[ look it is not his fault that red is such a difficult lion, and also completely opposite to everything lance had figured out while piloting blue. he's not a leg anymore, he's an arm, he's in a quick, hyper-responsive machine that sometimes seems to move even before he touches the controls. physically the red lion is much smaller, too, forcing lance to have constantly check himself and carefully watch out for the space around him, and red doesn't seem interested in helping out very much. lance can't help thinking of him (her?) as the quintessential girlfriend cat, the pet that fawns all over its owner and hisses at the well-meaning boyfriend trying his best to co-exist.

not that red was ever particularly fawning. lance had heard keith's story about how red let him get sucked out a galra airlock before deigning to lift a giant robotic paw.

allura and blue seem to get along just fine, which is both gratifying and annoying, because she'd talked about how this would change their mental bonds with the lions and with each other, and lance had thought maybe it would be a chance to get closer with her-- but no, her altean-ness, or possibly just her princess-ness keeps her out of the mental link, while every time he touches red he gets an unwanted wash of keith all over his brain.

when asked about it, allura had said blue was a very polite lion and didn't get memories all over its pilot like some kind of psychic mud clinging to it, just waiting to be rubbed off. it's sort of a compliment, maybe, except he has the feeling that she was talking about blue's own personality as being independently polite rather than it having anything to do with lance's brief ownership. red, on the other hand, has psychic keith-memory-mud like, knee deep everywhere. lance feels it whenever he sits in the chair, whenever he puts his hand on the controls. he's even wearing keith's stupid armor with keith's stupid bayard that he doesn't know how to use. the one time he'd tried to pilot red while wearing his own blue armor he'd been forcibly ejected out the lion's mouth and dumped on his ass. it sort of made sense that each lion was most compatible with their own color bayard, but blue didn't seem to give a shit what allura wore when she piloted, and pidge and hunk tried switching lions as an experiment and didn't get immediately vomited up like an unwanted hairball.

allura said, spend more time with your lion. allura said, concentrate on your bond of partnership. allura said, try focusing on memories of keith to give the lion a shared connection. except all his memories of keith now are weirdly mixed with memories of shiro, and red seems to amplify that connection, flooding him with sudden, shocking sense-memories of a mouth kissing his, a hand touching his hip, a warm, broad chest against his back as he rocked slowly down on a thick, huge cock. now he wakes up in the middle of the fucking night with come all over his stomach and thighs, a hand clapped over his mouth to muffle his noises and aching for someone who was never there in the first place. he's never been so horribly aware of his own body or how it's possible to physically feel the distance between you and another person. he just knows where keith is now, all the time, he feels the air in a room change when keith enters or exits, and it's obnoxious.

it gets worse in the actual cockpit of the red lion, apparently because all keith and shiro ever did was have sex in their lions. he gets flashes of them when he sits in the chair to the point where training sessions or meditation attempts begin or end (or both) with him having to jack off furiously, keith's red uniform shoved down to his thighs, sprawled back in the chair and his brain full of fog and half-memories. shiro's mouth on him. (lance has never been with anyone.) shiro's voice whispering his name like a lifeline. (it's not his name.) shiro with two human hands and all black hair, younger, surrounded by sunlight and looking soft and happy in a bed somewhere. shiro and keith and keith and shiro and sometimes keith alone, his face hidden in the crook of his own arm on the red lion's console, silently bringing himself off.

he legitimately doesn't sense or hear or see keith at first, his eyes half-open but glassy, and the red lion is crooning something directly in his head that sounds like a language he can't understand, and what red recognizes is the black paladin and his right to be here. lance is panting, cheeks flushed, and he turns his head blindly without really seeing, snagging keith's hand. ]

S-shiro...?