Anonymous prompt: I loved the Voltron fic you posted! Do you think you could write something with hurt!Keith? Thank you so much!
Voltron: Legendary Defender and related characters © Dreamworks
story © RenaRoo
The New Calling Card
Anyone would have said it was a bad call – to go it alone, to not wait for help, to not communicate what he was thinking.
In fact, they did. They all said it, rather loudly. Rather boisterously that Keith was not doing the smart thing by diving in headfirst to the situation. But he did it anyway.
That's just how he was. And not even Allura's angriest face or Shiro's clearest disappointment made him feel like he wouldn't do the exact same thing over again.
"I'd do the same thing over again," Keith told them, just for emphasis.
Coran was wrapping a bandage around his ribs and it was the strangest combination of painful and not tight enough he had experienced. Though, then again, Keith was rather used to managing these things by himself long beforeVoltron and paladins were words in his vocabulary.
"That's comforting," Shiro said, arms crossed across his chest in clear disapproval.
"It was reckless," Allura reiterated once again before waving toward the pods. "Not to mention most of our systems are still offline. Including the medical supplies."
"Yeah, nice going, Keith," Lance huffed. "What if I'd been hurt? Who'd be leading the team then? You're just lucky Pidge thinks she can fix all of this stuff."
"Trying!" Pidge called from the distance as she waved a wrench at them. "I said I'd try! Don't oversell it!"
"We have faith in your abilities to impress, Pidge," Shiro told her comfortingly.
"I already said I'm trying, Shiro! Stop buttering me up!" she warned.
Coran finished wrapping Keith's ribs and made a point of smacking him over the shoulder. "And that's all of it! Good as new! Or as good as we can get without a healing chamber."
"Ow!" Keith groaned, lurching forward with the strike. He rubbed at his ribs as he achingly sat back up and looked back around to the group. "Okay, I get it. But we had an invader in the power room, and I wasn't getting anywhere going at him hand-to-hand so… I pushed him into the stream. It was the only option."
They all looked at him like he had just pushed them into the power reserves of the Castle of Lions.
"Okay, but hear me out," Hunk said, holding up his hands. "Just… maybe you could've waited the twenty seconds it would've taken the rest of us to come and back you up. And then we could have overpowered the guy together."
"And put yourself and the castle at significantly less risk!" Coran added.
"In other words," Allura continued, arms crossed against her chest, "My exactsuggestion over our comm channel during this whole ordeal."
"But–" Keith began to stand in order to defend himself only to flinch over his ribs upon doing so. He groaned and sat back down, hand firmly kept to his side.
"But nothing, Keith," Shiro said, coming to Keith's side and gripping onto his shoulder tightly. "We're your team. All of us. And we're here to protect each other."
"Which also means we work better together," Lance added in a sing-song voice.
Shiro let out a huff and glanced over his shoulder at Lance before nodding in agreement. "Yes, Lance. It does," Shiro sighed. He then concentrated again on Keith. "You don't have to go things alone. Especially when they're boneheaded things to do."
Keith couldn't help but laugh at that. "Boneheaded is kind of my calling card, though."
"Teamwork, paladin," Allura said, a fond smile on her face. "Teamwork is thenew calling card."
"I'll try to remember that from now on," Keith promised.
