Thace had gone back to the pilot's seat about three hours ago after telling Matt to try to get some sleep again. He hoped he'd manage to at some point. Thace wasn't sure how easy it would be to get into a base that had been abandoned nearly as long as he had been alive. They'd need to be alert and prepared to deal with whatever the forest threw at them.
Which meant he would be needing to go to sleep himself as well.
He yawned as he put in the command for the ship to do one last large radius scan for anyone else. When it detected nothing he put it on autopilot and quietly walked into the bunk room.
Matt seemed to be asleep, sitting up with his head resting on crossed arms and tucked in knees, back against the wall. Thace wondered why he slept like that, instead of the way humans regularly slept. He thought for a moment, considering that he had only ever really known one human. Perhaps Haneul was the one who slept weird. Or humans just had two different ways of sleeping based off of preference. Thace shrugged to himself. He went to the bunk on the opposite wall and stripped down to his under armor, putting everything else neatly on the top bunk for ease of access later. Then he curled up under the warm heavy blanket that made soldiers like him miss their pods just as much as it was supposed to replace them. It was going to be nice seeing Tirique again if she hadn't been put on some other assignment since the last time he had had contact with anyone. He wondered how their mother was doing, if Grandmother was still alive and could tell Voltron had come back. If he didn't know better he may have guessed she was back in the pilot's seat when the Red Lion attacked Zarkon on its own. She lived for the day the man who stole her planet from her, betrayed the universe, was brought down to his knees under her clan where he belonged.
Thace sighed as he drifted off to sleep. He had never been one for politics.
A metallic thud woke him. He sat up, looking over at the human across the room. It looked like Matt had elbowed the wall in his sleep. He was about to lie back down when he realized that that wasn't the only noise that woke him up. Matt was crying. He hadn't expected that.
"Matthew?" He asked softly. The human didn't budge, clearly still sleeping. Thace got out of bed and padded over before sitting on the edge of the mattress. He put a hand on Matt's shoulder and shook him slightly. The next thing he knew he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling with a pain in his ribs.
He saw Matt cautiously peek over the edge of the bed.
"You alright?" the human asked.
Thace sat up with a grunt. "I'll live. How are you doing?'
"'M fine."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"There's nothing to talk about." Matt crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall.
Thace raised an eyebrow. "Experience says otherwise."
"Experience can kiss my ass," the human muttered, but Thace heard him all the same.
"You have a very strange way of speaking," the man commented.
"I have a very strange way of doing most things," Matt retorted.
"Even to other humans?"
"Most humans, yeah."
"Why is that?"
"None of your business."
Thace let the room be silent for a moment before he asked another question. "What's your planet like?"
"It's a big tilted rock filled with magma and mostly covered in water. We have a moon too."
"Tilted?"
"The axis that it turns on isn't straight, it's on a 23.5-degree tilt, but sometimes it can vary between 22 and 24.5 but only about every…. 40,000 years? Don't quote me on that it's been awhile since any of that was relevant."
"Oh." Thace frowned. "How does the tilt affect the planet?"
"We have seasons where it can be cold or warm and it's really neat."
"Interesting."
"But the poles are all frozen, almost nothing lives in those places. The entire arctic region goes half a year with only sun and half a year with only night because of the tilt, and the countries that go that far north can get almost no day at all during the winter, and almost no night in the summer. I'm from closer to the equator though so I've only ever read about these things."
"What is it like where you are from?" The complete shift in Matt's body language was surprising, leaning forward with his legs crossed, talking just as much with his hands as he was with his mouth.
"We have four seasons, the thing with Earth is that the closer to the equator you get the warmer it is because there's generally more sun and shit I'm not like, super close to the equator at all I'm actually closer north to the pole but anyway we have four seasons, in Winter everything kinda dies off because there's less sun, and the temperature averages below the freezing point of water so precipitation gives us snow and everything's white and there's no color. Except for some trees that have needles instead of leaves and are evergreens everything else is deciduous and sheds its leaves during fall which is the season before winter when things aren't quite below freezing but the temperature is still beginning to drop." Matt took a deep breath. "Anyway I'm going backwards with that, after winter things start to get warm again and all the plants regrow and trees get new leaves and sometimes they get flowers before they get leaves and it's all really pretty and smells great we also get a fuckton of rain then too so it's also very damp. Then we have summer and that can get really really hot sometimes it's actually dangerous to our health but we have technology that makes the air inside buildings cooler so that hopefully no one dies. Then after summer it starts to get chilly but not freezing chilly just a little bit cold, and that's fall. It just cycles through as earth goes around the sun."
Thace just sort of nodded, not having expected such a long explanation of that very specific topic of Earth's nature, and not entirely sure what to do with the information either, but glad that talking about it seemed to make Matt be in a better mood.
"Oh, one of the things that happen on earth that my friend Star found really wild was how we can get weather, with winds strong enough to destroy buildings and pick up people, and are completely and utterly devastating, but instead of just. Not living in the area where that's prone to happening we put holes in the ground under the places we live too if the wind levels or picks up the building nothing happens to us in the hole, and then we just rebuild when it's over. Unless you live by the ocean and it causes flooding then you just have to leave until the water goes down."
"Humans are indeed more resilient than expected," Thace commented.
"Good."
"Good?"
"Underestimation will be their downfall."
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The next one's gonna be a real kicker