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Lance's nightmares weren't getting better. He never told Keith the details- instead, he kept them inside his head, replaying them over and over. It was nearly impossible for a mermaid to drown. But in his nightmares, Lance was being pulled down underwater, but he wasn't able to change, only struggle with his legs and without his gills. He always woke up right when he was on the brink of losing consciousness.

Lance contemplated asking Allura if she knew what it meant, but he knew she'd just get worried about him and make him go back to the sea. Allura was already busy, stressed, taught like a rubber band being stretched further and further.

She brought Lance news of the war, which was now full-force, evenly-matched, "Zarkon is yet to show his ugly face." It scared Lance. He'd forgiven his father- life was too short to hold a grudge against your family, but now Carlos was on the war front, and Lance didn't know what he'd do if something happened to his father. What would happen to his mother, his family? Frederico would be notified, and Lance could only imagine how much that would hurt.

Shaking his head violently, Lance pushed those thoughts away. He was determined to finish his own mission, then he could worry about the war. He needed to have faith in his people. They were resilient, strong, and were being led by the combined force of the genius strategist Alfor and the entire Blade of Marmora fleet. That, of course, only made him worry for Ulaz and Thace... Grinding his teeth, Lance rubbed his bracelet, wishing Keith was there to console him.

Over the weeks, Lance had learned what a good listener Keith was. He'd sit with Lance and let him vent, never getting bored. He'd massage Lance's palms and keep strong eye contact, his dark eyes sometimes making Lance lose his train of thought.

Once, Lance was talking about a particularly difficult day at work, and Keith was staring at him, interested, silent. Lance trailed off, mesmerized, and he couldn't help it, he just fell forward into Keith's arms and pressed his lips to his, running his hands through that stupid mullet that he loved so much.

That was another thing, though. After that first kiss, Keith surprised Lance with little signs of affection that made Lance's heart speed up and cheeks go pink. Every morning (since they'd taken to sleeping together, either in the basement or the attic) Keith would wake Lance up with kisses to his face and a mug of coffee.

It almost made Lance feel bad- he felt like he didn't do enough for Keith, but when he brought it up, Keith disagreed and told Lance that Lance had already done so much for him, he was trying his best to make up for it. Although confused, Lance let it go and enjoyed the coffee and kisses.

Whenever they were both off work, they'd go out to eat, see a movie, or walk around town. Keith wanted to be closer, even closer than he was already, closer than he should've been, all because of the overarching threat of the end of summer. He took Lance to a pizza shop and they discovered that Lance's favorite food was not, in fact, heaven sticks/french fries, but garlic knots. Lance insisted on getting three more orders to take home with them.

They ate ice cream and went on walks on the beach and when they weren't chatting casually, they were just enjoying each other's company. Something about their relationship felt different. Keith couldn't place it, but it was something about Lance... Like the cliche that they'd met in a previous life or something.

He wanted it to last for as long as possible.

...

Something wasn't right. Lance woke up shaking and burning hot, feeling like absolute hell. He elbowed Keith harder than he should've and Keith woke up with an agitated, "Ow!"

But then he turned on the bedside light and saw Lance's face- saw how his nose and cheeks were turning the color of a bruise. Saw how his hands were red and splotchy as were the patches of freckles on Lance's collarbone, knees, shoulders.

"The tub," Lance groaned, wheezing. Keith raced upstairs, tripping over his own feet as he sprinted to the bathroom. Filling the tub, he didn't care that it was freezing cold- Lance needed it for whatever was going on. Keith thundered down the stairs, trying to catch his breath, and gathered Lance up into his arms, straining at the weight as he tried his best to hurry back upstairs. Shiro had woken up by the noise and was standing by the bathroom, looking drowsy and concerned.

Keith practically shoved past him with Lance in his arms, and gracelessly placed Lance into the tub, sending water splashing over the both of them. Lance hissed at the freezing water, which was only a few inches deep, but stayed still, watching the faucet anxiously. His hands were shaking.

"What the hell is going on?" Shiro asked, suddenly alert. Keith shook his head, giving Shiro a clueless expression. A few minutes later, the Holts were in the bathroom too, peeking through the doorway at Lance.

As soon as the water was deep enough to dunk, Lance thrust his head underwater, surfacing only to cry out in pain. Changing never hurt like this normally. Keith was by his side, and Lance gripped his hand tightly as scales sealed his legs together, decimating his graceful feet into a flattened tail. Once the process was over, Keith was still staring.

Lance looked terrifying. His gills leaked blue blood, and his scales were falling out, floating on top of the water like grotesque rose petals. Lance leaned back against the sill of the tub and closed his eyes. Tears were streaming down his face, and his bottom lip quivered.

"Lance, what's going on?" Keith asked, paranoid, terrified, pushing Lance's hair back from where it was plastered with sweat to his forehead.

"I don't know, I don't know," Lance heaved, "Just stay."

Keith vowed to. He fell asleep against the tub, holding Lance's hand even still.

...

"He sounds like he's been smoking a pack a day since he was two." These were the first words that Shiro told Keith the next morning. Lance was still asleep in the tub. He'd stopped bleeding and scales stopped falling out, but Keith wasn't letting him leave that tub until he was certain that Lance would be okay as a human.

What Shiro had said was true: Lance's voice sounded like fish hooks had been dragged through his poor lungs. It made Keith's heart break for his boyfriend. He'd already called both of their works and explained that Lance was extremely sick and he needed to stay home to take care of him. It was reasonable enough, truthful, even.

Matt had been searching around dark corners of the internet for any mermaidian sicknesses, but of course, all he'd found was bullshit and a few blogs from 7-year-olds about how their toy mermaids were feeling under the weather after their tea parties. Out of luck, and probably against his better judgment, Shiro called Allura.

When worried, concerned, upset, Allura was a force to be reckoned with. Lance had woken up in the tub- it was later in the afternoon, and had been damn near terrified at the news of Allura's beckoning. Keith had made him soup, even offered to go and get fries, but Lance could barely even drink water. He said that he'd throw up if he ate, he knew it, and he didn't want to waste food.

Keith didn't care if he wasted food- that didn't matter right now, what mattered was that he kept Lance as healthy as possible. And so far, he was failing. His own incompetency angered him, and sometimes he had to close his eyes, take deep breaths to keep from punching the wall. He wanted to help, but Lance was a completely different species. He didn't want to make him worse than he already was.

And it was bad, Lance was. He talked like it was fine, like he wasn't in pain, but Keith could tell. He saw it in Lance's eyes, the way he winced, the way he bit his lips. It made Keith want to scream- he wanted to take all the pain away. He could bare it. Just stop hurting Lance.

When Shiro told Lance about Allura, Lance's tail jerked involuntarily, sending water over the sides of the tub. His tail was longer than the length of the tub, so 3/4ths of his entire tail hung out over the end of it. "Shiro, you don't know Allura if you haven't seen her angry," Lance joked weakly, making Shiro's face go ashen. "Mermaids like Allura have an aura when they're pissed, so you can expect to see that when she comes over."

He was right. As soon as Allura came inside, hair messy and natural (she'd come straight from the sea- Shiro had called her emergency water-proof pager thing), she pretty much sucked all the attention to herself. Her eyes, darker, only softened for Shiro, briefly, as she kissed him. Her optics then caught on Keith, and he felt the air go dead. Her voice from the other side of the room sounded like it had been amplified through high-tech speakers- every syllable enunciated and separate.

"Where is my best friend?" she said, voice low. Everyone in the room suddenly understood her lineage, how she was raised to be a leader- practically a queen. She certainly had the aura of one. Held herself high, chin up, shoulders back, hands on her hips.

As Keith looked at her, everything, everyone else in the room blurred out while her figure stayed sharp, maybe even sharpened. And there it was again- the same thing he'd glimpsed in Lance. Gills- pushing against the skin of her throat, streaks of bright markings showing through her dark skin. When he managed to blink, they were gone.

"Bathroom," he said shortly, then turned, heading into the room himself.

Lance was sitting up in the bath, placing scale tape over his wounds. The adhesive would protect the sensitive spots until new scales could develop. It was really a genetic thing if you could regenerate scales, some mers couldn't, and sometimes if a wound was too severe, scales wouldn't regenerate even if you did have the gene, scar tissue would just form. Lance had the regenerative gene, though, so he hoped they'd grow back quickly.

He looked up when Keith came in, then startled a bit when Allura entered after him. "Ally..." he started slowly, holding his hands up as if in surrender. She swept forward and wrapped her arms around Lance's wet shoulders, and if he hadn't known better, he would've said she was shaking. The markings on his cheeks and collarbones pulsed slowly- happiness and pain. Lance made eye contact with Keith over Allura's shoulder, steady and calm. Keith nodded and walked out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

"What happened?" Allura demanded fearfully, looking over Lance's tail, examining the patches where scales had fallen out. She wouldn't tell him, but Lance looked paler, sickly. She didn't think he'd want to hear it yet.

"I was fine yesterday, but I woke up sometime in the night and it felt like... it felt like I was burning from the inside out. Keith told me that my patches," he pressed his fingers to the freckles on his cheeks, "were blue. Not my blue," referring to the color of his luminescence, "Bruise blue, bad blue. Keith brought me in here and I changed, but it hurt, more than usual."

Normally, the transformation that hurt more was changing into a human as a) the tail split in half and b) lungs had to start working, and changing back into a mer was easier because you just had to seal your legs and go back to gills, not to mention a mer's original form was much easier to return to, but this time the transformation to his normal self had hurt Lance more, and that was concerning, of course.

Allura bit the inside of her cheek, nervous (more than that, even). "Lance, maybe we need to rethink this. I knew that sending you up here was never a good idea, but now I'm starting to think it's a bad idea. You've been up here long enough. My father didn't think about the consequences, and I'm sure that whatever information you've gathered up here is worthy of the experiment. Father will have enough data to complete his study."

Lance sensed what Allura was going to say and started shaking his head, "Ally, please don't do this." Allura cupped Lance's cheeks, staring hard into his blue eyes,

"You have to come home." Lance weakly pushed her hands away, tears pooling up in his eyes.

"No, no, no," he protested, "Keith's here, I have to be with him."

"We learned about this, Lance, in school. You heard about mers who try to stay up here for too long. We were always told it took years, that they could survive for many months, but maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's because you have more luminescence than anyone in this century, Lance, maybe it's because you're so young.

"But I know that bad things will happen to you if you stay up here much longer." Allura gulped, "You will die, Lance, if you stay here. I love Shiro, but I know that mers can't stay on land, you're a living example of that. It's not right. It's not how we were made. Sooner or later, you have to realize that, and I'd prefer it to be while you're alive."

Allura was terrified now. She'd worked herself up. So much stress was on her shoulders from the war, and now this. Everything would be easier if Lance could come home. She could focus on the war, put her whole heart into the effort, and Lance could help her. He'd always been a strategist, however much he denied it. Passionate and strong, she'd always known his potential. Alfor had too.

She knew he'd make a great soldier, a junior general, even. She needed him to be down in the sea with her, with his family, with the village, where he belonged. She'd make him her private bodyguard, and he could live out that dream of being something equal to Ulaz and Thace, a fighter. There was so much waiting for him down there.

All that was waiting for him up here was a slow and painful death.

Allura knew it, Coran had told her about a distant relative of his that stayed out of water for too long. She knew from him how much a mer could suffer. She would never, ever want that for Lance.

"Are you saying I have to leave Keith?" Lance's voice was small, and he unconsciously lit up the luminescent stripes on his collarbone.

Of course, that was the other thing waiting up here. How could Allura disregard that? She knew that she'd give so much, too much, to be with Shiro, happily on land, but that was impossible. And it was impossible to turn a human into a mer, things just didn't work like that.

Allura had exchanged private letters with Lotor (for business only)- she knew the secret to the process of the change. He, of course, was the sea witch who changed mers, and he'd reluctantly told Allura the process (only because she was curious). Basically, he extracted all of the mer's luminescence, which was the main reason why they were a mer, and used it to suspend them in their human form indefinitely.

After he'd extracted that magic, that pure essence, there was no turning back. A mer could have as much luminescence as Lance and still not be able to turn back into a mer if they wanted to after the process. After learning that, Allura was repulsed from the idea.

She couldn't do it anyways, she was the heir, destined to be the next leader of the village, born to be her father's successor. At least now, she didn't second guess her future.

"I'm saying that we don't belong up here. That we have to go home, where we belong." Allura frowned, trying to steel herself even her next words dug at her heart, "Don't make me order you." It was a serious phrase. If Lance refused, he'd have no choice but to be banished.

Lance's face crumpled like balled up paper. His shoulders glowed, the same signal his father his presented when Lance had come home so long ago, after their fight. That sadness of nearly losing someone you love. Except for this time, Lance really was losing that person. He was losing Keith. He didn't know if he loved him, he didn't know what that felt like, but he knew he'd do anything to stay for as long as he could.

Up here, with Shiro who was like an older brother, Pidge, who was sassy and determined and had so much independence, it scared Lance, and Matt, who was funny and loyal and who Lance could see as becoming his best friend. Up here where Lance could wear makeup and smell food that didn't come from under the sea, where he could bury his toes in hot sand and run across the pavement, where he could drive a car and celebrate his birthday.

Where he could kiss Keith and love someone who didn't have a tail. Where he could forget about the war and how he'd be moving to a different part of the world and just have a normal human boyfriend. Where he could smell Keith's shirts and run his hands through his long hair and drink coffee with him in the morning. Where they could walk to the grocery store together and he could hold onto Keith's hips as they raced downtown in his motorcycle.

But Allura was telling the truth? Was he really dying? He didn't know. Would he ever be able to be with Keith again if he left with Allura? He didn't know that either.

Lance hesitated, then, "Let me stay the night," he pleaded.

...

hello wonderful readers! a few things (if you hate a/ns you can skip haha)

1) I'm going to WattCon! Are you guys going too? If so, we should totally say hi! I really hope to be able to meet some of you guys- I'll just be roaming around looking at panels and stuff hehe <3

2) Yes, in the last chapter, I confirmed my next klance fic lolol I'll announce the basic plot at the end of this fic :) do you think you'll be interested?

3) I've never read Percy Jackson but everyone here talks about Solangelo so I've kind of been wanting to get into the series. I saw this cute fanart and I was like 'who are these cute beans?' And then I looked at the comments and I was like 'oh they're Those Cute Beans'. Are they canon? Y'all know I'm a sucker for fluff and kisses,,, should I expect that? Where do I start? Like which books and stuff?

4) I will be posting a lot this week- it's my first completely free week this summer and I plan on using a lot of my time writing, so don't be surprised if there are 1-2 updates each day :)

5) I was asked about the luminescence and the meaning of different patterns. I remember mentioning this a little bit in one of the early chapters, maybe Blue Eyes, but I'll give you guys the "guide" that I've made. This is referring to the markings that the mers have that light up and what the different stripes and stuff mean.

Cheeks (the markings are identical to the markings that Alteans have in the show)- happiness, friendliness

Ribs- warning, anger, danger

Shoulders- sadness, surrender (in battle)

Collarbone- distress, panic, pain

Sail (in the translucent skin between the spines)- thinking, concentration

I still have to come up with a meaning for hands, gills, and fin, so if you have suggestions, let me know! I'll include them in the story if I agree :)

6) something real quick I wanna address:
(if you don't see the pic lemme know)

Red- tail
Orange- fin
Yellow- sail

Just so it's not confusing lol

qotd: it was raining here all of yesterday and I loved it. Thunderstorms and the sound of rain is my favorite kind of weather. What about you guys- what's your favorite kind of weather? Be as descriptive as possible~

also, side qotd: do you guys mind that i have long a/ns? if you do, i'll stop making them so long, I'm just curious^^

love yoooooou~~~