The Best Klance Fanfictions

Love and Other Questions

There was a sharp pain between his shoulder blades, and Keith couldn’t tell if it was coming from Shiro or if he’d cut himself in his fall. His arms didn’t twist quite right to feel the fabric of his jacket for a split so, reluctantly, he took the jacket off to examine it.

There was no tear, no blood, and Keith wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or worried. His eyes went to the black Mark on his right arm, a ring all the way around his bicep, smooth on the bottom but gnarled on top like the Mark was reaching ghostly fingers up toward Keith’s shoulders.

Keith felt sick just looking at it. Shiro was out there somewhere, hurting. Being hurt. Keith wouldn’t delude himself into thinking all the new scars had happened by accident. Whether the Garrison was holding him prisoner somewhere on Earth, or whether the Persephone had run afoul of aliens (a ludicrous theory, but one that fit surprisingly well with the facts Keith had uncovered so far) Keith didn’t know.

It didn’t matter, anyway. Keith was going to get Shiro back, somehow, and something in his gut told him the lion carvings in the caves held the key.

As Keith moved to put his jacket back on, he caught sight of another Mark. Words—new since this morning—scrawled in a near-illegible chicken scratch in a vibrant blue that matched the Mark on the inside of his left wrist.

There’s something wrong with my cell phone, the words read. It doesn’t have your number in it.

Keith rolled his eyes, glad his pen pal wasn’t here to see his lips twitch. Keith had been trying for years to get his soulmate to give up on the bad pickup lines; letting Blue know the lines actually had some (perverse, unexplainable) effect on Keith would only serve to undo what little progress he’d made.

The smile soon faded, though, and Keith yanked on his jacket without replying to the words. He didn’t have a pen on him, but even if he did, what would he say? Sorry I haven’t written you in a year, I’ve been busy looking at cave paintings while my other soulmate gets the shit kicked out of him on a daily basis?

Yeah, no thanks.

Keith rarely even saw his pen pal’s messages anymore, with as much as he wore his jacket. (To keep off the sun, he told himself, and not because he couldn’t stomach the sight of Shiro’s scars.) Frankly, he was surprised Blue hadn’t given up by now. God knew Keith wouldn’t blame him.

Blue’s Mark—a tiny pair of royal blue pilot wings—peeked out from beneath Keith’s glove and he tugged it down once, firmly, to hide the stinging reminder of what a terrible soulmate he was.

The caves, he reminded himself. The caves were what mattered now. The calendar he’d found six months ago carved into the floor and walls of an oddly round room pointed to something happening tomorrow. Something big. An arrival, if Keith had interpreted the pictographs right. He’d copied them down in his notebook, taken pictures with his stolen Polaroid camera to pin on his board back at the shack, spent almost every night staring at them under the garish light of the shack’s lone lightbulb. And he still wasn’t completely sure his hunch was right.

The date, though—that he would bet his hoverbike on. He’d spent a full month studying the calendar, which marked time by the angle of sunlight through a shaft in the cave ceiling, and he’d been back twice since to make sure he hadn’t messed up the calculations.

Tomorrow.

Which meant today might be Keith’s last chance to explore the caves and find more clues. Tomorrow he would stay near his shack, maybe do some patrols on his hoverbike while he watched for signs of the arrival.