Always Felt a Fire in Your Eyes

Chapter 1/1

In hindsight, Lance isn't sure what exactly started it, this intense need to outdo him, to out-pace him, to stand ahead of him.
Him being, well, Keith.
Lance remembers the exact moment when he first laid eyes on Keith Kogane. First day of his first year at the Garrison, and Lance was anxious, was nervous about fitting in and about the work and would he be smart enough for this? As much as his family assured him that he could do anything and didn't have to worry about it, he couldn't stop the swirl of "this is gonna go badly" brand of dread through his bloodstream.
So of course, in his typical fashion that the McClain family knew of very well, he was covering this by being ON.
And if you don't know what Lance being ON looks like, count yourself lucky because it was a mixture of loud and fast and Hi how are you? and I'm Lance McClain, who are you? and Wow, is that a bird??
So that's what he was doing, sitting at a desk near the front he had grabbed, chatting to a boy whose name he doesn't remember and managing to say about three hundred words a minute but not talking about anything interesting.
Looking back on it, Lance really wished he had been talking about something interesting, something so goddamn spectacular that when Keith walked through that door he would have been as entranced as Lance immediately was.
But it didn't go like that. Keith walked through the door and suddenly the boy Lance was talking to was gone because Lance needed to be friends with the small boy standing in the doorway. Because he was small, shorter than Lance and skinny and with his shoulders hunched and so many people would have taken one look at him and thought that he looked shy or tired but not Lance.
Lance saw what was actually there. The bruises on his knuckles that were otherwise white from how tightly the boy was clenching his fists, the stubborn way his shoulders were lowered, as if daring the whole room to look just a little too closely to just give him an excuse to come at him just once. Lance saw the way his dark eyes flickered up to survey the room in a practiced sweep, saw the gleam of black fire in those eyes as they settled on Lance.
And the funny thing is, if any of the other children had seen the things Lance did, they reasonably would have decided to stay away from the 'trouble'.
But, god, when had Lance ever had a reasonable reaction to anything? He couldn't remember. He felt a pull...like gravity. Leading him straight to the small, burning boy.
So of course his first thought was, this is someone to watch, to be near, to help.
So he decided right there that he would.
And he held onto that decision even as he stood from his seat and opened his mouth to greet the boy, only to have Keith Kogane roughly brush past him without a word.
If anything, his resolve only strengthened after that.
He was gonna be this boy's goddamn best friend if it ended him.

And well, that wasn't where the rivalry started, but maybe it was the next time they clashed, Lance attempting to reach out and being shoved away again (literally this time, Lance was marveling over the other boys upper body strength for a while). Or the fact that Keith wouldn't even look at him. Or the next time, when everyone whispered about how the McClain boy had been three points under Keith Kogane and Lance had tried to congratulate him on the winning score and Keith didn't even respond. Or the next time, when Lance told a group of boys to stop laughing at Keith's hair and Keith had scowled at him for the effort, still managing to not even look at him.
Whenever it happened, somehow along the line, it didn't matter if Lance was his friend, just as long as Keith Kogane noticed him.
If it killed him, those dark flame eyes were gonna burn at Lance again.

The next time Keith looked at Lance was slightly less dramatic, but no less important to Lance.
It was a regular day at the Garrison, the only special thing being the simulator tests they were taking that day.
Keith was going just before Lance and, of course, he nearly aced it. Lance couldn't take his eyes off Keith, at how his hair stuck to the sweat on his forehead and the tight, concentrated look on his face and how he seemed to be like the moment before an explosion. The aching silent motionless second of time before the eruption of flame and debris. Keith's gravity, and the weight of it, pressed Lance further toward him every day.
As Keith passed Lance on his way out of the simulation, Lance spoke quietly.
"Good job, pretty sure I can do better, though."
And Keith turned those eyes to Lance and they were filled with scorn but they were still burning and Lance burned with them and he decided right there, that if taunting was what got Keith to look at him, so be it.