"What the hell is wrong with your head?"

"My head? What the fuck's up with yours?"

"My mind's not the one that feels like—" and here Keith stops, unable to describe the completely alien nature of what they all felt through the link formed through Voltron. The others are silent, just as curious but too confused to even know how to ask.

Lance knows he shouldn't take it personally, but Mullet has always been able to rile him up. Somehow, despite having the social capability of a deformed potato, he's always known exactly what to say to make Lance's blood boil.

"Like what, Keith? Excuse me for being a special fucking snowflake! You think it's hard connecting with one weird mind, try connecting with four!"

He's getting too angry, too open. If he doesn't calm down right now, Lance doesn't know if he can keep from letting something slip. The absolute last think he needs at the moment is to go on a rant explaining all the ways he's always been different from everyone else. He should tell them. He knows he has to eventually. He has the golden opportunity right now, a perfect time to come clean about just how different he is from the rest of them. He won't. He never does.


Somehow, the rest of the team seems to have come to an agreement to not talk about it after Lance blows up at Keith. Shiro seems to have been the leading force behind this decision, although he does corner Lance soon after and tell him that if he ever needs to talk, Shiro's door will always be open. Lance lies that he'll keep that in mind.

It's not that he doesn't want to talk about what he is, because he'd love to. It's not that he's afraid of their reactions towards him being some kind of alien, because they've gotten along with Allura and Coran without any problems. It's not even that he's worried that they'll be angry at him for lying about his humanity, because after what they've recently been through he doesn't think they'd blame him for trying to survive.

Lance doesn't talk about what he is because he doesn't know. He doesn't know where he came from, or what his species is, or even how his species died (but he can guess, although doing so brings up a red haze that fogs his mind). Hell, he doesn't even know what color his own blood is. Every incident that should have ended in injury or death for a normal human never left him with a scratch. Fallen out of a tree? A fall that seemed to take ten times as long as it should have and a crater in the soft dirt. Crashed his bike into a pole? Broken bike, broken pole, unbroken boy. Even at the height of stupidity, when Lance stuck a fork in an electrical socket because his older brother told him not to, all he felt was a mild burst of something that made him feel energized for the rest of the day.

He's a freak. He knows that. The problem is he doesn't know what kind of freak out of the millions of aliens there must be out there he is, and if he doesn't know, how can he tell anyone else?


Lance asks Coran to teach him Altean, who happily agrees, eager to pass on anything he can. Lance is pretty sure Coran thinks he wants to learn it to impress Allura (and he'd be lying if that wasn't at least a small part of it), but the true reason is much more personal. Everything in the castle is in Altean, and while some things can easily be set to English, older scholarly articles and hard copies of books cannot. Unfortunately, no matter how many massive databases he searches through, how many dusty Altean tomes he struggles to read, there is no mention of a humanoid race with the power to manipulate electricity on an unprecedented scale.

Refusing to give up, Lance tries to use the castle's scanners to get a better look at the inside of his body.

This does not go well.


"There you are Lance, I've been—quiznack! Just a tick, I swear we'll get you out of this Number Three, don't worry!" Coran frantically gets out at the sight of Lance being bombarded with enough radiation to actually be visible to the naked eye. Within seconds Coran has slammed the emergency stop button, causing the radiation to come to an abrupt halt as the pod spits Lance out on his hands and knees.

"Why did you stop?" Lance almost shouts, "I was so close!"

Coran apparently takes this the wrong way, saying while pulling him as quickly as he can to the medical bay "Lance, this is not the answer. I don't know what it is that has you feeling this way, but all of us will do our best to help you through it."

It takes Lance a while, standing solid while Coran does his best to yank him off his feet, but eventually he understands, his expression giving way to horror as he tries to explain.

"No—Coran—I wasn't trying to…you know… I was just trying to scan myself!"

Coran halts his futile efforts and quirks an eyebrow, "No scan I've ever seen has used," his eyes widen following a quick look at the scanner, "over one hundred thousand rads? By the ancients, how are you alive? No—it doesn't matter, we need to get your levels down immediately!"

This back-and-forth goes on for some time, with Lance insisting he feels fine, and Coran insisting even more firmly that radiation levels of over a hundred rads can be quite dangerous to humans, never mind one thousand times that, until Lance finally exclaims "But I'm not human, Coran!"

Immediately, Lance's eyes go wide, and he slams a hand over his mouth. It had barely been a month since he'd decided to keep it from the team until he knew more, and here he was blurting out his best-kept secret to Coran (who, to be fair, was very easy to talk to). How could he be so stupid? Oh, well. "In for a penny, in for a pound," breathes Lance.

"What?"

"I'm not human," he says, calmer this time, "but I don't know what I am, and I'm trying to find out. Look at the scanner again. Please."

Slowly, Coran takes another look at the alien monitor, blinking at the information he's being given. The scanner works on the same principles a human X-ray machine does, by sending radiation through a body where dense material such as bone will absorb the radiation and appear brightly on the negative, while skin and tissue are not dense enough to absorb it and allow it to pass through, making it look more transparent. For humans, the average X-ray scan contains maybe three to seven rads. For Alteans, who have evolved stronger and denser, up to fifty rads can be used safely. At one hundred thousand rads, the upper limit on the scanner, there should be nothing but black. Coran's mind knows this. Unfortunately for his mind, his eyes see a completely white silhouette of Lance's body, without even a hint at what's inside.

"But—that shouldn't be possible!" exclaims Coran, eyes practically bugging out.

Lance has never been one for science, but he thinks he understands, considering he's been doing the impossible all his life. "Would you mind elaborating on that?"

"I—the only thing I can think to compare the density to is that of a neutron star or maybe Voltron itself—oh wait till I tell the others—"

"Coran, no! Please, you can't tell anyone else! I don't even know what I am yet and I doubt they'll be accepting if I just say 'hey, I'm not human oh and also my skin is as tough as Voltron, and we don't even know about my bones yet.'" Lance pleads, trying to convey just how important this is to him.

Coran takes a long look at Lance before he solemnly nods his agreement. "On one condition: as soon as this could possibly put the team at risk, you tell at least Allura and Shiro what's going on."

That's more than Lance had thought he would get, so he quickly agrees, and they begin to continue his testing.


Okay, that's all. One thing: sorry, but I'm going back and saying that this is going to be updated once a week on Saturdays from now on. Sorry, but I've realized that I'm going to need more time if I want to be able to actually spend time on the chapters I write and make sure they're good enough to put out, as well as run them through a beta. This does mean that chapters will be longer, as I'll be able to spend more time on them, and also that the story will be more coherent as time goes on (I hope). But yeah, this chapter wasn't as long as I'd like, and I wasn't able to put in a lot of stuff I wanted to, so that's my main reasoning.

Sorry to keep changing it up, but this is my first real fanfiction aside from some little drabbles I write for myself, so let me get a chance to get my feet under me.

Also, let me know how I'm doing! I don't mean to fish for reviews or anything like that, but I can't get better if I don't know how.

Thanks y'all.