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It was Lance who made them remember, which seemed somehow fitting when they thought about it. The one with the most reason to go home reminding them, who had the most reason not to return just yet, of what they’d left behind. He didn’t even do it on purpose. He’d been trying to explain chore coupons to Coran, and Pidge had remembered the last time they made one.
It had been in grade school. They had carefully labelled the rectangles of dark construction paper in red, white, and blue paint pens, and drawn the NASA logo on the front of the booklet. It had been NASA because they couldn’t get the Garrison one right. Mom had loved it, and used every single chore coupon by the end of the summer. The cover was still hanging on the front of the fridge, though, black paper bleached an ugly grey-brown by sunlight everywhere the magnet didn’t cover. Mom insisted she loved it whenever they asked why it was still up there.
Had she taken it down yet? She’d taken down almost all of Matt and Dad’s photos and things, after the Kerberos crew was declared dead. The three of them had probably been declared missing when they didn’t show up to class, and after weeks... they’d probably been declared dead. Mom wasn’t stupid, she’d know Pidge Gunderson was actually Pidge Holt when ‘he’ inevitably showed up on the evening news. But would she believe it? Would she believe that she had lost her entire family to the Garrison?
They could always ask Allura to open a wormhole, to give them one varga to go home and tell Mom that they were alive, but that would almost be more cruel. If she believed the Garrison’s word, then she would be grieving, and to disrupt that with hope which may not pay off for years and years... no, that would hurt worse than grief, especially if the unthinkable happened. And if she didn’t believe the Garrison about three students going missing, then going home and telling her that her youngest child was a soldier in an intergalactic war would only make her worry.
The best thing they could do was find Matt and Dad as quickly as possible. Then they could go home and- well, things could never go back to the way they were before. They couldn’t go back to being a civillian, a student, a kid. But they could reunite their family, could bring Matt and Dad home to recover, to be safe. And maybe... maybe they could get Allura to give them a little more than one varga to spend with their family. She would understand. If she had the chance to get her father back, she would want more than just a varga to spend with him.