A/N: Hey, y'all. Still busy with two toddlers in the middle of a pandemic, but I was reading over some old stuff and realized I wrote a new chapter for this story, like, months ago and just never got around to editing it and uploading it. Bad robbie.

Chapter 9: Sublime

As for K, to her surprise and irritation, the soldiers hadn't yet tried to find a use for her like they were using Clint. They kept her where she was and didn't let her heal more than to bind her wounds so she didn't bleed out in the dampener. But other than that, she was still nursing gunshot wounds and blood loss.

But that wasn't what had her annoyed.

She'd overheard the soldiers talking down the hallway about how she was the perfect bait for Wolverine. That was who they really wanted. She was nothing more than the honey in the trap.

She hated being underestimated. Especially when she could hear the soldiers talking about how she couldn't be a threat because she was a woman — and even more so now that she was a mother.

As if those things made her less likely to kill them — especially when they'd also taken two of her boys.

Still, K played into that assumption, slowly acting more and more injured than she actually was and simply watching the guards as they started to relax around her. They didn't think a small, hurt woman was much of a threat in a cell — especially not compared to the monster in the basement who had been surprisingly quieter lately.

They'd dressed her wounds — mostly — but they'd done a half assed job at best, and with the collar on, K really was losing blood. So it wasn't even a matter of good acting when she quit trying to hide the fact that she was shivering. Still, she exaggerated her level of awareness by simply curling up on herself a little tighter. She let her eyes slowly drift until they were almost closed — just leaving herself enough space between her eyelids that she could see a little of what was going on around her.

She wasn't stupid. She knew that they didn't want her dead. And she'd come close enough to bleeding out plenty of times to know what that looked like and how to replicate it perfectly.

Eventually, the guards got nervous enough that one of them came to check on her, and when she didn't respond to anything, they started to move from nerves into something more like controlled panic, eventually going so far as to call in someone she wasn't likely to stab to make a more thorough inspection.

"Make sure she's still alive," the guards told a fairly shocked Barney as they brought him to K's cell — which was the first time he'd seen her since they were captured, so he had no idea she was that hurt.

Barney approached K carefully, wary of how pale she already looked and of the fact that he could see she'd been wrapped up instead of allowed to heal. She was lying on the floor… He reached out to touch her and panicked almost instantly when she felt cold. "You need to get her out of here!" he insisted, spinning around to face the guards with wide eyes. "She needs to heal!"

"She still breathing?" one of the guards asked, though he looked nervous at what the answer was.

Barney was just as nervous, especially since, as he crouched down to check, K held her breath — and didn't blow her sneak when Barney blew straight past panic into freaking out as he rushed back to the door. "You have to let her out. You can't just let her die!"

The guards shared a look but didn't look as if they knew what the right answer was — and the more senior of the two turned into his radio to call for backup. And when the request from the higher ups was for him to go in and check for himself, he didn't look thrilled. He blew out a breath and handed his weapon to the other guard as he stepped into the cell to check on her himself, anxious as he crouched down next to her.

"C'mon, K," Barney whispered, on the verge of an honest to goodness breakdown even as the guard checked her over. "Please, Mom, c'mon."

It took a long moment for the guard to find her pulse, and he looked more edgy when he did as he reported back that she had a pulse — but it was slow and faint. He couldn't count her breaths reliably — and told his superiors as much — which set off a whole level of panic outside of the cell and down the halls, even as Barney sank to the floor, watching in disbelief.

He'd already lost one mom, and he couldn't — he just couldn't — lose another.

The guard situated her flat on the floor, and it looked like he was fully expecting the doctors on the way to get to work with equipment and extreme measures. So, not one of them was expecting it when the lead scientist — swearing at all of them for their incompetence — knelt down next to K and promptly dropped backward minus his head.

They'd turned the inhibitor field off as the scientists showed up, and since K was mostly playing possum anyhow, all she really needed was to feel the buzz of the healing working to know she could start tearing into them. The guards were the first to go — since they were more likely to shoot more; then, she turned to the scientists and doctors to finish the job.

When K was finished, she turned to Barney, who was hastily trying to hide the evidence of his quiet breakdown, even though she'd been aware of him the whole time and, even if she hadn't, she could smell the saltwater on him.

"I'm sorry," she told him quietly, taking the time even in the middle of the cell in the middle of an escape to wrap her arms around him when he so desperately needed the reassurance. "I wasn't expecting them to bring you here."

Barney took a hitched breath and nodded into her arms. "I'm okay," he lied. "You're okay. So… yeah."

"Sure, we'll go with that for now," K said, helping him to his feet once he had stopped gulping in air. "Take a gun — I'll take one too — and we need to find your brother and get out."

"They wanted him to do something," Barney told her as he forced himself to focus and grabbed one of the guards' guns. "I don't know what. But they were dragging him around last I saw him."

"Show me where; I should be able to find the scent," K said. "Especially if I have a solid starting point — and everything here is kind of … just blood."

Barney nodded and led the way backtracking down the hall toward where he'd been kept. "I only know which hall he went down after he saw me, sorry. That was yesterday…"

"Should be all I need," K promised. "I've worked with less." She closed her eyes and just breathed in the scents as she slowly walked a circle at the end of the hall, then leaned in the direction Clint's scent trail went and started down it, waving for Barney to keep up. She didn't like that they were going deeper into the facility. And she didn't like that they had to go down lower into the complex. Nothing about this felt like they were going to escape. But she couldn't leave without Clint. And she couldn't send Barney ahead outside to deal with the guards and full force of the military on his own. She honestly didn't know how she would get out — even without the boys in play.

What K and Barney didn't realize was that Clint had overheard the call for backup on the radio one of the men who brought him back down to the Hulk's cell was wearing. He'd heard his brother panicking, and he knew exactly the tone Barney had been using, too — the same one he'd used when he had to tell Clint their parents weren't coming back.

It was a familiar kind of dread, and Clint's hearing fuzzed out as he stopped listening to anything but Barney on the other end of the radio — and then to nothing but his own whirring heartbeat that he couldn't get under control enough to listen to what the creeps wanted out of him and the Hulk that morning.

"...understand?"

Clint blinked at the man giving the orders, his ears still rushing. "I… I can't … I need my mom," he said. He felt like he was barely four years old all over again, trying to wrap his head around his mom never coming home again. It was the same thing. All over again.

The man glared at him, his eyes flashing. "I don't have time for this. Get the Hulk to follow you or lose what's left of your family. Go."

Clint tried to swallow down his panic, but he couldn't. He couldn't. He needed his mom. He needed to be with Barney.

Barney.

That was enough to get his feet to move again, at least. Barney didn't sound like he was in a position to defend himself. Or even function. Not that Clint was doing any better at that. So he had to keep him alive.

Clint was almost shaking from head to toe when he practically stumbled in to where the Hulk was. He was trying — he really was — but all he could think about was that his mom wasn't breathing, and Barney was freaking out, and this was all really, really bad.

"Hey," Clint said, then cleared his throat and tried again, because he hadn't actually managed more than a whisper. "Hey, uh, we're supposed to go…" He gestured vaguely toward the door, blinking too many times because he did not want to cry.

The Hulk turned his attention to Clint and frowned deeply. It was obvious to anyone that Clint wasn't okay. "Yellow Hawk hurt?" the Hulk asked, sounding like he was ready to go to war for him.

"No," Clint promised. "No, I just—" He closed his eyes and tried to center himself, and that was when he felt a new presence in his mind, not at all warm and inviting like Jean's was when she taught telepathic defense but sharp and honestly painful enough to get Clint to take a step back.

The assault on his mind didn't last long at all before he straightened up, lifted his chin to meet the Hulk's narrowed-eyed gaze, and said, "Come on. Follow me."

The change in Clint's demeanor was so obvious that the Hulk started to shake his head, taking a threatening step forward with his eyes narrowed. "Bring Yellow Hawk back," he growled.

"I'm right here," Clint said calmly, even though internally, he was freaking out.

"No," Hulk replied, drawing himself up as he squared up with Clint. "Bring. Yellow Hawk. Back," he demanded, getting louder with every word, towering over Clint.

"Or what?" Clint heard himself say, as if from far away. "You'll what, hit me?"

For only a second, the Hulk blinked, letting out a frustrated roar when he couldn't just smash the problem in front of him — though the guards at the door that tentatively came for Clint when there wasn't a resulting Hulk rage were a different matter entirely.

The second one of the guards got too close to Clint, that was it — the Hulk snapped. And with every bit of pent-up rage he'd been building since he got there, he rushed toward them, bellowing his displeasure as he batted both guards away with one massive hand, not realizing Clint was already moving with the guards until there were three distinct sounds of people hitting the reinforced walls and then falling to the ground to lie still.

That was enough to get the Hulk's attention, and he spun to see the guards splayed out at odd angles, along with his new friend, who was very, very still and breathing shallowly where he lay.

With that, the Hulk let out a bellowing cry, scooping Clint up with one hand before he simply smashed his way through anything between him and getting his friend to help.

A couple floors above where the Hulk was destroying things, the men following K and Barney suddenly changed directions as all hands were called to deal with the Hulk. The problem for K and Barney, then, was that the Hulk was the same direction Clint's scent was.

K didn't have a good plan at that point, and when chunks of concrete started to fall, it was clear they needed to get somewhere more stable. "We need a place to hide," K told Barney. "I will find him, but you need to get hidden."

"Hide where?" Barney asked, gesturing toward the cracks forming in the ceiling. "This place looks like it's coming down!"

"We gotta go up first," she agreed. "Stairwell. If we can get away from this section of the main building, the larger wing will go away from this hole in the ground."

Barney nodded, though he was still looking the opposite direction. "Clint's that way, though…"

"I will find him if it's the last thing I do," K swore. "But I need to know you're safe too. And you can't go with me. They'll kill you."

"They'll kill you and Clint too," Barney pointed out.

"No, they won't," K said. "You said they had a use for Clint. And... well … they don't want me dead either." When Barney didn't look convinced, she laid it out for him. "Alright, listen — I know I've told you these people look at me and most mutants as animals, right? Well … if they can't make me behave or work for them, they would try to use me for babies, okay?" She gave him a raised eyebrow look. "They won't kill me. I'm too valuable."

Barney's jaw dropped open. "...augh," he managed at last, pulling a spectacular face.

"Yeah, try it from my point of view, sweetheart."

"I really don't wanna."

"Me either," she agreed, pushing him along. "But please … let's get you safe; then I'll find Clint."

Barney decided not to argue with her, purely because he was still so freaked out by what she'd told him. And K had been right about the relative stability of the facility as they moved away from the chaos in the lower levels. Higher and further out, they could still hear roars and rumbles, but the building was a lot sturdier. So they could actually safely hide.

He was still surprised, though, when K pushed him toward the vents, of all things.

"Umm… is this… safe?" Barney asked, though he felt dumb as soon as he'd asked it, since nothing in this place was safe.

"Safe enough," she said, then handed him her gun, too. "You need the back up weapon. Go down the shaft, find a turn and stay out of sight."

"You'll come back when you find Clint, right?"

"Oh yeah," she agreed. "I can sniff you down no problem. So don't be afraid to get away from this vent."

Barney nodded, gripping the gun tight. "Good luck."

"Love you, kiddo," she said before she closed the vent and screwed it back down — just so nothing looked out of place. With one last look, K finally turned and headed off back the way they'd come, intent on looking for Clint, though everything felt far more fragile the closer she got to the entrance to the lower levels. She wasn't entirely sure if she wasn't going to end up burying herself under tons of concrete when the building went down in that section — and she was pretty sure it was going to go down.

But she couldn't ignore that the sublevels were the last place that Clint had been — so she went down anyhow, trying to tune out the alarms and flashing lights all the way. She avoided soldiers, but only because most of them were focusing on trying to recover research ahead of the collapse. Whatever had happened that had the place rocking was already done.

Which meant a whole lot of creeps were all riled up and looking for a fight. K did her best work avoiding them, hiding in shadows and even simply behind doors as men rushed by and boots marched all around. She'd picked up Clint's scent and was following it deeper when she hit a wall of sorts as someone nailed her with a psychic attack. She wasn't sure if she was in a dampener zone herself or if the guy had something to boost his signal, but either way, he'd managed to stop her in her tracks. She found herself trying to find a place that was out of the way to try and get out of sight, but she couldn't focus enough to do so. So, instead of finding a spot to hide, she ended up on her hands and knees trying to find a way to ease the pain.

It was kind of wild from Barney's perspective, too, since whoever was hitting her with a psychic attack clearly didn't think he was any threat. So he didn't know what was going on when K went down; he only knew that he'd been trying to go deeper in the vents and heard her cry out.

Which wasn't exactly comforting.

He scrambled deeper into the facility, trying not to choke on some of the dust of debris that was in the vents closer to whatever had happened. He didn't get there in time to see K, but he did manage to overhear someone sounding smug and self-important as he ordered men to carry her back to her cell now that she was "subdued."

Which didn't sound great, admittedly. But, well, Barney knew where her cell was. And … the higher-ups were scrambling to deal with K and the Hulk and Clint.

Maybe Barney could use the fact that they weren't even paying him any attention.

It took him longer than he was comfortable with, and he kept expecting to be discovered and dragged out of the vents, so he had a death grip on the gun he kept dragging along with him. But still, somehow, he managed to find a vent that connected to a supply closet. And, hey, that wasn't guarded, and it suited his needs perfectly.

He climbed out of the vents and searched the shelves until he found a spare radio. He didn't know what kind of range it had, and he'd have to play with it somewhere quiet until he figured out what frequencies he couldn't use, but, well, if the X-Men and Avengers were looking for them — and they had to be by then, if they weren't already headed there to investigate the damage from the Hulk — then they'd probably be looking for any distress call, right?

Barney sighed and climbed back into the vents. He hoped his makeshift S.O.S. worked sooner rather than later.

As for Clint and the Hulk, they were far from Ross and the department within an hour. Clint was still unconscious — he'd broken several things when the Hulk had hit him and he hit the wall — so he'd missed the show as the Hulk raged his way out of there while keeping Clint from any more harm.

It probably wasn't going to do either of them any favors for the department to see that in play, but at least they were out. They could worry about long-term implications later.

Eventually, the Hulk had stopped running, and when no one came after them, he'd finally been relaxed enough away from the telepathic interference that had been bugging him before that he shrank down again — leaving Bruce Banner trying to once again piece together what to do now.

Bruce had to take a second to adjust — and then do a double-take when he realized that he was far from home with an unconscious kid in tow. He frowned and knelt down by Clint, but when his vitals looked okay, he shook his head and got to his feet, looking around… trying to figure out what to do.

This definitely wasn't the usual kind of Hulk trouble.

Not that there was a usual kind of trouble there…

Bruce was still considering the situation when Clint finally started to wake up and let out a soft groan, putting a hand to his head. "Ugh. My whole body is tingling," Clint said, waking up a little faster because he was still bothered by the sensation of healing. He wasn't driven to insanity like Deadpool, but it wasn't exactly comfortable either when he felt like he was buzzing everywhere.

Bruce frowned and turned his attention back to Clint. He knew from Tony what the story was with Clint and his healing, but he'd never heard Logan or K complain after a hard hit, so he wasn't sure… "Is that normal?"

Clint turned to face him and then smiled and twirled his finger in the air in celebration. "Oh, hey, you figured out how to be small again, yay!" He lay his head back down in the dirt. "Buzzing should go away. It's normal, yeah. It just sucks."

Bruce let out an interested hum as he sat down. "I didn't know that."

"I didn't either until I got it," Clint said, still lying down but squirming slightly, unable to get comfortable with the buzzing. Finally, he sighed and rolled so he could prop himself up on one elbow and look Bruce's way. "So, um, what happened?"

"I have no idea."

"Great." Clint lay back down again. "Last thing I remember, someone was in my head. Like, telepathically? And they weren't exactly being nice. Ringing any bells? Maybe? Possibly? Hopefully?"

"Clint ... that … could be a lot of people," Bruce pointed out. "Telepaths aren't exactly rare these days."

"Yeah, I know." Clint sighed. "I didn't recognize the guy. But I can guarantee Jean's gonna be pissed at him."

"I can't say that I feel sorry for him," Bruce replied. "Kinda earned whatever it is."

"That's what my dad says."

Bruce frowned and did a small double take, shaking his head to himself. "You alright? Now that you're not buzzing, I mean? Or are you still buzzing? I don't … that's not normal, you know."

"Yeah, I know," Clint said, looking down at himself. "I'm okay. It's mostly faded. I mean, it's still there… I must have had to do some serious healing. Kinda glad I don't remember it."

"Do you know how that happened to you?" Bruce asked slowly.

Clint glanced at Bruce, bit his lip, and shrugged. "Kinda all happened fast."

"What are you trying not to tell me?" Bruce asked, but the way he had let his shoulders slump and the tone he was using made it pretty clear that he suspected that the other guy had something to do with it at minimum.

"Woah, hey, it — I mean, I'm pretty sure I was just in the wrong place. Looked like you were going for the guards manhandling me." He sat up better and gave Bruce his best winning smile. "I'm fine! I heal."

"Clint, I know that even if you heal, that doesn't make it alright, no matter how your parents handle it themselves."

"Yeah, but it wasn't your fault," Clint promised quickly.

"The excuse of it being the Hulk doesn't really hold much water with anyone," Bruce said.

"No, I meant — it wasn't his fault either," Clint said. "Someone was in his head too, I'm pretty sure. He said it hurt."

"Well that's just great," Bruce muttered under his breath. He helped Clint to his feet and looked around at the lack of any signs of civilization. "We gotta get out of here. Before they go tracking the gamma radiation."

"They can do that?"

Bruce nodded. "So we should go. Try to put some distance between us and them." He stopped, then turned around, staring around them. "I don't suppose you know which way we came from, do you?"

"Sorry, left my map of the world at home," Clint said dryly. Then, seeing how genuinely tired Bruce looked, Clint sighed. "I'm gonna project as loud as I can for help. Professor X or Jean will hear me sooner or later."

"Won't that clue in the wrong telepath, too?"

"No one's as powerful as Jean," Clint promised. "She'll catch up."

"Good luck with that. I'm still going to start walking."

"I'll come with you," Clint clarified. "Just… gonna be real loud in my head, too."