The Best Klance Fanfictions

I want your Heaven And Your Oceans Too..

i want your heaven and your oceans too

mothpoem

  "bring the floor up to my knees / let me fall into your gravity / then kiss me back to life to see / your body standing over me."

— adele, i miss you

• • • 

Lance knows how this story goes, but still he sprints onward, pink sand crunching softly underfoot.

He’s always thought that if he had to bite it, if technology hadn’t made it far and fast enough by then, if death had finally figured out how to outrun him, he’d like to live out his last moments on a beach, preferably one buried in the marrow of Cuba. Maybe sprawled across the hot grain, no towel in sight, his fingers curled lovingly around the topmost layer of sand where it lived the loosest. His flesh memorizing, soaking up, devouring the seaside smells as the sun sank languidly below the water.

He thinks of his eldest sister Yves walking him down the shores of Varadero one smoldering summer when they’d fought their way free of the stale hotel their father worked bellhop in, the way she’d held tight to his tiny brown fingers and said, “Sand records history. ¿Sabías eso? Most things in nature remember. Trees, rocks—they can all recall their past. If you have the eyes for it, you can look at any of them and they’ll tell you their story.”

It burns on its way up his throat, the knowledge that the universe is granting him this one lone wish, if nothing else. It’s the most terrible pyrrhic victory he’ll never survive—to die on an alien beach parked a million light-years from his home country, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, if Shakespeare had given brown kids and their misfortunes the time of day in his sonnets.

Lance thinks, if sand records history, then so does his flesh.

His body remembers in all the worst ways—picking out the ripest avocados from the marketplace stalls of Cardenas alongside his humming mother, her thick hair piled high in a bun, flyaways caught against her temples with sweat, the pedi-taxis pulled by unruly mares trying to lure in passersby and their coins, packs of barefooted brown children playing baseball in the streets, their crows of victory rising in the air like triumphant birdsong.

Cuban birdsong, he thinks, has always been the voices of a million dark-skinned children—some brown, some black, some brown-black and glowing golden at the seams.

“Hey, so, I’m in a bit of a pickle here,” Lance pants into his helmet. “The Galra are backing me into a corner. They’ll figure out how to flush me out pretty soon and I have refugees with me. Young ones.”

He sends the adolescent aliens wrapped around his long limbs a panicked look and pulls harder where they’re clinging to his gloved hands, yanking them down the shores of the pink-fleshed beach, like in a surrealist version of an old memory—dark beaches, doe-eyed children, the haunted beat of approaching footsteps in sand, still far-off but rapidly gaining on them—a moment he’s already lived distorted by the evils of his brain in unconsciousness. Except he’s wide awake right now.

He’s always wide awake for the worst of his nightmares.

The child curled around his back like an infant-monkey digs their pointy chin into his shoulder and says something in another language that his helmet ingests and spits back out in robotic English.

“Hurry, Blue One,” his helmet recites, emotionless, because for all the ways Altean tech seems flawless at first glance, the translators built into their helmets have never been able to replicate emotion. Some things, Lance supposes—things like a child’s abject terror—are universal, because his brain has no trouble interpreting the sounds of the alien’s fear. “The Galra are fast.”