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“Lance, do you still have that bottle of–hey, buddy, have you been crying? Your eyes are all red.”“I’m not crying,” said Lance, snatching up his nearest child and hiding his face in her neck. Mariposa wriggled around and patted his hair, whispering something soothing into his ear before sending a pitiful glance at Hunk.“So it’s that kind of thing, huh?” sighed Hunk. “Crying into your kid’s hair usually means you’re upset with your spouse. Trust me, I’d know. I’ve only argued with Shay, like, twice, and I grabbed Taera and used her as a pillow both times and cried until I figured out how to iron my thoughts out and apologize.”“You just thought she was trying to spare your feelings by being nice about that weird Helithian casserole you made.” Lance dug his face further into Mari’s nest of red curls. “You guys never disagree about serious stuff. This, this isn’t the same kind of thing.”Hunk considered him for a few minutes. “Would a hug make you feel better? Then you can stop getting tears all over Mari’s shirt.”“‘Kay.”Lance put Mari down and launched himself into Hunk’s arms, curling up into a tightly-wound ball of limbs as he cried on his friend’s green apron. Somewhere in the midst of his tears, he wondered how hugging Hunk could still feel the same as it had when they were twelve-year-olds fresh out of elementary school: warm and steady and grounding, as if Hunk’s heavy shoulders were strong enough to hold off all the darkness in the world.He thought back to the year and a half they spent in space with Voltron, and realized that maybe they were.“Are you okay to talk about it now?”“Y-yeah, I think so.” He wiped his eyes. “So you know how Keith’s half-Galra, right?”“It would be pretty hard to forget,” smiled Hunk. “His mark’s been looking a lot more purple these last few years.”“Galra live around four times as long as humans do.”“Well, I don’t see how that’s necessarily a bad…oh.”“Yeah, oh.”“So what are you guys going to do?”“He’s going to see if his mom can find a doctor with the blade to deactivate that side of him, I guess.” Lance stared down at his lap. “It’s safe, according to Krolia. Apparently she’s only three-quarters Galra herself. Her grandmother was a tactician with the Empire who fell in love with a…I don’t remember what species exactly, but she defected and ran away to the Blade so that her baby wouldn’t be born an outcast. The doctors there gave her some kind of treatment, and when Krolia’s mom came along the other side of her was completely suppressed.”“So Keith’s going to turn off his Galra genes and keep aging like a human?” frowned Hunk. “I…never thought of that. Which is weird, because so many of us are probably going to have to think about it, eventually. Shay’s never even given me a straight answer on how long Balmerans live, and Shiro’s got segments of Altean DNA from being cloned so he’s going to live longer than Adam, too.”“Shiro and Adam handle things okay,” Lance muttered. “But Hunk, the thing is that I don’t want Keith to get that treatment. That’s why we argued. Keith only wants to do this because of me. He literally wants to change his body so he can die faster, because he wants to age with me. I don’t–Hunk, I don’t want that. I don’t want him to make a decision like that because he can’t live without me. Three of our children are Galra and two are Olkari–I’ll be around forty by the time Kazha and the twins are grown up by Galra standards, and not even Keith’s going to live long enough to see Lin and Syra come of age. He’ll get so much time with them that I can’t even dream of having, so why–”“Maybe he just loves you the most,” sighed Hunk, running a comforting hand through Lance’s hair. “I don’t know that I’d want to live even a day without Shay. It’s selfish, but it’s just how it is. You can tell Keith how you feel, but the final decision has to be his even if it’s one you don’t agree with.”“Am I making too much of a big deal about this?”“Absolutely not. I’d be reacting the same way, if I were you. But the both of you should definitely take some more time to talk about it, together. A couple of days definitely isn’t long enough to make a fully informed choice about something this important, right?”“Yeah, you’re right,” mumbled Lance, squeezing him tighter. “But in the meantime, can you just keep hugging me? I already feel a lot better than I did this morning, ‘cause you’re here.”“Of course I can. And what do you say to a blackberry pie, later? You and Keith and the kids can all come over for dinner tonight.”Lance squinted at him.“Blackberry pie? With ice cream?”“With milkshakes, if you want.”“I have been missing milkshakes.” Lance bit his lip. “Are you sure?”“You know my place is always open to you, uso.”“…I love you so much. You know that, right?”“Never forgotten it for a second. Come on, let’s go start that pie.”