Klance; of Florists & Tennis Shoes

Chapter VIII

Sleepy Tillandsias & Fathers

Keith woke up with a migraine-he always did. It was a habit now, he supposed, the bottle laying by his bedside becoming a given. He just wasn't sure when it had become such a normal occurrence. His eyes blinked awake, pupils once swollen, constricted immediately in response to the warm sunshine, his bed pressed against the broad window, leaving little room for escape. The white curtains were tucked into the space between the foot of his mattress and the glass, its length excessive and uncut. He hadn't been bothered to adjust it when he first moved a year or two ago, lacking the finesse and creativity other people tended to have towards their rooms. It seemed useless to him, because temporary homes didn't deserve any attention. He was, after all, going to leave his small rented studio eventually.

And the room reflected just that-that lack of care-with its queen floor bed, riddled in white sheets and an equally white duvet, a black framed full mirror hung on the opposite wall, room painted a generic grey. It was empty of personality, spartan in nature, a long white desk falling parallel to the bed, his aging laptop crooked on the surface. The studio was newly renovated, heaving with simplistic modernity, everything about it drawn out in straight lines and sharp corners, detached from a room's traditional warmth. Despite that crescent-white briskness, his space was a mess of unwashed clothes strewn about the moquette flooring, one stained with the remnants of milk tea and tracked mud, its grey surface blotched and darkened.

Keith was hardly one that took care of anything, even his carpet.

The room smelt faintly of deodorant, unlike the scent of jasmine braided into his hair when he came home from work-if he came home from work, it seemed, because Keith hadn't been to the shop in a little over a week and he wasn't sure he wanted to be back. Nothing about the idea was encouraging, not the sight of the flowers, or Shiro's line of questioning, or the last bottle of gin hidden under the floorboards. He groaned, turning onto his side to try and escape the sunlight, head buried into the feather pillow on his right. His gut twisted in on itself, and Keith had a hard time not heaving up a lung. He swallowed down the feeling of nausea.

He was hungover.

The feeling sunk into his bones, his body slow and unresponsive; he didn't remember what it was he'd drunken the night before, and part of him genuinely hadn't cared to find out. It was all the same-the same burn and the same intoxicated stupidity that had made an amateur alcoholic of him. It was true, though, because Keith had not been big on drinking much at all before he'd met Lance.

Lance.

The name fed on what remained of Keith's sober sanity, and the sheer humiliation of that night resurfaced briefly. He gave a loud, choked groan, breathing into a pillow that smelt of the plants he tended to. He hadn't touched a leaf in almost ten days, and he hated Lance for every moment he spent away from the little shop-he missed Red, and he missed Lance as well. Keith was almost sure whatever they had had between them, be it friendship or friendliness, was fucked - and it was entirely on Keith. It wasn't Lance's fault Keith was an idiot who'd fallen into a rabbit hole he couldn't quite fetch himself out of. Lance was not the one who'd offered Keith whiskey, and Lance was most definitely not the one to have practically gotten into his lap and planted one on him.

Fucking hell, Keith grimaced with closed eyes, hating his own phrasing. It wasn't only his phrasing, hardly-it was the entire situation that left him asking the boy in the mirror what he was doing with his life. With a final heaving breath, Keith forced himself upright, fingers twisting into the soft Egyptian cotton of his bedsheets, fabric warm beneath his cold tips. In all actuality, he would have never spent money on something expensive to 'fancy up the place' unless he was forced into it in one way or the other. The sheets had stayed a good year folded on the bottom shelf of his closet-after all, it wasn't Keith who bought them; it had been Allura that bought them for him.