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When they next find themselves on solid, but nonetheless foreign, ground, the first place Lance goes is the nearest equivalent of a fast food pit stop, and the person he takes with him is Keith. His choice of company is less of a choice and more the result of being the only two still awake and restless (and hungry) on the castle. Keith has on his signature broody pout from the moment they step out, to the second he orders what looks like a purplish-bluish salad and what hopefully is a glass of water. Lance, of course, would hardly let his rival’s mood swings damper his high spirits.
“Feels just like home,” he sighs, settling into a slouch in front of his trinity of milkshake, large fry, big mac. Some things, he supposes, and doesn’t think much further on it, are universal. He stretches his hands out across the table and his joints crack; Keith frowns down at them.
“You’ve said that twice already.” He tucks his napkin into his collar. Lance frowns right back at him as he picks up his plastic cutlery; he doesn’t think he’s ever seen someone use utensils to eat fast food before.
“That was the I-missed-non-goo-food edition.” He squeezes what might be intergalactic ketchup onto his fries, then takes a bite out of his burger, thinking, Hunk is gonna hate me for this.
Keith looks like he wants to reproach him for talking with his mouth full. Instead, he starts poking his own meal, like he expects it to start twitching before him.
“This is its own brand of goo,” he says, but he eyes, particularly, Lance’s mysteriously bubbly and pink milkshake. Lance takes a luxuriously long and indignant sip out of it, holds Keith’s gaze all the while.
“You didn’t have to come,” he then replies to cut short any more complaints, jabbing a fry forward, then veering it into his mouth. The place had to be a welcome change of pace from the castle, even and especially for Keith, who spends most of his time training and the rest of it being boring, or sleeping. It also had a touch of the familiar, the earthly: greasy smells, miserable graveyard shift cashiers, tacky wall decor. Just like home. Lance takes another bite of his burger, and as it floods his mouth says around it: “I could die, right here, and I’d be okay with that.”
“Save the death wish for once we’re done saving the universe.”
“I don’t really have a death wish, that’s more of a you-thing,” Lance says after swallowing, and Keith gives a quiet scoff. “And I wouldn’t want to die without ever.” His eyebrows give a suggestive spasm on his forehead: “Y’know.”
“That’s not dinner table talk.” And with his stern words Keith delivers a jab of a kick to Lance’s shin. Lance’s yelp eeks out in an impressive octave.
“I was talking about kissing!” he manages, before Keith gets any more ideas that might involve him and pain. He grumbles, reaching down to rub at his leg. “You’re cruisin’—kick me again, see what happens.”
Keith doesn’t seem moved by his threats, which invariably pisses Lance off, or maybe he doesn’t even hear them, which is worse. He looks at Lance as if he has suddenly sprouted horns, shrunk two feet, and morphed into an Arusian. Lance clears his throat and funnels a handful of fries into his mouth, thus summoning every fiber of dignity within him.
“What?” He doesn’t mean to yell it. He tries again, more aloof. “Are you really that surprised? Is it shocking, because I’m so kissable?”
“You just always seem so,” Keith pauses around a thoughtful drag from his straw. Potential adjectives flip like pages of a thesaurus through Lance’s mind before Keith clears his throat, “willing.”
Lance narrows his eyes, leaning back in his booth seat. “I’m sure you’ve been kissed millions of times, huh, hotshot?”
Keith smiles, for once. It sets Lance on edge as much as a sneer from a Galra soldier might, so he narrows his eyes even further.
“I’ve been kissed,” he says, as solemn as anything he ever says. He dabs at the corners of his mouth with his napkin-bib. “I’ve been married.”
And for whatever reason, Lance’s first thought: if he secretly got married to Allura behind everyone’s backs, it would be the ultimate betrayal, there would be no forgiveness. But Keith doesn’t leave him hanging in that worst case scenario for long.
“In primary school. It was quite serious,” he says. Lance can’t tell if he’s trying to be funny, or just being his own strange self. “We had personalized vows.”
“You say things with a straight face way too easily, my friend,” Lance says, after a moment of watching Keith benignly eat, silent save for a few crunches. His voice comes out hoarse, like there’s still a french fry or two stuck back there. He lets his forehead drop down onto his hand on the table in a rare, rare moment of weakness. “Damn, even you, before me?”
Then Keith says something that leads Lance to suspect, and not for the first time, that he’s not an earthling, but instead some wackadoo alien from a far-far-far-off planet where up is down and people blurt things out without considering social implications or the state of their friend’s esophagus. He says: “I’ll give you a kiss, if you want one that badly.”
Like he’s offering an opinion on sunny weather, or a sporkful of his crunchy purple salad. Lance’s throat suddenly tries to gargle a bite of his burger, so he grasps numbly for his milkshake.
“A pity kiss from my rival,” he considers it in a choked gasp, as he might consider sucking a lemon wedge on a dare. “Maybe if we both pick up the same really long fry, and chew our way to the center.”
“It was just a suggestion,” Keith says, lifting two placating hands, and if Lance didn’t know him better, he’d say it sounded a little sheepish. Lance takes a few more loud sips from his shake, hoping it’ll annoy Keith into changing the subject.
“I can’t believe you want to kiss me so bad.” He takes another big, slurpy sip. “Got a crush? A big fat rival crush?” He shoves a few fries into his mouth. “If I knew this was a date, I would have let you pay for my meal.”
“We’re not rivals,” Keith replies, so much calmer than Lance that Lance takes it as a challenge. He slouches in his seat, throws an elbow back over the head of it. Checks his nails, nonchalant.
“That’s what you got out of that?” he can’t help but ask. Keith watches him, and it feels more like a spotlight than even the overhead fluorescents. Lance tries to turn it on him. “Have you not been kissed since kindergarten? I’m the one who’s surprised.”
“It was second grade.” Keith glances between his meal and Lance, and he’s bad at pretending he’s not intrigued. “Why are you surprised?”
“You give off the obnoxious popular vibe. The mullet, and the rap sheet, and—the fingerless gloves,” Lance replies, and barrels on before Keith can take it the wrong way. “I’m so handsome, my name’s Keith and I’m a pilot.”
“That sounds more like a compliment than an insult,” Keith says slowly, a disdainful quirk to his eyebrows that only spurs Lance on. He tilts his head a bit, his bangs shadowing his face, like he’s assessing a particularly impossible physics problem. “And I don’t like that voice you’re using.”
“I can’t read social clues but look into my big angry eyes, look at my mullet,” Lance says, “I got fake-married in kindergarten.”
Keith’s mouth purses in a precursor of suppressed anger. “You sound jealous.”
“Jealous? Of a rival getting more action than me?” He snorts. Then, he pauses to consider it, mouth twisting. Then he involuntarily thinks of Keith’s mouth twisting, perhaps not in thought or frustration, but for something else. “I’m not completely hopeless, if I can get even you interested.”
Keith doesn’t make any objection but continues picking at his salad. He doesn’t like tomatoes, Lance notices, though to be fair the tomatoes in question are bright blue and quivering slightly. Would I kiss a boy?
They’re the only ones in the restaurant save the lumpy, humanoid-but-not-quite cashiers, and outside is as dark as a night on Earth. And Lance thinks, sure, why wouldn’t he, he has no prejudices. Keith might not be his first option, though. Though he wouldn’t necessarily be a terrible option. Lance’s got eyes that work. And evidently, he’s not the worst option for Keith, either. It makes a guy want to check a mirror, make sure his eyebrows are in line.
“What was that all about, anyway?” he wonders aloud, forcing a laugh and then clearing his throat; examining his half-eaten meal but then daring to glance over at Keith across the table. “Pretty reckless, even for you.”
“You’re the one who brought up getting kissed before dying,” Keith says simply, exasperation ever at the edge of his voice, and then, “I’m Lance, and I keep blaming my idiocy on—” his eyebrows furrow, “…me?”
Lance sighs, reaches over to clap Keith’s shoulder before he thinks himself into a short-circuit.
“You gotta, like, imitate my voice when you do that. Deep and gravelly.” He picks up a fry. “And, right, before I die. Which won’t happen anytime soon, not when I’m in my comfort zone. My home away from home, if you will.”
He gives a grand sweep of his arm, indicating the line of cashiers under an unintelligible glowing menu, the empty tables littered around them, flies whirring around overflowing garbage bins. Keith doesn’t seem quite as in his element here as Lance. He levels a glare at him, and in that frisson of a look Lance suddenly feels like they’re gearing up for a race in their lions.
“If that burger doesn’t put you in your grave, that milkshake will.”
“If that’ll save me from your company, then good!”
“Then you’ll leave this earth unkissed—” ouch, Lance clenches his teeth, braces for the critical blow: “and a crappy pilot.”
Lance slams his cup down, rattling their trays.
“Take that back,” he leans up over the table.
“Make me,” and Keith leans in too. And Lance realizes, despite the expanse of food between them, that the table actually really is quite small. But he won’t be the first to draw back.
“We’re at an impasse, then,” he decides, swallowing at nothing. It’s hard to look anywhere else, when Keith is sitting right across from him and offering, of all things, a first kiss. He rubs his neck. “How does it even work, do you think?”
“Put two mouths together,” Keith says, preoccupying his own with his straw. “It shouldn’t be that hard to grasp, even for you.”
“You make it sound lame. No passion.” Lance says, “There’s gotta be finesse. And what about the tongue!”
“What about the tongue?” Keith replies, a little outraged. It could almost make Lance laugh.
“Jeez,” he sighs instead. “I should be the one offering to kiss you.”
He regrets saying it as soon as Keith startles, blinking fast a couple of times and straightening, egged on by both Lance’s taunt and by—something else.
“Show me how it works, then,” he says, leaning forward, and he tips his head to the side just a fraction, “Or are you going to keep bringing it up and then chickening out?”
“Fighting words,” Lance growls. Kissing words. He licks his lips then wipes them on the back of his clammy, clammy hand. “Well, pucker up.”
Keith rests his elbows on the table and, in the slowest of motion, leans in. He makes not even a semblance of a kissy-face, which Lance had been looking forward to if only for some comic relief from the butterflies in his stomach. Though he does jut his chin up a little, it’s less funny and more—earth shattering. Good thing we’re not on Earth. He looks at Lance like he isn’t expecting anything at all. Lance guesses he has no choice but to prove that haughty expression wrong. He glances both ways like he’s about to cross a street, swallows a couple of times until the back of his throat fights it, and then leans in as well.
“Okay. Here I go. Here it goes.” He sucks in a deep breath and holds it. Keith doesn’t meet his eyes when lets his face dip as close to his as it might get when they’re squabbling. And so he keeps his own lowered to the mark: the unyielding, impossible set of his mouth. For a second, Lance thinks he couldn’t actually kiss those lips, not without the sky falling, or the world opening up beneath him and swallowing him whole, or his very own body combusting from the inside out. And slowly, he does anyway; he presses his mouth to Keith’s, a soft noise made entirely of lip at the contact. And quickly, he yanks himself back upright, the tips of his ears burning.
“How was that,” he gasps, trying to relax in a slouch back into his chair, drumming his fingertips hard enough against the table that they feel numb. Keith doesn’t answer for a moment; Lance glances over at him to see him bringing his fingers to his lips, brow furrowed.
“Just like second grade,” he says. “Blink and you miss it.”
“Then, come back over here, pretty boy!” Lance reaches just across the table in a second wind but without a second thought, grabbing fistfuls of the collar of Keith’s dumb jacket. Keith’s eyes widen, Lance notices, and he lets himself be reeled forward sharply. “I’ll blow your mind!”
Suddenly they’re face to face over the table again, and Lance nearly forgets what he’s about to do because they’re both frozen, uncertain how to proceed, stuck gazing.
“Uh,” Lance starts, “You gotta close your eyes.”
Keith looks like he wants to colorfully tell Lance just what he’s gotta do. But then with a cut off huff, he actually obliges, squeezing them shut. It leaves him in a jarringly vulnerable position, and Lance thinks, if he wanted to, he could get up and leave him like that. He doesn’t want to. Lance brings his hand up after wiping it on his pants to find the curve of Keith’s jaw; Keith’s eyelashes flutter open and he stutters something unintelligible before cutting himself off once more. And when they kiss a second time, Lance can hardly believe the softness, the lack of a clash, the way their lips part and fit perfectly—it’s so unlike them, but it’s entirely, undeniably Keith who he’s kissing.
He feels Keith’s breath come heavy against his cheek, his mouth a little more pliant than he ever imagined it could be, and they react and respond to each other in a way that, somehow, incredibly, allows the kiss to deepen, meals forgotten. And the second kiss somehow turns into a third, between it an interval of mingling breath and darkening eyes, and then a fourth, when Keith’s hands grip either of Lance’s forearms and squeeze, and a fifth where Lance’s hands land on either side of Keith’s face and guide it forward, tilt it up, and things get slightly wetter than before.
“This is good bonding,” Lance manages to gasp, his words caught on Keith’s parted lips. Up close, Keith’s eyes are glassy and unfocused, his eyelids heavy. Lance can barely keep his own open.
“You’re a fast learner,” Keith says, and it might be the nicest thing he’s ever said to Lance, even if his voice wavers with it. Something in Lance’s stomach upturns; it has little to do with his mystery meal.
“You—,” he starts, is kissed, number six, and then starts again, “So are you.”
Their noses nudge against each other, and they must have egged each other on too much because it doesn’t seem like they can stop or turn back, like they’re—hurtling to the ground at an impossible speed from an impossible height, eyes closed.
“So?” Keith says, and Lance nips at his bottom lip to bring his attention back to kissing. Keith pulls back an hair, just enough to see each other without going cross-eyed, a bruised and utterly kissable smirk on his mouth, a challenge. “What about the tongue?”
And then Lance claims his eighth kiss, and he supposes it’s Keith’s ninth, and together they earn a new first, perhaps one of many to cross off on some future hypothetical list that Lance surely would never daydream too fervently about: getting asked, politely and in a different language but in a tone universally unmistakable, to leave the premise—by an alien employee, in an strange fast food joint, on an unfamiliar planet. But—and Lance revels in this, especially—not before a french kiss or two.