midorisakura

24 hours seems like a lot of time.

It isn't.

You close your eyes to blink, and it's gone, just like that.

Time isn't measured by hours in space, though. It's measured by ticks, dobashes,vargas and quintants. And by Altean measurements, a day is less than 24 hours long. 20 vargas is all you get in a quintant. It's like you close your eyes, and when you open them, not even a full tick later, the quntant's gone, and a new one has begun.

For Lance, it feels like he's always running on empty, always going, going, going. A quintant, 20 vargas, less than the 24 hours that he's used to, is never enough for him to do what needs to be done.

Even if he never slept (and he's done that for quintants at a time until he's dropped into coma-like sleep), it still would not be enough. He'd still be short of the time that he needs to measure up to the worth of Keith, Pidge, Shiro, Hunk, Allura and even Coran.

Sure, he pilots the blue lion, and he thinks that maybe he's even fairly okay at it, and he's a halfway decent shooter, but he's almost useless as a fighter (he's a great punching bag, though) and he doesn't have the brains to be all that great at tinkering with electronic gadgets. He's kind of, just there, doing what he can, when he can, but it's never enough. He's never enough.

If he were a measurement of time, Lance can't help but think that he'd be little more than a tick, if that.

Sighing, Lance glances over at his teammates, trying not to let his depressing thoughts show. He plasters a smile on his face and winks at Allura, earning a raised eyebrow in response rather than a nasty, or haughty remark (for him, it's a win).

He's lost track of the conversation, which is nothing new. He's grateful (mostly) that no one seems to notice (or maybe it's just that they don't care) because he can feign interest, or go off on his own tangent with no one the wiser.

Shiro gives him a piercing look, like he's seeing right through Lance's inner musings and does not like what he's seeing. It's unnerving. Lance looks away, gazes, unseeing at the uneaten food on his plate.

"You gonna eat that?" Hunk asks, pointing at Lance's plate with a spoon filled with heaping goo.

Shrugging, Lance ups the wattage of his smile and pushes the plate toward Hunk. "I'm not hungry," he says. "It's all yours."

He can feel Shiro's eyes on him like twin lasers, and Blue's consciousness stirs inside, nudging him with concern. Lance ignores both of them.

Crossing his arms over his chest, and his legs at the ankles, he leans back in his chair, and watches everyone eat and pretends to follow the lively conversation that's occurring around him. Hunk, Pidge, and Coran are rather animated as they talk about something that Lance could not even begin to understand if he tried, and Allura appears to be amused. Shiro, Lance can see out of the corner of his eye, seems amused, too, though he keeps shooting concerned looks in Lance's direction.

It's when everyone turns to look at him, corners of their mouths turned down, eyebrows furrowed, that Lance realizes he's been asked a question. He blinks and swallows the sudden dryness in his throat, heart pounding a tattooed rhythm in his chest at being caught out like this.

"Uh...quantum physics?" he says, earning a round of groans, eye rolls, and a solid punch in the arm from Pidge that makes him wince. For someone so short and compact, Pidge can really pack a punch. Not that he'll say anything of the sort to the genius. He likes his body parts right where they are, thank you very much.

"You've got to admit that was the perfect punchline, though" Hunk says, nodding in Lance's direction.

Lance frowns and wonders what kind of conversation quantum physics would have been the perfect punchline for. It's uncanny how his subconscious seems to protect him even in times like this, when he knows his own lack of worth, his inability to truly contribute. Usually they leave him out of this sort of discussion, and with good reason. He is no genius, of quantum physics, or otherwise.

Pidge rolls her eyes, but nods, and then launches into a sentence about quantum physics that makes Lance's head ache. Shiro catches his eye and surreptitiously motions for Lance to meet him in the hall. Engaged in some sort of highly convoluted debate involving astrophysics, polymorphic distributions, and quantum physics, the others don't even notice when Lance and Shiro leave.

It's quiet in the hall. Lance follows Shiro silently, counting the passing ticks with each fall of Shiro's foot on the tile. He wonders if each footfall is a tick, or longer, and if his own steps are in sync with Shiro's, if they even count. What is the measure of a footstep anyway? Does it matter?

Shiro stops abruptly, spinning around before Lance can even register the movement, and they collide, lips pressed to lips, Shiro's human hand cupping the back of Lance's head, tongue pressing for egress. A frozen tick later, and Lance's heart flails against the cage of his chest, beating rapidly, like a bird fighting for its freedom. He can't breathe, doesn't want to, because breathing would mean that time is not standing still, and this is a moment that Lance would like to last forever.

24 hours is not enough time. A quintant is even less.

They pause for breath, Shiro pulling back slightly, eyes locked on Lance's, searching. "I see you," he says, voice low and scratchy.

Trembling, Lance tries to back away, but Shiro's grip is tight, and his body is warm, pressed up against Lance's like it is, and it feels so good, so right, like nothing ever has before. Like quantum physics is the answer to everything.

"Do you?" Lance asks, voice little more than a breath.

Nodding, Shiro leans close and traps Lance's lips in another kiss. This one's leisurely. Ticks melt into a dobash or ten, and Lance stops counting as he loses himself in the multi-faceted sensations of kissing a man that he'd admittedly had a passing crush on before he'd even left planet Earth. It's heady and dizzying, and Lance never wants it to end, but like all things, good or bad, it does.

"You matter," Shiro says after he catches his breath. "More than you think you do. Not a tick goes by that I don't think of you. Of...doing this, with you." He presses a chaste kiss to Lance's nose, mouth, cheeks, the hollow of his neck.

"But, I'm not...smart, like Pidge and Hunk," Lance murmurs, toes curling when Shiro kisses his Adam's apple as it bobs on a nervous swallow.

"And...I...uh..." he takes a shuddering breath when Shiro's lips grace the edge of his jaw, tongue darting out to taste.

"I uh...can't...can't fight like...like K...Keith," he stutters as Shiro's tongue traces a path along Lance's jaw down to his neck, and then suckles there, leaving a mark where anyone can see.

"We'd better move this to my room," Shiro says, and Lance follows blindly in the man's wake, feet not even touching the ground as he walks.

A tick and they're in Shiro's room, shutting and locking it behind them. Another tick and Lance is naked, standing in front of an equally naked Shiro, skin an embarrassed, warm shade of pink.

For all that Shiro's been through, he's still gorgeous, and muscular. Even his scars are sexy. Lance is a twig by comparison. Skinny and all knobby elbows and knees. Nothing impressive to look at.

"You're beautiful," Shiro says in a husky voice. He pulls Lance toward the bed, and they fall together, Lance on top.

Shiro just looks at him, eyes hooded and lit with something that makes Lance's skin feel tight and hot, and makes his heart race, his breath catch in his throat. He's not beautiful. He's not useful. He's just Lance. And yet, with Shiro looking at him like this, as though he's the only other man in the world, he feels loved, cherished, wanted.

It's almost too much, and Lance tries to right himself, but Shiro flips them, and Lance is suddenly pinned beneath the other man, looking up into eyes that hold nothing but the image of himself within their dark pools of lust, and Lance loses himself in the small universe of Shiro's eyes. A universe that, at least for this brief moment in time, holds only Lance.

"You okay?" Shiro asks. "Is this okay?"

"Yes," Lance says in a voice that's far too shaky and small to contain all of the emotions that he's feeling.

"Please." He doesn't even know what he's asking for, just knows that when Shiro smiles and plies his lips, tongue, teeth, and fingers to Lance's body, he happily loses himself in everything Shiro.

Time stops moving forward for a few vargas that complete a full cycle of a quintant, and then some, before Shiro and he are spent and collapse in a sweaty tangle of limbs and sheets, and fall asleep like that, cradled in each other's arms.

24 hours seems like a lot of time.

It isn't.

Before he knows what's happening, he's rolling out of bed, groggy, yet pleasantly rested, limbs heavy and tingling, and Lance knows that there will never be enough time in a day, or a quintant, to do everything that he wants to. That there will never be enough time on Earth, or in the universe, to love and be loved by Shiro.

"Stay awhile," Shiro says, reaching out and capturing Lance's wrist. "Just a few more dobashes."

Sighing, and grimacing at the flaky mess on his stomach, Lance crawls back into bed, lets Shiro pull him close, and rests his head on the man's chest so that he can listen to the steady beat of his heart ticking away the time like a clock. It's soothing, and Lance loses himself in the rhythmic ba bump, ba bump, knowing that, when he wakes again, Shiro will let him shower and wash away the evidence of their coupling, that life will resume as it always has, one tick at a time. But maybe, just maybe, he won't be counting down the vargas alone.