A/N: First in a series. Now that it's all over I wanted to redo things my way. Part one goes from childhood to our Paladins leaving earth. Very slow burn Klance. Some Shiro/Adam on the side. Trans Female Pidge. Soulmates. Implied Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Character Death. Implied Sexual Content.

Preflight

Shooting had been his Tío's idea.

"Nothing will teach you focus like a rifle," Tío Mateo had said.

The thought of it had been exciting, shooting a rifle like the soldiers in the old movies Marco used to watch. Mamá, though, had not approved.

"I need to do something," Lance had said. "I can't take my medication if I'm going to be a pilot, I need to show them I can get by without it."

Mamá hadn't approved, but Papá had talked her around eventually. Applications were still years away, and Lance was pretty sure that both of his parents thought it was a passing obsession, but they'd never discouraged him from pursuing anything, even when the last thing, model shipbuilding, had only lasted a couple of weeks.

He'd have rather been swimming at the beach every Saturday morning, but instead his limited free time off meds was spent at the range.

"Breathe in," Tío Mateo said. "And out." Learning to shoot wasn't a whole lot like the movies.

Lance pulled the trigger of his bolt action .22LR. A relic from Lance's Abuelo, it was about the most powerful weapon a civilian could own in Cuba. He didn't hear the metal ping down range.

"That was your trigger squeeze," Tío Mateo said. "You were anticipating the noise and you jerked your finger."

Lance groaned. If it wasn't his trigger finger, it was his breathing, if it wasn't his breathing, it was his sight picture, if it wasn't his sight picture it was his posture. There was too much to deal with at once.

"You'll get there chamaco," Tío Mateo said. "You just need patience."

"Did you have patience when you were in battle?" Lance asked, genuinely curious. He just couldn't fathom being in the middle of a gunfight and focusing on all those things at once.

Tío Mateo hesitated, but eventually he said, "Of course not." He looked almost ashamed to have said anything at all. "But you practice so much it's second nature, you focus until you don't need to focus anymore."

"What was it like?" Lance asked, knowing that he shouldn't.

Tío Mateo had fought in the Last War. It was something they learned about in History, and ever since he'd first heard of it he'd had a hard time reconciling his Tío in the context of something monumental. The thing was though, that it hadn't really been some big war of the ages, it had just been the last war, twenty years and counting. Mamá wouldn't let Tío Mateo talk about the war in front of Lance, but Lance had heard him telling Dad stories now and then. They were always sad, not like the shows he sees on TV. Lance thought that something really bad must have happened to him.

Tío Mateo shrugged. "War is crazy, Lance. You sort of know what you're going into, but you really don't, nothing can really prepare you, and when battle comes, it's a surprise. My first gunfight was over before I really realized what was going on. After that… I see that gleam in your eye, Lance. It isn't some glamorous thing. That's why we have the Global Initiative. I don't want the young to forget what war is, what it costs."

"Was it worth it?" Lance asked.

"No," Tío Mateo said, shaking his head. "It was a pointless thing." He paused and seemed to think about it. "Not all wars, maybe, some of them mattered. My papá's bisabuelo fought in the revolution that gave us democracy. Maybe that was worth it. I won't tell you there will never be a time in your life where duty will have you taking up arms, but don't be too eager for it. Whether it's worth it or not, it's a terrible price to pay."

"Do you think your war really was the last war?" Lance asked.

Tío Mateo sighed. "Who can say," he said. "We can hope. You know, the day you were born, it was the five years anniversary since the war ended, and people were so sure something would come along. It was the longest period of global peace in recorded history. Your bisabuelo had just died, so you were definitely going to be Lance if you were a boy, but you would have been Paloma if you'd been a girl. Maybe something to think about, peace bringer."

"So why the rifle?" Lance asked.

Tío Mateo shrugged. "Peace is wonderful," he said. "But I don't put all of my trust in it. Maybe war is over something stupid. Maybe what the countries are fighting over doesn't matter. Maybe there's a peaceful solution those in power won't consider because they won't be the ones fighting. At the end of the day, I didn't fight for some grand ideal. I fought because I was scared of what could happen to my family if we lost, if we lost everything. I fought for the people fighting next to me, who had become my brothers and sisters." He picked up Lance's rifle off the bench and ejected the spent shell casing. Handing it back to Lance he said, "come on, enough fundamentals for today. Let's see if you can get any more moving targets than you did last time."

He'd put on a smile, but it didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were distant.

"They're too fast," Lance said, stowing his rifle in its case so they could move on to the kinetic range where each lane had a programmable set of targets that popped up and down or moved across.

"You'll get there," Tío Mateo told him.

As they walked to the next range, Lance made sure to throw his arm around Tío Mateo. A few moments later, he felt Tío Mateo reach up and ruffle his hair and Lance thought he was probably feeling better. Lance started excitedly telling him about the latest girl that had caught his eye.

After the range, it was back home, where he helped out at the front desk and then folded about a hundred bedsheets with his cousin Frida. Luis was off touring colleges with a school friend's family so there was that much more work to go around. After lunch, it was time for his medication so he could study. During the week he would take a time released capsule in the morning, but over the weekend when he got time off his meds he could only take the four-hour dose if he wanted to sleep that night. When that wore off he struggled for another hour until dinner. Struggling was good. That was where progress came from. There were a hundred different tricks Lance had learned over the years to help him learn, but at the end of the day, he needed to be able to get by without them.

Dinner was always a family affair, at least for everyone who wasn't working, which was why shifts in the family's hotel were so heavily rotated. Everyone should get to have dinner with everyone. Of course, even with people pulling shifts in the kitchen or the front desk there were still a lot of people at the table. Even so, Tía Elena had been in charge of cooking that night so Lance went prepared to eat a lot.

"Do you still have time for the twins' swim lesson?" Marco asked over a loud disagreement between cousin Jorge and Miguel. It was a polite way to ask him if he'd remembered.

"I sure do," said Lance. "Not a problem; they're headed for the Olympics." They were five, and Lance had promised his brother that they'd be swimming just fine by the end of the Summer.

"I'm going to dunk you!" Rolando announced.

"Go for it, buddy," Lance said.

Rolando gave a firm nod, like it was a plan, and went back to his plain cheese quesadilla (one of the only thing's they could get him to eat).

Rolando and Camila weren't quite ready for the Olympics. Rolando still needed the kickboard, and Camila couldn't float to save her life but Lance was confident that they'd get the hang of it soon enough. Rolando, all twenty kilograms of him, did not manage to dunk Lance, but he let him think he'd gotten close.

After swimming was more studying for the entrance exam. It was way too late to take his meds and he felt like it was the hardest thing in the world. When he realized he'd been staring at the same paragraph for a good ten minutes while he daydreamed about finding a sea monster at the beach, he decided to give in and pull up Youtube. It was one of his tricks, when he had trouble with the book. He also thought it was cheating, since he was trying to teach himself to get by without his meds or his tricks, but he still needed to learn. There were a few channels where they explained different things in math and science, and he'd found ones where they made everything just right. The Youtuber had an excited way of talking, and the font on the screen really popped and grabbed his attention. It was cheating, but by the time he was ready to call it quits, he had a fairly good grasp of how to break down a polynomial. The thing was, it wasn't really studying for the entrance exam. He was studying for the classes he'd be taking the next year, which he'd have to ace if he was going to get into decent classes come high school, which was already a stretch, because everywhere he went, they took one look at his record and saw 'Severe ADHD' and wrote him off. But that was fine, because Lance was going to kick every exam's ass until he got to the Garrison.

"You know, you joke about it," Veronica said the next day after Lance had complained about the studying. "But you could actually get to the Olympics if you focused on your swimming. Coach Isidro called Papá. He wants you back on the team."

Lance had come in first for his age group at his last swim meet. Coach had been really excited, Mamá had made his favorite tostones, and everyone had acted like Lance had accomplished something; that had felt great, but it never really did feel like an accomplishment. So he was good at swimming. So what? Swimming was fun, it came naturally to him, it wasn't something he'd worked hard for. It wasn't something anyone had ever told him he couldn't do.

"I'm going to space," Lance said, shaking his head. "I don't have time for that anymore."

"You could talk to Mama about your hours in the hotel," Veronica said.

"She's losing you in a month, and then she loses me in a few years," Lance said. "Carla is talking about going to college in the capital, and Luis might go to that school in Mexico. I'm not doing that to the family."

"We can afford it," Veronica said. "I've seen the books, we could definitely hire more staff. We're just free labor. Honestly, I'm pretty sure they just think it builds character."

Lance shrugged. "You don't think I can make it?"

"Of course I think you can make it," Veronica said. "I just think you're miserable."

"Well, I haven't sat in the pilot's seat yet," Lance said. "I know it's going to be worth it."

"I've wondered…" Veronica said.

"I'm not just following you to the Garrison," Lance said.

"Okay."

"I'm going to be a pilot, not a science officer."

Veronica didn't say anything.

"I really just want to do this," Lance said.

"Because you want to be a pilot?" Veronica asked.

It had been a whim, putting the Galaxy Garrison on his pre-middle school aptitude test. Sure, he'd always loved space, but it hadn't been his fascination with space travel, or his love of the stars when he snuck out at night to go float in the water and stare up at the heavens, it hadn't even been because of Veronica's own aspirations. There'd been an event the day before that had been on the news. This pilot, Takashi Shirogane, had somehow managed to land on Mars after a meteor had taken out half his onboard systems and left him with less than a third of an atmosphere of air pressure. He'd saved his ship, his crew, and his passengers. The news had loved it all, and they showed clips of the pilot from when he'd been in the academy and representing the Garrison at a cool martial arts competition. Lance thought he had looked really super cool. The whole thing was cool. Lance wanted to be that cool. Lance wanted that sort of adventure. It had just been a whim, like model shipbuilding, and archery before that, and like becoming a world-famous wrestler when he'd been ten. It had been a whim, but being told he should aim lower by the career counselor had ignited a drive in him that had before only been a despondent acceptance of everyone's lowered expectations.

"Because I can be a pilot," Lance said.

It had almost been a year since he'd declared that he was going to go to the Galaxy Garrison and learn to fly in space. Even with the near constant struggle, the disappointing test results, and the tantalizing distractions he had to ignore in favor of working on boring math and learning English, even with all of that, Lance still pushed through, and when his seventh-grade report card had come home, Mamá had actually looked impressed. She'd made Lance's favorite dessert that night, budin de pan, even though she usually only made it around the holidays.

After so long without moving on to something else, the family seemed to accept that the Garrison was something Lance would be chasing for a while. Mamá still didn't like the shooting. Lance wasn't sure if learning to focus when he was holding a rifle had led to him doing better in his studies, or if the time he spent studying when he was off his meds had helped him focus when he was shooting, but he had kept up with it and he was getting better at both. It was nice to spend time with Tío Mateo, who usually didn't talk too much at home.

"There's a competition coming up," Tío Mateo told Lance while they cleaned the rifle one day as Summer was hitting its peak. "They've got a bracket for under thirteen."

"I'm not that good," Lance said.

"You're getting good," Tío Mateo said.

"Not good enough for a competition," Lance said.

"You don't have to win," Tío Mateo said. "Competition can be friendly. Besides, there're plenty of people who will tell you that you can't do something. You shouldn't be one of them. Show confidence and you'll do better."

"I'm still not going to do any good," Lance said.

"We'll see," Tío Mateo said.

There wasn't a very big gun culture in Cuba. Seeing some of the movies from America was just weird, how much everyone seemed to be obsessed with guns, but there were a good fifty people there entered into the competition, most of them his Tío's age. Lance wondered if they'd all fought in the war too.

Lance did better than some. Not coming in anywhere near last was nice, but he wasn't exactly close to winning either. It was actually fun though. The meet was a couple hours drive away from Varadero, and there were a number of kids his own age there who it was cool to meet. The guy who won in the next higher age bracket though was really cool, his name was Enrique. Lance was sure to watch him when it was his turn at the line. He looked like he belonged in some sort of teen action movie when he held his rifle and got all focused, and he was in the bracket Lance would be in the next year. He hoped he looked that cool by next year.

"Did you make any friends?" Tío Mateo asked as they left.

It had been the first time in a while that Lance had felt he could relax and talk to kids his own age outside of school. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed that. He used to be a social butterfly, but these days he was a hermit.

"Yeah, there were a lot of cool guys there," Lance said. He had always been good at making friends and he had drunk in the attention when he had had it.

"I saw you talking to that girl from Havana," Tío Mateo said.

Lance blushed. "Someone told me to show confidence."

He'd seen Enrique chatting with a couple of the older girls, and how they'd smiled at him.

"So did you have fun?"

"It was sort of awkward," Lance said.

"With the meet, chamaco."

"Oh," Lance said. "Yeah, it was really fun actually. Can we do it again next year?"

"There are more meets throughout the year, but yeah, we can do this again," Tío Mateo said. "You can try talking to girls again too, even if it's awkward. Don't let something being awkward stop you from putting yourself out there. You know your papá was quite the ladies man when he was younger, let me tell you."

Papá never really talked about himself from when he was younger, so Lance definitely let him tell him every detail he could get. The drive was nice. Tío Mateo told a lot of stories from when he and Papá had been younger, and he had a lot of advice about girls. Even though he never seemed to have a girlfriend for very long himself, he always seemed to have one.

It was pretty close to dinner time, but Papá put him to work cleaning up around the pool when they get back, and Lance tried making small talk with a couple of older girls in bikinis. They'd laughed at him, but like he was their cute nephew and not like he was some suave smooth talker who'd just told a good joke. Veronica came to call him in for supper.

"Who was that?" Veronica teased.

"Oh my god, none of your business," Lance said.

"Well there goes the Garrison," Veronica said. "Who has time for studying when there are cute girls at the pool?"

"Hey," Lance said. "I can do both."

"We'll see," Veronica said.

"What about you?" Lance asked. "Is Estevan too much of a distraction for you?"

Veronica shushed him, and looked around as if papá was hiding behind one of the planters. Lance grinned at her, a dare to bring up the girls by the pool at dinner. It was Tío Mateo who betrayed him that night around the table though. Mamá didn't look like she was ready for Lance to be showing any sort of interest in girls and after Camila had asked loudly if Lance had a girlfriend she had changed the subject and asked how the meet had gone, even though she didn't ever like talking about Lance's marksmanship.

"Lance," Teresa asked. "Marco and I are helping with the banquet tonight."

"I can babysit," Lance assured her. He turned to the twins. "Do you two want to be astronauts tonight?"

"Yeah!" Rolando exclaimed.

The summer came to an end eventually, and the tourist season died down too. The twins could swim the entire length of the pool and Lance thought he was prouder than Marco. Lance started the eighth grade and focused on showing that he could handle Geometry the next year.

It was a constant struggle, but Lance did make it into Geometry, and pre-Calculus the year after that, as well as an introductory physics class. The next couple of years also saw more meets and Lance chased after Enrique's first place until Enrique bumped to the over eighteen bracket. Somewhere along the way, shooting had become easy. Something he didn't have to think about. He focused on what he was doing and it was like everything else disappeared. If only physics could be like that. Eventually though, meets became too much of a commitment as the entrance exams started to come ridiculously close. Lance was spending a lot more time off his meds and struggling to focus off of them as well as he did on them. Saturday mornings were still reserved for Tío Mateo though.

His dad used to say he had an overactive imagination. He'd say it with a chuckle and a shake of his head as he ruffled Keith's hair. At least, when Keith was really young he did. When he got older, his dad would give him strange looks whenever he talked about it. Strange looks that said he was worried, that said that something was wrong. Keith stopped talking about the memories when he was eight. He supposed that he had probably brought it up with a classmate or two when he was little, but when his dad died two years later, Keith supposed that it really was a secret that only he knew.

It didn't take him too long to realize that no one else had the memories, that no one else remembered living other lives; remembered growing up, remembered friends who were long gone, remembered funerals for countless fathers, remembered dying. He'd been seven, getting chased by a dog and thinking he was about to be killed, when he remembered staring down at a smoking hole in his chest.

He heard of reincarnation for the first time when he was eleven. Whichever foster mom he'd been with that day had decided he needed to connect with his roots, though her solution to that was to get him a few books from the library about Asia. Only one had actually been about Korea. There had been a rather large Korean diaspora in Austin since the collapse of the Kim dynasty, but Keith and his dad had never really been involved with it outside of a few cultural events. He wasn't sure about his mom, but he was pretty sure his dad had been somewhere beyond third generation. He'd grown up a Texan.

Keith had looked through the books though. They'd taken away his outdoor privileges after his most recent fight at school so it had been something to do. It was a chapter on Buddhism that had caught his eye. When he read about reincarnation, he knew what those memories were. It didn't matter that no one else seemed to remember theirs, he knew what he was remembering. Once he had that, that confirmation that the memories were real and that they meant something, it put a lot of things into perspective. That was when he decided what he was going to do with his life. He was going to go to space.

It wasn't like he had complete recollections of everything. Some lives were just bare flashes of remembrance. Some lives he could tell were terribly long ago, but others were recent. Others felt fresh. For the most part though, memories seemed to be triggered. Something would remind him of a memory from long ago and suddenly it would be as though it was a memory he had held for his whole life. One thing about the memories though, was that most of them were definitely not from lives lived on Earth. When he'd been six, he'd seen a show about people on a spaceship, and he had suddenly remembered flying between the stars himself. He had also had a couple of extra arms in that memory, though.

This had made things very awkward when they got sex ed at school, and he suddenly remembered a lot of things about puberty from a lot of different species and became thoroughly confused. Alternatively, it could be really helpful. Oftentimes in school, some concepts just clicked, not so much that he remembered learning them already, but more like it was something he'd forgotten and just needed a refresher course.

He knew that there was so much more out there, beyond the sky, beyond the stars; and now that he felt that he had some sort of confirmation that these recollections were something more than his own overactive imagination, he knew he had to get there. Earth was where he had grown up with an absentee mom, where his dad had died, where he'd been tossed around time and again from foster family to foster family till he didn't really know what family meant outside of his memories of past lives. Earth was where no one really understood him or what was in his head. For a boy who didn't feel like he fit in on Earth, getting into space felt like the ultimate goal. There were people out there like him. People who remembered their past lives. There was more to it, something at the edge of his memory, an ineffable need that was driving him, but he couldn't shake it loose.

When he was fourteen and he was placed with the Shirogane family, he thought it was the best break he'd gotten in a long time that his foster brother was a pilot stationed at the Galaxy Garrison. Every time Shiro would visit home for a holiday or a weekend, Keith would grill him for details about the program, about the Mars colony he'd been stationed at for two years, about the Hyper Relativistic Drive research which might someday send mankind to the stars.

A year later, he was accepted to the Garrison for training as a cadet. Learning history had always been hard for Keith; he had so many different histories in his head. So was English class; he'd spoken so many languages and the rules of grammar got garbled. But there were some concepts in science, math, and engineering that were somewhat universal across species, and Keith just found that the concepts slid right into his brain like there was a slot waiting for them. Fortunately, the Garrison didn't test on History, and they only cared about his ability to understand English enough to handle classes. Shiro took leave the two weeks before Keith was set to arrive for training. He would be launching about five months later for Kerberos; the farthest out any human had ever traveled from Earth. He spent a lot of time with his parents, to make up for all the time they would be apart, but every morning he'd drag Keith out of bed to go to the park. He'd have more time for studying, Shiro explained, if he didn't have to worry too much about the physical fitness requirements while he was at the Garrison. Shiro didn't exactly act like a drill instructor, but he made sure Keith was some semblance of fit during the time they had.

Shiro reminded him of Kohvar and James, two older brothers he'd had in past lives, and Keith wished that he could have had Shiro in his life since he had been little and struggling through everything. He was the closest thing to family Keith had had in a long time. He wished he could ask him why he had bothered to look out for the aloof kid his parents had decided to foster.

When it was time to leave with Shiro at the end of those two weeks, he was almost sad to pack up and leave the Shirogane house, it was the longest he had ever stayed anywhere while in the system.

"You need to have patience, Aputi," Sefina said

"But it's been so long," Hunk complained. "Also, I told you to call me Hunk."

"And I told you, you can't give yourself a nickname," Sefina said.

"Oh, leave the boy be," Momma Talia said. "Hunk," she said very deliberately. "The roast will be done when it is done. If you don't have patience, the meat will be tough."

Hunk gave a long-suffering sigh and cast a disparaging look at the oven.

"Come on," Momma Talia said. "You can help me make dessert."

"Strawberry soufflé," Hunk said without hesitation.

"I don't think you have the patience for a soufflé," Sefina said with a laugh in her voice.

"I do too," Hunk assured her.

"Well then why don't you start separating eggs," Mamma Talia said.

Hunk hurried over to the refrigerator and got out the egg basket. Patience had always been something he had struggled with.

Six years later, when he announced that he had taken the preliminary entrance exam for the Galaxy Garrison his entire family had been flummoxed until he'd explained why.

"You're afraid of everything," Sefina said.

"I am not afraid of everything," Hunk said.

"You want to go to space?" Momma Natia asked.

"Well I don't want to go to space," Hunk said. "But it's the only way to get hands-on experience with the latest tech. They'll take me next year, when I'm fifteen. If I go the conventional route, I won't even get close to anything like this until I'm in my twenties. That's forever away."

"Space is dangerous, manamea" Mamma Talia said.

That gave Hunk pause, because he knew very well that space was dangerous. He'd spent plenty of time lying awake over the past month thinking of how dangerous space was.

"Garrison engineers get fast-tracked into some of the best companies," he said. "The Galaxy Garrison is where things happen. There's no waiting for tomorrow. I do my time in space and then I've got a cushy lab job designing flight systems, or telemetry sensors, or who knows what."

Of course, after he had taken the preliminary test he started getting calls from the recruiters. The Galaxy Garrison was highly selective, but they were also expanding, which meant they needed as many bodies as they could get into the program. The thing about space travel though was that it looked glamorous as heck, but in reality it basically sucked. Spaceships were cramped, the lunar base and Mars bases were all miserable places to live, and Hunk was pretty sure he'd go stir crazy if he ever got placed on Mars Station. Also, it was frickin dangerous.

Oh sure, there were luxury trips to orbit for the wealthy tourist. The really rich might visit the lunar base and do a moonwalk, but no one actually wanted to live there except the people who really loved what they did, and even they didn't want to stay for too long. So when someone passed the preliminary test and actually showed an interest the recruiters were all over it.

No one had actually told Hunk that he couldn't go join the Galaxy Garrison. They were still discussing it. Or rather, Mamma Talia was casually leaving space disaster movies running on the television, and Mamma Natia kept finding science and engineering magnet schools to try and tempt him with. Hunk, though, had the curriculum for the Garrison's engineering program and nothing compared. Until he could give an actual yes though, the recruiters were going to keep calling.

In the end, no one actually told Hunk that he could go join the Galaxy Garrison. A mobile testing center came to the island to find recruits for the next cycle and when the recruitment team called to see if he needed a ride to get there, Momma Natia just said that she would drive. The trip was unusually silent.

"They said I'd probably be here all day," Hunk said. "I'll call you."

Momma Natia nodded and reached over to hug him. She smoothed down his hair.

"You should go before I decide to drive off with you," she said.

Hunk nodded and got out. "I'm going to be alright," he said.

The written exam felt like a bit of a formality. Hunk had never been particularly modest and he knew full well that he was considered gifted. He was a bit disappointed in the end when he sat in front of a recruiter who told him he'd have to wait for over a month to find out if he'd gotten in.

"My test scores though?" Hunk asked.

"Oh, you scored in the ninety-ninth percentile," his recruiter said. "And you met the baseline for everything else. I'll tell you, I've never seen anyone with your test scores not get in, but we've got a lot more stops to make and a lot more people to test. That being said you should start planning as if you got in. Most likely, you're going to get sent to the American Division for the flight engineering program, maybe Europe, though their program is smaller. I've got a checklist for you, just some things that'll make your final application process easier when you're officially admitted."

"I was actually hoping to get into the Asia Division, their developmental engineering track's a bit more my speed," Hunk said.

His recruiter checked his screen and shook his head. "Yeah, your aptitude testing's great for that, but you're flagged for fitness. The development program funnels into the lunar base; that's a year at least. Galaxy Garrison won't let you spend that much time in low gravity, makes returning home hazardous to your health. You met baseline for entry to the flight program; you'll spend plenty of time on Earth in-between missions, and they'll get you ready for the flight fitness test while you're in training."

"What if I get better?"

"Our recruitment cycle ends in one month; that's when you sign on the dotted line and we make our assignments. That's not enough time. Now, we occasionally do transfers. First-year engineering classes are largely similar for flight and development tracks. If you can meet the standard by then you've got a shot at a transfer, if there's a slot."

"If I don't transfer," Hunk said. "How much time in space before I can get a posting on Earth and switch to development."

"At least a year," his recruiter said. "You've got a four-year commitment after your training, and most people don't get full-time slots earthside until they reenlist. The Galaxy Garrison trains people to go into space, you'd need to show that you're worth more on the ground than in a ship."

"That'll be easy," Hunk said.

"I'm sure it will be," his recruiter said, standing up. He extended his hand. "Really though, the wait is a formality. Welcome aboard cadet."

Hunk shook his hand but frowned. He had momentum at the moment. He could have probably gotten parental signatures, but who knew what would happen within the next month. He'd been selling them on the idea that the lunar base was way safer than the flight program, so there was another hurdle. He'd just have to work out a lot… while he waited.

When it was time to take the entrance exam, his recruiter came and picked him up and drove him to Havana where he'd be staying in a motel. Lance was going to have to go in on two separate days for tests. He was allowed to take the written exam while he was on his meds, but the flight aptitude test had to be done without any sort of aid. They were literally going to do a blood test in the morning to make sure the levels of the meds in his system were low enough.

The nice thing was that the written exam was graded instantly. He was ecstatic to find that he had scored in the 97th percentile. His recruiter told him that he'd scored well enough to get into the engineering track if the flight aptitude test didn't pan out. He told him that right after telling him that plenty of normal kids didn't even pass. Lance resisted the angry words on the tip of his tongue even as he felt the nervous pit in his stomach grow bigger. He spent the rest of the evening fantasizing about all of the things he'd have liked to have said to that in his head.

The following morning, before the flight aptitude test, he went through a very extensive flight physical that included everything from multiple blood tests, to running on a treadmill with a heart monitor, to a g-force test, to a flexibility test, and then finally after a very lengthy and invasive medical questionnaire he got a very invasive physical with an old doctor who poked and prodded him all over.

Finally though, he got to the aptitude test. It wasn't a flight simulation; rather it was a battery of tests that evaluated his spatial reasoning, hand-eye coordination, reaction time, memory, and most importantly, his ability to focus. When he got to the last test he started breathing like he was on the range. In and out, in and out, let the rest of the world disappear, in and out; the whole while there were clips from all sorts of television shows on the screen in front of him while he was supposed to be listening to a series of tones. Every time there were three tones in a row he was supposed to push a button. Probably the most difficult thing was that the three-tone sequences were few and far between, with plenty of other tones randomly put in. It was easy to lose focus like that.

The results of his flight aptitude test were not instantaneous, though they were lucky. The Galaxy Garrison was at the end of their recruitment cycle, so he'd find out the following day whether or not he would have a slot. That night his recruiter took him and a couple of other test takers out for dinner and let them run around one of the more touristy areas of the capitol. Veronica called him that night, all the way from Arizona.

"Did you find aliens?" Lance asked.

"Well they wouldn't tell a cadet if they did," Veronica said. "Did you find a girlfriend?"

Lance groaned. "Heidi said she'd go to winter formal with me," he mumbled.

"That's great," Veronica said. "Who's Heidi? Send pictures."

"There's no pictures," Lance said. He wasn't going to tell Veronica that the only picture he had of Heidi was from right after she'd insisted on teaching him how to take care of his skin so that she could be seen with him at the dance. The picture was of the two of them with all sorts of goop on their faces and cucumber slices over their eyes. It had been oddly nice, but there was no way Veronica was ever seeing the picture. "How's the desert?"

"Terrible," Veronica said. "How did your test go?"

Lance huffed. "They haven't told me about the aptitude test yet."

"How do you think you did?" Veronica asked.

"Well obviously I did great," Lance lied.

"That's wonderful," Veronica said. "What about the written exam?"

"Ninety-seventh," Lance said.

Veronica practically screamed. "Lanceito that's great. I'm so proud of you. I can't wait to be your upperclassman."

Lance let himself take the compliment. He didn't tell her about the comment his recruiter had made. They talked for over an hour, and Lance grilled her on the specifics of living at the Garrison. By the time he was done with the call he had calmed down and anxiety over the test results had gone to the wayside. He spent the rest of the night making friends with the other two recruits he was sharing the hotel room with. Raul had applied for the engineering track and Silvio was a competitor for a pilot slot. They were both super cool, and hanging out with them definitely helped keep him from worrying. That night though, after the others had gone to bed, Lance stayed awake for a very long time.

The following morning he skipped breakfast and stayed silent on the drive over to the intake center. Sitting in the waiting room was torture.

"Lance Sanchez," the woman was wearing a Galaxy Garrison officer's uniform. Lance felt his stomach drop as he got to his feet. He followed her into a small office where he could see a file folder with his photo clipped to the cover.

"First, I'd like to congratulate you, the Galaxy Garrison would like to invite you to join our next cycle as a pilot candidate."

Lance was speechless for a moment.

"I got in?" he asked.

"You did."

"I'm going to be a fighter pilot!" Lance exclaimed.

"Well, no," she said, bringing Lance up short. "You did very well, on all of your tests really, but you didn't quite meet the bar for the fighter pilot program. There is a spot for you in our support program though. I know it isn't quite as glamorous, but if you pass the program you'll be going to space. The program is only getting bigger, and there's plenty of important work for cargo pilots and telemetry pilots and the like. Now, we have a few things to go over. You need to understand your post-training commitment, and we're going to need to get your parents' final sign-off. You have a fairly sizable checklist you've got to take care of before you ship out."

Lance made sure to take notes while she talked. A lot of it he knew already from Veronica, and he wasn't worried about being ready for the physical fitness aspects. Veronica had already had him researching customs and courtesies, like when to salute, or when to call a room to attention, and when to call people by their rank rather than their position.

When she was done going over the checklist she talked to him about his medication while he was at the Garrison. He wouldn't be in charge of when he took it, he'd have to go to medical every morning for his meds, and he wasn't allowed to take it for certain tests and exercises. He'd expected something like that, but he'd hoped he could at least manage it himself.

"Any questions?" she asked at the end.

"What do I need to do to transfer to the fighter pilot program?" Lance asked. "Um, ma'am."

She paused. "That's rare," she said. "It's not undoable, but every class is filled by the time the school year starts. To transfer in, someone else would have to be transferred out. After that, you would need to be at the top of your class and retake the flight aptitude test to show you had significantly improved."

"I can do that," Lance said.

"I'm sure you can," she said. "But as I said, it's rare. We encourage all of our cadets to do their best, but it's important to focus on attainable goals. If you want to shoot for the top of your class, that's wonderful, we want all of our cadets to shoot for the top, but don't be disappointed when there isn't a fighter pilot seat waiting for you."

"Was there any part of the test that I should focus on, ma'am?" Lance asked.

She looked at his file. "Focus," she said.

Lance nodded, it wasn't unexpected.

"Of course all of our cadets have room for improvement, in all areas. So don't just rely on that one thing."

"I'm going to make it," Lance said.

"That's good to hear." She stood up with her hand out. Lance stood up and shook it. "Congratulations again, Mr. Sanchez."

"Thank you, ma'am."

It felt really weird to be disappointed after getting in.

The ride back was a bit awkward since Silvio hadn't gotten a slot. Raul was going to be an engineer though. He put on a big grin when he got home. He'd already texted his acceptance out to everyone and there was a party already in swing when he got out of the car. Mamá seemed a bit teary-eyed whenever Lance saw her.

The following day he was back to school, but he'd decided to stop taking his meds. He hadn't told anyone about that, but he needed to start improving. Mindfulness had never worked for him when he'd been younger, but after his first day at school off meds, he decided to pull up the guided audio files that were still on his computer. They were obviously for much younger children but he managed to get through the first track before he looked up a podcast on mindfulness that was more for adults.

He already used exercise as a coping tool, particularly before homework, but a week after he stopped taking his meds he started swimming laps before school and grabbing a quick breakfast to go. His appetite had improved without them, which Mamá definitely approved of, though she didn't know it was because he had stopped taking his meds.

Results varied. His stress level had definitely gone up. After forgetting a couple of assignments he started relying heavily on a to-do list and timers and alarms. Tío Mateo was the only one he told about his meds. They still went shooting on Saturdays. He was a great source of knowledge on dealing with stress. Lance started focusing on getting as much sleep as he was supposed to and self-care. Probably the only good thing from his brief stint at trying to date Heidi was that she'd indoctrinated in him a fairly comprehensive skincare regime that he'd turned into a nightly ritual. It was oddly calming after a full day of struggling through classes and homework, and actual work for the hotel. On top of that, he'd budgeted away a half an hour a day for video games.

The arrival of Summer vacation was a huge relief. It was also his last full summer vacation. The garrison only had two weeks off after Fall and Spring quarters and one week off after Winter and Summer. He went to a couple of marksmanship meets and in his last one, he managed to qualify for nationals, which was moot, since those would be in the fall. It was a nice accomplishment to end the summer with though.

Veronica came back for the last week of the summer and when Mamá wasn't hugging them, and the twins weren't commanding their attention, she drilled him on all the little things it was better to learn before he was in a military environment. The night before they drove out to Havana for their flight, there were tears, and there were lectures, and at the end of the night, when he went to bed, he found himself ruining his face mask with tears as he thought about all the time he was going to be away from home.

"Are you ready," Papá asked the next morning. He wasn't sure if he was talking about school or the first plane trip of his life. For someone who was shooting for the stars, he'd spent a lot of time on the ground.

"I've been ready for the last three years," Lance said. "Just you wait, I'll send you pictures of the rankings when I get to the top."

"Your mother wants a picture of you in your uniform," Papá said.

"I'll make sure to get one," Veronica said. "Right after I get a few shots of Lance getting smoked in hell week."

Lance groaned.

The plane ride was painfully uneventful, and the maglev from Los Angeles to Tucson felt like it was too fast to really enjoy taking in the scenery and the fact that he was in a completely different country. Lance didn't get much time once they disembarked. He got scooped up and labeled as a new recruit and before he knew it, he'd already seen the last of Veronica for a week.

Katie sort of hated space when she was younger. Periodically throughout her childhood it would take her father away for months at a time. Living in base housing meant going to base schools where all the other kids had parents who were in the program, and it baffled her sometimes how some of them would boast about what their parents did, like it was great that their mommy was doing research on Mars, or that their daddy was collecting dust from Saturns rings. If space was so great, then somebody else's daddy should have gone to go explore it.

She remembered being six, and Matt had had to beg her to go say good bye to their father before he left for another three months. Of all the things in their lives that they shared, space was the only thing that she and Matt didn't mesh on. Matt was probably one of those kids on the playground who boasted that his daddy went to space. The thing was though, that she and Matt had always gotten along. He'd always gotten her, he'd always had her back. If there was one thing she boasted about on the playground it was that she had the best big brother in the world.

Matt was smart, the smartest in his class, and he had included Katie in his love for science since she had been really young. He taught her how to code, he taught her the true scientific method, he taught her how to make a fusion reactor in their garage only a few years after he'd bought her her first chemistry set for her seventh birthday. The one thing he had never been able to teach her was to share his love of space. There were plenty of interesting scientific discoveries to be made out there, but Pidge couldn't see why they couldn't just send probes. People belonged on Earth.

Matt had always gotten her though. She'd been opening up presents at Christmas when she was five and when she'd opened up Matt's present to find a dress, she'd been caught off guard. Her parents had thought it was a mean joke and had immediately started scolding him, but when she'd realized that it was a dress, and that it was for her, and that she could wear it she had hugged him while screaming like a banshee and ran to her room to try it on, and her parents had realized that they were out of the loop.

Matt had always gotten her, and he'd always had her back, so when he announced that he would be applying to the Garrison when she was eight she'd felt betrayed. It had been around that same time that her dad had gotten stationed long term back on Earth though so a part of her felt like she had to trade them back and forth to keep them in her life.

In the end though, she'd been eight. It was hard having the most important person in her life leave like that, even when he was only moving to the other side of the base. Then his first quarter ended and he came home and after that he had weekend privileges. Somewhere along the way she got used to it. Dad was home every evening, Matt came home on the weekends and in-between quarters and they worked on science together, and played video games, and went exploring, and eventually they built a fusion reactor in the freaking garage, and somewhere along the way she found that she could love the joy that Matt got from space, even if it was going to take him from her. He loved it, and he loved her, and just like their dad, he would come back.

Matt left Earth for the first time when she was twelve, and of course she had hated it, but he'd been so excited, so a part of her had gotten excited for him. Of course he'd had to go off and do something stupid, like analyze sensor data on Kerberos and realize that there were signs of deuterium and got himself selected to be on the team that first went out there, and so he was going to be gone for more than a year.

It had been hard to be happy for him. It had been hard not to hack into the Garrison's systems and delete his entire personnel file. And of course, it wasn't just him. Their dad was the one who was leading the mission. The only reason he'd gotten himself stationed back on Earth was so that he and Mom could build the ship that would take them away from her for so long. A part of her hated them for it, even as she put on a brave face and asked him excitedly about the ship's systems. She wondered if her Mom ever felt the same way. Then again, Mom had been dealing with it since long before Katie had been born. Katie just hoped that when Matt and Dad got back they'd realize that they had it so much better on Earth and not stuck on some stinking spaceship, and then Katie would never have to get used to watching them leave the planet.

A/N: Well, new work, so please let me know what you think. Next chapter could be titled 'Keith does not work well with others.'