Star Crossed

Chapter 12: What's Your Favorite Color?

Summary:
Lance reflects, stands up for himself, and HILARIOUSLY misjudges a situation, which leads to Keith facing the fact that he is, without a doubt, completely and helplessly in love with Lance.

(So, they do as hopelessly pining teenagers do, and have sex. They're still so soft. I don't know. My hand slipped?)

[LANCE]

He laid on his back and followed the stars as they made their nightly trek across the sky, letting the easy inhales of early spring air carry him to some sort of hazy place between sleep and waking. It would so easy to fall asleep — the grass was soft and familiar beneath his skin on every pinpoint the two met — but to sleep would be at the expense of the view. The twinkles of white, blue, red, yellow, swirls of space dust and asteroids reaching out endlessly before him between the darkness that separates him from each star, and each star from another. Were they suns? Or little planets, like this one? Did they have mountains? Oceans? Were they already burnt out, had been since before he was ever born, but it had happened so far from his little cozy nook in the grass that the past was just finally catching up?

Space was a mysterious thing. A mysterious, heartbreaking, magnificent thing.

There were no answers out here, which was comforting in a way. Lance had always been one to talk himself into circles in search of understanding, but he didn't come out here to try to figure out the universe. Just to remind himself that he was a part of it, a speck on a speck of a planet, small but alive and lucky enough to bear witness to the suns and moons and stars.

His favorite time of day was actually "end-dusk," an exacting phrase he proudly made up for an inexact time. It was just that brief sliver of an opportunity, no more than ten dobosh, when dusk had almost completely slipped behind the tree line, and a few weak ribbons of orange and pink battled with the indigo that would overtake it, always, eventually. The moon would come out in any state of waxing or waning and take over for another night, but there was a small window where the two beings tipped the horizons on either ends of the earth. It reminded him of dancers in town on nights of festivals or celebrations, the back and forth, as the sun gave chase to the moon, and the moon always just too far away to reach, and they went around and around and around, never catching more than a glimpse of the other, but never giving up on the chance that one day, someday, maybe they could catch them.

Someday, but not today.

The sun was long gone, and his siblings were in bed by now. He could go inside, but he didn't really want to.

"Lance? Is that you, mijo?"

Craning his head backwards, he saw the inverted world where the stars were down and his mother was up, floating on the ground out in front of him.

"Sí, Mamá."

She sounded amused, her feet crinkling the grass as she approached. "What are you doing out here?"

"Just watching the stars," he said, sitting up on his elbows and waving a hand around in the air.

She sank on the ground beside him, folding her long skirt beneath her while she looked over at him. "What's wrong, Lance?"

Brow furrowed, Lance kept his gaze trained upwards. "Nothing, I just said I was — ow! Mamá, dios!"

"I did not raise a liar. Now tell me what is wrong."

Squirming slightly, Lance rubbed the back of his head where he'd been whacked. "Alright, alright, geez. I was just thinking... about Dad, I guess. "