Keith One Shots

~Leader Stress~

This was requested by Supersast. Also stupid article 13 has been accepted so I don't even know what's gonna happen with this book. Eh, whatever. Here ye go!

Based on season 3 when sheewo is back.

Third P.O.V

Keith was not okay.

He had just been leading an extremely stressful mission, in which, he risked everyone's lives multiple times. The decisions he'd had to make were difficult and snappy. Some of those decisions had also been incorrect, such as directions around a galra ship and in which order they should take out the guards. He was feeling fatigued from the previous missions and still wasn't confident with his leadership skills, meaning he made quite a lot of errors. This, of course, lead to Shiro shouting at him through the comms and the team giving him death glares during the mission. The more he got shouted at and death glared by his friends, the more he began to stress, the more mistakes he made and the more the team would have a go at him.

In fact, Keith had messed this mission up so badly that Shiro had to step in and make the decisions for him. To him, it felt like he was being babied. The feeling was similar to when you're babysitting a child but the parent has to step in because you couldn't handle it.

It was humiliating.

This was the main reason Keith was overjoyed when he landed his- no, Shiro's lion back in the castle. For a minute, Keith just sat in Black, his head rested against the chair and his hands sitting on his lap.

"What in god's name made you think I could do this?" Keith was directing the sentence at Black, but he mentally found himself asking Shiro it too. "Leaders don't screw up like this"

Keith sat for a few more minutes, taking deep inhales and exhales. Maybe today was just a bad day?

The paladin stood up, ignoring the aching in his legs as he excited Shiro's lion. He then made his way to the controls room.

On arrival, he was met with glares of all the paladins. Great.

"Keith, what took you so long?" Shiro asked, a stern expression on his face.

"Sorry, I got.. held up" Keith mumbled, not really feeling up to coming up with a proper excuse.

"We have a distress call from a planet, paladins!" Coran shouted, giving off his Coran smile. Keith had to admit, it shifted his mood the tiniest bit.

"We also have readings on a galra ship nearby. It has valuable quintessence on it and by the looks of our scanners, it'll be moving soon." Allura said, tapping the Altean keyboard.

"Well the distress call is more important, isn't it? People's lives could be at risk" Hunk stated. Keith then realised everyone was looking at him expectantly.

Ah, right, he's the leader.

"We should go after the quintessence. We'd take out a large chunk of the galra supply of it." Keith announced, his voice coming out confident and strong.

That's not how he felt on the inside.

"How do you know how much it is? This might not even be a little bit of the quintessence they have" Lance said, a slight drop of sass in his tone.

"Well... is there any way we could figure it out?" Keith asked, looking to Coran. The moustached man shook his head.

"I'm afraid not. All I know is that it's the 5th most powerful quintessence." Coran said. Seeing Keith didn't know how much quintessence there was in space and how powerful it all was, this didn't really help his case.