YELLOW [[klance]] [[COMPLETED]]

keith.

time drips and sluices together like paint down a canvas.

i don't spend every moment of every day with lance mcclain, because if so we'd probably have killed one another by now (i share a room with a guy that apparently finds enjoyment in blasting cardi b. at irregular and frankly unholy intervals while doing literally everything.) besides, we've got other things to do. his treatment, family, therapy...my therapy. so we're not conjoined at the hip, but being around him is like being around stars that you can breathe - it's invigorating and intoxicating. i'm just learning how to handle looking up and finding the boy that tastes like stars staring at you with an unreadable but soft expression on his face.

i feel inebriated.

in the past few weeks leading up to the end of the month and my possible release, i learn more about him, some stuff that makes me want to stab him an undetermined amount of times with a plastic knife just to get him to shut the hell up, other things that make me want to kiss him 'cause he's so absurdly pretty in the most awkward and boyish way possible. infuriating.

he hides chocolate under his bed, is deathly afraid of spiders (it was so. fucking. small), and his favorite animal is a shark. when he figured out i prefer fruity candy, he nearly rioted, and when he figured out i once had a spider when i was eight, he didn't believe me until i showed him pictures.

"what's your favorite animal?" he had asked, like an excited little kid at a sleepover even though we were both teenagers in a hospital with a nurse doling out pills on a tray. 

the topic had come up after he had explained to me his avid obsession with reading national geographic.

"hippos," i replied, without looking up from my sketchpad. 

"hippos? like, hippos-hippos?"

"what other kind of hippo would it be?" i asked, annoyed as i rubbed the shadow on a flower with my thumb. 

"why do you like hippos?" 

"i don't know."

"well, you've got to like them for a reason!"

"i just think they're cute! and also they can crush watermelons in their mouths. easily."

he squinted and rubbed his chin. "i guess that is kind of badass."

like i said, the weeks tumble until we're sitting here, one week away from my release. the whole room smells like the chipotle shiro dropped off for dinner before running to meet adam for a date. (lance wink-wink-nudge-nudged him out the door, until shiro, exasperated, rolled his eyes and left a vaguely-adorable blushing mess. i think he was mainly irritated because lance joined in on calling him a six-year-old when he realized shiro was born on a leap year. do i have regrets telling him that? ...no.)

lance is laid out across his stomach, feet crossed at the head of the bed, reading a harry potter book in serene silence. i sit at the foot of his bed on my laptop, playing snake online. i'm past my high score when i accidentally ram the blocky green stripe into the side of the box, obliterating it into a million pixels. i sigh and click menu. bored out of my mind, with every buzzfeed unsolved video watched and every online game exhausted, my eyes flicker to lance. 

he reads with his nose nearly touching the page, completely absorbed in one adventure of harry, hermione and ron's or another - all of which i'm sure he's reread multiple times. 

"i've read the whole series three times," he boasted to me last week, when rain was slicing at the windows and wind was howling hungrily at the windowpane. "i've read percy jackson twice, every series of rick riordan's once except for the trials of apollo because i've read the first book, like, five times. i've reread the hunger games twice but the last book about...eight times."