The Draconian (Keith x OC)

|| The Ark of Taujeer || {EDITED}

Everyone was gathered inside the bridge after traveling through a wormhole and to the other side of the galaxy to get away from Zarkon and his massive fleet. Allura sat on the small stairwell located on the central platform, her cerulean eyes downcast. "There's no point in debating this further. Zarkon is clearly tracking us through me."

"I highly doubt it, Allura," Arcadia stated. "He doesn't have a way to track you."

Pidge nodded in agreement. "She's right. That's not possible."

The princess lifted her gaze from the floor and glanced between Pidge and Arcadia with furrowed brows. "Why would that be so hard to believe? Zarkon's forces showed up on Arus only after I awoke."

Unlike Pidge and Arcadia, Lance was agreeing with Allura only in an attempt to flirt with her. "She's got a point. I would absolutely travel across the galaxy to find you."

Arcadia leaned over and tugged on the boy's ear, earning a whimper of pain. "You're not helping, Lance." He whimpered again when she tugged on his ear one last time before releasing him.

"It's not you, Princess Allura," Keith suddenly spoke up, grabbing everyone's attention. "It's me."

"Not you, too, Keith..." Arcadia sighed in disbelief. Between her best friend and boyfriend, she didn't believe either one of them was being tracked by Zarkon.

"I just think Zarkon must've imprinted on me during our fight or something," Keith said, adding reason to his own accusation.

Pidge shook her head, unable to believe either of them. "Look, the fact is, we don't know how Zarkon is tracking us. It could be through the black lion. Every time Zarkon gets close to it, Shiro has to fight him for control."

"That makes more sense because Zarkon was the original black paladin," Arcadia comments. "It's possible his bond with the lion is still strong."

"That's only when Zarkon is nearby. No paladin has ever been able to connect with a lion over a vast distance," Coran joins in on the conversation.

Hunk glanced around the room at his friends. "So what are we going to do?"

"Look," Shiro sighed, arms crossed over his chest. "It doesn't matter how he's tracking us because we're gonna take the fight to the galra soon enough. They've been chasing us from galaxy to galaxy. The last thing they expect is for us to come after them."

"The hunter becomes the hunted, hmm?" Lance hummed in satisfaction. "Awesome! That's the tag line from like six of my favorite movies."

Pidge sat in her seat and decided to show them what she invented, typing away on the keyboard. "As it happens, I took our list of recent galra attacks and analyzed it for both commonalities and anomalies among the attack sites. I was hoping to create an algorithm that would, within a statistically acceptable margin of error, provide a list of target-rich galra environments color-coded, of course, because what are we—animals?" An image appeared, revealing what she had been working on.

"What does color-coding have to do with animals?" Arcadia asked in confusion as she tried to listen to Pidge's explanation, but some of the words were jumbled up and out of order due to how fast the green paladin was speaking.

"Don't worry about it," Keith said to her before Lance expressed his own awe and confusion at what Pidge had just said.

"Cool! What is it again?" The brunette stared at the image in confusion.

"It's a galra finder?" Hunk pondered.

"Well, "finder" suggests that it locates the galra, whereas it would be more accurate to say that my model predicts their likeliest..." Pidge glanced at the others and saw the puzzled expressions on their faces. She groaned and gave up on her explanation. "Fine. It's a galra finder."