Lance stared intently at the dark grey stone of the wall in front of him, seemingly focussed on the cracks in the rock.

It started at approximately head height, and near the edge of the ceiling connected to a massive web of lines and fractures. It was like looking at a broken window, or the home of a trigger happy spider.

But Lance wasn't really looking at the wall. His intense gaze took in absolutely nothing, fixated in the centre of the spider-on-crack web but somewhere far away, trapped within the cogs and springs of his brain, whirring so loud surely everyone else could hear it.

Lance was thinking - or, he had been, until he got an unbidden thought of Pidge laughing. 'Lance can think?'

He frowned, shaking the image from his head and looking down to his hands.

Lance held a tiny vial, twirling it between his fingers. A tiny air bubble slipped from the bottom of the murky liquid and floated to the top as he watched.

The contents of this vial had saved Olly's life.

Increasing cell production rate ran the risk of increasing the rate of the virus' spread. He needed to somehow slow it down.

A lot of testing was going to have to be conducted.

"Y'know normally when you're waiting in a medbay with someone's life on the line, you notice when the person you're waiting for wakes up."

Lance started, gripping the vial tighter as it tried to slip through his fingers. Hastily he tucked it back in his pouch, keeping it from any further danger.

He'd been sitting in the same position for a long time, and as he shifted bones in his body moved, popping loudly as they snapped back into their original place. His whole body felt weirdly stiff.

The only word he could think of that kind of described it was crunchy, and as the bones in his neck ground together slightly he nodded to himself.

Yeah. Crunchy.

"You scared the heebie jeebies out of me!" Lance complained, taking in the paleness of Olly's face. He supposed it should be expected, with what she'd just gone through.

"Oh, stop being so dramatic, heebie jeebies only appear when Zarkon's witch sends them to quash rebellion."

"I-" Lance paused, blinking. "What?"

"Heebie jeebies." Olly said, a little confused. Then again, that could have been Lance's own confusion mirrored on her face. "They can destroy an entire planet's population in one night."

"Olly, no- the- oh my god," Lance let out a short laugh. "The heebie jeebies is just an expression."

She raised an eyebrow. "Wow, you humans are weird."

"So we've been told."

Olly giggled weakly. "Imagine believing the heebie jeebies can possess you," she murmured to herself, before looking around the room. "Hey, where's Roy?"

"She-" Lance stopped.

Where was Roy? He actually hadn't seen her since they had entered the caves. Why wasn't she sitting here with him, gnawing on her finger nails as they waited for her partner to wake from a serious operation.

"You know what? Good question" Lance brought his hand to his chin in thought, and Olly frowned.

"That's what I was afraid of..." she said softly, hands clenching.

"What do you mea—"

"Put this into perspective, Lance." Olly said, tone harsher than she probably intended. "Roy stabbed me. I nearly died. She blames herself. Zachesl, it's like you don't even know her."

The sneer dropped from her face almost immediately, and she sighed deeply. Lance could practically see the effort it was taking her to maintain her calm.

Nigh imperceptibly, Olly's fists tightened more, clenching the blanket between her fingers.

"Sorry, that was uncalled for"

In the distance, Lance could hear the angry yells of someone, echoing through the stone of the caves.

Maybe a medical facility wasn't the best place for an empath.

"So, can I get a shield stat?" He asked, Olly rolling her eyes once at his chosen terminology, as if her shields were a function on a ship rather than a delicate and taxing mental block.

"A solid fifteen percent." She said, deciding to humour him.

"Down to nothing but fifteen or fifteen from full?" Lance asked. In immediate hindsight, he could have figured that out himself.

"Take a guess," Olly said through a smile a little too sharp. Lance stood up abruptly, stone of his seat grating against the ground.

"Right, point taken. I'll go talk to the doctors."

Olly nodded, rolling over with her back to Lance. She brought her knees up so she was taking up barely half of the bed.

"If you see Roy, tell her to stop being a limp lump of fusi and get over here." She said flatly.

Lance nodded even though she couldn't see him and stepped out of the room, sliding the door shut with a slight snap.

Fusi. He assumed it was something like a cabbage.

Despite the size of the island, Lance was able to find Roy rather quickly.

She sat in the shadow of Blue, watching over the Skisch as they played together in the shallows. Roy swirled one finger through the sand, a repeated motion that left intersecting lines in the coarse grains of the beach.

She'd been doing it for quite a while, judging by the size of the drawing.

"Whatcha doing?" He asked sitting down by Roy's side. Her eyes snapped over to the footprints he had left behind him through her trails. "Sorry. No way through."

Roy huffed, swiping a hand over the part closest to her and erasing it. "Doesn't matter." She muttered.

Nyma sat up from her laying position a short ways off in the sunlight, and Lance realised that she was scantily clad in something similar to a bikini. It was a tad smaller than what was generally appropriate on Earth, though.

Lance decided to pay particular attention to her face.

"No idea what grumpy here is doing, but I'm working on my skin tone." Nyma said, and Lance could see the difference already, her skin seeming to be two or three shades darker than earlier.

"We call it tanning back on Earth." Lance said. "Everyone gets darker, but white people end up more tanned? I don't know if that's the reason we call it that, but yeah." Another thing to look up when he got home - the origins of the term tanning. He seemed to recall something about leather from his middle school history classes.

"We have something similar," Roy said, once more drawing in the sand. "But it only effects our markings. They get brighter in the dark after exposure to light."

Lance tried not to laugh at the description, which had essentially told him that Roy's markings were solar powered.

It was a strange concept to wrap his head around, but like many other alien abilities that he had experienced; such as multiple arms, empathetic abilities, and in some cases a large amount of unbelievable stupidity, he simply accepted it for what it was and moved on. Otherwise he might go insane out here, and he'd much rather get home mentally sound.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, only punctuated by Nyma rolling onto her front and resting her head on her arms.

"Olly was asking for you," Lance said eventually. Roy tensed up a little beside him, tongue darting out to run over the scar on her lip.

"Really?" She said casually, schooling her features. "What did she say?"

Lance smiled, giving her a soft, friendly blow to the shoulder.

"Something about you being a limp lump of fusi."

Roy visibly relaxed, shoulders lowering and brow smoothing out. "Guess I better get over there." She said, getting to her feet.

"She said that too."

Lance and Nyma watched her go, smiling at each other as her slow, controlled walk progressed into a full-out sprint.