Lance Alone

Part 3 (Keith)

​The remaining members of Team Voltron gathered in the bridge of the Castle to discuss their options. Keith was painfully aware of how few people there were: without Lance or Shiro, their numbers were small.

"Where could he have gone? It's not like Lance to run off like this. Do you think he was kidnapped?" Pidge asked. Keith pulled out the crumpled-up letter and showed it to them.

"I found this in his room. Turns out, he had been planning this," he explained. Hunk read it aloud for the group.

"What do you mean, he felt like leaving?" Pidge crossed her arms. "When I tried to leave, you all kept me here. Matt's been out there all this time. If Lance is leaving, I'm leaving!"

"No! No one is leaving," Allura said.

"Why not? We're no good without Lance OR Shiro. We have no one to pilot the Blue Lion, or the Black Lion. Unless  both of you have been working on your pilot skills, we can't form Voltron anymore. I might as well go find my family!"

As much as Keith didn't want to admit it, Pidge had a point. Losing Shiro had been tough on all of them, but at least the Galra empire was critically injured until Zarkon recovered. But they pushed on past it; all of them tried to focus their grief into finding him and uniting rebel groups. Since they couldn't form Voltron anymore, Allura had been spreading them thin across the better part of the galaxy, playing diplomat. There were small, scattered factions of rebels everywhere, and since the Galra presence had been so powerful, they hadn't been able to work together in a larger force until now.

"We should focus our efforts on our previous task: uniting the rebels," Keith said.

"Shouldn't we look for Lance?" Pidge looked back over the letter.

"Please. Lance does everything for the attention. This is all clearly an act. I'm sure he's just hiding around the corner somewhere, waiting for us to come get him. We can't get distracted right now by his childish antics."

"I don't think you know Lance as well as you think you do," Hunk told him, "he would never do anything that would endanger others."

"Well, then he wasn't thinking. He's endangering the whole team just because he wants special treatment. Why else would he do this?" Keith snapped. The rest of the team looked at him, confused.

"Seriously, Keith?" Pidge was the first to speak, "I think you of all people should know why he left."

"Me? Why me?" Keith was getting more and more frustrated--not that getting frustrated was an uncommon thing for him to do, but Shiro never got this kind of backlash when he was the leader!

"I'm going to see if I can't trace the pod he took," Pidge backed out of the circle.

"Yeah, and I'm gonna make some food that tastes like REAL blueberries," Hunk left too. He looked to Allura and Coran, but Coran just backed away, pretending to have something important to do. The only person left was Allura, and she was looking at him with a pained expression.

"Keith, is there... something you need to talk about? Anything at all?" She hesitated, waiting for him to blow up again. But he just shoved his hands in his pockets. He was going down to the training deck. If no one was going to listen to him, then he was just going to beat up some training robots.