The Best Klance Fanfictions

I want your Heaven And Your Oceans Too..

“Hurrying,” Lance says, quickening his pace, but the silk of the sand seems to absorb the impact of his footsteps, swallowing and stunting his speed.

He wishes, suddenly and fiercely, for hard-packed earth, someplace coarse and rocky, far away from the deserted beaches of Etalutauqsa, where the most recent Galra incursion is taking place.

“Lance,” Shiro says. He says it like a curse and everyone knows Shiro never swears in front of children. His patience these days has been wearing thin, like rock washed wane-gray. Their fearsome leader is no longer the darling, lamb-eyed pilot of the Galaxy Garrison, always camera-ready and grinning, with hair dark as soot and pristine, scarless flesh. These days, he is all ridge and built to draw blood. “I thought I told you to stay in your lion.”

“Yeah, no can do, bossman,” says Lance. Some things never change; one of them is Lance’s proclivity for martyrdom. “Those soldiers were about to close in on these kids. Couldn’t leave them to die and there was no way Red was gonna be able to lay down any covering fire without risking the little guys’ lives too.”

“The Blade was on them,” says Shiro, barely-contained frustration thrumming through each word.

Shiro, despite the heroic front he puts up, knows what it means to jettison nonessential weight. Keith took after him that way, Lance thinks. Like brother, like brother. Like scarred flesh, like scarred flesh.

“Where’s the Blade now?” Lance grits out. “Seriously? Kolivan, can you send someone my way? I’ve got about three minutes before I—”

The shot rings out over the quiet of the beach without warning, traveling high above the gentle sounds of the water mouthing at the sand in tender lovemaking, and laserfire lands somewhere along Lance’s left calf. He feels himself collapsing before he can right himself and topples over in the sand, crying out, like a car with a blown tire skidding off the tracks.

For a moment, his vision whites out as red-hot pain lances up his leg, flaring along raw flesh.

“Lance! Are you okay?”

“Lance?”

“Lance!”

Small hands palm at his helmet, jostling his head. He blinks, bleary-eyed, and stares up at a child with baby, velvet-textured antlers sprouting from their rose-colored flesh. The sky above them is bloody and mottled with black, wisping smoke. “Blue One,” they say, now tugging insistently at his hand. “There’s a cave up ahead. We must go!”

Lance shakes himself, adrenaline rushing in and dulling the pain some, and staggers to his feet. In a flash, he’s snatching up each of the three children and loading them up under his arms by their tiny waists. The knee-jerk elegance of the maneuver tugs at an old memory in his head and he thinks idly about the way he used to pull this move with his nieces and nephews whenever they visited from Havana, giggling toddlers in hand, how they squealed joyously while he made airplane noises and swung them around the room, sometimes tossing them playfully into the air, saying, Engines on! Commencing countdown! Ten, nine, eight...

“M’fine,” he says into his helmet, words slurring one against the other, and pushes up and off of the sand.

He bolts for the yawning maw of a giant outcropping of rock set several yards down the beach, breath whistling through his teeth and legs pumping. His arms ache with the combined weight of all the squirming aliens and every step he takes with his left foot sends pain rocketing up his body. He feels his eyes watering and pushes himself farther, faster, better.

Victory or death, he reminds himself, as his fear spikes tenfold, is the Galra way.

“It seems one of our own is already on their way over, paladin,” Kolivan says, in a deep, put-upon monotone, from Lance’s helmet. “ETA five doboshes.”