I Was Forced On A Mission With My Rival, But Then He Kissed Me In The Dark

“On your left, Keith! Seriously, are you even looking?” I shouted into the comms, banking the Blue Lion hard to evade a spray of purple energy blasts. The simulator rocked violently, throwing me against my restraints.

“I would be if you’d stick to the flight plan instead of trying to showboat!” Keith’s voice shot back, tight with irritation. His Red Lion streaked past my viewport, a crimson blur of reckless grace. He was flying too aggressively, too close to the asteroid cluster we were supposed to be clearing.

“I’m not showboating, I’m adapting,” I retorted, lining up a shot on a drone fighter. “It’s called tactical genius. You should try it sometime.”

“Just focus, Lance!”

“I am focused! You’re the one who’s about to get his fancy mullet singed!” I fired, and the drone exploded, but my focus had been split. In that second of distraction, I didn't see the larger drone Keith had been trying to flank. It fired a torpedo. Keith’s lion twisted impossibly to avoid it, but the maneuver forced him to abandon his own attack run. The primary target, a simulated Galra cruiser, slipped behind the cover of a massive asteroid.

A jarring klaxon blared through the cockpit. Bright red letters flashed across my screen: SIMULATION FAILED.

The silence that followed was heavier than any asteroid.

In the debriefing room, the air was frigid. Shiro stood before us, his arms crossed, his expression carved from granite. He didn't yell. That would have been easier. Instead, his voice was low, weighted with a disappointment that felt like a physical blow.

“This isn’t a game,” he said, his gaze flicking between me and Keith. We stood a careful distance apart, refusing to look at each other. “Out there, a mistake like that doesn’t just mean you fail the mission. It means you don’t come home. It means your team has a hole where you used to be. Teamwork isn’t a suggestion, it’s our single greatest weapon. And right now, the two of you are actively dulling its edge.”

I stared at the floor, the tile cool and unforgiving. He was right. Every word was a perfectly aimed shot, and my usual defenses felt flimsy and useless.

“Actually, Shiro…” Pidge’s voice cut through the tension. They were hunched over a console, brow furrowed. “There’s… something else. The data is weird.”

All eyes turned to Pidge. They brought a complex diagram up on the main screen—a 3D rendering of the asteroid field, traced with two impossibly tangled lines, one red, one blue.

“You failed the objective because your communication broke down,” Pidge explained, pointing to a specific point in the data stream. “But your flying… that’s another story.” They isolated the flight paths. The lines swooped and coiled around each other in a pattern that was too perfect, too fluid to be a coincidence. “While you were arguing, you were flying in perfect sync. Every time a drone locked onto Red, Blue, you were already moving to intercept before Keith even called it out. When you almost clipped that asteroid, Lance, Keith had already adjusted his trajectory to cover your blind spot. You were unconsciously compensating for each other. Instinctively.”

The angry heat that had been simmering in my chest vanished, replaced by a cold, prickling shock. I finally risked a glance at Keith. He was already staring at me, his dark eyes wide with the same dawning confusion I felt. The screen showed our lions moving as one, a seamless, deadly dance performed by two pilots who couldn't stand to be in the same room. The evidence was right there, undeniable and utterly baffling.

The silence in the debriefing room stretched, thin and brittle. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen, from the sight of our lions moving as one entity. It felt like watching a stranger who happened to look like me. Instinct. That’s what Pidge had said. My instincts were tied to Keith. The thought was deeply unsettling, a current of something unfamiliar running just beneath my skin. I felt his eyes on me, but I refused to meet his gaze again. The weight of it was too much.

Just as Shiro opened his mouth to speak, a ship-wide alert chimed, soft but insistent. Allura’s voice came over the intercom, clear and urgent. “Paladins, to the bridge immediately.”

The tension shifted, the personal awkwardness swallowed by the familiar call to duty. We moved as a group, the short walk to the bridge feeling longer than usual. The space was bathed in the cool blue light of the main holographic display. Allura stood at the center, her posture rigid, her expression grim. Coran was at a console beside her, his usual flamboyance absent.

“We have intercepted fragmented Galra communications,” Allura began, her voice leaving no room for argument. “They speak of a new commander, Kly'zaar. Intelligence suggests he is one of Zarkon’s most ruthless and strategic minds.”

A grainy image of a Galra commander appeared on the screen. He was leaner than the others, with sharp, intelligent eyes and a cruel twist to his mouth.

“Kly'zaar operates from a mobile command base, hidden within a hollowed-out asteroid,” she continued, the image changing to a swirling mass of rock and debris. “But what makes this base so dangerous is its power source. It’s equipped with an experimental cloaking field that renders it completely invisible to all our long-range sensors.”

Hunk voiced the question we were all thinking. “So… how do we find it?”

“That is the problem,” Coran said, stepping forward. He gestured to a complex energy schematic. “The cloak is nearly perfect. However, it has one tiny flaw. The unique power source emits a faint thermal residue. It’s a frequency so specific that nearly nothing can detect it.”

“Nearly?” Shiro pressed.

“The Red Lion’s internal sensors are uniquely attuned to volcanic and geothermal energies,” Allura explained. “We believe Keith can use them to scan for this residue. It’s the only sensor array in our arsenal sensitive enough to pick it up.”

I felt a surge of… something. Pride for Keith? It was gone as quickly as it came.

“But even if we can detect it, we can’t get a weapons lock,” Coran added, his tone somber. “The cloak scrambles targeting systems. To plant a tracking beacon, we would need to ‘paint’ the target with a sustained ionic resonance frequency.” He looked directly at me. “A frequency that, with some modifications, can only be produced by the focusing lens in your Blue Lion’s bayard.”

The pieces clicked into place with a dreadful finality. The room fell silent as everyone understood the implication. Red Lion’s eyes, Blue Lion’s aim.

“A full-scale assault is out of the question. Two Lions would be detected instantly,” Shiro said, his voice low and calculating. “This has to be a stealth mission.”

Allura nodded, her silver hair catching the starlight from the viewport. Her gaze settled on me, then on Keith, binding us together with an invisible thread of command.

“The thermal scanner and the bayard rifle can be adapted for use on a smaller vessel,” she said. “Keith, Lance. You are the only two who can accomplish this.”

“Us? Alone?” I blurted out, the words escaping before I could stop them. “In a tiny ship? Are you kidding?” My protest hung in the air, loud and undignified.

“My thoughts exactly,” Keith muttered, his voice a low growl. For once, we were in complete agreement.

Allura’s expression was unyielding. “Your personal feelings are irrelevant. The mission requires your specific skill sets, and therefore, it requires the two of you. Hunk has prepared the scout ship. It’s called the ‘Blue Dart.’ You leave in one hour.”

She turned away, signaling the end of the discussion. The finality of her command was absolute. I looked at Keith, and he looked at me. The shared dread was a palpable thing between us, a stark contrast to the unconscious synchronicity Pidge had shown us. This felt far more real.

The Blue Dart was, to put it generously, compact. It was less of a ship and more of a cockpit with engines fused to the back. The interior was so cramped that the two pilot seats were practically molded together, separated by a central console no wider than my hand. Getting in was a clumsy affair of twisted limbs and muttered apologies that sounded more like accusations.

Once strapped in, the reality of our confinement set in. My right knee was pressed firmly against Keith’s left. If I shifted even slightly, my shoulder would brush against his. The air, already tasting stale and recycled, seemed thick with his presence—that faint, clean scent of worn leather and something metallic, like the training deck after a hard session. It was suffocating.

“Try to keep your elbows to yourself,” Keith said, his eyes fixed forward on the hangar bay doors. His voice was flat, but the muscle in his jaw was tight.

“Believe me, I’m trying,” I shot back, adjusting my harness for the tenth time. “It’s not my fault this thing was designed for space mice. If you’d just move your leg over a little…”

“There’s nowhere for it to go, Lance.” He finally turned to look at me, his violet eyes intense in the dim cockpit light. “This is the space we have. Deal with it.”

I clamped my mouth shut, a hundred retorts dying on my tongue. He was right. There was no escape. We were sealed in this metal pod together, our mission and our lives now completely entangled. The hangar bay doors began to slide open, revealing the star-dusted blackness of space. The ship’s engines hummed to life beneath us, a low vibration that traveled up through the seat and into my bones.

The Blue Dart lifted off the deck, smooth and silent. As we cleared the Castle of Lions, the comm crackled. “Good luck, Paladins,” Allura’s voice said, distant and formal. “The fate of many worlds rests with you.”

The comm went silent. And so did we. The only sounds were the quiet thrum of the engine and the whisper of the life support system. The silence stretched, thick and heavy, filled with everything we weren’t saying. I could feel the warmth of his leg against mine, a constant, undeniable point of contact in the vast, cold emptiness ahead.