KLANCE: One Shots

Ghost Boy part 2

It's official. Keith hates Mondays.

He sluggishly makes his way up the stairs towards his apartment, carrying multiple bags of heavy groceries in his hands. Keith was a relatively fit guy, but he had just spent majority of the day at his new job, and it had taken a lot out of him. Once Keith finally made it up the stairs he fumbled around for his keys until he was finally able to enter his apartment. As soon as he managed to use his hips to push the door shut, he let out a small sigh of relief.

"WELCOME BACK KEITH!" Keith was so startled by the sound of Lance's booming voice that he dropped the bags he was carrying, sending it's contents to spill over the floor.

"AHHHH. Jesus Lance!" Keith exclaimed, holding a hand over his chest to steady his breathing. After a moment he leant down to pick up the scattered items.

"Oh shit sorry! Sorry!" Lance also began to help with picking up the spilled groceries. Keith lifted his eyes ever so slightly to see the ghost boy before him. Keith still couldn't believe that all of this was really happening. His mind drifted back to the night when this all began.

---------- *flashback* ----------

Keith couldn't sleep that night. He lay awake in his bed, staring at the ceiling and waiting for his eyes to adjust to his dark surroundings. He let his eyes wander to the corner of his room, where a glowing blue teenage boy sat with his legs crossed, hovering just above the floor. He had been staring at Keith the entire time without subtlety. Keith sighed and sat up groggily, giving up on trying to sleep anymore.

"Well I'm not going to get any sleep tonight so do you wanna stay up with me? " Keith ran a hand through his nest of a mullet as he looked to Lance, who was now grinning ear to ear. He floated closer to where Keith sat, hovering just over the edge of his bed.

"Yeah sure! What do you wanna do? I'm sure you've got a lot of questions." It was true, Keith wanted to ask Lance so many things about his existence. He figured he should probably avoid the obvious "how did you die" question as he really didn't want to send the boy into a frenzy of bad memories.

"OK well, how old are you?" Lance raised an eyebrow at the question, as if he weren't expecting something so casual.

"Well I mean I was 17 when I was alive but I've been like this for about 20 years. But I guess technically I'm still 17?" Lance trailed off and phrased his last line like he wasn't quite sure of his own answer. Lance still looked like a 17 year old boy, if you ignore the boy's glowing blue aura and semi-transparent skin that is. Despite being a ghost Lance didn't look as frightening as Keith had initially thought. He had short dark hair that was clipped above his ears and had a long slender face with pointed features. If Keith could look at him directly without seeing shadows of the desk behind him in his skin, he would likely say that Lance is quite attractive.

"OK, you said you've been here for 20 years right? What do you do exactly?" Keith moved the conversation along and noticed that Lance smiled sadly at the question.

"I don't do anything. I've been stuck in this place for decades and I can't leave. Whenever someone knew bought the place I would try to say hi and make conversation, but they would always scream as soon as they saw me." Lance brought his knees up against his chest and rested his chin in the crevice, gazing down at the floor with a subtle pout.
"It gets really lonely when everyone's afraid of you."

"I can kinda relate." Lance looked up at Keith in surprise, a curiousness in his eyes willed Keith to continue.
"I'm an orphan and was brought up in foster homes my whole life. I never really stayed in one place for very long so nobody bothered to try being my friend. I was always the weird kid that nobody wanted to talk to. The one they were all scared of because he was different." Keith bit the corner of his mouth in mild frustration as he remembered his past. The only person he'd spoken about this to was his best -and only- friend Pidge, whom he'd met in high school and actually managed to stay in contact with.