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He didn’t know why, but Lance couldn’t sleep. He tried everything he could think of, but none of it – not the headphones, not the eye mask, not the blankets – worked. There was nothing more to be done about it but get up and wander the castle.
The Paladin bond was growing stronger. Lance barely noticed where his feet were taking him, just knew this was where he should be going, and before he knew it he was in the Lion hangar.
Clearly Lance wasn’t the only one having a sleepless night. The hangar was full as if it was midafternoon instead of midnight. Pidge sat on the floor, laptop balanced on their knees and three different tablets scattered within arm’s reach, wires and cords weaving an electric web around them. Keith was only a few feet away, leaning heavily sideways against a stack of scrap metal with his eyes half-shut, just alert enough to keep an eye on his companion Arm. Hunk sat nearby, poking at some large thing that looked like a cross between a Segway and some kind of electric flying space wheelbarrow. Shiro was settled beside him, alert as always but somehow a little more relaxed for now, passing tools to Hunk in response to murmured requests.
All four looked up at Lance’s entrance, even Keith opening his eyes again to look over at him. “What the heck are you all doing here?” Lance asked rather hypocritically. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“I don’t see you sleeping soundly,” Keith muttered, head already dropping back against the pile.
“It makes sense,” Pidge said distractedly, typing at the laptop with one hand and tapping something on the screen of the tablet farthest to their right. “We’re in space. There’s no consistent time process.”
Hunk nodded. “Hex key. The biggest one.” Shiro handed it to him. “Yeah,” he continued, “either we’re on a planet that has its own cycle, or we’re in deep space with nothing to mark days by. Even if we try to keep a time pattern on the castleship, there’s still too much variation and our circadian rhythms are totally out of it, and our brains don’t know how to sleep normally anymore.”
Lance made an irritated noise, making his way over to sit beside Hunk and Shiro. “But I’m tired! All I want to do is sleep.”
Shiro smiled, and this close Lance could see the exhaustion on his face. The Black Paladin never slept well anymore. “It’s kind of like jet-lag,” he said, “but you don’t get used to it. We had something a little like it during the mission flight.”
“Permanent jet-lag,” Lance grumbled, sagging into Shiro’s side. “Great. Thanks, universe.”
They were quiet for a while. Most of the hangar’s lights were down, with just enough brightness for Hunk to see what he was doing with the assistance of a tiny flashlight. Pidge’s screens gleamed lowly like banked embers. The six moons of the system they were currently drifting through shone with different colors, but none of them the familiar silver-white-gray of Earth’s sole one.
“I miss the moon.” It came out of nowhere. Lance didn’t even realize he was the one who had spoken until Shiro looked down at him with a puzzled expression.
Hunk got it, though. “Me too, buddy. Remember when we used to go run on the beach at night?”
“And I broke my toe by running into you at full force? Yep. I could never forget that.” Lance’s voice was teasing.
Hunk gave as good as he got. “And we weren’t supposed to go into the water because sharks, but –”
“We went anyway? What’s the point of being near the ocean if you don’t go in it?” Lance asked indignantly. This was clearly an old debate.
“I miss the moon too,” Pidge’s introspective voice broke off any escalation of the absurdity of Lance and Hunk’s old nocturnal adventures. “Even before all this I didn’t sleep much, and I’d leave the curtains wide open, windows too if it wasn’t freezing, and the moon would light up my room like a lightbulb if it was full and there was no cloud cover. Even with clouds or when it was a crescent, it always felt like there was enough moonlight, every night.”
“The moon was huge in the desert,” Keith mumbled, eyes still closed. “It was like a second sun.”
Shiro leaned back against Lance. “I loved watching the moon change phases as time passed.”
His next words made them all pause for a moment, though. “I always thought of our moon as the moon. The one and only.
“But Kerberos was a moon too.”
Nobody said anything for a while after that.