief sob— “that I love him.”
The words settle around Lance. He’s never spoken them out loud before, but that doesn’t make what he said any less true. He still plans on never telling Keith. Underneath his hands, the wolf’s body tenses. It starts to squirm in his grip, and Lance immediately releases it in slight surprise and confusion. “Wha–”
The wolf sprints out of his bedroom before he can finish his sentence, clearly not one to stick around for mushy confessions. “Bastard,” Lance mumbles with a wet laugh. He drags his hands through his hair. “You really are just like him.”
After Keith woke up from the pod, he stood at Lance’s closed door wondering if he should knock, that if he did knock, would he even be let in. It was a pointed statement when he stepped out of the pod and saw everybody but Lance. At first, Keith was worried something bad still ended up happening to him, that he failed in his one goal, but Shiro assured him that Lance was fine, just taking some much needed rest. It only put Keith a little at ease.
He couldn’t help himself when his feet automatically took him to Lance’s door. He doubted that Lance was sleeping; he knows him too well. But then he felt his skin crawling, early signs of the transformation, and he retreated to his room. He ended up knocking at Lance’s door anyway.
There’s one major thing that Keith has discovered about being a werewolf: Keith may not have any control over himself when he transforms, being propelled by pure instincts alone, but he remembers everything in the morning. He used to hate it, but now, he’s extremely grateful.
He has to find Lance.
As Keith races through the halls, he finally spots Lance on the bridge, going through some recent mission data and hunched over the main control console. Keith wastes no time. “Lance!” he calls out. He must sound frantic enough because Lance whips his head up, eyes wide in surprise and maybe fear.
Between the shifting and the stint in the healing pod and the battle, Keith ended up collapsing onto his bed the minute he became human again. He only just woke up, five hours past when his internal clock usually wakes him up in the morning. He wishes he had been able to do this last night.
“H-hey, Mullet,” Lance greets him, a little startled by Keith’s franticness. He still smiles at the sight of Keith though, and that does wonderfully weird things to Keith’s heart, especially after hearing Lance’s confession.
He needs to tell him.
“Lance, I—” A wave hits Keith immediately and he gasps from the pain; he’ll never get used to this. Of his body wanting to break out of its normal mold and contort into a completely new shape. He staggers, almost falling. “Oh fuck.” Pain sparks behind his eyes.
“Keith? What’s wrong?” Lance’s hands are on him now, gripping his shoulders. It arguably makes things worse as Keith tries to back away. He didn’t want Lance to know. But he doesn’t think he has a choice in the matter unfortunately.
It comes on faster this time, sooner. Maybe it’s his anxiety from wanting to confront Lance, maybe it’s his raised heart rate. Or maybe whatever is happening to him has reached its peak. No matter what, he gasps because his skin screams and his mind burns. The itching starts at his scalp and quickly travels down his body until he is completely on fire. He claws at his skin, scoring deep, red lines as he tries to keep it together in front of Lance.
He hasn’t dealt with two transformations in less than twenty-four hours before; somehow this one is worse than all the others.
He struggles to move; he struggles to run. What is Lance going to think when he realizes who the wolf has been this entire time? Lance takes another step towards him.
“Wait, Lance, don’t—” Keith groans, folding over as he clutches his sides. Bones popping, his clothes rip and fall in tatters to the ground.
In what feels like minutes of torture, he transforms into a wolf with lavender fur and yellow eyes. He stares up at Lance, frightened and wanting to flee out the door but he’s too far from it and Lance is directly in his path. He stares, caught with his secret.
Lance’s hands cover his gaping mouth. He shakes his head in shock. “Holy shit! Keith ?”
Keith paws at the ground, not being able to say anything.
Lance drops to his knees right in front of him. He peers curiously at him but doesn’t reach out to touch, probably too afraid of Keith’s skittishness. “Dude, why didn’t you say anything?” Then he corrects himself with an annoyed frown. “No, wait, scratch that. You not telling us is the most normal thing about this situation.” This time he does reach out for Keith, gesture friendly and welcoming. “Keith,” Lance starts again, voice more gentle this time, “What did you do to yourself?”
Ducking his head, Keith whines, butting into Lance’s outstretched hand.
“Let’s get you to Coran.”
When they enter the med bay, Keith right at Lance’s heels, his head still lowered in some shame, Coran looks less than surprised to see them—well, specifically Keith.
Coran already predicted this turn of events apparently; he was just waiting for Keith to ask for help first since sometimes the bite won’t take depending on the species. In Galra, it activates ten fold, but since Keith is only half Galra, he seems to have gotten a small dosage of what the transformation virus usually has in store instead. He can thank his human genes for protecting him from whatever worse horror awaited him at least.
There’s only so much Keith cares to listen to as a wolf and almost doses off in the middle of Coran’s diagnosis. All he cares about really is the cure, something as simple as a quick—but very painful—shot, which when administered, he almost bites off Coran’s hand on instinct. But Lance scratches at the spot behind his ears and that settles him until his vision fades away.
When Keith wakes, human again, a sheet draped across his lap for modesty, the med bay is cold; goosebumps pepper his skin. That is all quickly ignored since Lance stands right in front of him, hands placed on the cot he sits on. Coran is nowhere in sight. Keith is not quite sure how long he was out for, and Lance doesn’t provide any answers for his unasked question. They remain shrouded in silence as Keith waits for Lance to speak first—mostly because he doesn’t know what to say but mainly because Lance keeps opening his mouth and closing it, clearly struggling as well.
Finally, with a sigh, Lance finds the words. “I’m going to ask this once so you better answer truthfully.” Keith nods and braces himself for what’s next. “Do you remember what you do as a wolf?”
Keith swallows and finds himself unable to lie under Lance’s watchful gaze even if he wanted to. “Yes.”
Lance stutters as he shuts his eyes tight and tilts his head back. “So you remember, last night when I—”
“Yeah.” Keith struggles to look at Lance as well. He stares at his lap, absently rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “I remember everything.”
He hears Lance suck in a sharp breath. “God, just reject me now and get it over with.”
Keith jerks his gaze up, mouth open. “Lance,” he says softly, reaching up to cup Lance’s face. Looking at him, Lance’s eyes are wide in surprise at Keith’s actions. “I jumped in front of that shot because I can’t even imagine a world without you in it. I’d do it again a hundred times, no matter the outcome. I care about you too much to see you get hurt.” He can’t lie and say he’ll never do it again; he knows Lance understands—because he knows Lance would save him too, if the situation was reversed. Without any fear anymore, Keith says, “I love you too.”
“Asshole,” Lance breathes out with a laugh. “That still won’t make me worry about you any less.” He brushes Keith’s tangled hair out of his eyes, tucking it behind his ears. His touch is incredibly gentle. “Why did you run off last night?”
“Because I was going to change back and didn’t want you to see.” He looks at Lance, no hesitation found within him at all. The truth from here on out. “I really did want to tell you right then and there.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Keith confirms with a nod. That’s all it takes.
Surging forward, Lance kisses him. He places his hands flat on the table beside Keith again and slots his leg between Keith’s knees. Pulling even closer, Keith weaves his fingers into Lance’s short hair. Lance wraps his arms around Keith’s waist. They stay like that for what seems like eternity.
When they break, Lance rests his forehead against Keith’s, and Keith wipes away the happy tears beading up in the corner of Lance’s eye. “You were an adorable wolf, babe.” He says it with a cheeky smile, knowing the rise he’ll get out of Keith.
Scowling, Keith quickly shakes his head. “We’re never going to speak of that again.” No one else is ever going to know. Just him, Lance, and Coran, that is all he can handle.
“Are you kidding me? It’s going to be the highlight of my vows.”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Lance smirks. “Please, you know we’re stuck with each other forever now.”
Keith smiles as he hums in agreement. He would love nothing more. “I’d like to put on some clothes first before you start planning the wedding.”
Cheeks tinting, Lance chuckles and lends him his jacket. He drapes it across Keith’s bare shoulders. “Don’t worry; I’ve got you.”