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Lance has always been a romantic.
Well, he’s sure that it’s pretty much common knowledge to anyone who knows him at this point, but still the sentiment stands. Growing up, he’s always got the idea that romance, falling in love, was supposed to be a grand affair. Fleeting gazes, pounding hearts and sweaty palms, lots of dramatics and a tearful confession. And maybe kissing under the rain or something.
He’s always looked forward to it, looked forward to the rush and plunge of falling in love. After all, it’s falling in love for a reason, right? The term itself suggests losing control at some point or another, things probably got very chaotic and exciting.
And so he waits, and waits, and waits .
He has crushes. Fleeting ones, on classmates in elementary school. Brief, intense ones, on his fellow cadets.
But he knows that none of them had been anything resembling love.
And maybe it’s because he’s had such firm ideas on what falling in love was supposed to feel like that he didn’t realize until it was way, way too late. When he’d already missed the entire process and was already too deep in to remember ever not feeling this way.
And Lance looks back, tries to pinpoint when it happened. Or at least, why it started happening. What he finds, though, is that—he can’t. He doesn’t know any specific moment where it could’ve happened, nor can he think of any specific event that could’ve toggled the switch from friendship to love .
It’s not until one day, sitting by a window with Keith, looking out at all the planets and solar systems and stars they’re passing that he realizes maybe he’s been looking at it wrong.
Maybe it hadn’t been a single event or a specific moment. Maybe it had been less like a puzzle, where the pieces fell together to create something, with the last piece like that final nail in the coffin. Maybe it had been more like—dominoes, a chain of things that affect each other so intrinsically that from the moment the first one fell, it was already determined that the last one would too.
And he thinks, all the way back to the first time they met, from petty rivalries to grudging respect to whole-hearted trust, and the way nods turned into Good job s turned into high fives turned into hugs.
Lance remembers arguments over stupid things. And it’s not like they don’t bicker over small stuff now because oh, they do . It’s different now, though. Because somewhere between one-on-one training sessions, late-night talks in the kitchen, and this , stargazing in the dark, something’s not quite the same anymore.
Looking over at Keith, who has his head tilted back and eyes focused on something far away, Lance can’t help but recall the first time he knew he was way too far gone on this boy. It’d been similar to right now, just the two of them, watching stars.
He’d looked at Keith and the way the stars had lit up his face, and the way he smiled while going on about something so mundane that Lance can’t recall what it had been about. But he’d just looked so beautiful, and Lance had thought, God, I don’t ever want to have to live without him .
And that’s when he knew.
It wasn’t earth-shattering, it wasn’t world-ending, it was a simple thought like any other that he had throughout the day. Lance hadn’t even been surprised because it’d been a long time coming.
Falling in love was supposed to involve a fall , somewhere. A loss of control, a rush, a plunge. Maybe it would be like the ground falling out, or a long dive off a cliff.
He thinks for him, it might’ve been more like a waterfall. The river starts and flows for miles, twisting here and winding there, before arriving at the inevitable drop. Afterwards, the water rejoins the river below and it continues on.
(He pats himself on the back for that one, because it was poetic and he’s quite impressed with himself for thinking of it.)
Briefly, he wonders if it’s unrequited. But then he thinks to the gentle hands steadying him after a stumble, the lingering gazes he feels on his back, and the nights like this, sitting side by side for hours with barely an inch of space between their fingers, and he thinks, No way .
Keith turns his head so that he’s looking at Lance and their eyes meet, but Lance doesn’t look away. And Keith smiles like he knows.
And Lance can’t help but smile back.
He doesn’t know how long they sit there afterwards, but he does know that at some point Keith had bumped Lance’s hand with his own, small and deliberate, and if there had been a way to stop smiling before, it sure doesn’t exist anymore.
Nothing else happens that night, but if the next day Keith’s eyes are brighter and Lance’s grins were bigger, then well —no one else has to know.
They continue to sit by the windows and stargaze together on many nights. It was a thing they had started by coincidence, and there’s never any spoken agreement about it. It was simply just that if either of them felt up to it, they went. So sometimes Lance sat alone, and he assumes that it happened to Keith as well.
But more often than not, they do it together. Sometimes they filled the silence with conversations, topics ranging from earth to space to the castle and everything in between, and other times they sat in silence. When it’s quiet, Lance’s thoughts are loud and clear, and he’s left to spend time with them by himself.
Keith said once that Lance probably thought more in the time that they sit in silence than he did during the rest of the day combined. Lance had vehemently disagreed, assuring him that Lance thought about lots of things at all times , but he can’t really deny that his mind never wanders any other time like it does during the gaps in their conversations at night. Maybe that’s reason that everything happens during their late-night bonding by the windows.
When one day, a while after he’d sat beside Keith and contemplated their relationship from the from the beginning to the end and then back to the beginning again, Lance grabs Keith’s wrist just before they part ways to head to their rooms, Keith doesn’t even hesitate before kissing Lance on the corner of his mouth.
It’s a small, chaste kiss, and it’s really nothing grand at all. Not like the pounding hearts and sweating palms or the passionate kiss in the rain that he’d imagined so long ago, but Lance has already let go of those ideas long ago. Falling in love hadn’t been a fast, exhilarating downward spiral, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good fall, all things considered.
All the flair and dramatics are overrated, Lance thinks. The feeling he got when he saw the small smile on Keith’s lips when he pulled away feels better than any teary confession ever will, and well, Lance has always been a romantic.
"Well now, really, when we go back into falling in love.
And say, it's crazy. Falling. You see? We don't say 'rising into love.'
There is in it the idea of the fall."
—Alan Watts, Falling Into Love