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VII.
When Lance steps out of the shower and HELP is written on the bathroom mirror, his first thought is: oh, okay. I've finally lost it.
At first, he thinks—or hopes—that it's a trick of the light, but he blinks the water out of his eyes, leans closer, and it’s clear against the steam gathered on the mirror. HELP. Real horror movie shit, honestly, but instead of jagged and ominous it's just…handwriting. Strangely familiar in the way that all-caps lettering all sort of looks the same, though the slant and scrawl of it isn't exactly common; Lance allows himself to brush it off as déjà vu. Something like that, at least.
He hasn’t been sleeping well recently. Or at all, some nights. There’s the dull thrum of a headache pressing at the back of his skull, and his muscles are all heat-loose from the shower, steam curling the hairs at the nape of his neck. He stares blankly at the mirror for a few long moments, then slowly raises his hand and wipes the letters away in one long stroke across the glassy surface.
There's something heavy settled in the air around him. The humidity of leftover steam trickles easily through the door, slightly ajar, and it pulls the warm flush from his cheeks along with it.
“Huh,” he says aloud, eyes fixed on the door handle. He closes the door behind him when he showers—it traps the steam into a satisfying fog, pressing against his skin and leaving heat-flush imprints. Right now, he feels the cold tile under his bare feet and goosebumps tracing the line of his shoulders.
The bathroom door is open.
He presses a damp palm to it, pushing it the rest of the way open, the hinges creaking in the silence of his apartment. Maybe it’s just because of how paranoid he’s been lately—which is ‘a common response’, according to his therapist—but it sets him on edge more than it should. As time passes, that paranoia is starting to feel a little more…pathetic. But he shakes the thought from his head as quickly as it comes, and wipes the mix of sweat and shower water from his forehead, tightening the towel around his waist.
It still feels like there’s someone watching him. He pretends he doesn't feel the prickle of it at the back of his neck as he mechanically goes about the rest of his morning routine: dressing in his work uniform, eating a breakfast that tastes like nothing, grabbing his bag off the counter as he heads out. For some reason, he’s only really able to shake the feeling once the front door closes behind him.
I.
“Have you seen Keith lately?”
The first clue that something’s up is that the question is entirely unprompted. Lance frowns at Shiro from across the counter as he wipes it down, and tucks the rag into the front of his apron. Shiro had walked in near the end of his shift, the rest of the café empty of customers. That wasn’t strange by itself, but Lance had expected a coffee order to come out of his mouth when he walked up to him.
“Uh.” He wracks his brain for a moment, trying to remember anything of the past week that wasn’t work, sleep, or watching TV on his couch. “A couple days ago? Maybe a week,” he replies. Shiro tenses his jaw, then unclenches slowly, like it’s an active effort. Lance looks at him a bit closer—there are faint shadows painted under his eyes, like he hasn’t slept well recently, and his hair is in disarray. Shiro runs a hand back through it, pushing his bangs up out of his face, which answers the question of why.
“Okay,” he breathes out. “Where was that? If you remember.”
“I ran into him on the train. I dunno, he’s been like—avoiding me. Doing Keith things.” Lance shrugs, trying not to sound bitter.
A thread of annoyance, maybe worry, pulls at his chest. He and Keith are a lot closer than they used to be, but Keith has never really kicked his tendency for avoidance as an answer to his problems. He’s been a shadow in Lance’s life for the better part of the last month, and it’s frustrating to have the reality shoved in his face that they’re not close enough for Keith to just…talk to Lance, about whatever’s bugging him. Or at least reply to his texts. He takes the rag out of his apron again and scrubs at a nonexistent stain on the counter, avoiding Shiro’s gaze.
“He’s been avoiding all of us,” Shiro says, and Lance’s head whips back up.
“That’s weird,” he says immediately. Usually, when Keith is doing—whatever he does, when he ignores Lance’s existence and Lance gets sick enough of quadruple-texting him to let him ride it out—he’s at least in touch with Shiro and Allura. Sometimes Hunk and Pidge, but if it’s bad enough (which Lance assumes it is, to last this long), he avoids them too, creeping around like a guilty dog who’d thrown up on the rug and was waiting for someone to find it.
Shiro drags a hand over his face, expression transparently haggard. “I know,” he replies, and his voice cracks a bit. Lance stares at him, wide-eyed. “Just, um. Let me know if you see him, okay?”
“Okay,” Lance echoes. “I’ll text him. I don’t know if he’ll respond, or anything, but I—I’ll give it a shot.”
“I appreciate it, Lance.” The smile on his face is forced, papering over a bone-deep tiredness.
The bell over the door chimes softly as Shiro leaves, and Lance watches him go until he disappears from view—the slumped set of his shoulders, the way he takes his phone out of his pocket and checks it no less than five times before he turns the corner down the block. Waiting for something.
Lance swallows around the rock in his throat, and gets back to work.
VIII.
The feeling of eyes on him needles Lance every time he’s in his apartment, and at a certain point he just needs to get out. Luckily, the paranoia doesn’t follow him outside his own door; maybe it’s a sign that he needs to leave the house for something other than work and groceries.
He knows he hasn’t been handling it well, okay. He’s barely seen any of his friends since the memorial—he texts them, because he knows any amount of prolonged silence would have them breaking his door down to make sure he hasn’t disappeared, too. But most of the time he’s just going through the motions of his own life, like his body is moving on automatic and he just happens to be occupying it.
The hug Hunk wraps him up in when Lance arrives to meet him reminds him of the benefits to seeing his friends in person, though. The force of it knocks the air out of him, but Hunk’s arms around him are a grounding weight, the warmth of his body heat comforting. Lance awkwardly pats Hunk’s back, his arm mostly pinned to his sides, and he hears a loud sniffle against the side of his head.
“Dude, are you crying already?” He says, muffled against Hunk’s chest, and he just squeezes Lance tighter.
“I haven’t seen you in weeks,” he replies, his voice all wobbly—yep, he’s definitely crying. “I’m in a fragile emotional state. You can’t do that to me.”
Lance forcibly relaxes, feeling more than a little guilty. Keith is Hunk’s friend, too, and more than that, Lance is Hunk’s friend. He’s barely left the guy alone since they met in third grade, even when he was clearly being clingy and annoying (and maybe busting into private Robotics Club meetings), so his recent stretch of introversion can’t have been all that reassuring. He lets Hunk hold him until he calms down a bit, leaning heavily against his chest.
The local park is a little emptier in November, but it never gets that cold in Arizona. There’s dim, cloudy sunlight streaming through the trees, grayer than it is yellow. Hunk inviting him to meet here was a pretty transparent effort to get Lance to go outside for longer than it takes to walk to his car and back when he goes to work, but he doesn’t know if it’s making him feel any better.
Part of the reason he’s been keeping to his apartment is that he keeps thinking he sees Keith—any head of black hair is enough to give him pause, dread and relief filling him in equal measure. He’s already kind of regretting agreeing to this, because on his walk here he saw some sort-of emo guy who looked so much like Keith that he almost ran after him. He caught himself at the last second, but the comedown from that false hope was so brutal that he had to sit down on a bus stop bench and take a few minutes to let his breathing even out.
“Sorry,” he says, belatedly, as Hunk pulls back. “I wasn’t trying to ignore you, or anything. It’s just been rough.”
“Yeah, dude. Major understatement.” Hunk holds him by the shoulders, studying his face. “Have you been sleeping?” He asks, and Lance winces.
“I’ve been sleeping enough,” he replies, which is at least close to the truth. Five or six hours is enough that he doesn’t get a splitting headache during the day, and when he’s not working, he usually ends up napping through the late afternoon. The fact that those naps usually come after getting to sleep at a cool four in the morning isn’t something he tries to think about. Sleep is sleep.
Hunk clearly doesn’t believe him, but he does Lance the service of pretending he does. They start to walk through the park, silent in the late afternoon calm, and that silence stretches out for a lot longer than it usually would between them before Hunk speaks up.
“Okay, I was gonna let you decide when we talk about it, but this is killing me,” he announces, rubbing his forehead. “I’m really worried about you.”
“Huh?” Lance fumbles out. Hunk gives him a slow, meaningful look up and down.
“You look awful,” he says bluntly. “You barely text me, and I haven’t seen you in person since the memorial. Did you think that you, like, seem fine?” Lance hunches his shoulders self-consciously, averting his eyes. No, he didn’t. He just didn’t expect Hunk to say it outright.
“No,” he mumbles. “I’m—I’m having a hard time. I don’t know what else to say.” Hunk’s gaze softens.
“All of us are hurting, man,” he says. “Just talk to me.”
Of course he wants to talk to Hunk. Lance talks to him about everything, sometimes (and often) when he definitely doesn’t want to know about it. But there’s no real way of addressing how torn-up he’s been over Keith without Lance admitting to his crush.
Before he went missing, it had been too embarrassing to bring up, and ever since, the idea of telling anyone just feels distasteful. Lance feels gross enough placing his feelings on the level of Shiro’s, or Allura’s—people who had actually been close to Keith, not pulling at his pigtails. Being so miserable around the rest of their friends makes him feel like a crying baby on an airplane; no one understands why he’s as upset as he is, and beyond the sympathy, they’d all rather he just shut up.
“I don’t know what to say,” Lance repeats weakly.
“Fine,” Hunk huffs. “I’ll go first: this sucks. All of this majorly freaking sucks. I miss Keith, and I’m worried about him, and then on top of that I’m also worried about you guys. We’ve been together to check his apartment, and go to the police, and the memorial stuff, but otherwise everyone just went off on their own, and all I can think about is that one of you could disappear, too. I’m scared, okay?”
Lance stares at him, barely processing. Hunk wrings his hands, and keeps going.
“It freaked me out so bad when he—when everything went down three years ago, but at least we knew. You know I’m a catastrophizer, man, I can’t deal with not having an answer. My brain keeps—” He pauses, breathing in sharply. “—just making stuff up about what happened to him, and it gets dark. I don’t want to think about him like that.”
“Me too,” Lance says quietly. “I think…yeah, the not knowing thing. It’s getting to all of us.”
“See!” Hunk replies, latching onto his agreement like a buoy at sea. “And we can talk about it! I’m going kind of crazy on my own here, I’m gonna be real.” Guilt shoots through Lance’s chest like a bullet.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll try to be more in touch, okay? I promise you’re not gonna lose me.”
“I better not, dude, seriously.” His mouth presses into a thin, strained line, and Lance can almost see the worst-case scenarios playing out behind his eyes as Hunk looks not really at, but through him. “I better not.”
Lost for something better to say, Lance takes his hand. Hunk laces their fingers together, leaning into him, and they walk around a while longer, the tension lessened.
Lance hugs him as hard as he can when they part ways—gets the wind knocked out of him again in return—and promises to see him again soon. Or at least call him more, so his brain doesn’t have the time to imagine Lance dead in a ditch somewhere. Hunk sends him home with food, because he doesn’t seem to believe that Lance is capable of feeding himself. Which is totally untrue.
Lance eats it anyway, feeling calmer after having some human interaction beyond customer service (which is more of a torture method than it is fulfilling to social needs), and lets himself relax a bit. He does his skincare routine for the first time in a while, finally mustering up the energy for it, and runs a nice, hot shower, forgetting about the feeling of being watched. At least, until he slides back the shower curtain and looks over to see writing scrawled into the fog on the mirror.
This is the third time, now. The first was ‘help’, the second was ‘hey’, and now it says:
HEY
ASSHOLE
The first message was easily written off as a product of sleep-deprivation, or a descent into insanity, or both. The second time, it became another problem for him to ignore. This is no longer ignorable. That weight in the air is back again, and it makes Lance’s bones feel too heavy for his body; the steam curling around him suffocating instead of a warm comfort.
Okay. So. Third time is a pattern: maybe he’s being haunted. And the ghost, apparently, thinks he’s an asshole.
Lance scoffs, nose wrinkling. He presses his hand, middle finger extended, to the mirror so when he pulls back it's outlined against the slowly dissipating steam. It's more performative than anything—it’s not like mirror notes are his only way of communicating with the apparent ghost in his apartment.
“Okay,” he announces to the bathroom walls. “If you're here, I’d like you to know I’m offended.” Movement in his peripheral vision draws his gaze back to the mirror, and he gapes at it as another word is slowly spelled out.
WHY
“You called me an asshole,” he points out, trying not to think too hard about the fact that he's talking to a ghost right now.
YOU ARE, said ghost traces clumsily onto the last remnants of fog on the mirror. The letters drip down, rivulets from the previous messages—and the tasteful imprint of Lance’s middle finger—beginning to blur the words into nothing.
Lance’s eyes flick back up from the bottom of the frame, where the condensation is running down onto the sink, and he sucks in a breath when he can see the hazy outline of someone standing behind him.
His eyes track the movement as the body shifts, the form of what might be a hand reaching out to press against the mirror. It leaves the dewy imprint of fingertips, smearing droplets of water down the surface of a mirror that does not reflect it, before the outline disappears entirely. The heavy feeling goes with it.
Lance braces his hands against the sink and stands there for a while, breathing in and out until he doesn’t feel like his chest is caving in on itself anymore.
III.
The last time Lance saw Keith was two weeks before his birthday.
That's what it says on the missing person report; filed away somewhere in the local police department, collecting dust. Lance remembers sitting at the officer’s desk in the early evening, watching blankly as the report was typed up. They had gone right to the police department after finding Keith’s apartment with most of his belongings left behind, and ended up talking to officers until sunset. Lance had been the last one to see him, so he was stuck at a desk giving his statement while the others waited in the lobby, under stuttering fluorescent bulbs that cast a grayish pallor over his skin.
He gave them as much as he could remember of that brief encounter with Keith, and rattled off a description of him to go with the photo they submitted for the missing poster. Clinical, like he was watching Keith from a distance: light skin, black hair, dark brown eyes. Black pants and boots, black hoodie with a red star sewn onto the shoulder. They didn’t ask for more than that, and Lance bit his tongue not to say something like—Keith sewed the star onto that hoodie himself, so the stitching is all uneven because he barely remembered how to do it from Boy Scouts. And his boots are all fucked up because he’s owned the same pair for ten years and keeps gluing the sole back on when they fall apart instead of buying new ones, like normal person. They don’t care, anyway. He’s just a name in a database.
The officer shook his hand after, clasping just a bit too tight and giving Lance a smile sickeningly tinged with pity. He remembers being thanked for coming in, some vague reassurances about them doing their best to find Keith, and Lance had nodded, arms hanging at his sides like a puppet without a marionette after he let go of their hand. He had walked back out to meet the others in the lobby, feeling hollow and strange, and when Hunk wrapped an arm around his shoulder, he realized how badly he'd been shaking.
The other part—the part he doesn’t tell anyone—is that the first officer who he spoke to told him point-blank that Keith was probably dead. That’s how all these types of cases go, she said, leaning back in her chair and fixing him with a heavy gaze. Never a body, either. You should prepare yourself for that, she’d told him, and when she got up and walked away to get her partner to take down Keith’s description, he nearly threw up in the trash can under her desk.
It felt a lot more genuine than the smile and reassurance had. Maybe she considered it some kind of mercy, to tell him the truth.
He’d gone home afterwards, because there wasn't really anything else he could do. Shiro had given him a strained smile as he climbed out of the passenger side in front of his building, telling him to get some sleep. Hunk and Allura were already drifting off in the backseat, Pidge’s face lit up in electric blue as she typed away on her phone. He thought about telling them, then. To pass the message on, or to have someone hug him and tell him that it wasn’t true—he’s not sure which. He knew that the officer’s words were going to keep him up too late to grasp at anything resembling sleep, but he forced a smile and told Shiro not to worry about him, anyway.
There were a lot of things that kept him up that night. The look in Shiro’s eyes when he opened Keith’s bathroom door, expecting a body; Keith’s wallet and phone left on his nightstand, his clothes and bags and everything left behind like he was just plucked out of reality—and the police report, black letters glowing on a dim white screen. He could still see the writing behind closed eyelids, haunted by the finality of it. Date last seen: October 12th, approx. 9:30 P.M., by Lance Alvarez.
Part of him wishes he didn't remember as much of the twelfth as he does. He doesn't exactly have a photographic memory, but when he thinks back to that day—he can feel each part of it in his gut, almost in his bones, digging for what went wrong.
Keith had already been AWOL for two weeks when Lance walked into the train car and saw a familiar head of hair in his periphery, and he decided to just pretend everything was normal. Talking to Keith when he was in one of his moods was like approaching a wild animal—you had to do it slowly, carefully, or it would bolt back into the woods.
He had been the least excited Lance has seen anyone look with their birthday coming up. He remembers him catching sight of Lance across the car as he walked over, the way his eyes darted towards the door like he was taking stock of an exit route already. He remembers plopping down in the seat next to him and nudging his shoulder obnoxiously, putting on a smile and feeling it falter when Keith met him with a blank expression.
For all of his reserved, broody personality, Keith usually had his emotions written on his face. It was one of the things Lance liked best about him—even if he didn’t say it out loud, he told you everything. Lance could always figure out if he was really annoying him or if Keith was trying not to smile, because his cheeks puckered when he bit the insides to stop the quirk of his lips; almost like dimples. There was no trace of that, then. Keith just stared at him like a stranger.
Lance remembers him standing to get off at the next stop, even though it wasn’t anywhere near his place. When Lance had curled his hand around Keith’s wrist and asked where he was going, he'd blinked wide, dark eyes at him and stayed silent. Then he’d shaken his hand off and walked away, the car doors sliding shut behind him with a friendly chime over the speakers.
He hadn't paid attention to the heavy bags under Keith’s eyes, or how his sleeves were held carefully against his wrists, until he played it back in his mind. He tells Shiro about that part later, and it’s not a surprise to him, but Lance still feels nauseous guilt pooling in his gut whenever he thinks about it.
His name is on the police report.
The sick feeling in his stomach never goes away.
II.
The silence is oppressive as Shiro turns his spare key in the door to Keith’s apartment.
This should’ve been his first stop, arguably, after Keith had apparently skipped out on their standing dinner earlier that week and never responded when Shiro asked if he was still coming. Lance finds out, a little after Shiro showed up at his job, that he hadn’t been the first one he asked about Keith; none of them had heard from him in several days, and Allura said that he hadn’t shown up at work for his past two shifts. That, Lance thinks, would’ve made him bust down Keith’s door, but Shiro—polite to a fault—had wanted to give him space.
Well, he got his space. If Shiro wasn’t going to use his spare key, Pidge had a lockpicking kit that she freely volunteered for the task. It doesn’t end up being necessary; the day after he checked with Lance, he asks all of them to come by Keith’s apartment with him.
The door swings open into an empty living room. The layout of Keith’s apartment is a little odd—the door to the bathroom sits right across from the front door, the bedroom and kitchen to either side of the living room, which takes up most of the square footage. Lance steps over the threshold uncomfortably, despite having been here a hundred times over—it feels weird not to be invited in. He turns on the lightswitch as he does, since the sun that bleeds in through the kitchen window is beginning to dim.
“He’s probably in his room,” Shiro says, though he doesn’t sound very convinced of it.
He lets the rest of them filter in, then shuts the door behind them; the five of them linger in the living room for a long moment, waiting for…something. Keith would’ve noticed the noise by now, if he was in the other room. Lance feels dread begin to sink in his chest—they’re quickly running out of options for where to find him. None of them had seen him recently, he hasn’t been at work, if he’s not at home…
Wordlessly, Shiro approaches the bathroom door, testing the handle. There’s a soft creak as it opens, the lock unlatched, and Lance catches sight of an expression of dread on his face as he looks inside. The bathroom in Keith’s apartment is shitty and small, so it doesn't take long to sweep over the interior and figure that he’s not in there, either. Lance glances back at Shiro, taking note of the immediate relief that washes over him. It strikes him, with no small amount of fear, that Shiro might have been expecting to find Keith’s body in there.
“Shiro,” Allura says, coming up behind him to lay a hand on his shoulder. “I think we may need to report him as missing.”
“No,” Shiro says quickly, like a reflex. “No, he’s—he’s probably just out of the house.”
“Where would he be?” Pidge asks, flopping down on the couch. She spreads her hands open, gesturing to the group of them. “He hasn’t been going to work. We’re his only friends, and all of us are here.”
“Pidge,” Hunk says nervously. She scoffs.
“What? I’m not being rude, that’s just true. He doesn’t hang out with anyone else. He barely hangs out with us,” she points out. Shiro drags a hand over his face, taking in a deep breath.
“Let’s think about this,” he says, a little unsteadily. “He still might be…”
He trails off, wandering over to the bedroom door and opening it. That room, too, is dark and quiet; the blinds shut. He flicks on a light—the bed is unmade, but there’s no conspicuous lump that would say Keith is simply buried under the blankets, asleep. Shiro stands there in the doorway for a long moment, staring ahead.
The four of them give him a minute, evidently waiting to see if he’s going to say something. When he makes no move to do anything but stare at Keith’s empty bedroom, Pidge stands up, starting to rifle through a pile of mail on the coffee table. Allura gives her a confused look.
“I’m checking for dates. At least then we know when the last time he checked his mailbox in the lobby was,” she explains, then frowns at the stunned silence that she receives. “What? Look, if he’s missing, we should be looking for clues.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Allura replies, heading over to the kitchen. “I should check his pantry, he may simply be out buying groceries.”
“I don’t know if that will help,” Lance says, grimacing. “Keith’s idea of fully-stocked is not anywhere near the average person’s.” Allura visibly deflates.
“That’s true,” she sighs. “Well, maybe there are some other clues to his whereabouts…he’s certainly left dishes behind.” She mutters that last part under her breath, disappearing around the edge of the doorway.
Lance lingers awkwardly at the center of the room, listening to Allura’s footsteps on the creaking floorboards and watching Pidge and Hunk poke around. He goes somewhere far away in his mind, like he’s watching it all happen in third person, and wonders if that’s what Shiro was doing. A cursory glance tells him that Shiro’s gotten himself unstuck, at some point while the rest of them set off to play detective. He’s walking around Keith’s room, having pulled the blinds open.
“Oh,” Allura says softly, from the other room, her footsteps stilling. Lance pokes his head into the kitchen to find her now similarly stuck, staring at the square window above the sink.
“What’s up?” He asks, and Allura turns to look at him, blinking slowly.
“It’s nothing, I’m sure, but—” She points towards the windowsill. “His plant.”
The pothos above the sink is thoroughly, thoroughly dead. Keith has had that plant for years, and it was the only one that survived his attempt at becoming the kind of person who keeps a lot of plants in his apartment. It may have been at the behest of his therapist, actually—Lance had made a bewildered comment about it when he came to hang out at Keith’s apartment and it was suddenly very green, and Keith mumbled something noncommittal about making his place less miserable, and being responsible for keeping something else alive. It was a good effort, but he has, like, the polar opposite of a green thumb. He’d managed to kill a cactus, which Lance wasn’t even aware was possible.
The pothos, though, was a stubborn thing which survived many waterings from Keith that Lance would have classified as drownings. Thrived, even; its vines winding up the dark wooden frame of the window and pressing its leaves closer to the sun. Keith seemed to have an easier time keeping track of a single plant’s maintenance, and he gradually got better at taking care of it until it filled out its pot and became a stalwart presence in his kitchen.
The window is cracked the tiniest bit, and a breeze sends one desiccated leaf fluttering through the air, landing on the floor between Lance and Allura. They look back up at each other, and though her expression doesn’t give much away, he knows that she’s thinking the same thing he is. If Keith let his stupidly beloved plant die, then something is seriously wrong.
“So, his keys aren’t on the hook,” Pidge says when they step back into the living room.
“Maybe he did just go out,” Hunk says. “Guys, does this count as trespassing? He’s gonna be so mad at us,” he bemoans, wringing his hands nervously.
“House keys?” Shiro asks, emerging from the bedroom. “Or is the key to his bike gone, too?”
“Both of them. He’s probably out on a ride.” Pidge says, pointing at the empty hook next to Keith’s front door where he usually leaves his key ring.
“I could call him?” Hunk suggests.
“He’s more likely to respond to that than he is a text,” Allura says, nodding.
“I don’t think so,” Shiro replies, and when they turn to look at him, he silently holds up Keith’s phone. Its lockscreen flashes for a moment, the background image barely visible behind a wall of notifications—mostly texts and missed calls. Lance sees his own name there, more than a few times.
“Hm.” Pidge purses her lips, getting a vacant, nervous look in her eye. “That’s not great.”
“He could’ve just left it on purpose,” Hunk says. That’s a fair assumption, under normal circumstances. If someone told Lance that Keith’s weekly screen time was one hour, he’d believe them.
“He left his wallet, too,” Shiro says grimly. “They were both on the bedside table. I didn’t see—a bag, or any clothes missing. Everything else is there,” he says, jaw tensed.
He lets that settle over them for a moment, conclusions beginning to form in each of their minds. Lance is struggling to find an explanation for any of it that doesn’t feel like a stone weighing in his stomach. Shiro walks over to the couch and collapses against it, setting Keith’s phone on the coffee table, then leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.
“There’s no, um.” His voice is unsteady, and he breaks for a pause. “There’s no note. So that’s good.”
No one says anything—Lance doesn’t know what to say to that, where to even begin—and Shiro’s face crumples before he buries it in his hands.
“I thought there might be one,” he admits.
The set of his shoulders, usually strong and steady, are slumped, trembling the slightest bit. He’s quite obviously crying, but trying to keep it down nonetheless, like if he’s quiet about it no one will notice. Hunk sinks onto the couch next to him, wrapping an arm around him and squeezing Shiro to his side.
“Hey, man,” he starts, hesitantly. “He knows we’re all here for him. And he—he would leave a note. It’s a good sign,” he assures him, even though he’s starting to tear up, too. Hunk’s a sympathetic crier.
“I can’t—“ Shiro gasps, scrubbing at his eyes. “I can’t do this again. I can’t.” He shakes his head desperately.
“We’re all here for you, too,” Allura reminds him, laying her hand on his shoulder. “Whatever’s going on, you won’t have to deal with it alone.”
Lance wants to chime in with a reassurance of his own, to get that ruined look off of Shiro’s face, but truthfully, he’s got nothing. Lance had walked into this fully expecting to find Keith moping somewhere in his apartment; he expected to get yelled at a little, and have to wrangle Keith into a conversation about healthy coping mechanisms, but nonetheless he expected Keith. He’s still half-waiting for him to open the front door and ask what the hell is wrong with all of them, breaking in and crying in his living room.
His tongue unsticks itself, and he tells Shiro: “It’ll be fine, man. He can’t have just disappeared.”
IX.
So maybe he caves and buys a ouija board.
It's not like Lance has ever shied away from the supernatural. He's been superstitious ever since he can remember: an azabache always hanging off of his wrist, a candle lit in his bedroom to burn off bad luck when he hits a rough streak, and maybe a few more questions to his neighborhood church’s priest about ghosts than was considered normal. Their friend group had always been split fairly even on the existence of ghosts: Keith and Lance on far ends of belief and disbelief, and the others dispersed somewhere in between with varying levels of enthusiasm when it came to defending their opinions. Keith had always been the one to roll his eyes when Lance talked about his absolutely real supernatural encounters, and…okay, admittedly it was fun to argue with him about it.
It’s really not funny anymore, to remember how he had huffed and puffed and told Keith he hoped he turned into a ghost when he died, just to prove himself wrong. It’s even less funny that Keith’s answering taunt was that he’d be sure to haunt Lance.
He unfolds the ouija board on the floor of his bedroom, sitting back on his heels. Realistically, if Keith was a ghost, Lance would've known from the second he brought the ouija board into the apartment, because Keith would have laughed his ass off about it. Lance had solemnly sworn off direct communication with spirits, always trying to explain how it invited them into your life, and Keith had just cracked a smile and listened to Lance ramble like it was entertaining for him.
He flattens his hands against the board, smoothing it against the hardwood of his floor, and places the planchette at its center. The thin wood is almost cold against his fingertips, and he catches himself wondering if the ghost is already here. If they'd seen him bring the board through the front door and followed, watching him unpack it and set up. The prickly feeling of someone watching him crawls back up his spine, and his hands shiver where they're lightly touched to the planchette.
“Okay, um,” he starts nervously, shifting his legs so they're folded under him. “Is there anyone here with me?” He asks. The heaviness from the bathroom seems to settle around him again. Lance remembers hearing people's descriptions of their supernatural experiences, and how they'd felt a sense of dread whenever the ghost was around. The heavy feeling is not dread, but…some sort of fuzziness. Like being draped in a thick blanket.
Lance startles at the feeling of his hands moving, and he breathes in sharply when he looks down and the planchette is settling over YES on the board.
“Okay. Fuck, okay,” he says, stricken. “Who are you?” He asks. The planchette hesitates, and then it spirals around the alphabet marked into the board, not really landing on any letters. Lance frowns, about to pull away and call the yes a fluke, before it stops the vague movement and starts spelling something out.
F-O-R-G-E-T
“Oh,” Lance says, suddenly realizing how disorienting death must be. “I'm sorry.”
I-T-S-O-K
“Uh, so, why are you in my apartment?” He asks, and the planchette lays still so long he's worried he scared them off, but it begins moving again after a moment.
I-D-K
Lance almost starts laughing. Which feels rude, but—he’s talking to a ghost, through a ouija board, and they’re using internet slang. Acronyms are pretty practical, to save time on spelling everything out, but still. It's one of the more surreal moments of his life.
“Guess you didn't die like, a hundred years ago, then.” He says. The planchette moves to YES in agreement. “How…how long have you been dead?”
R-E-C-E-N-T
Another pause—shorter this time, faltering.
I-D-K
The answer is frustratingly vague, and Lance furrows his brow. To their credit, the ghost is giving him as much information as they can for someone who must still be lost in the adjustment to the fact that they are no longer living. He still wishes he could get more answers.
“Today's November twentieth, if that helps.” He offers. The planchette darts to YES in response, then moves to say something else.
O-C-T-O-B-E-R
“Do—do you know the date?” Lance asks, his hands starting to feel unsteady. The silence that follows is crushing, and as he waits for the answer he tries not to hope. After a long moment, The planchette slides to NO. Somehow, Lance can feel the regret in the action, the ghost’s reluctance to let him down palpable.
“It's okay,” he assures them. “How about…hm. How old were you?”
2-3
Lance almost responds, but the planchette quickly darts back to the letters on the board.
B-D-A-Y
“Birthday?” He repeats. “Was—it was your birthday, when you died?” His heart thumps insistently against his ribcage. The planchette moves to NO again, a frustrated energy dragging along with it, then spells out:
C-L-O-S-E
“So…that makes you twenty-four now, technically.” Lance says, and tries not to think about October twelfth, two weeks before Keith’s birthday—
S-U-R-E
The ghost interrupts, but Lance can't be bothered to care too much when he feels someone else’s fingertips brush against his as the planchette is returned to the center of the board.
“Whoa,” he breathes, staring down at his hands. “I felt that.”
“That’s weird,” A voice says suddenly, and Lance yelps, nearly jerking his hands back from the board.
“Holy shit!” He shouts, his head whipping up towards the source of the noise, and—there's nothing. Just his bedroom wall, painted blue, in front of him.
“Could you hear that?” The voice asks, clearer this time, and Lance shudders. There's an echo coursing through it, making it sound far away, but the ghost’s voice is low and steady.
When he looks more carefully at the wall, there's a blur of something in front of him—wavy lines of distortion, like when the heat gets excessive enough that you can see it in the air. Faintly, he can make out the form of hands laying on the other side of the planchette.
“Yeah,” he says, uncomprehending, and slowly reaches out towards the someone sitting across from him. He lets out a startled laugh when his fingertips brush the distinct tip of a nose, the curve of a cheek. “Holy fuck, this is real.”
“Guess so,” the voice says, still disembodied despite the solidness of their form under his hand.
“Whoa,” Lance breathes, grinning. “Ghosts are real.” There's a peal of disembodied laughter, wrapping around Lance like surround-sound through the echo coating their voice.
“The mirror shit didn't convince you?” They ask, seemingly amused. He smiles sheepishly.
“I sort of thought I was losing it,” he admits, and, trying not to think about it too hard, says: “My friend, um—went missing, a while ago.”
A beat. Silence.
“They think he’s probably dead.”
“I'm sorry,” The voice says, genuine grief laced through their tone as if they had been just as close to Keith; had gone through all the chaos of the past month—closer to two months, now, fuck—along with the rest of them.
“S’okay,” Lance mumbles, biting back tears. Shit, when was the last time he talked to someone who sounded like they understood how he felt? His therapist helps, but he’s separate from it all. Seeing any of their friends just makes him feel Keith’s absence deeper, like a valley gouged through his skull. He feels guilty for avoiding them, but most of the time he just wants to hide away from it all and pretend that this is all one long, bad dream that he’s eventually going to wake up from.
The ghost sits silently across from him, politely not commenting on the frantic way he wipes at his face, trying to shove the tears back where they came from. He’s in the middle of something—come on, Lance. Get it together.
“Hey, maybe you know him?” He offers weakly, aiming for something like eye contact as he tries to find the distorted pattern in the wall and trace out their silhouette again.
“I only know you,” they say, blunt and simple. Silence drags on between them for a few moments, before they speak again. “Thanks, Lance.” They say, softer than before. Lance jumps at the sound of his name, staring wide-eyed at the glassy blur in front of him.
“For—for what?” He asks, too surprised that they knew his name already to form a coherent question about it.
“I don't know,” they say. “For talking to me, I guess.”
Lance does not think about how their voice sounds like Keith, underneath the strange, distant quality of it. The idea flits across his mind, and he shoves it back down before the pacing, restless thing that’s been occupying his brain lately has the chance to grab hold of it. The ghost can’t be Keith, because Keith isn’t dead. He’s just—he’s not.
“Sure,” he replies, voice thin. “Of course, man.”
The last stage of grief is acceptance. This, Lance knows, is not acceptance.
IV.
“No,” Lance says, shaking his head before Adam can get another word in. “Absolutely fucking not.”
“Lance,” Adam sighs. “We’re not asking for your permission.”
“Okay, well, I’m telling you no,” he says sharply. Sitting next to Adam, Shiro tenses. Lance has no clue how the two of them are on the same page about this. About essentially having a funeral for Keith, when Shiro had been just as dissatisfied with the way the case they filed with the police had resolved itself. If you could even call it resolved.
After a couple weeks’ worth of investigation, the cops had decided to close the case. Honestly, Lance thinks the report sat on a desk somewhere for most of that time before one of the officers picked it up, and they’d taken one look at Keith’s previous stint in inpatient after he tried to kill himself—three years ago—and closed the case. Washed their hands of it.
After what happened, Keith went through the ringer of inpatient treatment, outpatient group therapy, one-on-one sessions—therapists on therapists. Shiro was practically holding him at gunpoint to go to it, at first, but his resolve against accepting help had softened. The therapy winnowed down to just one therapist, then just once a week instead of twice, and Keith had softened, too. Seemed happy—or closer to it. One stamp on a document had rendered it all completely meaningless. No context needed; the police decided that he just went and killed himself in the middle of nowhere, without leaving a note or a clue for any of them.
There’s a moment burned into Lance’s memory, from when he went to see Keith after his attempt. Understandably, he had been mostly quiet, just letting Lance awkwardly try to fill the silence. But when Lance moved to leave, Keith had grabbed his arm and finally looked at him head-on. There was a desperate, wild look in his eyes when he said I don’t want to die, Lance. I know you don’t believe me, but I just want to—be alive a different way.
Lance did believe him. He still does, and he thinks: there is no way for him to wash his hands of this. It’s unfair that anyone could.
“We can’t have a funeral,” he says. “‘Cause—when he comes back, imagine how confusing that would be.” It’s barely a joke, and it doesn’t land. Not even a little; the expressions on Shiro and Adam’s faces, though different, are equally uncomfortable.
There’s a desperate hope in Shiro’s eyes, like he wants Lance to be right but is terrified of the alternative. When Lance’s gaze drifts over to catch Adam’s, the look on his face is carefully blank, the set of his jaw tense, and Lance knows—he doesn’t believe that Keith is coming back at all.
Anger sparks back up in his chest, but before he can say anything, Shiro cuts in: “It’s not a funeral,” he says, placating. “I agree with you, that’s moving too fast. This is just—to raise awareness about him being missing. Celebrate him a little bit.” The anger stays where it is, simmering, and Lance’s face twists up into a grimace.
“It sounds a lot like a funeral,” he retorts. “Next thing I know, you’re going to call it a celebration of life. Come on, what the fuck are we doing?” He asks insistently, splaying his arms open. It’s a gesture of invitation, for one of them to give up the pretense that this is anything but rolling over and swallowing the stamped, official conclusion without complaint.
“Look, we already told the others about this, and they agreed that it would be good for us,” Adam replies, his patience clearly waning. “I have no interest in arguing with you, Lance. We’re just asking you to show up.”
“No one else thought this was weird?” He asks. There’s a mix of fury and genuine shock—the more time that passes, the more obvious it is that some of them are losing faith, but Lance figured that more of their friends would be on his side. What the hell?
It can’t be true that everyone else has given up, when it’s so obvious that Keith is still out there somewhere. Why haven’t they been having search parties, or whatever it is people do when someone goes missing? The police clearly have no interest in helping them.
“What, so you agree with the cops? You think he went and jumped off a cliff somewhere?” He snaps, and he knows it’s cruel as soon as it comes out of his mouth. Adam winces like it’s a physical slap to the face.
“Don’t say that,” Shiro says, his voice going cold. “Don’t say that about him. You know we don’t think he would do that.”
“Do I?” He asks hollowly. “Do I know that? Because from where I’m sitting, it seems like you both think that he’s dead. No, sorry—you decided that he’s dead.”
“Stop it,” Shiro replies, the same edge to his tone. He closes his eyes, and takes in a slow, steadying breath before he looks at him again. “I know you’re hurting, Lance, but please. Stop making this more difficult.”
“I’m making—“ He breaks off into a laugh that sounds a little crazed, even to his ears. “I’m making this difficult. He’s been missing for a month, and you’re already planning his funeral.”
“Memorial service,” Adam corrects.
“That’s the same fucking thing!”
“Fine—you know what?” Adam snaps. “Maybe it is. Did you know that they found his bike?” He asks, and Lance feels everything in his body come to a screeching halt. There’s a long, agonizing pause while he scrapes together a response.
“What?” He asks, and Shiro turns to look at Adam, his face gone pale.
“Adam,” he says quietly, urgently. “We said—“
“No. No, he deserves to know.” His shoulders are tensed, body bowstring-tight.
“I deserve to know what,” Lance asks, and Shiro’s gaze turns to him, wide and haunted. “Shiro. What do I deserve to know?” He asks again, desperate.
“It’s not for sure,” Shiro says softly. “I didn’t want to scare any of you.” Lance feels frozen to the spot, just staring at him.
“Someone called in a tip based on the missing poster, and said they saw him at that canyon by the reservoir an hour away from here. The same week he was reported missing.” Adam’s voice is firm, almost clinical as he delivers the information. “The description they gave sounded a lot like Keith.”
“Yeah, but—how many people have black hair and light skin?” Lance’s voice scrapes out of his throat. That doesn’t mean anything. They could’ve seen anyone.
“How many people have a black hoodie with a red star on the shoulder?” Adam retorts, and Lance’s blood goes cold.
“They searched the canyon while the investigation was open, but no one found anything,” Shiro says, rubbing his temple like he’s trying to stave off a headache. “But they—they found a motorcycle nearby. Keith gave me his spare copy of the property record, so I confirmed it. It’s his.”
“You knew for that long?” Lance asks, and he feels the burn of anger make itself known again, smoldering inside him. “And you didn’t tell any of us?” Shiro takes in a shuddering breath, the hand on his temple moving to cover his eyes.
“I didn’t want to scare you,” he repeats, his voice small and quiet.
“When were you going to say something?” Lance presses, borderline hysterical. “Never? If he turned up dead, were you going to—“
“It doesn’t mean he’s dead,” Shiro cuts him off. “Okay? They didn’t find a body. If he jumped, they would’ve found something.”
“You don’t get to judge us for how we deal with this,” Adam says sharply. “I agreed to not tell anyone until we knew more. I’m telling you now, because I refuse to be treated like a villain for trying to move forward with the information I’ve been given.”
“Oh,” Lance says, a laugh crawling up out of his throat. “Oh, right, I suck for being angry at you. My fault.”
“Let’s all take a breath,” Shiro tries, ever the mediator, but he doesn’t sound all that calm himself. Adam waves him off.
“I told you, I’m not going to argue with you,” he tells Lance. Fucking liar—they’re already arguing. “I’m saying that we need to face the reality that it’s a legitimate possibility.”
He doesn’t say what ‘it’ is, but then again, he doesn’t need to. All three of them already know.
Lance stands, snatching his coat up from the seat next to him and wrestling it over his shoulders. He needs to get the fuck out of here. He needed to never come talk to them in the first place.
“Lance,” Shiro tries again, pleading. The anger in his gut feels white-hot, and he knows that if he stays here, he’s going to say something a lot worse than he already has.
So he just keeps his mouth shut, grinding his teeth as he storms out the front door. He nearly trips in his haste to get down the stairs of their two-flat, stumbling over the last step and headlong down the sidewalk. He feels his breaths coming heavy in his chest, and begs himself to keep it together for long enough to get to his car so he can lose it in private, but he has no such luck. He makes it as far as a few houses down before crumpling onto the curb.
He feels his body tremble as the dam breaks and tears start coming, but it’s somewhere outside of himself—he can only feel the sensation of it, his breath rattling in his chest and tears streaming messily down his cheeks. There’s no space for thinking about what he’s crying over, whether it’s the argument itself or the small part of his mind that let Adam’s words dig themselves into it and make him wonder. He just keeps himself breathing, hears his heartbeat thump in his ears.
A hand hesitantly rests itself on his shoulder, and Lance jumps. He wipes at his face hurriedly, starting to come up with an apology for whatever poor, unsuspecting neighbor whose house he’s planted himself in front of, but when he turns to look, it’s Shiro crouching behind him.
“Lance,” he says gently.
“What are you doing here?” His voice comes out hoarse, and Shiro laughs humorlessly, sitting down next to him.
“Well, I did happen to notice that you just sat down on my curb and started sobbing. So,” he shrugs. Lance sniffs wetly, giving him nothing else in response. Shiro purses his lips. “Look, I don’t think I explained myself very well back there.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” he mumbles. The fit of tears had purged all the anger from his system, and now he just feels…tired. He doesn’t have it in him to yell at Shiro for giving up on finding Keith, even if he still wants to.
“There is,” Shiro disagrees firmly. “I know you got the wrong impression about why I want to do the memorial service, and I understand why. I had the same reaction when Adam first suggested it; but I thought about it, and I realized that I need to be around people who are there to appreciate Keith instead of asking me where he is, or pitying me.
“I know how it looks, okay? I’ve been tearing myself up over it for weeks, but I think he’s right. It would be good for us to try and think about him in a happy way instead of—“ He stops, sighing. “I don’t know. I don’t know everything,” he says, defeated. Lance stares at him, swallowing the lump in his throat.
“Adam thinks he’s dead,” he says, not missing the small wince that Shiro reacts with. “You already knew that, right? I don’t know how you can even be in the same house as him.” Lance thinks he would’ve snapped by now, if he were Shiro. It drove him crazy to hear Adam talk like that, and he only had to tolerate it for one conversation. Shiro runs a hand through his hair, sighing again.
“Adam and I deal with grief differently.” Before Lance can object to that, he continues: “Someone being missing is still grief, Lance. It's not only about death. Adam and I don’t always agree on things, but I understand his thought process. He’s not trying to convince me of anything. He’s allowed to cope in his own way.”
Lance frowns down at his feet. He’s hard-pressed to believe that Adam isn’t trying to convince Shiro that Keith is already dead—it sure seemed like he’d been trying to convince Lance of it, and Lance isn’t the one married to him.
Ordinarily, he’d be admiring how measured and reasonable Shiro’s take on the situation is, but right now, he really wishes someone else felt the way he does. If giving up is the mature, adult response, Lance doesn’t want it. He wants to go back and yell at Adam more, wants to cry and scream and throw a tantrum. He doesn’t care.
“I didn’t come here to justify myself to you,” Shiro says in the wake of his silence, and Lance looks back over at him. His expression is soft, underneath the clear lines of tension. “I don’t think I need to, the same way you don’t need to justify yourself to me. But I’d like you to be there for the memorial. So, that’s my pitch for you coming,” he concludes, pushing himself to his feet. He holds Lance’s gaze, even as he stands over him, and Lance can sense the proffered olive branch between them.
“You have to tell everyone else,” he decides, after a long moment. “About the bike.” Shiro winces again.
“I know I do. I know, I’m sorry. I just—I’m trying to make it easier on you guys.” He casts a sad look down at Lance. “You don’t deserve this. You're so young, you don’t need to be worrying about this,” he murmurs.
“Well, we are.” Lance says. “Okay? It’s already happening. We might as well do it together.” He wipes at his face again, smearing tears over his cheek. Shiro keeps looking down at him, guilt creeping into his expression.
“Right,” he sighs. “Yeah. You’re right. I’ll tell them.” He agrees, and Lance nods. Hesitantly, Shiro adds: “So you’ll come?”
“I…I’ll come,” he replies, and Shiro visibly relaxes.
“I really appreciate it, Lance.” He says, so earnestly that it hurts. “Do you need a ride back home?” He asks, and Lance shakes his head.
“No, I drove here. I’ll just,” he shoves himself up on unsteady legs. “Get back to my car. Trusty ol’ Blue. Can’t abandon her on your street,” he jokes, his voice still warbly with tears. Shiro swallows, his eyebrows knitting together gently before the furrow smooths itself out again.
“I want you to know how much it means to me that you have hope he’s out there,” he says. “I do, too, but it’s—it’s hard, sometimes. It’s easier with someone else believing it, too.”
“Of course I do,” Lance replies, on automatic. Shiro nods; he hesitates for a moment, then holds an open hand out to him. Lance’s eyes flick down, his hands flexing at his sides, then back up to Shiro’s face, and the look in his eyes is sad and hopeful all tangled up together. It feels like he’s offering a lot more to Lance than his hand; more like a tether, to keep both of them from spiraling.
Lance takes his hand. That much, he can do.
V.
There is no coroner’s report delivered along with the final statements from the police. The most they get is a memorial service without a body. Never a body. You should prepare yourself for that, the officer’s voice echoes in Lance’s head.
There’s an option more terrifying than the cops’ conclusion being made out of laziness, and it’s the idea that there is a body out there somewhere. Lance had gotten his hands on the part of the police report that included the tip someone had called in—through no small amount of begging and guilt-tripping Shiro—and it didn’t make him feel any better. There was just a note about someone in the next county over saying they’d seen a person wandering out on the precipice of Marmora Canyon late at night; had been worried about their safety, but decided against calling the cops at the time.
Adam was right, even if Lance hates to admit it. The description sounds like Keith: Long, dark hair, washed in moonlight. Black hoodie with a red star.
It feels like a betrayal to Keith to think of any possibility other than him being missing, waiting for them to find him. The idea still lingers. Lance believes that he didn’t really want to die, he does—but Keith had said that in the wake of trying to, anyway. His bike sitting in Shiro’s garage after being towed off the side of the road, abandoned for a week or more, doesn’t exactly fill a person with hope. But, he thinks, maybe a little desperately. They had to tow it; Keith took the key to his bike with him. People who abandon their ride home to go kill themselves don’t do that.
They never found anything out in the canyon, anyway, and Lance tries not to wonder about it.
Here's the thing: he’s been to plenty of funerals. That's what happens in big families—lots of people means lots of death. Sometimes they were strangely impersonal affairs; a relative distant enough not to see often, but close enough to receive notice of their death. There was a lot of hiding out by the food and coffee, dodging conversation with relatives, a lot of white flowers and black fabric and empty condolences. One that he remembers well is his great-uncle’s funeral he went to as a kid: how the open-casket affair had still been something new and interesting, how he'd approached the coffin hesitantly and taken a second to understand the significance of it all.
The things his brain decides to file away and hold onto are strange, sometimes, but he understands exactly why this time. Even after a mortician’s no doubt careful tidying, his veins had been stark even beneath death-greyed brown skin, the body silent and arranged, and it stuck against Lance’s memory like an ugly refrigerator magnet. It was the first time he really understood the reality of death, felt the weight of it.
Lance lingers towards the back of the room at the thing none of them want to call a funeral, watching Shiro talk to people with Adam at his side. He stares at the picture of Keith—the big one, at the table in the front, flanked by other photos of him throughout the years. Shiro had dug up some of their old photo albums for pictures of him when the Shiroganes first took him in as a foster, and he’s been a steady presence at that table, but doesn’t seem to be able to look directly at it.
The largest, framed photo is relatively recent. Familiar. Lance looks at it until he gives up on the idea that it could feel like making eye contact with Keith again, until he starts imagining Keith laying in a coffin; appearing asleep except for the pallor of his skin, veins like spiderwebs of blue on his neck and wrists. Then he ducks out to go to the bathroom, and throws up nothing but bile into the toilet.
He steps out of the stall, wiping his mouth, and Hunk is standing at the sinks. He’s cupping his hands under the faucet, letting water pool in them, but when he goes to splash his face it’s already wet with tears. Lance feels something go soft inside him—Hunk’s always been an empathetic guy. He’s been so caught up in his own head that he forgets, sometimes, how badly this is tearing everyone else up.
“Hey,” he says, and Hunk startles, turning to look at him.
“Oh—jeez, man, hi.” He sounds strained, like he’s been crying for a while.
“Needed a break?” Lance asks, creeping up next to him and bumping their shoulders together. Hunk sighs.
“Yeah. I just—I think I was starting to freak people out. I couldn’t keep looking at his picture, or Shiro, or Allura…” he mumbles, voice wavering. Lance nods. The two of them have already lost so much. Allura’s dad, four years ago, and both of Shiro’s parents, long before they knew him; then his grandparents who had raised him and fostered Keith. It feels like a sucker-punch to even think about the last part of Shiro's family being gone, and Lance knows he’s only scratching the surface of how Shiro feels.
Allura has been taking it pretty hard, too. She and Keith spent a lot of time together after her dad died, tethered together by the shared experience of grief, and Lance would hazard a guess that she’s his best friend out of all of them. They work together, they lived together during college—they’re more similar than he would’ve thought, when he first met them. Both passionate, both ambitious and intense and self-sacrificing to a fault. It’s not that much of a surprise that she and Shiro are the ones who have felt the impact of his absence the most.
His own grief feels fake, next to theirs. He’s known Keith for years, but a good few of those were spent picking fights with him and resenting him for being so buddy-buddy with Allura during the era of Lance’s painfully one-sided crush on her. Eventually, they’d settled into something resembling a friendship, and Lance had woken up one day and realized that there was a Keith-shaped spot worn into the fabric of his life. They spent so much time together, it just became comfortable to have him around. He knew Keith without really setting out to do it: knew his absurdly picky eating habits, knew the way he clenched and unclenched his fists to calm himself down, could pick out his dark, messy hair in a crowd.
There’s something else there, too. Something that might be easier to say if Keith were—here. If they never had to put up missing posters. Lance had finally gotten his head out of his ass about it, a couple months ago, and had been gradually trying to figure out whether he should ask Keith out or dig a deep, deep hole to climb into and never come out of. That part of his brain feels like it’s blocked off with caution tape, now. Whenever he veers too close, tries to put a word to it that he doesn’t quite know how to admit, all he feels is an all-encompassing regret. Like maybe saying it out loud would’ve changed something, instead of push Keith further away.
Something about the way his grief is tangled up with that regret makes him feel dirty.
Lance pushes it down, even as his throat burns, and leans his head on Hunk’s shoulder. He tugs at the sleeve of his suit—he didn’t own a black suit before, so he bought one cheap for this. It doesn’t fit right, overly stiff, and wearing it had veered far past uncomfortable by the time he got to the venue for Keith’s memorial.
“Do you think he’s really dead?” Hunk asks quietly, and Lance goes still. He glances at Hunk through the bathroom mirror; his eyes are closed, hands gripping the edge of the counter.
The truth is, his therapist has already talked him through the stages of grief, and Lance thinks he’s going to be stuck in bargaining forever. With the police, with Adam insisting on a memorial service that still none of them have called a funeral, and with himself. Three years ago, he thought Keith was dead when Shiro was stuck at the hospital waiting on updates for hours, and Adam had come back from cleaning his apartment with too much blood on his clothes and a distant look in his eye. He had steeled himself for having to read the note Keith left behind, and live with the hole in his life.
And then he wasn’t dead.
The relief had been like a physical thing drawn out of his body, the weight of grief falling off of him all at once. Lance got to see him in the hospital, bandaged up and guilt-ridden and still half wanting to kill himself. He got to visit him during inpatient as light slowly came back into his eyes, and he got to watch the scars on his arms turn silvery with age. He got to watch him live past it.
Lance keeps waiting for the day that weight will come off, now, but weeks trickle by with no news, no grand reveal of Keith showing up at one of their doorsteps, and it just lays there stubbornly. Sometimes he stares at his ceiling and tries to remember how to breathe again while it chokes him, but even once he finds five things he can see, five things he can hear, touch, et cetera—the weight on his chest remains.
He’s torn between trying to live with it, and hoping against hope that it will go away. That Keith isn’t—
Lance can’t even think it. He’s not sure how Hunk managed to say it out loud.
“I don’t know,” he says instead, because that’s simpler. He tugs at the sleeve of his suit, trying to get comfortable, and doesn’t think he ever will be again.
XI.
The thing about being haunted is you can't find anywhere to be alone.
He's in his room, legs tucked up to his chest and face buried uncomfortably against his knees when he hears the doorknob turning. He doesn't move to get up, or look, just lets it happen. There’s no dip of weight on the bed, but that same heavy presence lays itself over him, and Lance knows that someone is sitting there next to him.
“You have no concept of privacy,” Lance manages after a few long minutes, his voice coming out hoarse. “You know that?”
The ghost, unsurprisingly, says nothing. Everything about communication with them has been picky, fluctuating at best. Lance can hear a faint whisper, can see the flicker of a shadow, but it's always in his periphery. Out of reach. He sniffs, turning a wet cheek to press against his knee and staring distantly into eyes he isn’t sure are there.
After a moment drenched in silence, he speaks again.
“We had a funeral. For the friend I told you about,” he mumbles. It kind of feels like talking to no one, but he figures he's already halfway off the deep end—might as well dive the rest of the way in. “I mean, no one called it a funeral, but that’s pretty much what it was.”
He feels the faint brush of fingers against his hand where it’s wrapped around his knees, keeping him curled into himself. It feels like an invitation to continue.
“They closed the case so fast. Something about…special circumstances, I don’t know. ‘Abnormal behavior’. I forget how they phrased it, it just sounded like—bullshit.” He lets out a watery laugh. “I still think it’s bullshit. I don’t—he’s not dead. Him acting weird doesn’t mean he’s dead. He was always acting weird.”
There's a soft hiss of air that almost sounds like laughter, if Lance strains his hearing hard enough. The phantom sensation of a hand tentatively brushes against his shoulder.
“I think,” Lance starts, voice cracking slightly and fresh tears already pooling in his eyes. “What—what makes this all worse is he almost died. A couple years ago.” He pauses, sniffling and wiping his nose on his sleeve messily. At this point, he's sort of past caring. “It wasn't good, but he ended up being okay, and I just—I keep feeling like—”
“He's going to be okay again?” A whisper-thin voice finishes for him. Lance buries his face against his knees again, nodding. There's silence again, for a while, and it's not clear if the ghost isn't talking, or if whatever they're saying just isn't coming through. The silence drags on for a while, and then—slowly—Lance feels arms wrap around him.
Touch has, for some reason, been the only thing the ghost can consistently do, and it feels different than Lance expected it to. There’s an absence of warmth, but it doesn’t feel cold, or like a chill down his spine. Not the way people usually describe ghosts, or the way they show it in movies. It feels a lot like touching anyone does, really, just with something missing: body heat, something alive. Still, the ghost doesn’t phase through him like he thought they might—their body presses to his back, a solid weight. It’s probably more comforting than a ghost hugging him should feel, but he's exhausted and sad, and he doesn't stop himself from sagging against them, eyes slipping shut.
He doesn't know exactly when he falls asleep, but when he opens his eyes again, sunlight is streaming through the slats in the blinds and he's wrapped up in blankets. Lance sits up, rubbing at his eyes as he checks the time on his alarm clock. It’s hard to tell whether or not that was a dream. A lot of things have felt unreal, lately.
XII.
So, the other thing is—Lance doesn’t tell anyone he’s being haunted.
Partly because that sounds crazy, right? He’s not stupid, he knows his friends are already worried about him. He hasn’t been making much of an effort to hide how poorly he’s dealing with all of this; usually, he’s better at putting up a facade of normalcy, but most of his energy has been spent just getting through the day. It's not as if any of them are under the impression that Lance has purged the whole ordeal from his mind. They know he’s thinking about it. All of them think about it. That’s the hard part—if he comes clean, either they think he’s having a psychotic episode, or they believe him. And if they believe him, then someone else might start putting the pieces together in the same way that Lance has been trying to avoid: there's a ghost in his apartment who’s twenty-three years old, who died sometime in October this year. Who showed up after Keith’s memorial service and has a soft, deep voice.
It’s just easier if he doesn’t say anything.
The longer the ghost is around, the more Lance can hear them. They talk to him, sometimes, or at least respond to his idle chattering. At first, Lance wasn’t really expecting them to respond—just in the habit of talking out loud—but then a voice started talking back, and it became routine. Lance comes back from work, yells ‘honey, I’m home!’ into the apartment as he kicks off his shoes, and a weird ghost-voice echoes back from somewhere.
He’s been able to see them more, too. Not consistently, and nothing clear—just a vague silhouette that sometimes takes on the impression of features, like a quick, hasty sketch. Lance wonders if it’s because the ghost doesn’t remember what they look like. They still don’t remember their name; every so often, Lance asks if anything has come back, but most of the time he gets the same answer.
“Not really,” they say for the umpteenth time, and Lance sees a shadowy shrug of their shoulders.
They’re more corporeal than usual, today, which is why he’d bothered asking. He can make out most of their body; stocky and kind of short, baggy clothes making it hard to discern anything else. There are no details, just a pale outline that fades away as it moves up to their head. Shoulders shift back down, and Lance can just make out hair brushing their neck before it blurs into nothing.
“Maybe we should go over what you do remember,” Lance suggests, out of no small amount of curiosity on his part. “It might help, y’know. Jog your memory.”
“I don’t know that we have much to work with,” they say dryly. Lance raises an eyebrow in question, and they elaborate: “I barely had anything when you talked to me with the ouija board. I only remembered when you asked specific questions.”
“I could do that again,” he says hopefully.
“Sure. I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” they reply. “It was still all fuzzy.”
“You remembered when you died, sort of,” Lance considers. “Do you know how it happened?”
There’s a long beat of silence, and he worries over whether that was a little too aggressive to start with, but then they say: “No. There’s just nothing, and then I was here.”
“Really? Like, nothing at all?” He asks, and gets a considering hum in response. Their hair shifts like they’ve turned their head—maybe looking out the window.
“I guess there’s…the impression of something. But it’s like it’s behind a wall,” they explain, a little quieter. “I can’t—it’s hard enough remembering who I am. I don’t even know what I look like.”
“I can kind of see you,” Lance tells them, and they turn back to look at him. “I could describe it?”
“If you think it would help,” they say, shrugging. He leans in closer, squinting at them. It’s hard to think of where to start—usually, he’d describe someone by their details. Eye color, distinctive features, maybe their fashion sense. Not being able to see any part of their face makes it more difficult, but as vague as the impression is, it’s still there.
“You have long hair,” he starts, because that’s the first thing that sticks out to him. “Like, shoulder-length. You’re a little shorter than me, and I think you have, like…a hoodie on? I can’t tell if you’re buff or your clothes are just baggy.”
The ghost laughs at that, small and breathy. Their hand moves up to touch their hair, and as it shifts, Lance watches the side of their face appear behind it—tucking a lock of hair around their ear. A silvery hoop earring glints in the light.
“Oh,” he says, surprised. “You have an earring. I couldn’t see that before.” The ghost pauses, then their fingers move to toy with the earring, just as surprised by its presence.
“Huh,” they murmur.
“I’ve been thinking, like—maybe I can’t see you that well because you don’t know what you look like,” Lance says. They let out a frustrated huff.
“That doesn’t help us at all, Lance. I already told you, it’s just—” They gesture vaguely. “A brick wall.”
“But when I described you just now, I started seeing more,” he presses. “I couldn’t see any of your head before, and now the side of your face is there. Kind of.” It’s mostly obscured by their hair, except for the curve of a cheek where some of it is tucked away.
“Okay,” they sigh. “It’s your plan. So…what now?”
“Uh…” Lance looks them over, trying to pick out any other details that could help. He already said pretty much everything he was able to make out. “Well, I’ve just been calling you ‘they’ in my head. Does that sound right?” He offers. The ghost thinks on it for a moment.
“I’m a guy, I think.” The line of a jaw shapes itself into existence, half of a mouth. “No, I’m definitely a guy.”
“Okay. Okay!” Lance says, encouraging. “That’s something.” The corner of that mouth twitches, lips pursed in consideration.
“You’re probably right, about why you can see me. I can at least—I can think, now. When I ended up here at first, it was just…” He trails off, strained. “I wasn’t anything. Anyone.”
An eye blinks open on the visible side of his face, and despite himself, Lance jolts in surprise. The ghost notices it—that eye focuses on him, its iris a filmy white, and Lance sees some kind of understanding fill his gaze. This might be the first time Lance has looked at him so directly; the first time he’s had a clear point to make eye contact with.
“That’s why I didn’t know my name when you asked me,” he says, his stare heavy on Lance’s face.
“You knew my name,” Lance says. He’s been stewing on that ever since it happened.
“Huh?” The ghost asks.
“I never introduced myself to you, the first time we talked. You just called me Lance.” He swallows, tracing the cloudy lines of the ghost’s face now that he’s solidified into something more visible. It’s still vague—like trying to make out someone’s face deep in the shadows—but there’s something familiar about the cut of his jaw, the shape of that eye.
“Oh,” he says, like he hadn’t really noticed. “I guess I did.”
“Did you, like…hear me talking to myself? Or hear someone else call me that?” Lance asks, shaking off the thought.
“I must have,” the ghost agrees. That makes the most sense. Lance talks to himself all the time, and despite his streak of hermit-esque behavior, he’d been taking phone calls from his friends. Some of them had to be loud enough to overhear, or he might’ve put someone on speaker and they’d said his name. The alternative is—
He doesn’t know what the alternative is.
“What was your friend’s name?” The ghost asks, out of nowhere, and Lance goes still.
“What?” He replies, after a beat. His voice feels strangled in his throat.
“The one you had the funeral for. The missing one,” he clarifies. Lance knows what he meant. That’s not what he was asking.
“Why do you want to know that?” He’s surprised by how angry he sounds, all of a sudden, but he can’t help it. Maybe it’s the was instead of is, maybe it’s the implication that—he’s thinking about it, too. That the possibility of him being Keith doesn’t just exist in Lance’s crazed, grieving mind that has been looking for Keith in everything.
That one visible eye just blinks back at him, the vague impression of a mouth on his face falling shut. He doesn’t answer the question. The silence pulls out long enough that Lance starts to wonder if the connection tethering the ghost here is wearing thin again, but the image of him sharpens a little, and he can see the jut of a resolutely closed mouth.
“Maybe we can give you a nickname,” he says weakly, like a peace offering. “So, uh. So I don’t have to just call you ‘the ghost’,” he explains, fingers hooking quotation marks in the air. It’s a feeble attempt to change the topic, and the ghost doesn’t buy it, either.
There’s a name Lance could call him. Neither of them say it.
X.
There’s this dream he has, after the first time he talks to the ghost outside of clumsy messages on his mirror. Of a train car, clattering through the pitch-black October evening, all of the seats empty except for a hazy, heat-waved silhouette sitting a few feet away. In the middle of that nothingness, dark eyes blink open and stare at him, and Lance’s eye catches a flash of translucent teeth as a mouth shapes itself around words.
“Hey,” a voice says, echoing strangely, but the tone is deep and familiar. “Hey, asshole—“
Lance snaps awake at nine thirty, half an hour after he fell asleep, and stares at the red numbers blinking at him through the dark. There’s a weight against his arm, and as his eyes drift back closed, he sees a shadow moving next to him.
XIV.
It’s kind of inevitable that he would slip up. The idea had planted itself solidly in Lance’s brain, encouraged by the small glimpses of the ghost that had steadily become clearer. Every so often, his eyes catch on the earring in the ghost’s ear, and all he can think of is Keith telling him about piercing his own ears with a sewing needle when he was fifteen. He looks the ghost in the eye, and imagines that intent gaze dark brown instead of cloudy and translucent. He sees the hair brushing his shoulders and imagines it black, washed in moonlight.
For whatever it’s worth, he doesn’t want to. He’d love to separate the two of them completely in his mind, keep his thoughts of Keith carefully sectioned off from any implications of death. Still, the idea lingers like a predator stalking the treeline at the edges of his mind; he keeps catching himself calling the ghost Keith in his head, and each time, he’s terrified that it might be the right name for him.
However many times he’s nearly bitten his tongue off to avoid calling him Keith out loud, the way it ends up happening is mundane enough that he doesn’t realize he’s done it at first. Lance comes back home after a long shift at work, run-down and only half paying attention, and as he locks the door behind him, he calls out: “Keith? You there?”
He’s met with silence, and frowns, starting to wrestle off his sneakers. He doesn’t bother with untying them, just shoves one toe into the other’s heel and pries it off, trying to repeat the same with the other side and nearly tripping over himself when his sock slips against the back of the shoe.
There’s a blur of movement in his peripheral vision, and he looks up. The ghost is standing in his bedroom doorway, staring at him. Both of his eyes are visible, for the first time, and Lance stills in surprise.
“Oh, hey.” He finally manages to get the other shoe off, straightening up as the ghost stays unmoving. Did something happen? He’s kind of ominously still.
“What did you call me?” He asks. Lance opens his mouth to respond, running the last minute or two back in his head, and as soon as he realizes what he’d said, he slams his jaw shut with enough force that his teeth click.
“Nothing,” he replies quickly. “I didn’t mean to do that, sorry.”
“No,” the ghost says. He’s spurred into movement, crossing the room to Lance. “No, say it again.” Lance feels his heart drop into his stomach. This cannot be real.
He turns around to avoid the force of that gaze on him, taking off his jacket and shoving it into the hall closet. He stays facing that way for a while, taking more time than he really needs to smooth out the fabric over the shoulders of the hangar and pretending to rearrange the other coats hanging on the rack. There’s an agitated noise from behind him, caught in the back of an incorporeal throat.
“Lance,” the ghost says insistently, grabbing him by the shoulder to pull him back around.
He feels more solid, somehow, the echo nearly wiped clean from his voice. Lance knows before he turns that the shape of him will be clearer, but it still doesn’t prepare him. The ghost’s hand curls into his shirt, like he’s afraid Lance will run away from him, and as he stares him down, the image sharpens. Details fade in like sure strokes of a pen lining a portrait, forming the line of his nose, his heavy brow, cowlicked bangs hanging over his eyes, and Lance feels sick. He recognizes that face. He knows that face.
“Please,” Keith says softly, desperately, shadowy color bleeding into his eyes. “Just say it again.”
Lance takes in a long breath, and gives in. “Keith,” he says, his voice breaking like a kid.
He must have been expecting to hear it, but Keith’s eyes still widen the slightest bit. Lance watches clarity seep into his form, a somewhat distant look in his eye like—like he’s remembering, and that alone would be enough to ruin him. Keith’s grip on his shirt loosens, and Lance backs up, his breathing starting to come a little too fast.
“No,” he says, helplessly, like it could stop what he’s seeing. If there was any doubt left, it’s gone now. Keith stands in front of him, the same way he would if Lance had just invited him over, and everything is clear now—dark, tangled hair, the solemn twist of his mouth, the scar on his cheek that he got in a bar fight. He’s wearing the same clothes Lance last saw him in; the same ones in his description on the missing person report.
“Lance,” Keith says, hesitant and slow and him, and Lance shakes his head.
“No,” he repeats. Keith is still translucent, a reminder of what this really means; Lance can see the kitchen counter through his torso. A shaky cry tears itself out of his chest. “No, no. No.”
Keith takes a step towards him, and Lance stumbles back, his shoulders hitting the door of the hall closet. He leans heavily against it, sinking to the floor, and covers his face with his hands.
“You’re dead,” he sobs, shuddering. “You’re really—you’re dead.”
“You knew that,” Keith says, and he shakes his head.
“No,” he repeats weakly. There’s a sigh from above him. The floorboards don’t creak as Keith moves, with no weight to strain under. He feels a shoulder press against his, and Keith peels one of his hands off of his face, leaning towards him to catch his eye again.
“Lance, c’mon.” He says, too gently. “It’s been two months. You knew.” Lance stares back at him for a long moment. It feels somewhere in between normal eye contact, and how it felt to stare at his photo during the memorial service. He’s realer, like this, but there’s still something missing; it’s more like looking at him through a window.
“I didn’t—I didn’t want you to be dead.” It feels stupid to admit. Childish, to plant himself stubbornly in denial and refuse to move, like he could keep Keith alive if he just never admitted that he was already gone. “I didn’t know.”
Keith’s expression crumples. He opens his mouth to say something, but, seeming to reconsider, just reaches out for Lance instead, pulling him to his chest. Something in Lance takes it as an invitation for the floodgates to open, and another sob wracks his body, instinctively clinging to Keith. He can feel the soft texture of his clothes under his hands, and it feels almost normal; if he closes his eyes, he can convince himself that Keith is solid and alive in front of him.
“I kept thinking you’d—you’d just show up again,” he cries into the shoulder of Keith’s hoodie. “I wanted you to come back. I wanted you to come back, Keith.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. Lance feels a hand settle onto his back, stroking up and down his spine the way Keith knew always calmed him down. There’s a muscle-memory response that flushes the tension out of him, even as it makes him cry harder—the sound horribly loud in the quiet of his living room.
“Don’t you dare fucking apologize to me,” Lance chokes out, gripping him tighter. “Don’t be dead. If you want to apologize to me, don’t be dead.”
Keith is silent for a long moment, the only evidence that he's still there the hand at the back of Lance’s neck.
“You can say you told me so about the ghost thing,” he says. “If that helps.” Lance snorts, wiping his cheek against Keith’s shoulder.
“I told you so.” He takes the invitation to settle back into their typical argument, even though it comes out strained. He’d kill for any sense of normalcy, right now. “It wouldn’t hurt to hear you say that I’m always right, too. And that I’m a genius.”
“Don’t push it,” Keith grumbles, something unbearably fond in his voice. Lance laughs, burying his forehead into the hood of Keith’s jacket.
He closes his eyes again, searching for a trace of body heat that could let him pretend that the past two months have just been a really vivid nightmare. There’s nothing; just like there’s no sound of Keith’s clothes shifting, or breath moving his chest. It’s just a simulacrum.
He pretends anyway, and doesn’t let go until Keith does.
VI.
Lance tries not to wonder, but he does it anyway. At night, mostly, staring at the ceiling of his room or falling into restless sleep and letting his unconscious mind do it for him. It’s less like actively imagining it, and more a scene in a movie playing out in front of him, one of those horror movies that Keith loves but Lance had to watch through the cracks in his fingers. Just like when Keith picks the movie, it plays on whether he wants to see it or not.
He sees Keith wandering along the edge of the canyon, stuck in the wings of the scene, and no matter how much he screams at him, Keith doesn’t notice he’s there. Maybe he does, and he just doesn’t care. Sometimes it plays out differently—the rock underneath his feet crumbling away and Keith trying to step back, grasping for a hold before he falls so far down that Lance can’t hear the impact when he hits the bottom. Sometimes he walks away, and Lance watches him get back on his bike and drive off into the endless dark. Sometimes he just disappears—blink and you miss it.
Most of the time, he jumps. Casually, like he’s just taking a step forward; he goes over the edge into nothingness, body dropping like a stone. Every time, he‘s gone.
XV.
He still doesn’t tell anyone. Selfishly, he wants to keep Keith to himself.
If he was going to guess at a ranked list of Keith’s closest friends, he’d probably be at the bottom. It’s not that they didn’t spend a lot of time together, or get along—they did, in a weird way that mostly involved Lance provoking him to keep his attention—but they were never really close enough that they, like, talked about stuff. Lance tended to be the last one to find out about the deeper parts of Keith’s life, and the times when they opened up to each other were few and far between. He’d get excited when it happened, and think that he was making some kind of progress in chipping away at Keith’s tough exterior, but then the next time he’d see him Keith would be all cagey again, giving him a wide berth. That, or he’d just act like it hadn’t happened at all.
A part of him feels like Keith haunting his apartment is giving him something he missed out on while he was alive. Like it’s a gift. It’s a sick way to think of it, sicker to keep Keith away from the people he probably misses more than Lance, who miss him, in some insecure attempt to be his favorite for a little while. He considers the idea that he might get bored with just Lance around, that he might want to talk to someone else—but Keith doesn’t ask to see anyone, and Lance doesn’t offer.
The decision makes itself for him one weekend when his conversation with Keith is interrupted by the doorbell ringing. They both stare at it for a moment, like it’s alien technology, before the buzzer blares again, and Lance hurries over before it breaks his eardrums, pressing the intercom button.
“Hello?”
“Lance, hello.” Allura’s voice comes through, scratchy through the old speaker. “I happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in on you, if that’s alright.”
“Uh—” Lance glances back at Keith, standing in the kitchen, who seems to have been struck still by the sound of Allura’s voice. “Yeah, come on up.” He says, before he can think better of it.
Keith is standing behind him when he opens the door, and if Allura sees him at all, she does a great job of pretending not to. She just flashes Lance a tired smile, tucking a braid behind her ear.
“It’s good to see you,” she says as she steps onto the doormat, toeing off her shoes. “I know we’ve all been quite wrapped up in our own heads, lately, but I’m trying to do a better job of it. Hunk certainly gave me a talking-to.”
“Yeah, me too,” Lance says, only half paying attention. Keith steps closer to her, starting to reach out, but then he brings his arm back to his side, apparently changing his mind. His brows furrow, eyes fixed on her as she sheds her coat and folds it over her arm.
“Allura?” He says quietly. Then a little louder: “Allura. Can you hear me?”
She just stays facing Lance, a flicker of confusion crossing her face—he’s not sure if it’s because she hears something, or Lance’s silence is coming off as strange.
“Would you like to sit and talk for a bit?” She asks, and Lance forces a smile.
“Of course.”
They settle at his kitchen table, midday sun from the window in the living room casting a square of light over the wood. Lance makes some tea, which he pretty much only has in his cabinets for her and for when he’s sick, and she takes a cup gratefully. Keith hovers around her at the table, and as Lance sits down, he watches him reach out to touch her. His hand just slips through, fingers curling into themselves instead of around her shoulder; Allura doesn’t give any indication that she noticed it. The hopeful expression on Keith’s face shatters.
“So, uh,” Lance says, trying not to react. “In the neighborhood, huh? What for?”
“I’ll be honest, Lance,” Allura says, which is not a promising start. “Hunk is a bit of a gossip, as you know, and he told me you’re not doing well.” Lance stiffens.
“I’m managing it,” he replies, looking down at his mug. “I don’t need you to check up on me.” A dry burst of laughter from Allura has him looking back up, confused.
“Oh, no. No, I’m also doing horribly,” she says, waving a hand. “I came to commiserate.”
“What?” Lance asks, wrinkling his nose.
“No one else is interested in being miserable with me for a bit. I thought you might,” Allura offers. She takes a sip of tea. “Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s important to keep a positive outlook, but—for a moment, I’d like to wallow. In his honor, and all.” A wry smile pulls at Lance’s mouth at that last part.
“He likes to do that, yeah,” he laughs, and is rewarded with a somewhat more genuine smile from Allura.
“Hey,” Keith objects on impulse, frowning.
They each watch Allura, gauging her reaction, but there’s still nothing. Lance had been able to touch Keith before he could hear him, so he’s not exactly filled with hope after seeing Keith’s hand phase through her. Keith clenches his fists; visibly forces himself to relax, breathing out; then turns to Lance.
“Can you talk to her for me?” He asks. Lance’s eyes dart towards him before he catches himself, refocusing on Allura. She’s distracted enough by spooning sugar into her tea that she doesn’t seem to notice it. “Tell her I care about her. She can be as sad as she wants, or—or move on, I just want her to know what she means to me,” Keith says, and Lance can see the nervous movement of him rubbing his thumb against his pointer finger out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re his best friend, y’know,” he says, and Allura looks up abruptly, clearly not expecting that. “We’re not supposed to play favorites, or whatever, but it was pretty obvious. How much he loves you,” he says, filling in the meaning behind what Keith told him.
“That’s sweet of you to say, Lance,” Allura replies, relaxing. “He’s certainly my best friend. I always thought we were…foils, in a way. We understand each other well.”
“I miss her,” Keith says next to him, an ache in his voice. Lance doesn’t know if he’s just saying it to himself, but he tells her anyway.
“I bet he misses you, wherever he is.” Allura sighs, looking out the window over his shoulder.
“Is it silly of me to keep thinking he’ll come home?” She asks, and her voice is light, but there’s a sadness in her eyes that has Lance scrambling to reassure her.
“No! No, of course not. I mean, I do too,” he says. It hits him a moment after he replies that he’s lying—he knows for a fact that Keith isn’t coming back. Agreeing with her came easily, though; maybe he’s still trying to believe it.
“It’s been a long time already. There are cases where someone’s been missing for longer, of course, but those are usually…” She pauses, wringing her hands. “Well. A body.”
“He’s a tough guy. He’s probably Bear Grylls-ing it out in the desert somewhere,” Lance jokes, though Keith looms in his peripheral vision, decidedly not re-enacting Man vs. Wild. Allura relaxes a little, and as good as it feels to make her happy, guilt creeps in at offering her false hope.
“Even so,” she says, looking down at the mug in front of her, then back up at him, hesitant. “You understand how I feel, don’t you, Lance?”
He swallows. Had Allura noticed his crush on Keith? Lance hadn’t gotten around to talking about it with Hunk, much less anyone else, but he’s under no delusions that he’s a difficult person to read. He’d essentially been playing right into the stereotype of a middle school boy being mean to the girl he likes, so who knows if someone else had put the pieces together before he had.
“Yeah,” he agrees, hoping she doesn’t say anything else. “I do.”
He mostly lets Allura talk, Keith feeding him something to say to her every so often. Lance awkwardly tries to re-word the messages so it sounds like it’s coming from him, instead, and it works fine, though Allura seems surprised at how insightful he suddenly is about her friendship with Keith. It’s easy to comply with her request to wallow, but Lance keeps some of the more embarrassing details to himself, hyper-aware of Keith listening to them.
“Oh,” she interrupts herself as she glances over at the living room window, noticing the light starting to turn pink with sunset. “Is it already that late? I should really be getting back home,” she says reluctantly, standing up.
“It was good to see you,” Lance says as he walks her over to the door. She slides her feet back into her shoes and pulls her coat on, smiling gently at him.
“You as well, despite the circumstances.” She hesitates, then says: “Thank you for this.”
Some strands of hair have been left free from her braids, wispy and curled, and a curl falls into her face as she untucks her braids from under the collar of her coat. Keith reaches forward again, absently brushing it out of her face, and it doesn’t move, but this time a flicker of confusion passes over Allura’s face.
Her eyebrows knit together, turning her head towards Keith with a pensive look. From where Lance is standing, it looks like she’s staring right at him, and he watches Keith’s eyes widen.
“Did you leave a window open?” Allura asks, looking back at Lance and pointing a finger towards the living room—inadvertently pushing her hand through Keith’s sternum. His gaze drops down to his chest, staring at her wrist poking out of his shirt.
“It’s a little drafty in here,” Lance lies. “Old building.” Allura nods, casually brushing the loose hair out of her eyes herself.
“Ah, of course. Well,” she says, placing her hand on the doorknob. “I should get going before it gets truly dark out.”
“Text me when you get home?”
“I will!” She assures him, and then the door creaks open, and she slips out into the hallway with a little wave goodbye. Keith stares at the closed door for a long moment.
“Just you and me, huh?” Lance asks, a thin, nervous smile on his lips. Slowly, Keith turns to him.
“Yeah,” he says, something softening in his expression. “Just you and me.”
XVI.
When Lance was a kid, he had a bad habit of picking at scabs. He can’t really remember if it was out of impulse or if he thought it was helping the cut heal, getting rid of the scab, but either way it left him with a lot of scars from skinned knees. At some point, his mom had chastised him for it—told him that it was better to leave them alone, let them sit as long as they needed and peel off on their own rather than wrench them off before their time and get the blood welling up all over again.
The only thing it does is prolong the hurt, he remembers her saying, pressing a bandage over the red-beaded wound. You need to let some things be, ¿me entiendes?
He guesses he isn't the greatest at following advice.
“Do you remember now?” Lance asks unceremoniously over a game of cards they’re playing on the floor next to his bed. It feels more appropriate to the situation, anyway; he and Keith have been pushing as close to normal as they could, and all it really did was shift things further out of place. It’s not exactly easy to pretend everything is A-okay when your Gin Rummy opponent isn’t even corporeal.
“My name?” Keith asks, discarding an eight of clubs. “Yeah, I figured that one out.”
“Don’t be a dickhead,” Lance replies, frowning. He takes the eight without thinking, then looks at his hand and realizes that doesn’t help him at all. The game is the last place his head’s at right now, in all honesty. “I mean what happened to you.”
That gets Keith to stop, the corner of his mouth twitching downwards. He looks up at Lance through his bangs, his expression carefully neutral.
“You had a funeral,” he says, voice frighteningly steady. “I think you know.”
These are the moments in which everything before the second he said Keith’s name out loud begins to scare him. Lance knows part of this story: He knows October twelfth, knows Keith’s solitary figure out by Marmora Canyon, knows him pressing an invisible fingertip to the steam on his bathroom mirror and drawing out words, but he doesn't—he doesn't know anything else. He has no timeline for the space in between Keith’s disappearance and him resurfacing at Lance’s apartment as something not-quite human.
The times that Keith talks about the whole thing so nonchalantly shake him, for the sole reason that he's obviously thought about this a lot—enough to desensitize him to it—and Lance realizes that Keith was alone when he realized that he was dead. Maybe Lance was in the apartment when it happened, but something feels lonelier about that. Having been there, but unable to see or hear him; just serving as another reminder of the world that Keith could no longer reach.
“You know what I meant,” he says instead of any of that, folding his cards. Keith sets his hand down in turn, a conflicted expression crossing his face.
“I didn’t kill myself,” he says, and Lance has never been so glad for the way he refuses to beat around the bush. Relief relaxes his frame, even as Keith keeps talking. “I know I wasn’t—I was really depressed. I figure that was obvious. But I didn’t do it.”
“Okay,” Lance replies, feeling like he can finally breathe. “Okay,” he repeats. Keith eyes him suspiciously.
“You thought I did,” he decides.
“I didn’t.” Lance says, and Keith frowns, clearly unconvinced. “I was worried that I was wrong. That’s different. I was worried that I—that there was something I could’ve done, or some big sign I missed that you were gonna try it again, and I fucked up by giving you space.” Keith’s expression turns horrified, and Lance swallows. The assurance that Keith didn’t go out intending to die doesn’t soothe that fear, not really.
“This is not your fault,” Keith says firmly, almost angrily. Lance isn’t too sure that he’s right. “Don’t think like that.”
“What happened, then?” Lance asks, diverting the topic back. He knows that whatever reassurance Keith tries to give him isn’t going to stick; might as well save him the effort. Keith’s shoulders slump the slightest bit. While he couldn’t see his face, Lance got good at reading his emotions through his movements the way he used to with his expressions: defeat is almost etched into him, now.
“It still feels like a wall’s there,” he says. He squeezes his eyes shut, thinking. “I can remember before and after, but in the middle it’s just darkness.”
“Someone said they saw you by Marmora Canyon,” Lance tells him, because he realizes he hadn’t before. Keith opens his eyes again, brows furrowed as he looks back at Lance.
“That sounds right,” he says. “I wanted to be alone for a while. Get some clarity.”
“Did you…” Lance swallows, remembering his relentless dreams after the memorial service, after Shiro handed over the final report from the police. “Do you think you fell?”
“I don’t know. I think I remember walking away from the canyon. Then it just feels like my head’s underwater, and then.” He gestures vaguely around them.
“I’ve been wondering,” Lance starts, because he never knows when to quit. “Why me? Like—why not Shiro?” He asks. Keith tilts his head, a smile curling at his lips.
“I said I’d haunt you, didn’t I?” He jokes. Lance winces, and he can tell the moment where Keith realizes it was ill-timed. His face falls, then settles back into a solemn expression. “I don’t know. I just…ended up here. I couldn’t figure out why, either.”
“You didn't know who I was,” Lance says, not an accusation so much as it is filling the blanks. Keith shrugs.
“I didn't know who I was, either.” Lance already knew that, but it still plucks at his chest; a sympathetic ache. Like he should've known from the second Keith manifested in his apartment from whatever great beyond exists, should've sensed it or something, even before he traced those words into the steam. Should've been able to help, the way he hadn’t before Keith disappeared. Before he died.
“Lance,” Keith interrupts his spiraling thoughts, words heavy with an emotion he can't place. “I'm sorry.” He says, and it sounds so incredibly sincere that Lance falters for a moment.
“For what?” He asks. Keith looks down at his palms, the way he always does when he’s trying not to be obvious about avoiding eye contact.
“I was being a really shitty friend,” he says, voice cracking. “I was stubborn, and dumb, and I knew you guys wanted to help me but I just—fuck.” Keith sniffs, and Lance opens and closes his mouth a few times, not knowing what to say. Keith has never, ever cried in front of him before. Blindly, his gaze fixed on Keith’s face, he fumbles to take his hand.
“It’s not your fault, either,” he insists, and Keith looks up at him, eyes glinting in the light. “Whatever happened, it’s not because you ignored us. I knew who you were when I decided to be your friend, Keith. I knew you were an avoidant asshole, and I wanted to be around you anyway.” His nose wrinkles, a frown pulling at his mouth, but Lance steamrolls through it. “I’m not gonna lie to you and say I wasn’t pissed off at you for ignoring me. But it was—I wanted you to want to talk to me about it. That was it. I wanted you to trust me like you trust Shiro and Allura. When I found out you hadn’t been talking to them, either, I was just scared.”
Keith stares at him as he goes on, open-mouthed, and Lance doesn’t give himself time to think about what the emotion in his expression is. He just pours it out; everything he spent the last two months wishing he had said to Keith. He squeezes his hand tighter, ignoring the lack of body heat against his palm.
“And I missed you,” he says, voice already wavering. “I missed—I don’t care that you were being stubborn, or a shitty friend. It wouldn’t have changed how I felt even if you did kill yourself. Okay? I still would’ve…”
The words die in his throat. He’s not really sure what he intended to say—it feels disingenuous to say that he’s in love with him, but calling it a crush feels too small for what the feeling is. He cares about Keith; he loves him the way he loves Hunk, or Allura, or any of the rest of them. The thing that entangles itself with his grief, still, is the idea that he could’ve fallen in love with him. They could’ve been something, even if that something was just Lance pining after him uselessly.
“You…?” Keith asks, and Lance’s focus snaps back to him. This time, he takes a moment to scan his expression: Keith’s brows are furrowed softly, his big, dark eyes intent as he holds Lance’s gaze. He searches his face, but it’s hard to find something there beyond confused anticipation.
“I could’ve loved you,” he admits. “I was—I was starting to. But it’s because you’re a weird, stubborn asshole. I like that about you. So,” he finishes awkwardly, buckling under the weight of Keith’s silence.
Keith’s eyes widen, his mouth opening around nothing. Lance didn’t tell him to get a confession back—more like in spite of knowing he wouldn’t—but it still hurts to see the nervous, awkward look that overtakes him as he tries to figure out how to respond.
“I don’t…” He starts, and Lance winces. He doesn’t need to hear the rest.
“It’s fine, man,” he says quickly. “Don’t worry about it. I just wanted you to know.”
Uncharacteristically, Keith listens to him. He presses his mouth shut, the furrow between his brows deepening. He still hasn’t looked away from Lance; a tear still clings to his lashline, unshed, and Lance’s hand twitches with the impulse to brush it away.
“I’ll put the cards away,” he mumbles, sweeping their discarded hands and the draw pile together and keeping his eyes down as he slides the deck back into its box. He pushes himself to his feet, grateful for the excuse to escape the room where it feels like his confession is still hanging in the air.
Lance doesn’t hear him stand up—just a sound like wind blowing through the window—but a hand catches him around the wrist as he steps into the doorway, and he turns to see Keith there. His gaze burns through Lance, his expression settled into something determined, and he moves—he moves closer—
Keith’s mouth brushes his cheek, hesitant at first, and then he presses a kiss there with more intention. Lance freezes, afraid to scare him off even as he pulls back. Keith’s touch feels feather-light, as firm as his grip is; no real weight to him. His hold on Lance’s wrist loosens, fingers skating over the back of his hand as he lets him go, and after a long moment, Lance gets the nerve to look at him again.
Keith stares back at him with perfect neutrality. Of course, the times when Lance really needs to know what he’s thinking, he loses the ability to read him—or Keith suddenly gains the ability to keep a poker face. Just like the last time he saw him alive.
“I can put them away,” he says, like he didn’t just do something insane, plucking the box of cards out of Lance’s hand. He walks off into the living room, and Lance doesn’t linger to see if he spares a glance behind him.
XIII.
Lance sees him out of the corner of his eye, flickering in and out—the details barely visible, but fading in, slowly. Even without seeing them, he feels eyes on him.
Ghosts are not cold, like movies told him. He shivers.
XVII.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Pidge says as he opens the door, her feet propped up on his coffee table with a laptop balanced on her thighs. Lance stills in the doorway, keys dangling from the lock. Keith is sitting on the couch next to her.
He glances up from the laptop screen where he’s peering over her shoulder, making eye contact with Lance, and Lance tries very hard not to react to the sight of him. Pidge doesn’t seem to be able to see him—he’s pretty sure that if she could, there would be a lot more yelling happening right now. Still looking at him, Keith presses his hand against Pidge’s cheek. It phases through until his fingers poke out the other side of her face, and she doesn’t even blink.
Well, there’s that settled. Zero for two.
“Why are you in my apartment?” Lance asks, pulling his keys out of the lock and kicking the door shut behind him. With some difficulty, he pulls his gaze away from Keith. If she saw him staring at what, to her, is an empty spot on the couch, Pidge doesn’t mention it.
“Hunk has your spare key. Ergo, I have your spare key,” she says.
“Awesome. I feel so secure.” He replies, voice dripping with sarcasm. She looks up at him over the rim of her glasses.
“Hunk isn’t exactly Fort Knox. If you’re entrusting him with all your sensitive information, you’re already fucked.”
“Hunk is very trustworthy. He doesn’t break into my apartment while I’m gone, for one.”
“It’s not breaking in. I used a key,” she points out. Lance huffs.
“Okay. Whatever. Once again, I gotta ask: why are you in my apartment?” He asks. Pidge shrugs.
“A friend can’t check in on a friend?”
“A friend can text a friend to ask to come over,” he says, and she snorts, like he’s making a joke.
“Yeah, sure. Do me a favor and check your messages. And your missed calls, while you’re at it,” she says dryly, and Lance’s stomach swoops. Well. Okay, she might have a point. His notifications are getting a little scary.
“Are you ignoring them?” Keith asks, arching an eyebrow at him. “That’s my thing.” Pidge seems distracted enough by something on her computer, so Lance shoots him a glare. It’s not like he can respond to anything Keith says right now, unless he wants to look like he’s totally lost it.
“Sorry,” he tells Pidge sheepishly. “I’ve just been…” Super depressed? Getting haunted? Finding out that said haunting is our dead friend, who I’ve told no one is actually, for sure dead? He lets the sentence trail off into nothing.
“Yeah,” Pidge says, agreeing with whatever filled-in meaning she’d taken from that. Lance relaxes a little. She sets her laptop on the coffee table, pulling her legs back. “Listen, I wanted to ask you about something.”
Warily, Lance makes his way over to the couch. Keith scoots over to the far side to let him sit next to Pidge, and when he glances at her screen, she just has a blank tab pulled up.
“You doing a grand reveal?” He jokes. She purses her lips, taking a moment to answer.
“I wanted to explain it to you before you see it,” she says. Okay. Great. Reassuring. “So—I tried not to go full crazy sleuthing. I know, it’s just torturing myself, yada yada. But it’s been bothering me ever since the police closed the case, so I started poking around.”
“Like—about Keith?” He asks, the sick feeling weighing in his stomach again. She nods.
“He’s on the missing persons database, since we made that report, right? But there’s also a section of the database for unidentified people. Like, if someone turns up at a hospital and is in a coma, or something, and they don’t have ID, they’d be there.” She explains.
“Or if someone finds a body without ID,” Lance says. He can tell she’s dancing around saying it—in fairness, the last time they really talked about Keith, he’d been aggressively against any suggestion that he was dead. The only reason he’s come around is…well, the reason is sitting next to him on the couch, his eyes boring through the side of Lance’s skull.
Pidge casts a hesitant glance towards him, clearly not expecting him to say it for her.
“Yeah. Like that,” she says, then leans over her laptop.
She clicks away from the blank tab, and the page that fills the screen is from the unidentified persons system. Small text fills out all the details about the case, but the top of the page reads Red Star John Doe in clear, bold type.
“I found this one looking for any results for young adults in Arizona from October to November,” Pidge explains. “They name them sometimes, I guess, if there’s something distinctive, so there aren’t just a million John Does. This one is because his jacket had a red star on it.” Lance looks at Keith out of the corner of his eye, and finds his gaze already fixed on the screen.
“What did you want to ask me?” He asks, turning to face Pidge instead. She meets his eyes for a moment before flitting away, back to the screen, then back at Lance; some courage gathered.
“Keith had that hoodie he sewed the star onto,” she says, and he knows that she already had an answer before she came to him. Maybe she’s hoping he’ll prove her wrong. “Was he wearing that the last time you saw him?”
“Yes,” he says, and he watches the minute slump of her shoulders as the fight goes out of her. “There’s a picture, isn’t there? You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t really think it was him.”
“There’s a reconstruction,” she mumbles. Despite himself—despite the carefully collected calm he’d managed so far—Lance winces, squeezing his eyes shut. Reconstruction means a body. Reconstruction means a body that looked bad, bad enough to need a representation of what he would’ve looked like alive in order to be recognized. Pidge clicks over to the header that says Images & Documents, and a picture slowly loads.
If Keith’s ghost wasn’t sitting next to him, Lance thinks he probably could’ve made himself believe it wasn’t him. The Asian population in Arizona isn’t that small, and the approximation of his facial features is off enough that he could convince himself. His scar is missing, and they’ve parted his hair neatly in a way that Keith has never done in his life or death. The expression on his face is too friendly, the eyes vacant and unnerving, but Lance looks at him and knows that there’s not anyone else it could be. They added his hoodie in the picture, and the top of a red star peeks out over his shoulder.
“And it’s a body?” He asks quietly, even though he already knows the answer.
“They found him in the reservoir,” Pidge says, and Lance’s stomach turns. “About a week after we filed the report. He was just—floating there. They’ve been keeping him in the morgue the next county over. I guess the police departments don’t communicate with each other.” He stares at her. Keith is silent behind him.
“The reservoir?” He frowns. “That person who called said they saw him by Marmora Canyon.”
“He probably parked his bike and walked over. They’re not far apart.”
“That was way before we reported it, though.” Pidge’s mouth presses into a thin line, and Lance realizes what she’s getting at. “He was already dead?” He asks, his voice coming out small and scared.
“I think he was dead by the time we checked his apartment,” she says, the words dropping like a two-ton weight onto his chest. “It takes a week or two for bodies to float up after drowning.”
After drowning. Unbidden, Keith’s voice drifts though his head, saying I remember walking away from the canyon, then it just feels like my head’s underwater, and it takes every piece of Lance’s self-control to not turn around and look at him.
“You went full crazy sleuth,” he murmurs, and Pidge lets out a humorless laugh.
“Yeah, well, the damage was done at that point.” She shuts the laptop firmly—evidently wanting to keep the photo up even less than Lance does—and eyes him carefully. “You’re taking this a lot better than I thought you would. I was expecting you to yell at me.”
“You talked to Adam, huh,” Lance replies, just as humorless. Pidge raises her eyebrows at him, and he sighs, running a hand through his hair. “It’s—it’s been a while. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”
“Would you come with me to tell him and Shiro?” She asks, and he balks in surprise.
“You didn’t go to Shiro first?” Pidge’s expression twists, a little pained.
“I wanted to make sure before I did.” She gathers up her computer, grabbing her bag from next to the couch and packing it back inside. “I mean—I was pretty sure. But I needed someone else to be sure, too. And you’re the last one who saw him.”
Lance nods. He understands; wonders if she’d been imagining Keith in crowds the way he had for a while, if she’d stared at that picture and doubted how much she could trust her own mind with seeing the similarity. There’s a world where she went to ask Lance, and the possibility was crossed out by something like him having found that hoodie at Keith’s apartment when they went to look for him there. Then, telling Shiro about it would’ve only been an act of cruelty, reopening a half-closed wound.
Pidge stands, looking at him expectantly. “Can you come, or what?”
“Uh—yeah.” He doesn’t want to, but he knows that she doesn’t, either. She relaxes slightly, and sets her bag on the table, heading towards the hall closet where she’d hung her coat on the doorknob. She turns away from him as she pulls it on, and Lance takes the opportunity to look at Keith.
He’s staring at her bag on the table, lost in thought. His hands are resting on his thighs, and he’s slowly clenching and unclenching them into fists. Lance nudges their knees together, and he looks up suddenly, startled. He still can’t speak, not while Pidge is here—but Lance does his best to communicate are you okay through his expression, and watches as Keith’s eyes slowly refocus, coming back down to Earth.
“You guys go,” he says, his voice hollowed-out. “Go tell—Shiro should know.”
The selfless fucking idiot. Annoyed, Lance mouths are YOU okay as emphatically as he can. Keith’s reaction immediately ripples over his face, mouth twisting into a frown. His hair is hanging in his eyes, and it makes them look dark and distant.
“Just go. I’ll be here.” It’s still not an answer.
“Lance,” Pidge interrupts, and Lance sees her waiting by the front door. “Can you bring my bag?”
“Yeah,” he replies hurriedly. “Yeah, I got it.”
He grabs it from the coffee table, standing up to meet her. He digs his keys back out of his jacket pocket, following Pidge through the doorway before turning to pull it shut behind them. Keith stays on the couch, staring down at his hands, and the door to Lance’s apartment closes like a tomb.
XVIII.
It’s an hour-long drive to the morgue in Garrison, Arizona, and they make it almost entirely in silence. Lance pinches himself twice on the way there, but no dice—he still doesn’t wake up.
After he and Pidge broke the news to everyone, Shiro called the mortician to ask about how they could confirm if the body was Keith’s. In a near-comical turn of events, the bar fight and subsequent arrest that made Shiro give him a lecture so aggressive that Lance had been nervous on his behalf hadn’t just resulted in the scar on Keith’s cheek—it also put his fingerprints on an official police record. Fingerprints, which are probably their best bet for matching him to the body that’s been sitting in cold storage for the last few weeks, just an hour away.
Shiro managed to get a copy of his arrest record from the police, which was kept in their system despite the charges being dropped—the guy who Keith had been booked for assaulting declined to press charges out of a healthy fear that hitting him with a beer bottle and leaving a permanent scar on his face made the case look a lot worse for him than it did Keith. Shiro sent the fingerprints over to the mortician to run against the John Doe, and, theoretically, they could’ve just waited for an email back, but that was never going to happen. Shiro wanted to ID the body in person. As they sit in the car, the lab is still running the match, and none of them really know whether or not to hope that the drive will be a waste of time.
Lance didn’t want to let him go alone (and maybe felt a morbid curiosity about the body, himself), but no one else could make it except for Hunk. Who is currently fidgeting next to Lance in the backseat, clearly twisting himself into knots in his head.
Shiro white-knuckles the steering wheel up until they park the car, and a soft rain dapples the windshield as each of them climb out. The rain has turned the afternoon misty and gray, just as unappealing as the square, nondescript concrete building which houses the mortuary. Shiro does most of the talking when they get inside, having been the one in communication with the mortician and the only one of them with legal rights to information about Keith, as part of his immediate family. Lance waits with Hunk in the lobby as he talks to the receptionist, computer keys clacking loudly in the otherwise-empty room. After a moment, someone in a lab coat comes out, and she and Shiro disappear down the long hallway; Lance’s brow furrows.
“Are they already taking him back to—y’know?” He half-whispers to Hunk. He looks back at Lance, a little green around the gills.
“I dunno. I guess so,” he says, still fidgeting. Lance frowns.
“I was gonna go, too.” He says, and Hunk balks.
“What? Why?” He asks. It makes sense that he’s baffled by the idea. It’s a testament to wanting to support Shiro that he even came with them, given that he looked like he was going to hurl when Lance told him about the body in the first place. “Does Shiro know that?”
“I—” Lance pauses. He didn’t actually tell Shiro that he planned on looking at the body with him, but he figured it was obvious that was the plan. “That’s why I wanted to come. I mean, part of it. I thought he knew that.”
“I don’t know, dude,” Hunk murmurs. “I don’t think you want to see him like that.” A moment passes, and they both realize that Hunk was already talking about the body like it’s Keith, and Lance didn’t argue with it. They lapse into silence.
Lance doesn’t know how much time passes like that until Shiro comes back. The mortician is gone—it’s just him, his face hidden underneath the shadow the harsh fluorescent lighting casts until he steps out from the corner. Lance and Hunk stand to meet him halfway, and when Shiro looks over at them, his expression is unreadable.
“So?” Lance asks, when he doesn’t speak first. A breath hisses through Shiro’s teeth; his eyes meet Lance’s, but it doesn’t feel like he’s really looking at him.
“The fingerprints are a match,” he says, and the confirmation settles heavily over the three of them.
“Did you see him?” Lance asks, and Shiro’s shoulders stiffen, his expression still inscrutable.
“Yes,” he replies, clipped. “And now we’re leaving.”
“Whoa, what?” Lance moves to step forward, towards the hallway. “No, I was going to—”
“No, you’re not.” Shiro interrupts him with a hand on his chest, pushing him back. “We’re done here.” A confused sort of anger rears its head in Lance’s chest, and he glares at him.
“I want to see him,” he says, and Shiro shakes his head.
“You can want whatever you want, but you’re not going back there.” He casts a glance over at Hunk, who holds his hands up in surrender.
“I didn’t want to look,” Hunk says quickly, eyes nervously darting between the two of them. “We can leave.”
“Fuck you, man. Why are you being an asshole about this?” Lance snaps. “You’re not the only one who cares about him. Why do you get to see him and we can’t?”
“Let’s talk about this outside,” Shiro says cooly. His calm just makes Lance angrier, makes him feel like an obnoxious child being ignored by the teacher.
“We can talk right here,” he retorts, even as Hunk lingers in his peripheral vision, silently pleading with him to let it go. “Why can’t I go see him?”
His eyes trace over Shiro’s face again—the firm set of his jaw and mouth, eyebrows tensed—but it’s the look Lance finds in his eyes that gives him pause. Everything else is calm and collected, albeit visibly tense, but there’s tears collecting at the corner of his eye. Lance stares at him, horrified as one rolls down his cheek and his expression recontextualizes itself into a bone-deep sadness.
“He was in the lake for a week before they found his body. None of you need to see him like that,” Shiro says, much quieter. He swallows, his jaw twitching. “I wish I didn’t.”
Lance just stares back at him silently, at a loss. Hunk’s hand curls around his elbow, not saying anything, either. Shiro looks between them, then wipes his cheek, sighing.
“Let’s go,” he mumbles, and heads for the door without waiting for an answer.
The ride home is equally silent and strained, though for different reasons this time. Lance is still working out how he should apologize by the time Shiro pulls up to Hunk’s apartment, and as he’s stewing in his own thoughts, Hunk tugs at his jacket.
“Can you stay over tonight?” He asks, sniffling a little. “I really can’t be alone right now, man.”
How is Lance supposed to say no to that? He doesn’t. He just nods, and mumbles a goodbye to Shiro, stepping out of the car after Hunk. The rain has lessened, but it leaves the Arizona heat—persistent even in late fall—feeling more humid than it usually does, the air still dewy. It’s evening by now, already dark now that they’re edging into December.
It occurs to him as they climb the stairs to Hunk’s third-floor apartment that there’s no way for him to let Keith know why he won’t be coming home that night. Guilt turns on a spit in his stomach as he follows Hunk through the door, both at the idea that Keith might be waiting up for him, and at the creeping thought that Keith might not even be there when he gets back. For all his insistence on ghosts being real beforehand, Lance doesn’t know how any of this works: why Keith came back, why he’s tied to Lance’s apartment, and what would make him leave. He should’ve thought of that before he even left this morning—they just said goodbye in passing, casually. Lance hadn’t even thought of the possibility that it would be the last time he’d see him.
He tries to push it out of his mind for the rest of the evening; he and Hunk mostly distract themselves by watching a movie and ordering dinner, settling into their usual routine for a sleepover. It’s been a long day, and for all Hunk said about talking things through together, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t want to talk about it right now. Lance is grateful for it; he doesn’t know how he could get through a conversation without admitting that he already knew Keith was dead.
Halfway through the movie—a feel-good thing they’ve probably watched a hundred times—Hunk lays his head heavily on Lance’s shoulder, and when Lance wraps an arm around him in turn he feels his body trembling. It’s still left unsaid as Hunk leaves a wet spot on the collar of his shirt, as Lance holds him and reminds him to breathe, pretending he’s not two steps from falling apart himself. He thinks that some reassurance would be helpful right now, but what would he even say? The only thing that doesn’t feel like a complete lie is just repeating you’re okay, you’re good, we’re good over and over. Solace that Hunk isn’t going to lose the rest of them, too.
He almost tells him about Keith’s ghost in his apartment, then, but Hunk’s breath rattles in his chest, and he can’t get out I miss him all the way without crying again, and Lance swallows it back down.
That night, when he falls asleep, it’s not like watching a movie play out anymore. The dream is vivid, down to the bite of wind and the feeling of leather against his sweaty palms. He tries to look down, but it’s like he’s a spectator behind someone else’s eyes, unable to move himself—still, he feels the soft thrum of an engine below him, hands gripping handles, and he knows where he is. Who he is.
He watches through Keith as he parks his bike on the shoulder of the highway and wanders out towards Marmora Canyon. Even knowing that his dreams after the memorial weren’t real, weren’t accurate, Lance is bracing himself for the rock to give way, or Keith to step over the ledge. He doesn’t even get close enough for that to happen; he wanders a couple feet away, looking out over the darkened horizon. At one point, he tips his head back to the night sky above, and a long time passes with him just staring at the stars.
He does walk to the reservoir—like Pidge said, it’s not far. That’s where it goes wrong. Lance’s—Keith’s eyes skim over the shape of the dam in the distance, on the opposite bank. The water level is lower than usual after the oppressive heat they’d had that summer, still not quite recovered, and even as Lance screams at him from inside his head, Keith walks closer. He sits down on the lip of the reservoir, folding his legs under him, and sits there for a while in the cold night air. He closes his eyes, at one point, and Lance is terrified that that will be when it happens, but it’s not.
It happens when Keith moves to stand up, and he misjudges how close he’d been sitting to the edge. He braces a hand next to him, but when he moves to put his feet down on solid ground, his heel catches the rim of the reservoir and slips. It sends him stumbling, his leg buckling as the other tries to plant itself in thin air, and Lance feels the swoop in his stomach as he tips forward and sees the sheer cliff face below.
It feels too real: the fear, the racing thoughts in his head, they don’t feel like his own. It doesn’t take long to fall, and at first, Lance thinks about when he made fun of Keith for not being able to swim—feels like all of this is the universe laughing at him—but there’s a sickening crack of bones as he hits the still surface of the water, and he realizes that it wouldn’t have mattered.
The pain is the only part that feels more like a dream, distant and uncommunicated even as the rest of it feels as sharp and clear as a memory. Lance wakes up in the middle of watching air bubble out of his mouth in the dark water, sinking like a stone.
He pitches forward on the bed as he wakes, gasping for breath, and it takes a long moment to see the darkness in Hunk’s room as something other than the reservoir water surrounding him; to remember how to breathe. He sits up shakily, curling over the edge of Hunk’s mattress and starting to cough, still feeling the phantom sensation of water filling his lungs. A cold sweat trickles down the back of his neck, making his hair stick to his skin, and as Lance stares at the floorboards, the morbid thought creeps in: it takes longer than that to drown. He didn’t wake up when Keith died.
“Lance?” Hunk murmurs behind him, his voice still thick with sleep. “Whasswrong?”
He tries to say something, but the words just come out as a wet, gasping breath. He feels the mattress shift, and a broad hand settles on his back, stroking up and down his spine. The weight and warmth of it is comforting; grounding.
“It’s ok, buddy,” Hunk says, more awake now. “It was just a nightmare. It wasn’t real.”
Lance buries his face in his hands, shuddering even as Hunk wraps an arm around him, soothing him gently. He curls against his chest, letting Hunk gather him back onto the bed and underneath the blankets. Despite the restless terror that nightmare struck into him, it’s still late at night, and sleep eventually finds him again—this time, dreamless.
XIX.
Keith is still sitting on the couch when Lance walks in, and he looks up sharply as the door opens. The relief Lance feels that he’s still here is visceral, even as he feels guilty about it—he should want Keith to be able to move on. Rest in peace, and all that. He shouldn’t want to tether him to his apartment like a dog on a chain in someone’s backyard, but he does. Having him here has quelled the wave of grief, in some ways, and Lance has no idea what he’s going to do with himself when he’s gone again.
“It was me, right?” Keith asks. He twists his hands, staring at Lance. There’s the same look on his face that Shiro had walking out of the morgue: expression steeled, but eyes giving away a deep, heavy sadness.
“Yeah. It was you.” Keith’s fists clench. “You remember it now?” Lance asks, and he knots a hand into his bangs, pushing the hair out of his face.
“It came back when Pidge was here,” he replies, staring at his lap. Lance hisses through his teeth.
“Keith,” he says softly, aching.
“You don’t need to know what it was like,” Keith says before he can ask. “I’m not going to tell you that. It’s just—it’s more real, now. That I’m dead.”
He glances back up, warily, like he’s afraid there will be some expression on Lance’s face that he doesn’t want to see. Maybe there is. Lance drifts closer, sitting on the couch next to him when it doesn’t look like he’s going to make a run for it.
“I already knew that. Obviously,” Keith mumbles. “I figured it out in the first couple of days. I think it was days, at least. There might have been more, where I didn’t even realize time was passing. I kept fading in and out at first, like—I’d black out in the middle of a room and then wake up again later.” His eyes meet Lance’s, still hesitant. “It stopped happening after you could see me.”
Lance remembers when that feeling of another presence would come and go; when he saw Keith for the first time behind him in the bathroom mirror, barely person-shaped and terrifying in his vagueness. He feels awful, now, for being grateful for the times that presence was gone.
“But there wasn’t anywhere else,” Keith keeps going, the floodgates open to every piece of this that he hadn’t told Lance, filling in the space between October twelfth and his incorporeal finger on Lance’s mirror. “It was just empty, Lance. Just—gone. I don’t want to go back there,” he says, a terror creeping into his voice that Lance has never heard there before.
“You’re not going to,” he says, automatically; the look Keith gives him tells him that they both know there’s no guaranteeing that. Lance reaches for his hand, tangling their fingers together. “It’s just ghost stuff being weird, right? It works differently, otherwise you wouldn’t even be here.” Keith is silent for a moment, his brow furrowing.
“I’ve been thinking about that. How it works,” he admits. “I figured I was dead when you couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t touch anything, and then I didn’t get why I was still here if I was dead. But it’s unfinished business, right? You told me about that.”
“That’s just a thing from movies,” Lance argues.
“It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?” Keith pushes back. “My body was missing, and no one even knew I was dead. But now you do. You’re fixing the thing that’s keeping me around, and I’m—” he pauses, fumbling for the words. “I’m afraid. Of it just being empty like that forever.”
“Keith.” It’s punched out of his chest, and Lance knows he sounds ruined—but there’s no point in trying to pull the emotion back. Keith already knows. He can do with the information what he wants.
“Let me finish. Please,” Keith says, his hand gripping Lance’s desperately.
Lance nods back minutely, jaw clenched. He couldn’t look away from Keith even if he wanted to, and a part of him does want to—his gaze is a physical force on Lance’s face, eyes dark and wounded as he stares at him.
“I wasn’t going to tell you that I didn’t feel the same,” he says after a moment, and there’s a moment of confusion before his meaning punches through Lance’s chest. “I was going to tell you I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t think I do, but I want to try anyway.”
“Huh?” Lance creaks out, and Keith squeezes his hand so tight that he feels fingernails digging into his palm.
“I didn’t think I’d ever hear you say something like that, and I was just—it’s so fucking unfair that I only get it now. When I can’t do anything about it.”
“What do you mean?” Lance asks, his heartbeat thundering in his ears. Sun bleeds through the window, and it catches on Keith, lighting up his silhouette on the couch like the ring of a halo.
“I could’ve loved you, too,” he says quietly, sunlit. “Why do you think I’m here, Lance? Why do you think I knew your name before I knew mine? There was just this…tether, to you.”
He understands what Keith meant about unfair. It hits him a second after the happiness does, and consumes that happiness like a wave crashing over the shore: he feels the same way disappearing into he’s dead, and you’re going to lose him a second time. Keith’s nails are still digging into his palm, and Lance thinks his hand would be shaking if Keith wasn’t holding it so tightly.
This could’ve been the part where Lance kissed him, and they’d go on a supremely awkward date before Keith threw his hands up and asked why Lance was acting so weird when they’ve known each other for years, and then they started arguing again. It could’ve been the part where Lance annoyed him and the rest of their friends with PDA and cutesy nicknames, and he got to figure out which ones Keith pretended to hate; where Lance really got to love him, instead of something halfway there.
He knows why Keith said it, though. Why the confession was prefaced by his fear of what comes after they bury his body and there’s nothing left unfinished.
“You can still do something about it,” Lance says. Keith’s expression twists with confusion, and Lance huffs, pulling him closer by the hand until their faces are close enough that understanding sparks in his eyes.
He leans in like he’s still expecting Lance to change his mind—moving halfway and stopping when their noses brush, looking at Lance through his eyelashes. Unwilling to let go, Lance uses his free hand to cup the back of Keith’s neck and pulls him in the rest of the way. The touch of Keith’s mouth on his sparks through him like a static shock, and Lance presses closer desperately. He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to memorize how he feels, how he kisses Lance—trying to burn it into his brain, however much he knows it’s going to hurt later.
Ghosts are not cold, like movies told him.
Lance shivers.
XX.
Lance dresses in the same stiff, cheap suit the morning of the funeral. He didn't want to pick something nice, felt like picking something that he’d wear again for anything else would likely end in a panic attack in some fancy bathroom. His shoulders tighten when he feels a phantom hand smooth down the back of his collar, fingertips brushing at the back of his neck. He glances up into the mirror, and Keith stands behind him.
“Need any help?” He asks. Lance has already been fumbling with the tie for a while, zoning out halfway through and forgetting what step he was on.
He sighs in defeat, turning around and letting Keith undo the jumbled mess. He’s quick and methodical about it, carefully pulling the knot up to his throat and turning down the collar around it. Lance vaguely remembers Shiro talking about Keith joining JROTC in high school and hating it the whole time, and wonders if it’s still muscle memory to him from that.
“I wanted to ask you,” Keith starts, haltingly, his fingers still curled around the tie. “Tell the others that I, uh, I love them, too. And that I’m sorry.” He doesn’t look at Lance when he says it, staring at his chest.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Lance says. “You didn’t mean for it to happen.” Keith lets out a soft, shaky sigh.
“I know. Still.” His eyes flick back up to meet Lance’s. “You’re going to tell them about me being here, right?”
At first, Lance wants to ask how Keith even knows that he hadn’t, nervous that his possessiveness over the whole thing was obvious—but, duh, if he had, Keith would’ve known about it. Everyone would have come over and talked to him, even if they couldn’t hear him talking back. The realization strikes Lance, way too late, that he could’ve relayed what Keith was saying back to them, or they could’ve used the ouija board again. Nothing was ever stopping him from telling them, even when it was clear that he was the only one Keith was able to interact with.
He can’t imagine that no one else will think of that when he tells them, either. He just nods back at Keith, not wanting to think about how angry they’re going to be that he kept this to himself.
“Do you think you’ll still be here?” He asks, knowing the answer. Keith pauses, like he really has to think about it.
“No,” he says. “Are you going to be okay?” He knows this answer, too. Lance falls silent.
“I really could’ve loved you, Keith.” He says, voice squeezing in his throat, instead of answering him—though it's an answer in some ways. A flicker of hurt passes over Keith’s face before it buries itself.
Instead of words, his reply comes as his hand tugging Lance closer by the tie and his lips pressing against Lance’s mouth. It should feel good. He had thought—before Keith came back, or maybe before Lance knew he was back—that having this would have made it easier. That Keith knowing how he felt would make him being gone easier to accept, slake the desire that was disguising itself as regret. Even when Keith feeling the same was a distant possibility, that seemed easier, too: my boyfriend died was an easier way to package his feelings than—however he could describe his relationship to Keith. The reality of it is less forgiving, though. It’s just a reminder of what he’s losing.
Leaving Keith when it’s time for him to drive over is even harder. When Lance opens the door, Keith hesitates for a moment, then tries to step over the threshold, and gets pulled back into the foyer like a magnet. Neither of them say anything in the wake of it—Keith doesn’t even bother to explain what he was trying to do—but he kisses Lance again in the doorway, and there’s a desperation there that Lance is scared to put a name to.
He doesn’t want to be a mausoleum to Keith for the rest of his life. But, fuck, even as he drives to the graveyard, he can’t see a point where this oppressive grief ends. Someone told him a long time ago, when his abuela died and he felt a part of himself go with her, that grief doesn’t get smaller; it shapes you around it. You grow larger than the part of you that grieves, and it turns into nostalgia, or a reminder of love—something easier to think about, at least. Something that doesn’t make you feel so hopeless every time you touch it.
The funeral is a start, but it doesn’t feel like closure. Lance thinks about his literature class in college, about Orpheus and Eurydice—he thought it was beautifully romantic, back then, to love someone so much that you’d defy death for them. His brain had skipped over the finer details, more preoccupied by the love story than he was with its ending. He always wanted a better one, anyway. Maybe the appeal of a tragic romance was to wish for a happier ending, even if it would’ve softened the story too much.
He doesn’t know what kind of happy ending he could rewrite this into. He couldn’t have changed anything: Keith was going to drive to Marmora Canyon and fall into the reservoir no matter what Lance did, and Pidge was going to come to his apartment with a picture of the Red Star John Doe, and they’d find his body. Lance can’t keep him in limbo forever. He can’t even stop him from being stuck there, in the first place.
So burying him doesn’t feel like closure. It feels like climbing up the steps of Hell and looking back to finally find Keith there, then having him torn away all over again.
It’s just the five of them, plus Adam, that go to the secluded corner of the cemetery where Shiro’s family plot is, and Lance carries the urn the whole way from the funeral home, shaking a little. It’s so light, he can almost forget that he’s holding everything that’s left of Keith in his hands.
There’s a low headstone already marking the grass, freshly engraved, and seeing Keith’s name on it makes the weight on Lance’s chest feel crushing. There’s only three lines, for his name, the dates that tell you in numbers how he hadn’t even lived to see twenty-four, and an epitaph that reads Per aspera ad astra. Through suffering, to the stars.
Keith would’ve liked that. He talked about it, a few times, how he believed in atoms being recycled more than he did any kind of afterlife. Some quote from an astronomy book, about how all humans are made of the same things as collapsing stars—"all of us star stuff". Shiro was the one who picked everything out, and he had probably heard the same spiel; maybe in more depth than Lance had. Maybe Keith liked the idea of disappearing into the universe once he was done being human.
He imagines the ghost of Keith in his apartment compacting into a ball of light instead of a shadow, leaving through the open window and streaking across the sky like a meteor in reverse. It’s a little easier to stomach than the idea of him just...fading away.
“Lance,” Shiro says gently, placing his hand on top of the urn. Lance startles, clutching it to his chest on instinct before he relaxes.
Shiro reaches out expectantly, and Lance hands the urn over. In turn, Shiro passes it over to the gravedigger, and then Keith’s ashes are being lowered into the hole in the earth. Lance stares blankly as dirt gets shoveled overtop, the redwood box becoming less and less visible until he can’t make out the shape of it anymore, and the plot becomes level with the rest of the ground.
The rest of the funeral happens through a haze in his mind, his body distantly participating as they clean up the headstone and decorate it with flowers. Each of them says a few words, and when it’s Lance’s turn he says something half-true about how long they’d known each other, and how Keith was fun even when he was pissing Lance off, but it still sticks in his throat like a lie. He doesn’t skip out on lunch after, even though going to Keith’s favorite diner without him there makes him feel like he’s about to throw up.
At the end of it all—after they’ve all hugged, and most of them have cried, and Hunk threatens everyone to stay in touch better—Lance gets back to his apartment building and lingers in the lobby for a long while. The stairs feel terrifying, the landing with his door on the second floor visible from the bottom step. It’s quiet. Keith never really made noise, even less after he came back, but the lack of it still feels foreboding.
The click of the lock is loud as Lance turns his key, breaking the silence, and he opens the door into an empty apartment.