Chapter Text
Another late night, another endless sky of stars for Keith to lose himself in. Lance always accuses Keith of sleeping with his eyes open, camped out on the observation deck bench and gazing into impossible galaxies like he always dreamed of as a kid. But Keith comes here when he can’t sleep, when he wants to be alone with the stars, with no chance of anyone stumbling across him like in the training room.
Instead, Lance finds him, with relative frequency, and talks his ear off because he can’t sleep either. Keith filters him out like a podcast; pleasant background noise with no need from conversation on his end.
That always, inevitably, becomes impossible.
“Dude, are you as horny as I am?”
Keith blinks once, twice. Swings his gaze from the glitter of starlight to his teammate and fellow paladin of Voltron, former grudging rival and now less-than grudging friend, who has decided tonight’s topic of conversation will be horniness.
“Almost certainly not,” Keith replies flatly.
“C’mon, you don’t get worked up?” He’s sitting like the bisexual disaster he is, stretched like taffy on a bulbous chair he’d long ago dragged in from the lounge. He switches positions, one foot on the floor then none, briefly two, before he perches on the back of it, both feet planted on the seat. “It’s gotta be just as long for you as it has been for me, right?”
“For what?”
“Sex! Unless you’ve secretly scored any alien dudes?”
Keith stares at him. “You’ve had sex before?”
Lance stares back. “You haven’t?”
They are staring at each other.
An eternity passes in a single baffling moment, until Keith gathers the wherewithal to ask, “Like with a real person?”
“As opposed to what?”
“Robot?”
“Have you fucked a robot?”
“I haven’t fucked anything.”
It’s easy not to—with the space war, and their training, and all the unbelievable alien planets. Being part of Voltron takes up a lot of time and attention.
But besides the logistics, Keith’s never felt built for sex with other people. Like, from a social skills perspective. Or a flirting perspective. Tolerating touch from other people. Being comfortable in his own skin. The list goes on, so there’s not much to get horny about. He assumes he’ll die a virgin, considering he could go down fighting anytime in the aforementioned space war. If he survives… maybe he’ll try to make sex work for himself then.
“When did you fuck anything?”
“On Earth,” Lance says, like it’s something Keith should know. But Keith had long ago rationalized away all of Lance’s bravado as false. (Except his sharpshooter rep. That’s very real). “Is it that shocking?”
“I have literally only ever seen you strike out.”
“That’s not my fault!” Lance is standing now. “It’s impossible for a relationship to flourish when we’re never with the same people for more than a week. I haven’t had a chance to work my magic!”
Keith chooses not to mention him bombing with Allura. “You don’t need to be dating to fuck.”
He crosses his arms, a defensive move. “I’ve been told I’m an acquired taste. People need time to acquire it.”
That’s certainly how it worked for Keith, but he takes forever to warm up to anyone. And he doesn’t like the way Lance’s shoulders hunch when he says it.
“Okay, well, whatever. You’ve had sex, good for you. You’re horny about it. Sorry. Why are we talking about this?”
“It’s bro talk! We’re bros, I’m talking.”
Keith runs the numbers on this claim. Between the two of them, Lance would be the authority on what bros talk about. However, “Shiro has never once talked to me about being horny.”
Laughter bursts out of him. “Oh my god, can you imagine?”
“No! And I won’t!”
Lance is still laughing, and Keith likes that, but when Lance calms down, he asks, “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“No.” Keith replies before taking any time to consider the question. He’s lived his life in varying shades of discomfort. Lance complaining about being horny doesn’t ping his radar in any meaningful way. It’s Lance.
“Okay. Cool.” He oozes back into his seat. “So you haven’t done it. Because of your no-touching thing, or?”
“It’s not no touching. It’s…”
“Selective?”
“I guess.”
“So have you just not selected anyone worth touching you like that?”
Keith shrugs. “I mean, that, and—” He waves a vague hand at himself.
Incredulous wrinkles appear on Lance’s forehead. Very seriously, he says, “You’re hot, Keith.”
His face flares red. “Well. Thanks. I meant that I’m trans, but. Okay.”
Lance blinks. “Trans?”
“Don’t play fucking dumb, dude,” he scoffs.
“I didn’t—” He splutters, going for his best impression of a fish on dry land. “Am I supposed to know that?”
Keith skips glaring at him and goes right to rubbing his temple. “What do you mean are you supposed to know that? How do you not know that?”
“You never told me!”
“I never told you I was gay either, and you know that.”
“Because when you’re checking dudes out you have the subtlety of a brick wall.”
“Yeah, and I talk about gender stuff with Pidge all the time,” Keith retorts. “You’ve literally watched me do my T-shot!”
He gapes, running out of excuses. “I thought it was a Galra thing. Or like, space stuff…”
“You thought I was injecting space subcutaneously?”
“Like a space medicine!” His gestures wildly. “We’re in space! I saw a flying pig the other day, anything’s possible!”
Keith can’t help it. He laughs harder than the absurdity calls for, especially when Lance joins in. But it’s so late it’s almost early, and after another gruelling day that ended with nothing but a promise they’d have to do it all again tomorrow, it’s stress relief to laugh at something so stupid.
Once they catch their breath, Lance says, “Anyways, if you ever get as horny as me…”
Keith brows draw together.
Lance quirks one in response, practiced as a cartoon character.
They exchange a series of looks and eyebrow raises that Keith is afraid he understands all too well.
“I’m just saying!” Lance says in conclusion. “My record with my hand is four and a half.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed by that?” Keith asks, instead of finding out what constitutes half an orgasm.
“Oh, right, you probably go on and on with your stuff, right?”
“My stuff?”
“Your junk. What do you call it?”
He’s so stunned that he answers with the truth. “I don’t call it anything.”
“What about Kevin?” He cocks his head. “Admiral Fleebus? Fluffy?”
“I’m not asking for suggestions,” Keith snaps. “And my pubes are not fluffy.”
Keith holds his stormy glare for two whole seconds, until Lance pulls a face, which sends them both into another round of hysterical late-night laughter.
They call it a night after that. There’s a bloated moment in the hallway, where their bedroom doors face off with each other, when Lance’s “if you ever get as horny as me…” is the only thing bouncing around Keith’s brain.
It passes.
They retreat to their separate rooms, and Keith goes to bed by himself as always.
There is a new development, which is that he knows without a shadow of a doubt that at this exact second, Lance is masturbating. He strains to hear, but of course the castleship’s soundproofing is better than that, even with whatever advantages his Galra hearing offers.
He shouldn’t be trying to eavesdrop on his teammate jerking off anyway. That’s weird and invasive. The only thing that makes it less weird is that Lance offered to have sex with him—because he’s horny, he’s so fucking horny, and he’d be happy to release all that pent up sexual energy with Keith.
Which makes it impossible not to imagine what Lance would be like in bed. Like, if Keith had followed Lance into his bedroom, what would they be doing right now?
But he doesn’t think about that. It starts objectively, guessing about Lance’s experiences on Earth, or a hypothetical alien. He bases it on Lance’s attempts to flirt out here. Lance said himself he was an acquired taste, and Keith can’t help but imagine that he’d try way too hard to be sexy, go so over the top trying to impress the object of his affections that he’d land flat on his face.
To be fair, he’s definitely improved over time—earned his confidence instead of acting cocky to hide his insecurities.
It’s best when he’s not thinking about it. When that winning smile melts into something serious—like when he assures refugees of their safety, or he hones in with laser focus in Blue, or he’s in the middle of a firefight picking off bad guys like they’re cans on a fence. In those moments, Keith would rather look at Lance than anywhere else.
Like the time Lance dropped a Galra creeping up behind Keith in one shot, its sword clattering to the ground a second before its body fell, just feet away from Keith. He’d sought Lance out, and spotted him tucked away in a rocky outcropping—his brow steady, eyes sharp. A flick of a dangerous smirk.
Keith had thought, Hot.
There’d been no time to dwell on it in the moment, and no reason to consider it later, so Keith hadn’t.
Now though, half an hour after Lance offered to have sex with him, and at least fifteen minutes spent musing on Lance’s sex life—the time has come to think about it.
So Keith imagines himself on the receiving end of Lance’s cheesy pickup lines. It’s Keith who Lance leans closer to, filling his senses with warmth and the surprisingly welcome scent of his sweat. It’s Keith who Lance pushes up against a wall, or crawls atop of, a smile on his lips as his weight presses Keith into the mattress. And then?
He’d kiss Keith, for sure. He’d be good at it, almost certainly. And if he wasn’t, well, it’s not like Keith would have anything to compare him to.
But after the kissing… that’s where the heat that’s slowly been festering in his gut gets doused in ice water. Because he’d have to take off his pants. And then Lance would look at him. And touch him. And that runs Keith through such an unsettling gamut of emotions that he’ll never get worked up enough to jerk off. Masturbating has to be a surprise even to himself—a mindless, rushed session when pent up frustrations overwhelm him. Certainly no daydreaming about someone else touching him.
With a cold flush, he flips sleeplessly to his other side. His mind drifts to Lance’s four and a half orgasm day. He tries to pinpoint when that possibly could’ve been by over-examining his behaviour in hindsight, until exhaustion finally consumes him.
He dreams of Lance’s smile between his thighs. A pulsing, amorphous pleasure, taking him on a dream-wobbly ride, conjuring up experiences Keith has never had. Lance making Keith moan his name with whatever he’s doing with his mouth, or fingers, or both. Urging, “You can do one more, can’t you?”
Keith slips to consciousness, and the tempting heat comes along with him. Half-awake, he clings to the dregs of easy enjoyment, the lack of self-consciousness and weirdness about his body. Everything felt perfect in the dream.
He drops his hand to his boxer-briefs and works himself over, stiff fingers over wet cotton. It’s already not as good, too much reality sneaking in, but he’s so close, it only takes a little bit of friction to get him there.
He bites his wrist to quiet his gasp. The image of Lance holding his thighs open sparks something special, making him squirm and rub harder, aching for more.
It’s better than normal, but in the end it still leaves him with a want that he shirks away from as soon as reality fully hits him.
Keith exists in a body, bone and flesh and pumping blood. His body is a real, tangible thing, and despite all the body-positive messaging growing up that washed over him like water over glass, he’s never stopped feeling weird about that. Except when he’s fighting—running til his lungs burn, swinging his sword like it’s his own arm slicing through armour, trusting his thighs to launch him exactly as far as he needs to go. In action, it’s not Keith’s body doing those things, it’s just him.
Now, when he sits up with a heavy sigh, sticky in his boxer-briefs, this is his body.
Yet again, his thoughts turn to Lance’s body across the hall. Did he start his morning the same way? Wishing for someone else to touch him as he pumped hard and slick into his own tight fist?
An unprecedented flush rises on Keith’s skin.
Oh no. Oh… no.
Lance doesn’t proposition him again. Keith doesn’t know how he’d react if he did. They skimmed past it so quickly last time, Keith had no chance to consider it. Nowadays, considering sex, and Lance, and sex with Lance is almost all he does. Some would say it’s constant. But they’d be wrong. It’s just at night and in the morning and whenever Lance is shirtless in Keith’s presence, or when he flirts with aliens, or when he looks hot fighting, or when he throws a smirk at Keith so devastating it makes his knees weak. It’s not all the time.
Because that would be a problem. This is not a problem.
But armed with the context of Lance’s rampant horniness, Keith can’t help but wonder. For example, when Lance is late to breakfast, and he blames it on his unnecessary skincare routine—how much of that alone time in his bathroom is spent jerking off instead? When he shows up for training with a pep in his step and a bright grin, is he joining directly after an orgasm? When Lance tugs at his ponytail with a wink, and Keith shoves him away—not because he wants to, but because he has to, or else he’s going to pin him to the wall and ask how long it’s been since those fingers have touched his dick.
Lance’s behaviour betrays none of his self-proclaimed horniness, which is as impressive as it is mind-boggling.
The only reference to their observation deck conversation at all is when they’re changing after a training exercise, and Lance goes, “Hey!”
Keith pulls his head out of his sweaty T-shirt and looks at him. Lance is straddling a bench with his pants unzipped, which is potentially a plot to kill Keith where he stands.
“No top scars?”
Keith glances down at the healthy dusting of hair across his chest. “Nothing gets by you, huh?”
Lance flips him off. “So were you on puberty blockers, or what?”
Keith appreciates that Lance’s made-up explanations are sometimes correct, so that he doesn’t have to give a bio lesson. “Yeah. When my dad was still around, he helped me get on them. Then at the Garrison, Shiro helped me get on T.”
“Cool,” he says.
There’s a protracted silence, wherein Lance has zoned out looking at Keith’s chest, but Keith doesn’t notice because he’s busy staring at Lance’s open zipper.
The only thing that saves them is Hunk calling them to dinner from the hall.
There was a brief time period before the Garrison when he lived with an estranged aunt—Keith still has no idea what his dad told her about his whole deal. When she asked Keith why she needed to use her insurance to cover his medication, he said he had a hormone imbalance and if he didn’t take it, he’d get sick and die. It was only half a lie. He would not have been well if Mother Nature suddenly wrested back control of his body at thirteen years old.
He’d started blockers after health class in middle school, when he felt sick to his stomach hearing “girls will experience this, and boys will experience that” in relation to all the promised changes to his body in the coming years.
Keith already didn’t fit in, solemn and intense, with an unruly pile of hair that his dad didn’t make him brush. He asked too many questions, never satisfied until he’d annoyed everyone in the vicinity on his quest of understanding. Of course, he eventually resolved to just stay confused until he figured things out on his own, but that was long after he’d cornered his health teacher after class. He’d demanded to know about his choice in any of it—as though growing a soft chest and wide hips was something he could opt out of. He was sent home with some pamphlets and told to talk to his parent or guardian.
His dad hadn’t seemed surprised, which in itself wasn’t shocking either. Single father Leroy Kogane hadn’t been raising Keith as a daughter. Just as a kid. And when he asked the kid who he wanted to be, Keith looked up at him and said, “Like you. I wanna be like you.”
His scratchy stubble and rough laugh. The sweat stains darkening his shirts and the dirt under his nails. The broad shoulders that could still hold Keith above a crowd at ten years old. He wanted that. He wanted a one-way ticket away from training bras and menstrual pads and giggling over boys (his objection here was to the giggling, not the boys).
Sitting through health class on puberty blockers felt like he’d won something. Like he’d outsmarted the system. He didn’t care how his teachers now stumbled over their “this happens to girls, and this happens to boys”, trying to include the boy in class who these things didn’t apply to. Keith knew what they meant, and he knew which fates the puberty blockers would protect him from.
He felt so smug, until the words “sexual intercourse” entered the educational mix. He didn’t feel sick, but he did get the feeling that none of this would ever apply to him, either. There was no one he liked enough to put up with all the touching. No one he’d trust enough to be so vulnerable with.
And this time, he didn’t need any pamphlets or doctors to get out of it.
Keith only ever brings up this thing with Lance to Hunk. They’re alone together on a stakeout, and even though missions are normally a welcome reprieve that demand all of Keith’s focus, stakeouts take forever, and he’s decided that he desperately needs to know how serious Lance was about his offer.
So he allows himself to ask, “Has Lance ever bro-talked to you about being horny?”
Hunk glances at him before returning his attention firmly to the security base in front of them. “Um. Yes. Semi-frequently.”
“Has he ever offered to have sex with you?”
He gives a weary little sigh. “Not in so many words.”
Keith nods, falling silent. Odd. He’d have expected Hunk to be Lance’s first choice. Well, other than Allura. Keith’s glad that never happened. Lance hooking up with Allura would be a nightmare. He’d never get over her.
“You know I’m trans, right?” Keith eventually says.
“Yeah.”
“And gay?”
“Yes. And autistic.”
“I’m what?”
Even in the dark, Hunk pales. “What?”
Keith breaks into a wicked grin. “I’m just fucking with you, man.”
Hunk huffs a laugh, and the night marches on.
Keith spends a month doggedly trying to repress his sweaty thoughts and feelings, and fails spectacularly in the face of semi-frequent wet dreams of which Lance is the star. Most mornings, it’s a cold shower and an early start in the training room. But he gives in too often, indulging in musings of Lance’s grin against his mouth, and his fingers sending goosebumps up his flesh. Which is bad, because it’s never long before he’s sitting in front of Lance in real life, wondering if there’s a world where he can ask Lance to casually lie on top of him without warranting a thousand questions.
Keith’s never had this wild need for tangible, tactile physical sensation before. Like, he knew he was gay because girls never crossed his radar, and if he didn’t catch himself, he’d stare at shirtless guys like a hawk hunting a rodent. But he’s never had any intentions beyond the looking —not talking, and certainly not touching.
That’s changed, and it’s all Lance’s fault.
On the one, positive hand, Lance has already offered to solve this. On the other, negative hand… there’s everything else.
At the end of this horrifyingly horny month, there’s a big mission, where they save a planet and gain another ally. And that’s great, until they have to attend a party in their honour.
He’d rather be fighting. He knows what to do in a battle, who to be, how to feel. The cause and effect in a physical fight is clear, and the pumping of his heart, the stinging sweat in his eyes, the scrapes and burns, make him feel alive.
Keith does not feel particularly alive at this party, but at least it leans more backyard cookout than gala. The city they’re in is home to refugees from across this solar system, so with the dozens of cultures represented, there’s not a particular one they have to respect with cultural dress. That means Keith gets to wear his real clothes.
Lance, who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing his everyday Earth attire to a big event, rummages up an outfit from a local street vendor that he looks perfect in. Keith’s less bitter than usual since he hasn’t been forced into something ridiculous, but he still can’t take his eyes off the way the flowing toga-robe thing drapes across Lance’s frame in his trademark blue. Summer heat lingers even after the sun goes down, so the material is light and breezy, drifting like water as Lance walks. He skipped the undershirt it came with, so along with his arms, his chest is bare, all the way down a deep V. Keith really does think Lance is trying to kill him.
He also thinks that maybe they should fuck.
It’s such a terrible idea, Keith can’t hope to shake it.
The party spills out of the repurposed military fort onto a huge garden courtyard, with flowering topiary and something like multicoloured fireflies glowing in the dark.
Voltron entered together, and slowly divided as the night stretched on. The only way Keith gets through these celebrations is by clinging to a teammate like a life raft. But he doesn’t want to seem like a kid afraid of losing his mom in the grocery store, so he does end up by himself. Too awkward to even ask his friends to keep him company.
And the fruit punch isn’t even alcoholic.
He posts up next to a column, hoping he looks as unapproachable as he feels, and scans the crowd for Lance. He’s usually good about dragging Keith into conversations and then doing all the talking for him.
Lance is easily spotted, telling a loud story next to a fountain spewing liquid that’s sparkly and pink.
There’s a variety of aliens here, ranging from humanesque with different colouring or extra limbs, to straight-up talking animals. Lance has found himself in the middle of them. Keith doesn’t miss how Lance’s eyes keep drawing to one alien in particular, with iridescent golden skin and feathery hair in a striking emerald colour.
The crowd ebbs and flows until it’s just the two of them, and the girl seems delighted to have Lance’s full attention. She’s laughing and smiling as she lays a taloned, golden hand across Lance’s bronze chest.
Keith knows Lance has waxed his chest before—he’d watched Lance do it during one of his spa days in the lounge. Immediately after, it looked like he’d gotten a rash, but soon enough his skin looked sleek and smooth. Keith couldn’t know for sure—he wasn’t crazy enough to try to touch him. Lance had offered to wax Keith’s chest, too. Team bonding. He’d said no way, he put all this effort into growing it, why the fuck would he wax it. Keith doesn’t know how Lance interpreted that if he didn’t know he was trans at the time.
In any case, it doesn’t look like Lance has waxed recently, and the alien girl doesn’t seem to mind, with the way her fingers slip through his sprinkling of chest hair.
Looks like Lance’s prayers have been answered.
Keith knows he should look away, if for no other reason than he needs to locate a different teammate to follow around, but he has to see this play out. The girl points toward the fort, outfitted with dozens of guest rooms up for grabs, and Keith braces himself for Lance to lead her away by the hand.
But that’s when Lance looks up and locks eyes directly with Keith.
Keith makes a beeline for the punch bowl without looking back. He takes a sip, and still no one’s spiked it. Absolutely useless. He’s debating whether he’s made enough of an appearance that he can return to the castleship, when the back of his neck pricks.
Lance is standing behind him.
“You having a good one?” Lance asks casually.
“What happened to the girl?” Keith says.
“What girl?”
“Or the—whoever that alien was. The one you’ve been hitting on for half an hour.”
“Hard to hit on someone when your teammate is watching you like a TV show.”
Keith’s cheeks glow cherry red. He hadn’t meant to cockblock Lance—and he hadn’t. There’s no way this was on him. “No, they were totally into you. They wanted to get you somewhere private.”
“How would you know?”
“They were smiling at you. They maintained prolonged eye contact. They were touching you and kept leaning in closer. You were both literally turning to leave when you saw me.”
“Okay, stalker.”
He crosses his arms. “I was looking for you. Sorry I found you.”
“What’d you want?”
“Nothing.”
And maybe Lance knows Keith as well as he dreams he does, because he doesn’t push for an explanation. Keith finds himself most often at Lance’s side at these things, after all.
It occurs to Keith that perhaps he has cockblocked Lance in the past. Nothing kills a flirt more than a sullen, silent shadow, he’s sure. Especially since, on more than one occasion, his resting bitch face has been misread as jealousy, and the two get mistaken for a couple. No wonder Lance is having trouble landing a one night stand.
But Lance flopping tonight has nothing to do with Keith.
“Where’d they go?” Keith demands. “They were into you, right?”
Lance hesitates for so long that Keith starts to doubt his body-language reading abilities. He thought he’d been getting better at it, but that could all be thrown out the window when it comes to unfamiliar aliens.
Lance shrugs, lanky limbs akimbo. Well, not so lanky anymore. Keith tries not to think about the muscles and the veins in Lance’s arms from dedicated hours practicing his sharpshooting.
“I wasn’t feeling it,” Lance says.
“Bullshit.”
He laughs. “You think you know the inner workings of my heart, man?”
“I know the inner workings of your dick, and it’s horny! Unless you came five times today and got over it?”
This nearly kills Lance, who’d been mid-sip of his punch when Keith spoke, and makes a big production of choking and spluttering on it.
Keith glares at him until he’s done.
Eyes watery, Lance finally manages, “You been thinking about me coming a lot?”
Keith’s not in the habit of lying.
He shrugs.
“A shrug is not a no!”
“I’m aware.”
Lance stares at him, his overactive frame suddenly stilling. “Anything specific?”
“Yeah, I’ve wondered how much of your time spent on your skincare routine is actually jerking off.”
It’s not the best flirt in the world. One could argue it’s not a flirt at all. A bit of plausible deniability, maybe. Yes, Lance offered to have sex with him, but he could’ve been kidding. He said it like a joke. But that’s how Lance says most things. It doesn’t mean he’s not serious.
“You tell me.” Lance accompanies the challenge by shoving his cheek in Keith’s face.
“Is—?” Keith doesn’t know what to do. He kisses his cheek.
Lance squawks, flaring red. “Oh!”
So much for plausible deniability.
“What did you expect me to do with that?”
“Gaze upon the beauty of my clear skin,” Lance says, dazed, “all thanks to my dedicated skincare routine.”
“Ah.” Keith nods in understanding. “Sure, I saw that.”
“Good.” He throws back his punch, jittery now. Looks away, then back to Keith. “Have you really been thinking about me jerking off?”
“You literally described it to me.”
“And it’s just such a tantalizing idea, it hasn’t left you since?”
Keith makes purposeful eye contact. Heart pounding somewhere in his throat, he touches Lance’s arm and leans closer. “Pretend I’m smiling.”
Lance’s throat bobs. “You wanna get out of here?”
Keith nods, watching Lance’s eyes widen even more. Lance is not being cool about this at all—like never in a thousand years did he expect Keith to take him up on his offer. Maybe it was a joke after all.
But then Lance turns smoothly to slip Keith’s hand into his, and he leads him out of the crowd.