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autisticlancemcclain · 1 year

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“You have saved us,” says the dignitary warmly, signalling to the gathered attendants behind them, “and so for the Voltron Team, we have assembled a gift!” They move to the side, and four attendants come forward holding a truly giant box.

Shiro grimaces. “Oh, thank you, but there’s no need —”

“Hell yeah!” Lance says, rushing over to open the box before anyone can stop him. “Presents!”

Keith shares a look with Pidge, who shrugs. Presents are presents. Keith certainly wouldn’t mind a present.

“Double hell yeah!” Lance whoops in delight, voice muffled from where he’s dug so deep into the box that only half of him is visible. “It’s candy!”

The dignitary looks a little embarrassed. “It is perhaps a little childish, but we thought —”

They don’t have time to finish their sentence before the rest of the team cheers, rushing over to join Lance and dig through the box of goodies. Only Shiro hangs back, shaking his head in fond amusement and thanking the dignitary like a Real Adult™️.

(He’s 100% going to wait for them to fall asleep and then stash all the stuff he wants, Keith is sure of it. He’ll probably even sneak into their rooms to steal what they already have, because Shiro is a sugar fiend. He used to eat Keith’s halloween candy. Keith had to set a trap to keep it safe.)

“Do you think we could eat some now?” Lance whispers, grin lighting up his face.

Pidge shakes her head. “No, the atmosphere here isn’t breathable for us, remember? We’ll have to wait until we get back.”

There’s a millisecond of a pause after she speaks, and then Lance’s hand flies up to his visor.

“Dibs on first pick!”

Keith is quick to follow, calling second, and then Allura, and then Hunk and Pidge tie. They quickly play rock-paper-scissors to find out who has to be last while Shiro wraps up with the diplomacy stuff.

Hunk loses. He looks very grouchy about it. Keith tries not too look too smug about his place in line.

Allura is strong enough to lift the box back to the lions on her own once they’re finally finished, and argues that as a fee she should get extra candy if they can’t divide their prizes evenly. Since she has been trained in debating since she could talk, she wins that fight. It doesn’t take away from any of the excitement. None of them can wait to get back to the castle.

The second their lions touch down, they’re all racing down the hangars and to the kitchen, where they all sit in their seats at the table, vibrating in excitement, cheering when Allura finally dumps the box out onto the table. They each then take their turn picking whatever looks the most appetizing, from candies that look like gummies to boxes of treats that look more like pastries. They’re done so fast you would think they were a pack of piranhas devouring a manatee, or something. All of them rip into several of their treats immediately.

“Hey, this pastry thing kinda tastes like gingerbread cookies!”

“Oh my God, I think this is chocolate! Green chocolate. But chocolate!”

“This tastes almost like candied juniberry petals!”

Keith is particularly fond of a tube of jelly-like substance that’s so sour it kind of burns off his tastebuds. He’s also very fond of the face Shiro makes when he tries it. Interestingly enough, a lot of them are making strange faces — the thing about alien candies is that they have no idea what to expect, so they end up trading a lot of things that they picked that they hate but someone else seems to love, for some reason.

“Gross!” Lance exclaims, pouting at a pack of something that looks almost exactly like gummi bears. “Aw, man. Of course blue candy in space doesn’t taste like blue. Tastes like cough syrup. Yuck.”

Keith had nothing against cough syrup. “Let me try.”

Lance happily digs out all the blue gummis from the bag, handing them to Keith, who pops them in his mouth. He then glances over at Lance, raising an eyebrow.

“These do not taste like cough syrup, you dork.”

“They do so!”

“They do not.”

Lance scowls, but his brown eyes are bright with mischief.

“Well, then, what do they taste like?”

“I dunno. Not cough syrup.”

Lance rolls his eyes, lips quirked in a small smile. Keith can’t help but smile back. “Well, you can have all my blue stuff then, weirdo. I don’t particularly enjoy the taste of NyQuil.”

Keith shrugs. “Sounds good to me.”

———

All of them do what they can to make their candies last. Pidge, to absolutely no one’s surprise, runs out first. Keith is decently certain that if you were to chemically test her blood it would be fifty percent sugar and fifty percent caffeine. Lance runs out next, though, probably because he’s dumping all his blue candies on Keith — every movie night, he crawls over whoever he’s sat next to in order to hand Keith the blue candies he comes across. Eventually he cuts out the middle man and just curls up next to Keith every night, handing him the candy directly. It’s nice, except Lance is always freezing, so he hogs the blankets. And sometimes he complains about being cold so much that Keith has to grab his hands and warm them up so he’s finally quiet, or shove his toes under his thighs. Eventually that turns into Lance curling up into Keith instead of just next to him, leaning into his side and shoving his icy fingers under Keith’s shirt, “so your freaky furnace tendencies at least have a purpose, oven boy.”

Keith is a little bit embarrassed to admit that he did not get the hint at all, even a little bit, and Hunk had to pull him aside to explain that Lance was running his hands under cold water before every movie night to have an excuse to put them on Keith. Lance was not, in fact, nearly as scared of horror movies as he pretended to be, either. Nor does he ever comment on the body heat or muscles of anyone else whose space he commandeers, even though Lance rarely ever keeps his hands to himself.

Look, Keith never claimed to be the most socially graceful person on the planet. Er, the universe. How the hell was he supposed to know that Lance liked him, too? Why couldn’t Lance just say something like a normal person?

(Keith is aware that he didn’t say anything either, thanks, but in his defense, he’s not the one who claims to be a casanova, so. That’s on Lance and Keith will die on that hill.)

It doesn’t take long after Pidge and Lance run out of candy for the complaining to finally begin. For a while Lance pouted at Keith until Keith gave in (no it never took long, yes Keith is embarrassed about it, shut up) and gave him some of his candy, but soon enough Keith ran out, too, and then Hunk and Allura, and then they were all sad and snackless. Instead of waiting for another planet to gift them a giant box of goodies, this time, they hit up a space mall (different from last time, since they were banned for life) and went into a candy-shopping frenzy. They used up all their funds picking up every piece of candy they saw off the shelves, and Keith barely convinced Lance to stay out of the fountain this time. (And he means barely. Lance is very good at getting his way, and he’s also become very good at manipulating Keith now that he knows that Keith is possibly a little bit down bad for him. But luckily he’s down bad for Keith, too, so Keith managed to use that to his advantage for once.)

New candy, same drill — Lance opens his bags and immediately starts digging around for the blue stuff, dumping it all into Keith’s lap. Keith happily throws a hard blue candy into his mouth, expecting the tart flavour that Lance hates so much that he makes Keith brush his teeth before kissing him so he won’t have to taste it.

Except this time, there’s no cough syrup (not) flavour — it’s sweet and mild, almost berry-like. Keith raises an eyebrow and eats another one, a gummi this time, but it’s got the same flavour. Huh. Maybe the weird blue flavour was specific to the planet that gifted them the candy originally.

Keith looks as slyly as he can over to Lance. Lance is totally oblivious, curled up under Keith’s arm, passing the blue candies Keith’s way without even looking at them.

Keith grins. Hell yeah. He’s about to score half of Lance’s candy for life. Boyfriend status be damned.

He keeps up the charade for years. No matter what planet they get their candy from, the blue candy never has the strange cough syrup flavour — it really was specific to that one planet. It varies a little from region to region, but mostly any blue candy is something vaguely fruity, often very sweet and mild. They’re delicious, and Keith knows Lance would like them just as much as any other candy he likes.

But, hey. A man is entitled to some secrets, Keith thinks. Besides, Lance makes a face almost every time he picks out a blue candy, handing it to Keith without even pausing to consider. How would he ever know?

———

One day, on a supply stop in a region they’ve never been to before, every single bag of candy available is blue.

Lance pouts. “This sector hates me.”

“I don’t think they’ve targeted you personally, babe,” Keith says, pressing a kiss to his hair.

“It feels like they are! How am I supposed to survive until the next supply run when all my candy tastes like cough syrup?”

“Well, I mean, you don’t have to eat the cough syrup candy.”

Lance scoffs. “What am I supposed to do? Not have any snacks for when I’m too lazy to go get real food?”

“That’s an option, yeah.”

“As if. I’m just going to suffer, I guess.”

As Lance huffily picks out a variety of blue candy, Keith starts to sweat. Oh, no. If Lance is going to force himself to eat what he thinks is going to be cough syrup candy, then he is going to find out the truth.

Keith is about to either have his ass kicked or be sleeping on the common room couch for the next six months. He’s not sure how Lance will ensure that Keith doesn’t just go and find a random bunk to sleep in, but he knows his boyfriend, and ‘Lance’ and ‘impossible’ don’t often exist in the same realm.

Keith is fucked.

“You know, Shiro has a secret stash,” Keith tries as Lance approaches the cashier. “You could probably get some non-blue candy from him.”

Lance flips a dismissive hand. “I definitely will, but who knows how long that will last? I’ll just have to live with it. Plus, maybe my tastebuds have evolved, or something, and I don’t hate them anymore.”

“Yeah,” Keith says weakly, mourning the sleep he is going to lose. “Maybe.”

———

Keith waits in tense anticipation until the next movie night, when they all settle in with their candy and put on some strange flick that they’re all going to talk over anyway. He writes his own obituary in his head as he watches Lance tear open the bag, reach in, and reluctantly pop a candy in his mouth. He chews for a moment, then freezes, looking slowly over to Keith.

“Dearest love of my life,” he says, and Keith knows he’s fucked. “This candy, ever so strangely, tastes of fruit and joy and not cough syrup flavoured misery.”

Keith clears his throat. “That’s — uh, that’s weird, babe. Maybe this region makes blue candy differently.”

Slowly and carefully, Lance sets the bag on a side table, then turns to Keith, smiling sweetly. He reaches over and lays a gentle hand on Keith’s cheek, rubbing his thumb over Keith’s cheekbone. He leans in closely.

“I am going to ask you a question, star of my skies, and please know that I know all seventeen of your tells, so I will know immediately if you lie.” He pauses for a moment, and Keith takes in the full power of Lance’s crazy-eyes.

He hears various people snickering in the background. It’s so wonderful to know how much the team cares about him, the rat bastards.

“Have you been eating my fucking blue candy for four years knowing damn well there’s nothing wrong with them?”

Briefly Keith considers faking a heart attack.

“Perhaps,” Keith says, because he’s already accepted his grave. Gig’s up. Past him is a dumbass, Lance knows all, etc, etc.

To his shock, instead of immediately dragging him to the training room to whoop his ass, or even verbally tearing him a new asshole, Lance’s chin begins to tremble. And then his eyes start to water.

“You — you really did that to me? You tricked me?”

Keith feels like a bucket of cold water was dumped on his head. “Wait, Lance —”

Lance pulls away a little, sniffing. “You could have asked, you know. I love you a lot. I would’ve shared with you.”

Keith is going to go back in time and whoop his own ass. Seriously. Or maybe get someone to whoop it for him, because he is a monster.

“Lance, baby, I’m sorry,” he says desperately, grabbing onto Lance’s hand. “That was mean, okay? I’m sorry. I’ll never do that again. You can have as much of my candy as you want for the rest of our lives. I swear. And all the candy I steal from Shiro, too.”

“Hey,” Shiro says, but Keith ignores him, eyes only on Lance.

He glances over at Keith hesitantly. “Really? For the rest of our lives? You promise?”

Keith holds a hand to his heart. “With the team as my witness.”

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Lance’s face clears, all traces of tears completely gone.

“Great!” he chirps, tucking himself back under Keith’s arm and turning back to the movie. “Serves you right.”

Keith blinks. Hey. Wait a second. “Did I just get manipulated?”

“Yes,” Lance says easily. He pats Keith’s knee reassuringly. “I’ve known about the blue candies the whole time, babe. You crack your knuckles when you think you’re being sneaky.”

Keith’s mouth opens, then closes again. The snickering he heard from the rest of the team turns into outright laughter.

“It’s okay, babe,” Lance says again, but this time his voice is teasing. “I’ll let you keep the blue ones.”

———

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