Hey Brother, Avicii.

Probably gonna stick with monthly updates for this particular fic. Thanks y'all for sticking with it! This was one of my favorite chapters to write, if not the most technically challenging (how do bombs?) and it heavily features Matt.

TW for slightly graphic mentions of blood, death, and a little bit of (necessary) self harm (not related to depressive thoughts or suicidal tendencies, but I thought I'd warn people anyway)

Shit's about to go down.

Rainbow Drive. June 9th, 2016. 12:12 pm.

"You're not going in, Pidge."

"You don't get to tell me what I can and can't do," Pidge spat, shoving her laptop into her backpack and zipping it closed with anger.

Allura's lips pressed into a line. "You agreed when you came on board that I-"

"I agreed to Voltron to find my brother," she snapped. When she looked up, her eyes were watering. Her hands trembled on her bag. "And he's…" Her voice broke. "He's right there." She pointed feebly at the children's hospital, just a block away from where they were parked. "He's right there, Allura, I can't do nothing."

Shiro knelt next to her. "You won't be doing nothing, Pidge," he promised, soft. He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. "You'll be monitoring everything, guiding us safely. And we will get him out, if it's the last thing I do."

Pidge's chin quivered and she looked down at her bag again. Very slowly, she opened the bag and pulled the laptop out. Moved back until she was leaning against the wall of the van. "Okay," she said. Her words were small. "Okay. Tell me what to do."

Shiro stood up and looked at the others. "Allura and Coran are staying here with Pidge. Coran, you're helping Pidge track routes, Galra movement, and finding those other four bombs. Hunk, you and I are going to find the bombs with the failsafe's and deactivate them. Keith, Lance, you guys are going to Matt."

Lance frowned and glanced at Keith. "Neither of us knows how to deactivate a bomb," he said slowly, his words gaining confidence as Keith shook his head in confirmation. "What use are we?"

"You're not deactivating the bomb," Allura said, clasping her hands in front of her.

Pidge whipped around to glare at her. "Excuse me?"

She held up a hand. "The Galra didn't put Matt there to blow up the hospital. He's there to get our attention. I'm sure of it. They are using him in the hopes that we go in and rescue him and lead them back to our base with whatever tracker is on him."

"Or in him," Keith muttered, crossing his arms. At everyone's looks, he faltered and glanced away. "My dad…they put a tracker literally under his skin. It's possible."

Allura's lips tightened. "Regardless, we're not leaving him there. You two are to escort him out safely. Once Hunk and Shiro return, we'll…we'll take him to a local area that they could not possibly risk invading and attempt to deactivate everything. Understand?"

The group nodded and Allura handed each of the four a small tablet. "These will guide you to the points you need. Good luck. And remember, we're on comms if you need us."

Pidge latched her hand onto Lance's wrist. "Get him back," she whispered.

He shifted and squeezed her hand. "I'll do my best, Pidgeon."

She tapped at her computer and nodded. "Back loading doors are open, security feed is looped. You have ten minutes."

Shiro nodded. "Let's go."

Altea Children's Hospital. June 9th, 2016. 12:23 pm.

They split up in the emergency waiting room, Keith and Lance heading to the left and up to the third floor, the nursery wing, and Shiro and Hunk going right and straight, to the OR. Lance was sure the hospital had been cleared out, but at one point, he and Keith passed a nurse's lounge with the door propped just the slightest, and he froze.

Keith looked back at him, lifting an eyebrow. With the mask over his face, he looked like a totally different person, which Lance figured was kind of the point. He jerked his head back to the door and glanced at his watch. They had 8 minutes before security feed was up.

He pushed the door open despite Keith's silent protests and froze at the hoard of nurses crowded into the room, each one either carrying or holding the hand of a child. Most of the kids were crying, quiet, and one nurse had her hand over another's mouth.

Lance held his hands up slowly, glanced back at Keith. His eyes were wide. Angry. He looked back at the nurses and knelt next to a child, dragging a finger up to his lips. Quiet. The children in the room nodded and Lance looked to another nurse. "I promise," he whispered, his voice barely more than a whisper of air. "Voltron will help."

An older nurse, cradling an infant, looked up in surprise. She locked eyes with Lance, drifted to Keith, and nodded. She shifted the child, reached into her pocket, pulled out her keys with remarkable silence. Lance felt a breath of laughter rise up in him as he spotted the Marmora keychain dangling from the chain, inconspicuous amongst the keys and the "Number One Mom" pendants.

Keith's eyes were glittering when he looked back at him, and Lance rose to his full height. Pried a knife off his hip and flipped the handle to the closest nurse while Keith handed another to the Marmora member. They shut the door silently behind them and then continued.

They'd wasted almost a full minute, but Lance knew it was worth it, if they could help others.

"Lance. Keith."

Pidge's voice froze them in place and they backed against the wall. "Two guards coming up your way. Four seconds. Three."

Lance lifted his pistol, already adjusted to fire silently. "One."

One. Two.

They didn't even hit the floor, Keith catching both of them and easing them to the ground. His lips were pursed as he stood, looking down at them. There was recognition in his eyes, and Lance carefully gripped his elbow and tugged him away and to the stairwell.

"I'll lose you guys in the stairwell, so hurry," Pidge informed them.

They eased the door shut and, as they ran up the stairs, Lance glanced at Keith. "Who were they?"

Keith's nose wrinkled. His eyes were bright behind his mask. "Teenagers. Got recruited because they were desperate to help their families." He looked sideways at Lance, taking the next flight of steps a little slower. "That's how a lot of Galra end up with Zarkon, you know. They're broke, in dept, paying off loans. They need an out."

"There's gotta be a better way," Lance protested.

Keith's jaw clicked as he set it. "There isn't always one," he murmured.

They took a second at the landing to breathe and then stepped out into the infant ward. Matt leaned casually against the receptionist's desk, gaze locked on the incubation room across from him. In it were two nurses and a half a dozen babies, both nurses watching him fearfully. His hands were loose at his sides, his pose non-threatening, but when he looked to Lance and Keith, he relaxed even more.

"Took you guys long enough," he muttered. "Voltron, right?"

"Yes. You know what they're planning?" Keith asked as Lance opened up the bomber vest on Matt's chest and studied it. They had less than four minutes.

Matt nodded. "Using me to track you. I'm sure you guys figured that one out already, though."

"I thought-" Keith snapped his mouth shut, grunting a little when he remembered that he had an audience. He took a breath and shut his eyes. "Shiro, Hunk, what's your progress?"

"Three of the four are done. We're almost to the fourth now. We took out the guards around each one, but they won't stay down long."

"You guys have two and a half minutes on the cameras," Coran informed them.

Lance clicked his tongue and stood, closing the vest again. "Let's go."

He nodded at the scared nurses and they ushered Matt out of the room and back into the stairwell, taking the stairs as fast as they could without stumbling. "I thought Zarkon was giving me until the end of the week for information," Keith finally said, hopping three stairs to the first landing.

Matt snorted, looking annoyed. "Clearly he doesn't trust you."

The underlying mutual feeling was obvious in his words, and Keith flinched. Steadied himself. "Probably right. Still, this seems extreme. What was to stop you from just leaving? You weren't tied down."

"There's a bomb on my chest, Kogane," Matt said, humorless.

Lance stopped them both on the second landing. Keith frowned. "Lance, we only have-"

"I know," Lance snapped. He looked at Matt. "Are you two going to fight the whole time? Because that's going to look fucking suspicious if two people who supposedly don't know each other hate each other."

Matt looked from Lance to Keith and back. Something in his features shifted. "You know everything?"

"Yes."

Matt's lips pursed. "I'll control myself. Does…does Pidge know? About Dad?"

Lance lowered his voice, trying to be respectful. "No. And that's…you can tell her that. But Keith is the one that needs to tell her it was him. That can't be you, Matt. I'm sorry."

"What's to stop me?"

"Matt."

Lance stared at him, pleading. Gentle. Matt studied him, and suddenly watching them, Keith felt like he was interrupting something. It was hard to remember that they had known each other before all this.

"Okay," Matt said finally. He looked at Keith and stuck a hand out. "Okay."

Keith took it, firm, and nodded. "Okay."

They burst out the main exit to the emergency ward and found themselves surrounded by Galra.

"A minute over, are you guys fucking KIDDING ME?" Pidge was shouting into their comms.

Lance lifted his rifle and switched the setting from stun to kill. Keith handed Matt his spare knife. For a moment, there was dead silence. A standoff.

Then the first Galra lifted a pistol.

They didn't even get a shot out before they were falling, a hole in their head. Lance's shoulders tightened and he swung his rifle.

It was a blur, for the next thirty seconds. It felt like it lasted a lifetime. Keith and Matt moved into the fray, knife and sword taking down enemies and Lance picking them off from the doorway.

There was a half dozen left when he ran out of ammunition and dropped his weapon to his thigh. Four when he whipped a throwing star at one ready to stab Keith from behind. Two when he threw another star into one charging at him with nothing but his bare hands.

Keith stabbed the last one between the shoulder blades as it swung for Matt, sending it crumbling to the ground. For a second the trio sat in silence. Keith offered a hand to Matt, who took it slowly and let Keith drag him to his feet. Keith was bleeding on one cheek. Matt's whole body was littered with cuts and burns from the lack of protection. One of his ankles was twisted.

Lance glanced down, took stock of himself. Aside from a nasty cut on his right bicep, he was okay. He recalculated when blood trickled down his cheek from his reopened head wound. "Pidge?"

"You're clear. Go. Hunk and Shiro are already back."

Shouldering Matt between them, Lance and Keith stumbled out to Rainbow Drive, let Coran pull them into the back. The moment the doors shut, Allura floored it.

For a second, they were quiet, untwining Matt's arms from their shoulders. And then Pidge was there, her lips trembling.

To her credit, she didn't fling herself at her brother. Her eyes strayed to the open vest, to the bomb underneath, and she heaved a sob back. Matt's hand found her cheek, dragged through her hair. "Hey," he whispered. His eyes were watering. "It's okay. You can figure it out, I know you can. You're the smartest person I know."

Pidge nodded, took his hand in hers, and leaned her cheek into his palm for just a brief moment, swaying as the van took a turn a little too sharply. The motion seemed to wake her up, and she dragged Matt to a bench while Hunk fussed over Keith and Lance's injuries.

Matt shrugged the outer vest off while Pidge studied the bomb closely. "No countdown, which means they have it wired remotely," she said clinically. "They could set it off at any time, but they won't, because they want our location. Which means that if I can deactivate the signal to the remote, for even a couple minutes, we could drop it somewhere it wouldn't hurt anyone and it'd be okay."

Coran knelt next to her with a laptop and passed it over. While she tapped away, he squinted at the buttons on the vest. "The tracker for the vest is here," he said finally, drawing a line across Matt's breast area, where a thin wire ran. "We can cut it easily, which means that if we cut it, it'll probably set the bomb off instantaneously. So we can't get rid of the tracker until we get rid of the signal and the vest. But if the signal is cut, it may also set the bomb off."

"Copy," Pidge muttered, her fingers still flying. "Allura, can you drive us somewhere like…barren?"

Hunk looked up from where he was smoothing a bandage over Lance's forehead. "The farm to the West of Shay's family is empty, has been for years. No one lives there, and if the blast radius was only enough to take out the hospital, it's definitely big enough."

Allura veered left towards the highway heading for the Balmeran mountains. Keith, bandaged, was looking out the back windows with Shiro. "We're being followed," Shiro informed the group. "Three cars back. They definitely have the plates and van style now if they didn't before."

Coran leaned over and grabbed another laptop. "Well, then let's fix that. Allura, what street are we on?"

"Sycamore. Turn for the highway is two lights away."

The man's mustache twitched. For approximately ten seconds, his fingers flew. "Tell me when we're through the light."

"Going now!"

He hit enter, and Shiro and Keith grinned at the same time. Keith glanced back at him. "You changed the lights?"

Coran's eyes twinkled in a youthful way. "Certainly did my boy. It'll buy us a few minutes to get away, at least."

"We're on the highway now," Allura said over her shoulder. "So we can merge and hide more easily. Hunk, what exit is the farm?"

Hunk moved to the window to relay directions to Allura and Coran sank back down next to Lance, his work done for the moment. "You lot are okay?" he confirmed, looking between Lance, Shiro, and Keith.

They nodded. Pidge turned back to them with a glare. "What took so long?" she demanded. "You guys should have been in and out without having to deal with anyone aside from a couple guards."

"We found a room full of kids and nurses," Lance said, twisting his hands in his lap. His eyes stayed on the floor. "I couldn't just leave them undefended, I…I wanted them to know we'd help them."

Coran reached over and gently pulled Lance's mask off from where it had still been sitting on his face. As if realizing they had also not removed theirs, Keith and Shiro did the same. "That is the purpose of Voltron. So you did well."

Matt nodded, holding his hands loosely in his lap. "Yeah. It's…I'm glad you guys could help them. I hated seeing them so scared of me, there was no way they could believe that I wouldn't hurt them on purpose."

"We're coming up on Shay's neighbors," Hunk said before anyone else could speak. "Pidge, are you ready?"

Pidge eased the jacket off of Matt, holding it gingerly in her hands. "Ready. How long until possible detonation once we turn off location, Coran?"

Coran eyed the computer. "Once the loss of connection is registered? Seconds."

She handed the vest over to Shiro, who moved next to the door where Keith was ready, his hand on the handle of the van. Hunk glanced back from the front. "We're in the middle of a field. Allura, keep driving as fast as you can. Shiro? Throw it. Far."

Keith pushed the door open. They were going nearly 70 miles an hour when Shiro whipped the vest and Allura swerved to keep momentum from bringing the vest back into the van. Coran waited one second, two, three, and then cut the remote connection on the vest.

Six seconds later, the field exploded.

Keith wrenched the door shut against the boiling heat with a gasp as everyone flinched and ducked, but they were just far enough that the only damage was the scorching on the back of the van. For several seconds, they rode in complete silence.

Matt stood, wavering, and walked over to Keith, holding a hand out. A look passed between them and then Keith reached behind him and handed over his knife, unsheathed. Pidge frowned uneasily. "Matt?"

He gave her a warm smile, lifted his arm, and dug the knife into his wrist with a gasp. Pidge shrieked and moved, but Coran grabbed her by the waist. The van wobbled and Shiro steadied Matt by the shoulders, Keith reaching out to grip his forearm and hold him steady. Matt's jaw was clenched tight and he pressed the blade into his bleeding wrist, twisting the tip under his skin.

With a sickening squelch, a small chip dropped from his wrist to the floor, covered in blood. It was blinking. With a smile, a grim one that painted his face haunting colors, Matt stepped on it with a satisfying crunch.

He handed the knife back to Keith, accepted the towel from Hunk. He wrapped it around his wrist tightly, and then dropped to his knees and buried his sister in a hug.