When Lance got back to his shared dorm with Hunk with a new flight manual, because the ones he had got out from the library a couple of weeks ago had clearly not been enough, the first thing he did was sit down at his desk was slam the book down onto the table, then his head onto the book, groaning more at the unsatisfying thud it made then the pain that said action produced.

Hunk, being the amazing best friend that he was, didn't even look up from his own project, something that could detect the waves that different elements make, but instead made out a grunt of agreement, his fingers continuously moving the part of the complex machinery, careful to keep his strength reigned in as he moved around the delicate pieces into their proper places, occasionally muttering to himself to make sure that he didn't make a mistake as he built the machine from memory.

Lance stared at his friend from his place at the desk, his head still resting on the heavy book as he admired the way that Hunk just knew what to do with the wires, his quintessence just dancing across his fingers as he figured out what to do while his own just tightened around itself, as if trying to hide from a predator. Humans were amazing, as their capabilities seemed to blow his own out of proportions. Sure, humans have yet to discover quintessence, but they were so talented in such a variety of things it made Lance sometimes wonder how they even manage to learn anything at all in their school with the huge range of subjects available to them and the little amount of time to do it.

They were always in a rush, humans that is, because it was now March, meaning that they were already over halfway through their first school year. By the end of said month, their teachers wanted them to start flying simulations of the machines that they had only learned about for the best part of four or five months, which is not that long at all. It was like expecting Skye to already know where mindscape like the back of her hand, something that should be taking at least 15 phoebes to properly enter without causing damage to the user.

Maybe it was just an Altean thing to learn things slowly, because Hunk seemed to have no problem with the speed of their education, actually enjoying the rate that his teachers moved from one topic to another within a couple of weeks, his Yellow quintessence bubbling with excitement every time a new subject was introduced. Even the newer kids, the ones that took over the places of those who dropped out over Christmas were already catching up with the theory, doing twice the amount of the standard work set while Lane struggled to even catch up with the fighter class, despite the amount of pre-knowledge from being a cargo class held.

His respect for Catharyne for being able to go to high school, then university, where help was minimal for an education that demanded everything to be learned with an impeding deadline, only grew.

He lifted his head to get started on the work set by Iverson, willing to at least show that he was trying to catch up despite being at what seems to be a biological disadvantage (not that the humans knew that) when his phone, left on the centre of his bed after looking at all the messages on his phone but never replying, started to vibrate.

He had a call.

Sighing, he turned the first page of the manual, grabbing his note pad, and began to write in Spanish, as his English still wasn't every good written for him to go back to, with the occasional Altean or Galran term mixed in, using his ability to multiple languages to at least help him some of the least memorable buttons on the ships main board. This wouldn't be the first time he had left his phone to ring, since he still hadn't replied to Mama in now since the beginning of January. He knew that, one day, he would regret the action, but there was only so much he could take from then at the moment before having the desire to throw his phone across the room and listen to the glass smash into thousands of pieces.

"You still ignoring them then?" Lance huffed again before turning to Hunk, who was staring down at his project in confusion, clearly struggling with a part of it, as the phone on the bed stopped vibrating.

"Yeah, Mama still wants me to come home as soon as humanly possible," Lance smiled to himself at the choice of words. "And Skye is convinced that she's never going to see me again, mainly because of something that Paulyne said." Lance replied, his eyes going back to the scribbles on the page and frowning, the almost illegible Spanish with small amounts of Galran and Altean mixed in with the human characters, making it impossible for anyone on the planet, and possibly in the entire universe, to read and understand what coloured buttons would make the machine do what except for Lance, as languages was one of the only human subjects that jumped out at him. He had started to learn English at 8, and a bit of French when he was 12, as part of the human schooling system, however, he started to pick up Japanese when he found out that it was Captain Shirogane's first language.

(Denise called him a fanboy at the time for his fascination for the language and the reason as to why he started to learn it, something that even now Lance couldn't deny.)

Quickly, modern languages became his favourite subject at the small village school that all his family had attended at some point in their lives, if only to keep up appearances. He had started to learn Altean from Catharyne at aged 11, wanting to find a way to spend time with the weird older sister who didn't want to learn about quintessence like the rest of the family, the oddest thing in the universe in Lance's preteen mind. The 15-year-old Catharyne at the time was absolutely delighted with the idea, and, not before long, the two of them were talking to each other in what is now considered a dead language, one that only the druids of the Galra Empire use. After learning about the Galra empire and the war, all he wanted to do was help, even if his family disagreed with his choices, so, after begging his grandfather for a solid month, he finally started to learn some basic Galra, something that actually made his grandfather smile after he learned the speed he was picking up the new language, a rare occurrence for anyone to see after his wife's death a century before.

It was one of the things that actually got him accepted into the Garrison, as it wasn't often that they got a teenager who was fluent in two languages and passable in another two, if the alien ones were taken out of the equation. It wasn't a requirement for the applicants to speak a second language, mainly as the US education system was really bad at teaching their students foreign languages, but students, with a bigger focus on pilots, were expected to be a 'secondary' expert in something. Popular choices for pilots were combat, as the Garrison taught self-defence, first aid (though lots of people dropped out of the course after finding out it really wasn't for them) and extra-terrestrial intelligence, for all those alien fanatics. Lance, however, is one of the only people in his year to become a linguistics specialist, and he's pretty proud of that.

"They do know that the holidays are coming up, right?" Hunk asked, only to get a shrugging Lance as a response while he filled the page over, taking in the information before scribbling something down, a little note in Japanese due to how the kanji reminded him of the function of the particular button.

"I think that they know it's coming up, but becau-" Lance paused what he was saying and turned to look at his phone, which was vibrating again.

Strange. They never tried to call back this quickly.

Walking over to his bed, he picked up the phone and looked at the contact that filled his phone screen.

Paulyne

He had never given her a nickname, not that he didn't try, but because she always managed to change his opinion on her so much, especially over the last couple of months, nothing was ever able to stick properly. This, of course, meant that she was the only one on his phone without a nickname, which was pretty sad in Lance's opinion.

Of course, she never gave a quiznak on what he called her.

Though, the bigger question was why was she calling him, now of all times?

"Hola, ¡mi hermana favorita!" Lance said brightly and loudly, smiling tensely into the receiver. There was an awkward silence on the other side making Lance hold his breath in confusion, and, as the seconds ticked passed, he wondered if his older sister had given up there and then and had decided to hang up on him the instant she heard his voice.

"Please don't make me hang up the phone straight away."

Lance sighed silently, letting the tension he didn't know he had flow out of his body, and he felt his quintessence calm at the sound of a family member's voice, even if they did have such a bad personality.

"Por favor, you love me too much for that." The small teasing came naturally to Lance, slipping from his tongue the same way that he naturally converted from one language to another.

Now, if only he could get his flirting to that level standard, then he would be unstoppable.

"No sabes qué."

Lance let out a small laugh at the reply, not that he expected less from his hermana.

"Harsh. What do you want?" There was a quick tone shift in his voice, which caused Hunk to spare a glance at his best friend. The tension was back in the air, like a static electricity before a storm. Smiling at Hunk, Lance stood up, leaving his work at the desk, and walking out into the hallway, not wanting to make his friend worry about his family situation than he already did, or overhear something that no human was allowed to know, even if he was his best friend.

(There were times, like now, that he wished he would just tell Hunk the truth, the whole truth.)

"To convince you not to come home for the spring holidays."

Lance stopped dead in the hallway of the dorms, one hand still on the door handle while the other held his phone to his ear, a cold chill filling his spine and the oddest impression of someone watching him came back, their invisible eyes bearing into him, their stare calling him, daring him to go find them.

"Why?"

"Well, Mama's not impressed with you not replying to her texts, no one is really if I'm being honest. You know she wants you to come home as it is, and Skye wants the same. Denise just wants the family to stop fighting, whether you're here or not, and Catharyne is too busy studying her human history to even know what's going on. Abuela is more interested in her project than the food on her plate and Tia Angelica is spending more and more time out of the house, saying that she's 'working', even though everyone knows she not!"

Lance hear her sigh on her side of the line, and he gritted his teeth.

"Okay, the family's falling apart. So what! The same thing happened when Papa died, you know that! We managed to recover then, why can't we do it again? It's not like I'm going anywhere for the next couple of years anyway, they can't send cadets off to space, so it's not like they have anything to worry about. I need to tell Mama this face to face for her to understand Paulyne, not over text!" Lance almost shouted, but softened his expression when a couple of year mates walked past, curiously watching him talking on his phone as they walked passed, so he compromised and growled it down his phone to the point that he wouldn't be surprised if Paulyne asked for a repeat what he just said.

"Last time the family wasn't separated halfway across the world! Last time, we knew that Papa wasn't coming back. Last time, we were sure of what was going on in the war, where we stood and were armed with the knowledge of what to do if we needed to. But, now, we don't know what's going on, we don't know how close the Galra are to coming to Terra, especially with the Kerberos mission failure. I get that you're angry at her, and I know that you want to talk sense into Mama, trust me, I've tried, but the only person who seemed to even believe me about the Blade is Abuela, and you know what she's been like recently."

There was a pause on the other side of the phone, making the only thing that Lance could hear was his own laboured breathing, out of breath despite not being the one doing the talking, giving an impression of a man who sprinted 100 miles, and the rush of his quintessence and his blood in his ears, blocking out the world's sounds and only leaving

"Mama's not ready to hear it yet. Not from me, and definitely not from you."

"But what am I supposed to do during the holidays Paulyne, I can't just live at the Garrison, you know that right?" Sarcasm poured from his mouth and into the receiver, while his hands reached for his pockets for the small white crystals that have been able to call his pockets home for the last couple of months. They did little to slow his racing blood, but his breath was able to calm at least a little, making it like he had only ran a single mile instead.

"I'm saying it's only for the spring break, they'll allow it due to you being an international student. Just- just give Mama a couple more months for it all to sink in, for her to accept it, or she might never let you go again."

Paulyne sounded on the verge of begging, a strange tone coming from her. Swallowing, Lance looked down the corridor where he saw his year mates walk down, eyes unfocused as he pondered over what he had been told.

"Sure, whatever. You can be the one to tell her." With that, he hung up on her, and went back into his shared dorm, chucking his phone onto his bed, turning back to the desk and sat down at it, then winced when he heard his phone bounce off of the bed and onto the floor. Hunk set his now completed project onto his own desk, as he gave Lance a concerned look.

"Is everything okay?"

Maybe, in once universe, Lance spilled the beans and explained everything that was wrong in his family, the old war between the Galra empire and the new fighting within themselves. Maybe, Lance told his best friend that he wasn't human and that he wanted to go to past the solar system to fight against those who oppressed the others. And, in that one universe, Hunk supported his friend's decisions, and was happy to finally know what was causing them so much worry.

But, hey, that's another story, for another day.

"Not right now, but we're getting there."

A.N. – Okay, so I was supposed to have this finished about Thursday, so I could upload it on Friday, but then I was struck with an Illness that made me sleep not only the weekend away but made me miss college today too. Ugh. Kudos and comments would be well received and make me 10x better, so please leave some below.

In other news, I'm making a soundtrack for the series, so if you have any songs, list them in the comments!

Hola, ¡mi hermana favorita! - Hello, my favourite sister!

Por favor - Please

No sabes qué - You don't know that

Hermana - sister