(no subject)

[lionblade]

[ the thing is, he's not mad at shiro. maybe he should be, but he's not, because he understands that going from ace pilot with promising space exploration career to prisoner of war to leader of a ten thousand year old resistance faction doesn't leave a lot of room for the smaller, interpersonal problems. pidge is the one with a real cause for a grudge, anyway, and shiro is so painfully, obviously, trying his best to be the leader they need. he doesn't deserve keith hunting him down in the middle of the night to talk about the fact that they had toed the fraternization line uncomfortably close during keith's academy days, and then he thought shiro was dead, and then he started getting weird fucking dreams about alien energies and maybe shiro not being dead, and then... everything else.

shiro is treating him like one of the guys and he understands why. it's easier that way. it's been years and they're both different people now, except keith still has those same dreams--not the ones that left him awake in the dark and sure that shiro was alive, sure that he was breathing somewhere, alone, needing, and so helpless that it hurt to breathe. no, these are the old academy standby, thinking of shiro leaning in close, shiro taking off his shirt for training, shiro finally turning around and seeing him looking. the kind of stupid fantasies that left him hard and wanting when he woke, frantically jerking off just so he could get up and function around shiro without popping wood.

(he still has the dreams about shiro being alone somewhere, every now and then. he gets up and paces down the hallways and brushes his hand over shiro's door, but he never hits the comm button. they have each other now, or something, he tells himself. the dreams are clearly some kind of influence from the lions, and they're all together now.)

anyway he has shiro back and there's still a fucking glass wall between them. no unnecessary touches. no late nights together in one of their rooms, even though all they had ever done was talk. it's frustrating as fuck and he gets it and he's trying really hard to be fucking understanding, trying not to push. allura had said that they might notice some influences from the lions, now that they'd all established a bond, that they might be more sensitive to each other, but keith doesn't feel sensitive so much as scraped raw, holding everything back. he wants to hit something all the time. he snaps at lance and flings himself into battle when he has the chance and he thinks sometimes he can feel shiro through that link they're all supposed to have, that hint of quiet strength coupled with some sort of strapped down emotion-- loneliness? pain? --but then it's gone and he's left wondering whether he imagined it in the first place.

they'd been encouraged to go and spend time with their lions to strengthen their mystic bonds or whatever, but here keith is guiltily fucking sneaking around the wrong hangar, running his hand carefully over the black lion's sleek metal skin. that tiny little place in the back of his head where his weird impulses and gut feelings come from isn't telling him that he's unwelcome, but he knows that this is kind of suspicious. ]