greendaleinc

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When I come back you'll still be here

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Lance has always been a light sleeper. There’s a reason he wears all the equipment and shit. People who sleep like a fucking corpse — like, ahem, certain mullet haired boys who could pass out hanging from the ceiling by their big toe and sleep for eight hours — don’t wear eye masks and headphones.

It does, though, have the occasional benefit. Like having a natural defense mechanism to pranks by dickhead siblings, for example. Can’t put butter on his nose in the middle of the night to make him break out if he wakes up at the slightest creak, Marco.

Asshole.

But most of the time it’s a pain in the ass. It means that unless he is wearing those massive headphones, he’ll wake up if someone so much as sneezes four doors down.

Or, perhaps, if his training obsessed boyfriend likes to wake up at the asscrack of castle-simulated dawn, then Lance is rudely dragged from dreamland. And to make matters worse, if Keith thinks Lance is awake, he’ll try to convince Lance to go with him, as if Lance has any interest in all at doing intense cardio at five in the fucking morning.

He’s so goddamn cute when he’s hopeful that it works every time, too. He gets this stupid little smile on his face, like he’s imagining all the stuff they’re going to do together, that Lance physically has to drag himself out of their endlessly comfortable bed and go run laps around the training room or whatever, feeling like he’s half-dead and incapable of speaking in anything but grunts. All while possibly planning the murder of his morning-person boyfriend so he never has to do this again.

Lance has, coincidentally, gotten very good at feigning sleep.

Now, every time he hears Keith’s alarm go off — several fucking times because, as previously mentioned, Keith sleeps like a rock — he concentrates hard on being still, breathing evenly. Holding whatever position he’s in and fighting to urge to so much as crack open one eyelid. He’ll stay where he is as he feels Keith carefully pull his arms out from under Lance’s head and around his waist (because for all Lance grumbles and grouches Keith really does do his best to make sure Lance gets all his beauty sleep. Sometimes he’s so careful that it takes him several minutes to extract himself fully. Those mornings are always the hardest for Lance to pretend he’s still unconscious, fighting the smile that desperately wants to pull its way across Lance’s lips). Then Keith will tiptoe around the room getting ready, slipping on a t-shirt and sweatpants and braiding his hair. Finally there’ll be a few minutes of silence, as if Keith is just standing still, watching Lance sleep, and then he’ll lean over and press the gentlest of kisses to whatever part of Lance peeks out from his mound of blankets, before he’s off to go make himself sweat before he’s even had breakfast.

It is, if Lance is being completely honest, his favourite part of the day. That quiet, secret affection always makes something soft and warm bloom in his chest, making him grin as he fades back to sleep.

Only…one morning he feels Keith pull carefully away from him, hears him patter quietly around the room. The rustling sounds of Keith getting ready are a little louder than usual, a little less muted, as if Keith is rushing. And there’s no period of silence.

No kiss.

Lance sits up straight once he hears Keith’s footsteps fade down the hall, looking at the closed door in confusion.

Hey.

He considers, for a moment, just dismissing it and going back to sleep. It’s no big deal, after all. It’s not like Keith is getting less affectionate as a whole, or anything. In fact Lance woke up last night because Keith was talking in his sleep — about Lance, saying all sorts of dorky and adorable shit. Lance recorded it.

If he goes back to sleep now, he won’t have to get up for a couple more hours. And when he does, he’ll make his way to the kitchen where Keith will no doubt be waiting with a smile, a kiss, and a cup of coffee because he is literally the best boyfriend in the world, even if he wakes Lance up in the mornings.

Lance considers falling back asleep for one whole minute. It’s just a silly, chaste peck, after all. It’s not such a huge deal.

He scowls, throwing off the blanket and shoving his feet into his lion slippers. It is a huge deal. He needs his secret early morning kiss, dammit, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that he’s going to let Keith forget it.

He stomps down the hallway, ignoring an amused Shiro who says something along the lines of “Looking bright eyed this morning, Lance,” and keeping his eyes locked straight ahead.

He will get answers. And apologies. Many of them, in fact.

He pauses right before he enters the training room, messing around with the lockpad settings so he can override the automatic function like Coran showed him.

This feels like a door slam moment.

Once the manual opening has been enabled, he takes a breath, then kicks open the doors with a bang, startling Keith so hard he nearly gets brained by the gladiator.

“So I guess love is dead,” he says once Keith has called for the simulation to end, glaring daggers at the man in question.

“Lance…?” Keith stands a couple feet away from Lance, panting, sword held loosely in his right hand and head tilted to the side. “What’re you doing up this early?”

“Obviously you don’t love me,” Lance says again, well aware that he’s being dramatic and childish and not caring at all.

“What? You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

He’s mad at Keith, dammit. He is. But suddenly he feels silly, barging in here feeling all scorned and a little genuinely upset.

Of course Keith loves him. He — it was easy, for him to say that. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like it was an objective truth.

“You didn’t kiss me before you left,” Lance says, and he’s annoyed with himself for sounding hurt instead of petulant. “You always kiss me when you wake up. But you didn’t today.”

Keith softens immediately, stepping right up to Lance, sword clattering to the ground. “Baby,” he says warmly, cupping Lance’s cheeks and kissing him gently on the forehead. “I didn’t even know you were awake when I did that.”

Lance keeps his gaze trained on the ground, arms still crossed over his chest, stubbornly unreceptive. “Of course I do. You’re noisy. But if I wake up then you pout at me until I come train with you.“

Keith chuckles. “And you give in every time I ask.”

“Stop changing the subject, Mullet. You didn’t kiss me this morning, so obviously love is dead.”

“Love is dead, huh?” Keith presses another kiss to Lance’s forehead, then the bridge of his nose, then the tip of it. Then he moves to his cheekbones, his cheeks, the corner of his mouth. His jaw. The underside of his neck.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Keith mumbles. “We were up late last night and I ended up waking up late. I was distracted. I forgot.”

Lance tries so hard to hold on to his stubbornness, drag this out a little longer. If he’s grouchy long enough, Keith’ll do a face mask with him tonight to make up for it, he’s sure of it.

But then Keith nips gently at a particular sensitive spot, right under his ear, and Lance melts.

“I guess I can forgive you,” he mumbles, undoing Keith’s braid so he can thread his fingers through his hair. “But you have to make it up to me.”

Keith’s hands move down to his waist, and he tightens his grip. He doesn’t lift his lips from Lance’s skin.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” Lance shudders on a breath. “You have to — fuck — you have to do a face mask with me tonight.”

“‘Kay.”

“And — read to me. Out loud. I like it when you do that.”

“Whatever you want to read I will, Bluebell.”

Lance squeezes his eyes shut, trying desperately to stay focused, but it’s hard when Keith is so close to him, fingers slipping under his shirt, mouth tracing a line from his neck to his collarbones.

“And you have to come back to bed with me. Right now. I want to go back to sleep and I don’t want to do it alone.“

He’s expecting even a little bit of protest — Keith likes his morning routine and Lance can rarely convince him to sleep in — but instead he feels Keith’s grin press into his skin, feels his grip tighten.

“We can for sure go back to bed,” he says wolfishly.

“To sleep,” Lance insists. “It is five thirty in the goddamn morning. I barely have to energy for this conversation. I want to pass out and I want you to be holding me while it happens.”

He feels Keith’s grin get softer. Then he straightens up and presses one last, lingering kiss to Lance’s lips before pulling away.

“Alright,” he says, clipping his bayard to his belt and entwining their fingers together. “Let’s go back to bed.”

Lance smiles, relishing the feeling of their skin pressed together from the short walk back to their room all the way to sliding back under the covers, wrapped snugly in Keith’s arms.

Maybe he doesn’t mind being a light sleeper all that much.

———

based on this post (third slide)

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Whoever came up with the term ‘draining your social batteries’ was one hundred percent correct, because that’s the exact feeling. Keith feels like he’s physically dragging himself down the dark hallways of the castle, like his duracells are barely puttering along enough to get him back to his room.

God, Keith fucking hates having to go to diplomatic missions alone. (Well, he wasn’t really alone. But Retired Shiro is about as helpful as a rubber duck, so. He mostly just comes along so he can wear his horrible dad shirts in public and be complimented on them, and to tease Keith at every given moment.)

There is one good part about having such a draining day, though: when he finally makes it to his room, door sliding open at the press of his hand, the scent of Lance’s floral shampoo and the sound of his gentle humming is like injecting concentrated relief into his veins. Like all his batteries got zapped by Zeus himself.

It’s a great feeling, is what Keith is trying to say.

“Hi, baby,” Lance says with great amusement when Keith flops on top of him with a groan. “Long day?”

“You know it was,” Keith mutters, batting Lance’s book from his hands and securing them in Keith’s hair, face pressed into his chest and legs tangled together.

Lance takes the hint and starts carefully detangling the mess that is Keith’s helmet hair, laughing softly to himself.

“It can’t have been all bad, hm? I’m sure there were some good parts.”

The quiet, reflective optimism makes Keith smile. It’s such a Lance thing to say — to be so sure that there must have been a good side, at least some sort of silver lining.

“I guess so,” he relents. “There was this pretty interesting tour of their history museum in the beginning. You know how the Floxions have all those freckles?”

“They’re the pink ones, yeah?”

“Yep.”

“Then yes, I know.”

Keith shudders as Lance runs his nails through a particularly sensitive part of his scalp. “Well, they have this belief that each of the marks is a place where they were kissed by a lover in a past life. I thought that was kinda cute.”

“Huh.”

Lance pulls his hands away, making Keith open his eyes and pout at him in protest, because hey. He had a hard day. He deserves to be petted.

But Lance doesn’t notice — he’s busy looking down at his bare legs, pulling down the waistband of his shorts slightly the glance at his hip. Then he tilts his head down to his chest. Finally he looks back at Keith, brows raised playfully.

“You were a fuckin’ horndog in our last life, then, babe. I have freckles all over.”

And then he bursts into giggles, covering his mouth with his hand and scrunching his face so hard Keith can barely see the brown of his eyes.

It’s a joke. Lance is teasing him, poking fun at the way Keith likes to kiss him all over and mark him up when they make love. This is nothing new, really, nothing he hasn’t heard a thousand times before.

But that’s not why Keith’s mouth has gone dry, or why he stares at his lover in a quiet sort of awe. It’s that Lance heard about marks from a past life, of the imprints a lover might make on your soul, and he didn’t even hesitate before thinking of Keith. Didn’t consider any other option, exhaust any other possibility — he was as sure as the day is long that his soul is entwined, unquestionably, with Keith’s. As if they have been each other’s since the dawn of time, in every life, in every way.

“I love you,” Keith says, a little helplessly. It doesn’t feel like enough. How can three little words capture the intensity he’s feeling in his chest, his throat, his lungs? How can eight letters convey the desperate kind of devotion that burns through his veins? How could any combination of sounds ever be enough to press the all consuming fire that burns for Lance, in every one of Keith’s cells, in the very molecules that make him?

It’s not enough. It will never be enough.

But Lance seems to understand, anyway.

“I know,” he says cheekily. “You’ve apparently been showing me for dozens of lifetimes, to cover me in marks this much.”

Keith snorts, settling on Lance’s thighs and pushing him back on the bed, grinning as Lance’s breath catches slightly. He leans down to press a lingering kiss to the juncture of Lance’s neck, and then another, and another and another and another, kissing down his shoulders and collarbone until Lance finally gasps, hands gripping the fabric of Keith’s shirt.

“When I’m done with you tonight, your next life will have more marks than clear skin.”

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Voltron: Psychopomp! Keith, Voltron’s most active frontline fighter. he’s still as willing to throw himself into danger now as he was when he was younger, but he’s certainly more discerning of when the situation calls for it. Instead, he’s learned to channel his more anxious active energy into helping with refugee efforts, being the labour to Hunk’s genius in building and planning cities to accomodate the displaced of the war. He’s settled down and knows how to articulate his feelings better than he used to, though he still relies of non-verbal forms of help (but his family knows exactly what he means). Pidge tends to liken him to a feral street cat that’s mellowed out with age and is more than content to nap all day.

Other Psychopomp Character Sheets:

Lance | Pidge | Keith | Hunk

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slowly allowing my ideal version of voltron out of my brain by redesigning the characters at the end of the series when they’re older…. may or may not add more, but here. 27 year old Lance McClain, Voltron’s Eyes

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lovely to be rained on with you

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i’m not saying “do it anyway” (but you’re going to)

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something quick before bed

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kick 2025 ?? it’s more likely than you think

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I felt like it would have been Lance

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keith's like, why's this guy mad at me so early in the day

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klance text posts i hope they explode

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drew them a while ago (you can use them as icons with credits! i kinda made them as icons in the first place lol)

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leggy lance

bonus keith live reaction:

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has anyone done this yet

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Idea foe herlem lance. What if the team and otjer members of Harlem ask Slav who's in the lead 4 winning lance heart. They also ask how in other realities did they woo pance. Likevif one universe where allura is canon or shance is canon, they wanna know how they got together

Is it bad I want Slav to be a little shit and not answer them directly? Like:

Shiro: So… How’s the ranking?Slav: You went up, for sure.Shiro: Ok, but what’s my position?Slav: Still lower than Keith.Keith: *flips the bird at Shiro without looking away from Lance who’s blabbing about something or another*

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Allura: Are there realities where I end up with Lance?Slav: It’s statistically impossible for them to not exist.Allura: *fist bumps the air like she learned from Lance*Slav: Not all end up in a nice way though.Allura:… Listen here, you little bastard–

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Pidge: So, how are ending up together?Slav: You and Lance?Pidge: Duh.Slav: Well, depending of the reality, you’ll confess on his deathbed.Pidge: You’re so goddamn lucky Lance likes you, you fucking centipede-owl.