"Hunk, I owe you an apology," said Lance.

Hunk looked up at him. Pidge did not, still squinting at the readouts she was getting on some thingumajig. The two of them looked quite cosy, sitting next to each other on the couch as they sifted through the pile of salvaged technology on the table. By contrast, Keith was a grumpy splash of red and black at the far end of the couch. If he sat any further away from the others he'd fall onto the floor.

"Just one apology?" said Hunk.

Keith snickered. What was he even doing here? Shouldn't he be off doing his stupid sexy loner thing on a distant mountaintop or something?

"A couple, actually," said Lance, not letting himself be distracted by Keith's stupid sexy loner thing. That is…his stupid not actually sexy loner thing. His highly unattractive and silly looking loner thing. "But for starters, I've been thinking about that whole disaster with Nyma. About how I got distracted by a pretty girl, but you kept your head."

"I think letting her steal your lion goes beyond 'distracted' ," said Keith.

Lance continued to ignore him. "And I was thinking back to our time at the Garrison, and how I used to drag you and Pidge out to bars to pick up girls all the time, and you were always complaining that we'd get into trouble."

"Uh huh…" said Hunk.

"I just…" Lance put his hand on Hunk's shoulder. "I realise that was wrong of me. I'm sorry."

"It's no big deal," said Hunk. "But thanks."

Lance leaned forward and looked him in the eye. "And I want to say: it's ok with me that you're not into girls."

"What," said Hunk.

Pidge leaned away from the two of them. "Are you sure you want me to be here for this conversation?"

"I know I don't want me to be here for this conversation," said Keith.

"This applies to you guys as well!"

"Why would anyone care if I wasn't into girls?" said Pidge.

Keith threw his hands into the air and shouted "Why the hell is who I'm attracted to any of your business?"

"It's not! That's my point! I'm just saying…it's ok if with me if you're gay! Or...aromantic, or whatever! I'm cool with the whole rainbow! I have two moms! My cousin's genderfluid with two girlfriends and we get along great." Lance gave a nostalgic sigh, remembering how happy Cande had seemed at the last family get together. "I wish I had two girlfriends."

Pidge squished up her face in disgust. "Ew."

Lance wagged his finger at her reprovingly. He'd expected better! "Seriously, Pidge? That's homophobic, transphobic, and poly…phobic. Is polyphobic a word?"

"I'm being homophobic?" Pidge stood up and pointed her finger back at him. "You're the one assuming that Hunk's gay just because unlike you he doesn't throw himself at every girl he meets."

How had he ended up the bad guy all of a sudden? He was the one being supportive and enlightened! "I do not throw myself at every girl I meet!" He looked to Hunk for support but his backstabbing so-called 'best friend' just shrugged.

"You kinda do, dude."

"I didn't throw myself at Shay! Or Pidge!"

Hunk winced. "Nooooot really making yourself look better here."

Keith was still glaring at him, which was to be expected, but Pidge looked kind of…disturbed? Had he offended her? Girls could be weird about that kind of thing.

"I mean, no offence, Pidge. You're very, um…" It wasn't that Pidge was ugly or anything, but she was kind of…anti-hot, for some reason. Maybe because he'd met her as a guy? Probably for the best, would have been weird at the Garrison. Although…would he have been attracted to a hot girl if he'd thought she was a guy? He was certainly able to appreciate guys aesthetically. And if…Lance realised he hadn't finished his sentence. "...smart! And stuff. You're just, uh…"

Hunk was still wincing. "Fourteen?"

Once again, Lance's world tilted wildly on it's axis. It had been doing that a lot lately. "PIDGE IS FOURTEEN?" He stared at the person he would once have sworn was a seventeen year old boy. She was awfully short. And not very womanly looking. But…fourteen? She was barely older than his baby sister!

Pidge raised an eyebrow at him, looking more like a sarcastic old man than a young girl. "How old did you think I was?"

Lance was having trouble expressing himself in words. "I don't know! Old enough to go to bars?" He thought back to some of the adventures he'd been on with Hunk and Pidge. It did explain why she'd always stuck to orange juice…But that wasn't the point! "I took you to bars! I could have been arrested!"

"You gave me the fake ID I used to get in!"

"Because I thought you were old enough to have one!"

The door opened with a quiet hiss and Allura strode into the room. There was an angry look on her generous lips and her hands sat firmly on her generous hips. Now there was a women who'd been through puberty. "What are you all shouting about?" she shouted. "What's going on?"

Keith stood up and loped towards the door with an unselfconscious elegance that made Lance even grumpier. "Lance is freaking out about Pidge being fourteen. And I'm leaving." And then he left. Quitter.

"Pidge is fourteen…as a measure of what? Time? Height? Weight?" Allura tilted her head to consider Pidge from different angles.

Lance threw his hands in the air. "Years! She's only fourteen years old! That's like two seven year olds in a trench-coat!"

"So fourteen years is young, by Earth standards?"

"Yes!" said Lance. Why was no-one else surprised by this? Didn't Alteans live for like a bazillion years? Surely fourteen year olds must seem like infants to them. Of course it was possible eighteen year olds did too. Hmm. Maybe avoid telling Allura how old he was?

"It's not young by Altean standards?" asked Pidge, with childlike curiosity.

"Oh, yes, fourteen Altean years is very young indeed, for someone of my species!" said Allura. "But I don't know much about the human life cycle. I'm not sure we even measure years the same way." She sat down on the couch. Lance sat next to her and she shifted a little distance away. Personal space, huh. He could respect that. He was a very respectful guy!

Pidge tilted her head. "Hmm. A tick is one point two seconds, and there's thirty one million seconds in a year…"

Lance rolled his eyes. "How do you know that?"

"Everyone knows that," said Hunk. Lance rolled his eyes again and Hunk grinned. Nerd.

"So…an Earth year is about thirty seven million ticks, and I'm…five hundred and twenty million ticks old," said Pidge. Put like that, it almost sounded like a long time.

"I must admit I was never very good with numbers," said Allura, further cementing her place in Lance's heart. "But there are fifty ticks in a measure and seventy five measures in a stretch…"

After some more messing about with numbers, and a digression into the structure of the Altean solar system, they managed to figure out that an Altean year was about half as long as a human one.

"Oh my goodness! You are young, Pidge!" said Allura. "How many years until you reach adulthood, like the others?" Lance liked the sound of that. He was an adult!

"Four years, I guess?" said Pidge. "By my country's laws, anyway. But it's not like humans have distinct growth stages. In some ways I'm an adult already."

Yeah, keep telling yourself that, buddy thought Lance. "And in others ways you are fourteen years old and a child. How did you even…you got better grades than I did!"

Pidge smirked, childishly. "Because I studied."

"You must have studied pretty hard," said Hunk. "I couldn't have handled the Garrison when I was fourteen. I could barely handle it at seventeen."

"You're seventeen, Hunk? So you are also a child?" Allura looked at him with concern, like maybe he needed a nap.

Hunk selfconsciously rubbed the back of his head. "Uh...well. I'm not a legal adult in most places, but that's not quite the same thing."

Lance smirked. "Yep, he's a child. A tiny, innocent, helpless child. It's lucky he has me to guide him with my mature, adult wisdom."

"Lance, you are three months older than me." Hunk whacked him in the arm. "Keith's a few months older than you, isn't he? Does that mean you're going to listen to his mature, adult wisdom?"

"Ha!" laughed Lance. "Keith is a bitter old has-been jealous of my youth and vitality."

"So you're all young!" said Allura, looking at Lance with that same unsexy concern. A lesser man might have found it annoyingly condescending. "Except Shiro, of course. I'm sorry I never realised, I might have treated you differently."

"Like...not shooting at us with lasers differently?" said Hunk.

Allura smiled. "Oh no, I would still have shot at you. That was necessary. But I'd have been more maternal about it."

Lance gave her his most mature, calming, manly expression. "Allura, you don't need to be maternal with us. We're not children. Well, except Pidge."

"I'm not a child!" said Pidge. Exactly like you'd expect a child to say.

Instead of looking back into Lance's manly, calming eyes, Allura was staring at the door. "How old is Shiro, by the way? Out of curiosity."

"About twenty five?" said Lance, who had maybe read Shiro's bio a few times back at the Garrison, trying to figure out how to also be so…to be seen as so cool.

"Twenty five Earth years?" said Allura. "Goodness."

Lance went to the door and looked down the hallway. Sure enough Shiro was still where Lance had last seen him, doing pull-ups on another doorway down the hall. Did metal arms need exercise? If he didn't keep doing pull-ups, would his regular arm get all noodly and stop matching the Galra one? "Hey, Shiro," shouted Lance. "You're twenty five, right?"

Shiro stared at him and blinked, still hanging from the doorway, as if he had to think about it. Oh, right, that year in captivity. The Galra probably didn't throw their prisoner's birthday parties. Instead of shouting back, Shiro dropped to the floor and walked over towards Lance. "I'm twenty four," he said. "Why?"

"We were just discussing the difference between Alluran and human ageing," said Pidge, as if the actual topic hadn't been her alarming and unexpected fetus-ness. "Though I guess we mainly discussed the human side. How old are you, Allura? Do Alteans have distinct growth stages?"

"You mean how like caterpillars turn into butterflies?" said Hunk. "That would be pretty cool."

Lance winced at the mental image of Allura in a chrysalis, getting all goopy. "Please tell me you don't have, like, a larval stage," he said. "Unless you get wings, that would be be pretty cool."

"I'm not sure what a butterfly is, but we don't have a larval stage," said Allura. "Or wings. Not naturally, anyway, there was a fashion when I was young for people to change shape so that they had decorative wings, they were always getting caught in doorways…" She looked off into the distance, happily, then her eyes became sad for a moment. Probably remembering that all those people were dead. She forced herself to smile. "Our bodies change as we get older, but it's a gradual process, unless we choose to make it otherwise."

"So you can use your shape-changing to control your own growth as you mature?" said Shiro, sitting down way closer to Allura than he needed to. "That's amazing."

Instead of shifting away Allura just smiled at him. Probably felt sorry for the poor guy, he always looked kind of sad. Those maternal instincts again. "Well, yes and no. Many is the young Altean who has injured themselves trying to force a growth spurt before their body was ready for it. It's generally considered unwise to attempt any sort of major shape change until a child's body has finished growing out of girlhood."

"Only the girls have to worry about that?" said Pidge.

"Oh, no! All children do," said Allura. "But all Altean children are girls, even if they're not girls."

There was an awkward pause as everyone tried to digest that. Lance decided to take the 'stupid question' bullet.

"How can they be girls but not girls? Is this a translation thing?" Lance didn't understand whatever magic translation technology made everyone mutually comprehensible in this part of the galaxy, but he had watched enough bad movie dubs to recognise a translation error when he heard one.

"Hmm, yes, probably," said Allura. "Let me try to explain…There's girls as in children, and then there's girls like I was, those who choose to grow into women once we reach adulthood. When Coran was a child, he was a girl, but not a girl, because he decided to become a man. Does that make sense?"

Lance pondered. "So Alteans are all, uh...biologically female when you're kids, and then some choose to become male when they grow up?" That was pretty weird. He'd always assumed Alteans were basically like humans, asides from living for hundreds of years and having pointy ears. But they were aliens after all. Maybe they had extra hearts or something too. Or tentacles!

"Yes!" said Allura. "Well, male or something in between. There used to be a whole range of genders...And some choose to be men without changing their biology, because they want to give birth to children, and some change their biology and still see themselves as women."

"Huh," said Lance.

"It must all seem rather complicated to you! Human gender seems much simpler," said Allura.

"Not...really," said Shiro. "We have people like that too, though we can't change our shapes by force of will. So there's a lot of surgery and hormones. Your way sounds a lot easier."

"Oh, how difficult for them!" said Allura. Shiro looked embarrassed, like he didn't know what to say next. This stuff could be kind of intimidating to talk about.

"My cousin Cande's genderfluid," said Lance, helpfully. "They have two girlfriends!"

"Gender…fluid?" said Allura. "Is there some sort of liquid involved?"

"What?" said Lance. "Oh. No, it's just like…their gender changes all the time. So it's fluid! Like water!"

"Ah!" said Allura. "Fascinating!"

"Yeah!" said Lance.

"Speaking of fascinating," said Allura, turning to Pidge, "have you had any luck with the tech we recovered from the Galra scouting ship?" Apparently she'd decided that was enough of interspecies gender theory hour and it was time to get back to saving the universe. Good old Allura always…sucking the fun out things? But in a charming way. Kind of.

"I've got something better than luck!" said Pidge, her face lighting up. "I did a spectral analysis of the material used to shield the engines, and I think if we adapt a pod's laser to send an ultra high frequency burst of light where the combination of the wavelengths matches these values…" She started typing out equations on her screen and gesturing enthusiastically.

Ah, kids.

Later on Lance bumped into Coran, standing on the outer edges of the castle and staring up at the night sky. He looked kind of sad.

As much as Lance missed Earth, at least it still existed for him to go back to. It must be even worse for Coran and Allura, with Altea only existing as a memory. Maybe they'd come to Earth with the rest of them, when all this fighting was done. If all this fighting was ever done. Would they like it there? It would seem pretty primitive, technology wise. And maybe culturally too, like…would people be racist towards Allura? Assuming they weren't too distracted by the pointy ears and luminous eyes to notice her skin. Hopefully first contact between humans and aliens would go better than it usually did in the movies.

"When we get back to Earth I am taking you out to meet my family," said Lance. "I bet you'd get along great with my Uncle Rudi, his moustache is even bigger than yours."

"But is it as magnificent?" asked Coran, eyes sparkling.

"Hmmm…I don't know," said Lance. "Yours is curlier but his is thicker…" He rubbed his chin and felt the faint prickle of stubble. "Do you think I'd look good with a moustache?"

"Of course!" said Coran. "Everyone does! I've being trying to persuade Allura for decades but she says it doesn't fit her aesthetic." He rolled his eyes.

Lance laughed at the mental image of Allura with a big bushy purple moustache. "Yeah, sorry dude, but I'm going to side with her on that one." It was weird to think she could grow one. Or, you know…an elephant's trunk. Or giant fangs. Under the circumstances, her and Coran's aesthetics were both pretty subdued. If Lance could literally look any way he wanted he'd look…well. Taller, for a start. And more Shiro shaped.

He took another look at Coran, thinking about the fact that he had chosen specifically to look…like that. Maybe Alteans were into the dorky Victorian explorer look? Would it be weird to ask him what made him decide to be a man at all? Then again, what had made Lance decide to be a man? Would he have made the same decision if he'd been born in a girl's body?

This was all getting a bit too philosophical.

"Coran, are there any nearby planets with hot girls?"

Coran pulled on his moustache in thought, "The flame-eaters of Noxlon 5 have an average body temperature of ten thousand degrees. Is that hot enough for you?"

Lance groaned.

"Although I'm not sure they have genders, precisely," mused Coran. "What with being swirling blobs of lava."

"Not that kind of hot," said Lance. "Hot like Allura, you know? With curves in all the right places."

"Hmm. Well, there are myths, lost in time, of a pan-dimensional being that lives just beyond the event horizon of the black hole in the centre of the galaxy. Stories say that it's shape curves so wildly that it forms a non euclidean…"

Lance laughed and patted Coran on the back, then looked up at the twinkling stars above. "Never mind," he said.