Chapter Text
Even after several days had passed, Keith could hardly believe that he’d nearly been assaulted over Pokémon, of all things. Sure, he hadn’t actually gotten hurt, but that wasn’t for lack of trying; it was just that that Lance guy was a complete and utter dolt who probably didn’t know up from down. And yes, Keith had probably spent over sixty percent of his waking hours over the past two weeks playing the game himself, and yes, he did pride himself on having the strongest team on his floor by a long shot, but that other guy—man. At least Keith had limits.
By then, he’d at least figured out that this probably had something to do with the events of the night he’d taken the Cheeseboard gym. He couldn’t remember doing anything offensive, but it was possible—probable?—that it was some unspoken social agreement he’d broken. Or maybe Lance was just a flaming asshole. (And it was just a guess, but he was pretty sure which of those two options he found more likely.)
Anyway, everything about it pissed him off. And because he couldn’t make sense of it, because maybe there was no sense to be made (which was a likely conclusion to come to wherever interpersonal relationships were involved), Keith dealt with it in the way he knew best: by ignoring it entirely.
It wasn’t bad, as far as coping strategies went, and maybe it would even have worked if—for example—he’d gotten on a spaceship and went to live on a distant planet where he’d never have to interact with another human being ever again.
However, since this was not actually possible, Keith found himself in the unfortunate position of still having to talk to people, at least sometimes. For example, there was Pidge—that girl who lived on his floor and who appeared, to most casual observers, to be surgically attached to her laptop. She spent most of her time hanging around in the common room because she didn’t want to bother her roommate with her typing—and to be fair, she did an awful lot of typing. She was a CS major, and kind of a weirdo (not that Keith had the moral high ground to be making statements like that about other people).
He’d heard rumors that ‘Pidge’ was not her real name, but even the professors called her that, so he did, too.
Keith didn’t go out of his way to talk to her (or anyone, for that matter), but she seemed to make it a point to greet him, whenever he passed her on his way outside. Perhaps, Keith thought, this was just one of those things that people did.
“Hello,” she said, seated at her usual table in the common room as he went by, phone in hand. “Going Pokémon hunting?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.” After a moment, she added, quite casually, “Make sure you keep an eye out for that Lance guy.”
Keith stopped in his tracks. He had a funny sinking sensation in his stomach that probably had nothing to do with the instant ramen he’d eaten for lunch.
“Lance guy?” he asked, carefully. “What, uh, Lance guy?”
“Oh, you know,” said Pidge, not even bothering to raise her eyes from the screen of her laptop. “The one who’s been following you all over the place, even though his classes are on the opposite end of campus?”
Keith choked.
“What do you mean, following me? I—wha—how—”
“Well, you see,” said Pidge, slowly and carefully, over the assault weapon sound of her typing, “I have these things called eyeballs, which are aided by the glasses that I wear on my face, that let me see things such as the fact that you are being stalked by a literal insane person. Or, you know.” She shrugged. “Everyone is talking about it?”
“They are?” Keith said, miserably. It probably went without saying, but he’d never been stalked before. Should he be alarmed? What was the correct response to a stalking? Did he need to get the authorities involved?
Correctly interpreting the apprehension on his face, Pidge beamed at him in a way that she clearly felt was reassuring.
“Don’t worry,” she said, brightly. “I’m sure he’ll have gotten over it by the time we graduate.”
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t alleviate any of Keith’s concerns.
It was bizarre how he hadn’t noticed it before, but since it had been pointed out to him he started seeing Lance everywhere. Lounging around on the lawn outside Keith’s lab period whenever he happened to glance out the window, or leering at him while standing in line for Mexican food at the dining hall—once, he even caught Lance peeking at him around a corner like the literal Looney Tune that he was, and immediately turned around and went the other way.
And it wouldn’t have mattered, but it was starting to affect his studies, which did matter. n the day that he got his linear algebra pop quiz back with a B+, he decided that enough was enough. Something had to be done.
Problem was, Keith didn’t really have anything that you could call a support group—there was Pidge, maybe, if your bar for friendship was low enough that exchanging occasional greetings in the common room met it—and then there was Shiro. Shiro was a graduate student in the aeronautical engineering department who TA’ed Keith’s solid mechanics class, and Keith was a staple at his office hours.
Thanks to this, they had struck up something of a rapport, and on the day that he’d decided to do something about it, he somehow found himself in Shiro’s office trying to—well—talk about things. It didn’t exactly come easy to him, but with some mild encouragement from Shiro, the whole sordid tale soon came spilling out of him.
“—and then he jumped me, if you can believe that, and we fell, and knocked over a table. Then, uh... his friend came, and... uh... dragged him off of me.”
Having reached the end of his story, he stopped there, unsure of how to continue. Up to that point, Shiro had been listening quietly, though with eyebrows slightly raised. But when Keith fell silent, it seemed to fall to him to speak, so he cleared his throat.
“He... jumped you?” Shiro asked. For reasons unknown to Keith, he sounded quite perturbed.
“Yeah,” said Keith, and then amended, “Kinda. Well... he threw himself at me? Then fell on top of me, I guess.”
Shiro’s eyebrows continued to inch towards his hairline.
“Did he... uh... end up hurting you?”
“Well... not really.” Keith had to admit that he’d come out of the incident surprisingly unscathed; apart from having the wind knocked out of him from the fall, he barely had a scrape. (Lance, on the other hand, had probably given himself a concussion—not that this mattered much, since he always acted kinda crazy.) “He didn’t, like, punch me or anything. But—that’s not the point!” Scowling, he crossed his arms. It was clear that he’d failed to communicate the severity of his situation; in fact, Shiro rather looked like he was suppressing laughter.
“And he’s been following you around campus, you said?” Shiro asked.
“Maybe,” said Keith suspiciously. “Why are you smiling?”
Shiro didn’t answer him right away. Instead he made a thoughtful noise, and leaned back in his chair. He steepled his fingers in front of his face, like he was trying to shape his thoughts into words. At long last, he spoke, but it wasn’t what Keith wanted to hear. “Do you think he’s cute?”
Keith sputtered. “What?” Clearly the entire world had gone mad, and he’d only just gotten the memo. Because if there was a route from the story he’d just told to the question that Shiro had just asked him—well, he sure as hell couldn’t see it.
Watching him over steepled fingers, Shiro just sighed.
“Look,” he said, “this is just a theory of mine, but...”
*
Nearly half an hour passed before Keith managed to extract himself from Shiro’s office, though this was not without learning some things about human nature that he really, really didn’t want to know. And wasn’t it fascinating, in a way that was simultaneously funny and awful, how wrong of an impression you could give someone of a situation if you were as bad at communicating as Keith was? Because there was no way that what Shiro had said could be true. It just—it couldn’t.
Could it?
To summarize, Shiro’s theory was this: either Lance was developing some very aggressive kind of brain tumor that would shortly be claiming his life, or, he had a really big crush on Keith.
(Given how much Keith sucked at reading people, he didn’t really fancy his chances playing the Lance-crush lottery.)
After all, it was entirely possible that Shiro was just making things up. He wasn’t involved in the whole mess; it wasn’t his skin on the line or his ass being stalked by some unbalanced Pokémaniac. Shiro might have been devastatingly good-looking, smart, and capable to boot, but he was still only human. Maybe he’d just gotten it wrong.
All the same, armed with his newfound knowledge of the world of romantic dalliances between human beings, Keith began to see everything in a terrifying new light. It was a world of feelings; a kind of twilight zone where sometimes people got crushes on other people, and those crushes made them act like they had brain tumors. As far as he knew, there was no precedence for people having crushes on him, per se, but there was probably a first time for everything.
He tried studying himself in the mirror critically to determine which, exactly, of his physical characteristics made him “crushable”, but, after ten minutes of silent staring, had to conclude that he still didn’t know what Lance saw in him. Yet there had to be something, he thought to himself, grimly, or he wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
He found himself longing for a world where people communicated in a straightforward manner, without relying on anything as nebulous as body language. Then that Lance guy could just have come up to him and said I like you, let’s go do whatever it is that people who like each other do!, and all Keith would have had to do would be to say heck yes or heck no, and that would’ve been the end of it.
But, as Keith knew, nothing was ever that simple when other people were involved...
*
Pidge had quite a lot of faith in her observational skills, but it wouldn’t have taken a genius to notice the new and very conspicuous presence of Keith in the common room every evening. It wasn’t that she minded, of course; the common room didn’t belong to her, and she wasn’t fundamentally opposed to having company there. But she always pegged Keith as a creature of habit, and it wasn’t like him to be moping around indoors, which probably meant that something was up.
“Aren’t you going to go Pokémon hunting?” she asked, curiously, watching him over her laptop. Keith, who was seated on the couch by the wall, morosely browsing his Pokémon collection, didn’t look up.
“No,” he said in a dull voice.
“Why not?”
Silence.
“Is it because of the Lance thing?”
More silence; Pidge took this to mean yes, and sighed.
“Have you, uh.... tried talking to him about it?”
She watched as Keith’s thumb stopped moving, mid-scroll. He had a look on his face as though the thought had honestly never even crossed his mind.
“No,” he said, again.
“Well, maybe you should give that a try,” she said, brightly, as though that solved the matter.
Keith, however, was not to be consoled so easily. He looked as though he was still thinking, and hard.
At last he asked, “But what should I say?”
That... was a good question, actually. Certainly, no answer came to mind right away—but let it never be said that Pidge couldn’t improvise.
“Oh, you know,” she said, trying to sound authoritative, and not at all like she was making things up as she went along. “Just say hi to him, I guess. Be friendly. Kill him with kindness!”
Keith just stared at her. It occurred to Pidge that Keith was the sort of person who might know many ways of killing a man, but probably none of them involved kindness. She sighed.
“Just—you know—confide something in him. Taking someone into your confidence builds closeness. Or find some common ground! You guys both like Pokémon, right?”
“Yeah,” said Keith. “Enough that he tried to kill me over it.”
Helplessly, Pidge shrugged. “Maybe that’s his way of making friends?”
She seemed to have said the wrong thing, for Keith immediately clammed up. He stared down at his lap, although he didn’t seem to be focusing on anything in particular; instead, he was frowning a little, and... blushing? He really was. It was enough that Pidge would even have found it cute, if she happened to swing that (or any) way.
“Uhm,” she said, trying not to feel like a mom encouraging her son encouraging her son to go outside and play with the other kids. “Look. Just give it a try, okay? If it doesn’t work, you can at least say you tried.” And, feeling extra charitable, she added, “You can come back and tell me about it afterwards, if you want.”
Still staring at his lap, Keith nodded silently. When, after a few moments, he peeked at Pidge from under his bangs, she made encouraging shooing motions towards him. Still wearing a somewhat doubtful expression, Keith eventually rose and left.
She watched him head out to his doom, then shook her head, and went back to typing furiously.
*
After a brief but spirited search of the area around the dorms, during which he also made the occasional stop to catch Pokémon, Keith found Lance loitering around in the courtyard, staring at his phone. He was alone, which was good because at least there’d be no other witnesses if Keith managed to make a complete and utter fool of himself.
It took a few moments for Lance to notice when Keith’s shadow fell over him, but when he finally looked up, his expression darkened. Ignoring this, Keith forged ahead regardless.
“Hi,” he said, awkwardly. “Big guy’s not with you today, huh?”
Lance fixed him with a deeply suspicious look, one which probably would’ve wounded Keith, had he possessed normal human feelings. “Why are you talking to me?” he said. “Is this a trick? Are your Valor buddies hiding nearby so they can beat me up?”
“No,” said Keith, and then remembered: confide in him. “I, uh, don’t have buddies.”
Lance stared at him. “Dude. Sad.” Then he seemed to remember who he was talking to, and replaced the pity on his face with a disgruntled look. “Anyway, beat it. I’m meeting someone for dinner, and the last thing I need is to have you hanging around cramping my style.”
Briefly, Keith wondered if Lance had always been this annoying and rude, or if it was a skill that he’d honed over many years of being a total prick. Then he reminded himself to focus, and heard Pidge’s words in his mind: Find common ground...
“I caught an Electabuzz just now,” he announced, suddenly.
More than anything else he’d said before, that got Lance’s attention. “What? No way. Those things have gotta be rare as hell.”
Keith didn’t bother using words to argue his point; instead he produced his phone, and held it up to Lance to put the evidence in display—one Electabuzz, in the digital flesh.
“You weren’t kidding. Holy crap,” Lance breathed, the envy on his face clear as day. “When was this?”
“Um. A couple of minutes ago, on the way here,” said Keith, who was mainly relieved that Lance wasn’t glaring at him anymore. But he wasn’t so relieved when, in the next moment, Lance seized him by the shoulders.
“Take me there!” he yelled.
“You don’t have to shout,” Keith said, testily, once he’d managed to recover from the shock of someone yelling directly into his face. “I’m right here. Anyway, don’t I cramp your style?”
Letting go of him, Lance waved a hand impatiently. “Details, details,” he said. “We can talk about that after I’ve caught one, too.” He was jumping around like a kid at Christmas, and his enthusiasm was both frightening and contagious. “What are you waiting for?!”
Keith didn’t have an answer for that, so he led the way. And he started out at a walk, but Lance kept barreling ahead of him even though he didn’t know which way they were headed, and at some point—Keith wasn’t even really sure when—they were just flat-out running.
“I caught it over by the convenience store,” Keith panted, as they rounded a corner.
“Shit,” Lance muttered; his eyes were fixed on his phone. “It’s not showing up—wait—THERE!”
He came skidding to a stop and Keith came up beside him, watching intently over his shoulder. It was, in fact, an Electabuzz, and Keith was amazed that they’d even made it in time.
“Use a berry,” said Keith.
“I know that,” Lance snapped. “You don’t have to micromanage me, man.” He used a berry, and tossed the first ball, which was batted lazily away by Electabuzz, who wasn’t having any of this catching nonsense.
“Your throwing technique sucks,” Keith told him. Lance didn’t answer; he had a look of utmost concentration on his face, as he waited for the perfect moment. Then, he loosed the ball. It rose and fell in a perfect arc, landing squarely upon the head of Electabuzz, and swallowing it. One shake... two... it was caught.
“HELL YEAH!” Lance crowed, dancing around. He threw an arm around Keith’s shoulders to make him dance, too, and then let go just long enough to start typing. “I’m gonna name him Edison!”
“You name your Pokémon?” asked Keith, baffled.
“You don’t?” Having finished typing, Lance put his phone back into his pocket, beaming. Then his eyes met Keith’s, and his grin faded a little. But after a few awkward beats, it returned in full force, and he held up his hand.
“Here, gimme five.”
Seeing the way Keith stared at him as though he had two heads, Lance laughed.
“C’mon, man! You deserve it.”
Keith, who had never given anyone a high-five in his life, raised his hand slowly, as though he wasn’t sure what came next. For a few moments they both stood there with their hands up, and then Lance moved, high-fiving Keith with a loud smack.
“There, you big weirdo,” he said, sounding satisfied. “Good work. Listen, I gotta run, I’m late now and if I don’t show up, Hunk will ditch me. I will—” he grinned, “—catch you later. Get it? I’ll catch you later? Ha!”
“Okay,” said Keith, who was struggling to process the fact that Pidge’s strategy of kindness homicide seemed to have actually worked. Also, his hand stung a little; he wasn’t sure he understood the point of high-fives. But, he thought, it wasn’t a bad kind of sting.
Still chuckling at his own ‘joke’, Lance waved and left.
Watching him go, Keith couldn’t help but feel that maybe there was something to this friend-making thing, after all...