This work addresses the problem of a fast packet retransmission scheme intended for transporting delay-sensitive flows in a Cooperative Diversity (CD) environment. This cooperative fast retransmission scheme exploits the advantages of the CD environment and hybrid Automatic-Repeat-reQuest (ARQ), while allowing retransmission just one time via a cooperating user (i.e., partner) or via both the sender and the partner simultaneously. Complementary link packets are used for the retransmission whose policy can be adjusted on the basis of the qualities of channels among the sender, the partner and the receiver, as well as the application layer protocol data unit size, using the application throughput as the objective. For this scheme, we first derive the application throughput formulas which are then verified via simulations. Next, the CD-based optimized fast retransmission scheme is shown able to achieve better effective throughput (goodput) than other CD-based or non-CD-based ARQ schemes in various Nakagami-m slow-fading environments. As a result, the proposed scheme should be an excellent fast retransmission mechanism for real-time multimedia transport in many CD environments.