Chapter Eleven: Playing For Keeps

Hill and Osborn hadn't cared to stick around for the show in the briefing room — probably because they didn't care to hang around Clint and Noh for longer than necessarily, honestly. But the two men were watching the feed of the mission in relative silence. They weren't interested for the moment in lashing out or sassing their captors, instead half holding their breaths — both of them absolutely ready to jump into a fight if something went wrong.

And of course, it was almost inevitable that it did — when the feed cut very suddenly. When Clint replayed the last few seconds of footage, they could see the camera pointing down at the ground, and Clint studied the angle with his head tilted the same way the camera would have been before he said, "She caught it on something."

"Purposely?" Noh asked.

Clint raised both eyebrows high. "Oh. I'm sure she'd never do that."

Noh just had to chuckle the slightest bit, though it hadn't changed the worried expression on his face. "Do you think that would be grounds for…"

"No, not in the helicarrier itself. They put her down, and a SHIELD agent could find her."

"Perhaps that is what she was hoping for," Noh said almost too quietly for Clint to catch it.

"Yeah, well, I'm not saying they won't do something about it when she's somewhere they know they can recover her," Clint pointed out with a deep frown.

"You seem to have insight into how they think."

"I got along with Hill for a long time when she was in SHIELD. You know, before she went off the deep end?" Clint shrugged. "Took over her team for her actually. Turns out her tight leash backfired on her even back then."

Most of the feed consisted of Daken's muted reminders on time, though the relaxed tone of his voice made it clear that she was on schedule or ahead of it. It was the only indicator they had once the camera was suddenly out entirely, all the way up to when she apparently returned to Daken missing a sizable chunk of her uniform, but with the file in hand.

"Well, now we know how she 'caught' the wire," Clint muttered, unable to hide the smirk. "How long do you think before Hill reads her the riot act when she gets back? When I worked with her, it was usually pretty immediate."

"Yes, but she will have to beat Norman Osborn to the punch, and when I worked with him, he was gleeful about reminding us who was in charge."

"We'll flip a coin." Clint shrugged lightly, his tone flippant and hiding the honest concern.

The two settled back to wait for K's return, their relaxed postures a total contrast to the looks of worry as they both knew there would be at least some kind of consequences for K's… creativity.

They knew it wouldn't be long to wait when Osborn and Hill returned to the room and took their seats, though neither of them addressed Noh's or Clint's presence for the time being. Norman looked annoyed, and though Hill was trying to hide it, she had a purple flush to her complexion that gave away her frustration as well.

"That's a good shade on you, Maria," Clint said conversationally. "The purple. Don't think I've seen you wear it before." She glared and didn't look at him, so he turned toward Osborn. "We could dye your hair to match it, and then everyone would know you're the newest supervillain duo on the block. You should advertise that better. Coordinated looks. Maybe match your wardrobes. The green tie doesn't go with her black ensemble, Normy."

This time, he got a very dry look from Osborn. "Tell you what, Barton. Keep your mouth shut on your own, and I won't glue it shut."

Clint responded with an unmistakable one fingered sign but fell into silence for a bit — more because Daken and K were making their approach than for anything else. Any other time, he'd probably mouth off to Osborn more, but K was in a precarious enough position as it was without him making their captors even angrier.

When K and Daken arrived a short while later, it was obvious that the camera didn't do justice to the amount of damage on her uniform. But it was also obvious that she didn't seem bothered in the least by how much skin she was showing. Instead, she very carefully handed the file to Osborn and took her seat, with Daken between her and Clint.

"You ditched your recording equipment," Hill said. It wasn't a question.

"I did no such thing," K replied, straight-faced and with a perfectly calm expression and tone. She took a breath and let out a sigh before she explained, "I was on a timer, and as it turns out, you underestimated a few of the spaces I had to get through." She leaned forward a bit, without even a whisper of heat to her tone, as she met Hills' gaze. "I did just have a baby."

Osborn looked unabashedly amused by the silence and the look on Hill's face as he waved the file in his hand. "Well, Ms. Hill, if you're through being reminded of the finer, salient details, I think we have work to do before SHIELD inevitably realizes we have this." He shot K a look that didn't linger on her face at all before he grinned again and got up to head for the door, clearly enjoying himself.

Hill glared for a long moment before she rose to leave as well, and Clint didn't make it until she was gone before he burst into laughter — not that he tried that hard.

Daken was already on his feet and pulling at K to follow him. "Distance yourself from these two," he advised quietly.

She glanced at the two of them and gave them a little wave. "I should probably get clothes on before he comes back," she said loud enough for Noh to catch before she raised her voice for both of them. "Keep your temper. Both of you. I'll heal."

"From what?" Noh asked, in a tone that said he clearly already knew and was annoyed anyway.

"Do as the lady says," Daken said low, and it was clear that he wasn't touching her in the least.

But that really didn't stop both Clint and Noh from looking like they were simply ready to murder Hill and Osborn when K went down all the same — and it wasn't that they were listening to K that kept them from acting on it but the fact that they didn't know where Osborn and Hill had gone that kept them from going after both of them.

Director Fury had Logan on the phone as he stared at the carved-out, foot-tall letters on his desk that spelled 'Hill' along with a neatly-written note detailing exactly which file K had stolen and the message that 'password is not a password', signed with a simple 'K'.

He'd snapped a picture of the note and the defaced desk and already sent them to Logan and was trying to find the words to explain what had happened. "Your wife was here. No one — no one — knew it, and she left this lovely note to tell us who Osborn is working with. The whole thing was quite thoughtful," Fury teased.

He shook his head to himself as Logan swore on the other end of the line. After a few quick words between them, Fury promised to send for him as soon as they followed the trace that was bound to come up when Osborn tried to use the old passwords.

Fury had only been off the phone with Logan for a few minutes when Quartermain arrived with a single printed sheet that had a set of coordinates. "Osborn tried the passwords about two minutes after you made your call," he explained. "Trace took us about five, and the printer was out of ink. So that's about ten minutes turnaround."

"But you have them?" Fury asked as he turned to the screen to see where in the world Osborn was hiding. "The printer was out of ink? Doesn't anyone know how to use a pen and a piece of paper? Or is that a lost art utilized only by spies infiltrating my office?"

"We have them," Quartermain agreed as he handed Fury the sheet, barely stowing the smirk as he ignored Fury's commentary.

"If you'd been a couple minutes faster, I wouldn't have had to call Logan back."

Quartermain just smiled at that, clearly with a look of trouble. "Like I said, sir. Printer was out of ink."

The second the trace started working when Osborn put the passwords into his computer, Osborn knew about it. For all his shortcomings, he was a genius in his own right, and he'd had plenty of security measures of his own installed. So when the trace started up, his systems were sure to lock everything else down — at the very least, it would prevent SHIELD from getting any more information than their location, even if he couldn't stop that part.

He glanced up at Maria Hill with fury etched in his features. "Time to go," he told her frankly, and she was already speaking into the comm on her shoulder to direct her men — the people who had followed her from her break from SHIELD — to start the evacuation.

Elsewhere in the compound, Clint and Noh had only just gotten back to where the kids were, trying very hard to look like they weren't still pissed off about Osborn putting K down, when the evacuation alarm blared.

The two men looked at each other and, for just a moment, shared a grin. They were pretty sure this was K's doing. No way was it a coincidence that they had to evacuate right after K had been at SHIELD's headquarters. But the grins quickly gave way to determined looks as they focused their attention now on the four kids from the school that were with them.

A few of Hill's former SHIELD supporters started to file in and bark orders for them to get moving, and Noh and Clint didn't need to say a thing as they both moved to position themselves between two kids apiece, hands on shoulders as they made sure to keep themselves between the ex-SHIELD agents and the kids.

"Move it," one of the ex-agents said when Brye seemed not to be moving fast enough, and the dark-haired young woman looked wide-eyed for a second before she picked up the pace.

Clint noticed with a quick glance that she had her hand half-cupped around something, and he thought he could see a little eight-legged creature hiding in there. When he said as much to Noh, the Kree fighter pursed his lips in thought for a moment before he nodded. "Her ability allows her to speak with animals," he explained. "It's likely that is a friend of hers."

Clint raised both eyebrows for a moment before he had to snort out a bit of a laugh. "Yeah, well, guess I can't judge with the spider friends I've got," he muttered.

Noh had to smirk a bit at that and shook his head at Clint as he ushered Rico and Hisako out, very nearly carrying them both despite their protestations that they were fine on their own.

"You don't have to—" Rico said, but at that, Noh picked him up by the back of his shirt and went that much faster, especially because the ex-agents were looking a little antsy around Rico, who was the most obviously different with his very pronounced physical mutations.

They very quickly loaded up onto a transport, and while the ex-agents made a point to shove the two adults in the group far back from the cockpit so they couldn't see the coordinates being set as to where they were headed now, Brye very quietly whispered into her hand and set her eight-legged friend down with a small smile at the others. And with that, the brown spider went to go scout out their new location for them and to be their forward spy.

Which was good, because as soon as the base personnel were all evacuated, none of the prisoners got a warning before the bands that they were all wearing knocked them out to prevent them from causing any trouble in transit.

It was the same group of rescuers as had gone to the moon base that raided the coordinates Fury sent to them. The five of them were ready for a fight — though admittedly a bit worried about their friends, especially when Fury had warned them that Osborn and Hill likely knew they'd been traced.

It wasn't clear if anybody was home yet as the jet approached the former SHIELD base. They seemed to have set off some of Osborn's automatic security measures, not that it slowed Logan or Natasha down in the least in their desire to get going, both of them silently urging Scott to move faster simply by being a little too close. They didn't see any personnel-operated defenses, but there were definitely a few missiles and lasers to deal with before they could even get closer — and all of them were hanging on tight as Scott piloted them through. They weren't in the blackbird but a borrowed SHIELD jet, and it didn't have the same flying capabilities as the blackbird.

Natasha got a good, clean, open shot and took out the weapons firing at them after a while of ducking and dodging, and from there, it was just a matter of setting down and barging in — and hoping they hadn't spent too much time just trying to get there.

Logan was clenching and unclenching his hands, wound tightly and just waiting to get somewhere in the ballpark so he could go. So it was no shock when he did not wait for word from anyone before leading the charge, looking for someone to hurt. They burst into the base in a rush of energy — but when they arrived, it was clear that the place was simply empty.

Natasha glanced over her shoulder at Logan and said in a clearly frustrated tone, "YA ustal ot etogo."

"Avengers usually have more instant gratification, yeah," he admitted. "You're spoiled."

She gave him a look. "I wouldn't call a few weeks instant."

"Should I give you your welcome packet now or later?" Scott replied with a perfectly straight face as he came to a stop closer to Logan.

She fixed him with an even drier look than she had given Logan. "Let's just search the place," she said shortly.

"I suppose now isn't the time to point out that it was one of ours that got us here?" Scott said quietly to Logan before he could take off again.

"No," Logan replied with a little smirk as he turned away from Scott. "Not yet. She's in a mood." Which at least was proof that Logan was gaining hope again if he was making anything like a smart aleck remark.

"Perhaps later then," Kurt suggested, not bothering to hide his smirk as much as Logan was.

Peter glanced at the three X-Men and shook his head with a small smile before he all but skidded over to Natasha to catch up with her. "They can't have hidden everything," he said cheerfully. "I mean, we didn't give them much time to clear out, so there's got to be sloppy … somethings."

Natasha raised an eyebrow at him, knowing full well he was trying to pull her out of her frustration. "This is Maria Hill and Norman Osborn. And you want to hope they were sloppy," she pointed out.

"I'm an optimist," he said, his shoulders shrugged all the way up to his ears — and she couldn't help but smirk at him.

The five of them picked their way through the base, but as Natasha had pointed out, of course, Osborn and Hill were not sloppy, even in a rush. There was little to find except for Logan to confirm that, yes, they'd been there and they'd just missed them… along with a few other familiar scents.

But it wasn't until Kurt was searching through what looked to be some sleeping quarters that he found something at last. He had only spotted the corner of the note, and when he pulled it out and saw that it was written in perfectly printed Japanese, he teleported right to Logan to hand it to him. "This is for you," he said.

Logan took the thin rice paper from Kurt and raised an eyebrow at how it was addressed before he read through it. He thought it over for a moment and waited for the others to converge before he read it for the rest of the group. "It's from Daken," Logan said. "Osborn and Hill have a few of our kids from the school. Apparently, Osborn snatched them up under the guise of building a team while they were trying to find a way to help fight Kree." He looked over to Scott. "Should have re-started the junior team."

Scott nodded with a frown. "As soon as we get done here," he agreed. "We will."

"There's a bigger problem, though," Logan continued. "He described what they're doing as a 'nasty combination of Weapon X and Maria Hill'." He paused, lowering his tone a bit. "And even without much detail, it sounds nasty already."

"Yeah, those two things in concert do not sound like anything I want to touch with ten feet of webbing," Peter said, making a face.

"It's all about controls. Like the band they had on Noh — but with a little more punch to 'em. To top it off, I can't cut through 'em either," Logan said as he pocketed the note. "He'll let us know where they're at when he gets free of the mess."

"Lovely. More waiting," Natasha said with a scowl.

"Yeah," Logan agreed with a little growl. He could empathize, but he really wasn't in the mood to listen to it. Even from her. "Not my cup of tea either, but ... if it's a modified Weapon X control, you don't want them using it on Clint any more'n I want 'em usin' it on K. We show up to spring them without a way to get it off, and they're toast."

It was clear Natasha agreed with his assessment because she was nodding, but that didn't mean she looked the least bit happy about it, and she let out a string of Russian swears before she asked, "What's keeping you from cutting it? If there are measures in place that we can get past…"

"I'd take the zap if it was that," Logan said. "You know I would. But they made these out of adamantium."

Peter let out a low whistle. "They're not playing around," he half-whispered, almost to himself.

"No," Logan agreed. "If he's willin' to fork over the cash to cover that — he's playing for keeps."

"He's not keeping my yastreb," Natasha said with one raised eyebrow.

"If you think I'm gonna let him keep K, you're crazy," Logan said with a scowl. "Not to mention the fact that Jubes actually needs that augmented idiot."

"And the kids from the school don't need to be running the kind of stuff you know Hill and Osborn are going to want from them," Scott said with a deep scowl as he thought about it.

"Yeah, I'm sure you can educate 'im, Slim," Logan said as Kurt led the charge to get out of the base.

"So if we can't cut through the controls, how do we… I mean, we can't just go charging in and risk them getting killed, right?" Peter asked, his nose scrunched up as he clearly thought it over.

"Not if we get to the ones holding the controls in the first place," Kurt said, his tail switching behind him. "If we run Osborn and Hill through, the devices they wear won't be much of a problem."

"I like that," Logan agreed. "You run 'em through, Nat and I'll cut their hands off."

"That's if you can get close enough fast enough — and without them knowing we're coming," Scott pointed out, looking thoughtful.

"You tryin' to say I can't get close enough without tippin' 'em off?" Logan asked with one eyebrow raised.

"I think it would be safer to get those devices off our friends first, especially the kids…" Scott fell into a deeper frown as he thought it over before he scrubbed a hand over his face. "Alright. I don't know if she's still on planet, but… if the bands are metallic, my sister-in-law can get them off."

"Sister-in-law?" Kurt said with his eyebrows raised high. "When did this happen? And why were we not invited?"

"I'm not actually sure when it happened," Scott admitted with almost a smirk. "I only know last time I talked to Alex, he mentioned they'd eloped. No idea where or why we weren't invited, and he hung up pretty fast, so…" He shrugged. "But the point is, I'm sure Lorna wouldn't mind helping us out again."

"Your brother's smart," Logan said distractedly as he shot Kurt a little look. "I'm sure there was no reason at all." He smirked a bit to himself. "Just impulsive, right?"

Scott shook his head. "Anyway, I'll call her up — see if she's still on-planet or what she and Alex are up to… But at the very least, she can track K down for us like she did before if Daken doesn't get back to us soon." With that, he switched on his comm to call his brother before Kurt could press for any more details — and it definitely looked like he wanted to.

Of course, Alex sounded a bit surprised when Scott asked to speak with Lorna, and there was a long and pregnant pause before she finally got to the phone. When Scott quickly gave her a rundown of as much as he was willing to say over the comms and basically what they'd like her to do, though, she paused for an even longer time.

"I'll help you," she said at last. "Just give me a bit to get some things arranged. We'll meet you at the mansion."

"Thanks, Lorna," Scott said warmly before she hung up and he leaned back.

"Does she know the school is trashed?" Logan asked. "You know. In case she's looking for Gumbo's gumbo."

"She might not," Scott admitted, shaking his head at Logan. "We'll have to send her by Tony's hideout. When this is over and we have our people back."

When Clint and Noh came around again, it was in a new base — and a new briefing room, apparently. There was the usual long table setup and Hill and Osborn looking smug, and K was there with Daken — almost like nothing had changed at all, unless you counted the fact that Hill's face had turned an even darker shade of purple across her cheeks and she was glaring hard at K.

"You sent SHIELD a message," Hill directed at K as soon as all three were conscious. "That was not in your mission parameters."

K kept her relaxed body language but didn't bother to hide the fact that she was glaring right back at her. "You picked me because you knew I'd infiltrated the helicarrier before. Unseen. Undetected. So you should have known that I always leave SHIELD a message. It's my little way to remind Fury that he's not as sneaky as he thinks he is."

Clint sat up a bit straighter at that and couldn't hide the flat-out grin, because he'd heard rumors about little messages that no one could figure out where they came from.

"You're not working for the same people anymore — your little games won't fly here," Hill said coolly.

K smiled sedately at her for a moment. "No offense, ex-AD Hill, but if they couldn't stop me from playing with my food, what makes you think you can?"

Osborn gave her an almost gleeful sort of grin. "For one thing, you're not in this alone, Mrs. Howlett," he pointed out and tipped his head at the two heroes across the table from him — who both suddenly felt very aware of the distance and the fact that Osborn was reaching for his jacket pocket.

K took in a deep breath, looking bored as she relaxed further before she crossed the space between herself and Norman faster than either of them could react. In the blink of an eye, she was half wrapped around him from behind, with her arm around his neck — sure that the band was making contact with his throat as she carefully extended one set of claws just until she'd made contact with his skin just under his ribcage. "You didn't read my file either," she said quietly into his ear. "I do not play fairly."

"Neither do I," Norman replied with a deep glare as he glanced to Hill for a moment before she reached for something in her pocket and, a second later, Noh let out a very loud shout before he simply crumpled to the floor.

Before he hit the ground though, Norman cried out in pain as well when K let the claws already poised under his ribcage out, then readjusted to rest her other fist under his chin. "Go ahead. Hit the other one." It came out like a purr, and Norman flat froze, clearly not expecting that kind of a reaction.

Hill watched the entire thing with a frown before she stood up and took a few quick steps back from Norman, though it was clear she was amused at the situation he found himself in, even if it wasn't helping her at the moment. When Norman looked at her with an expression of surprise, she smirked again and, without looking away from K and Norman, said, "Daken, do your job. You're supposed to keep her from doing exactly this."

"She wouldn't do things like this if you two weren't so incredibly stupid about what you say around her," Daken replied as he moved to try and get her off of Norman. "I thought you had experience dealing with ferals."

"I do," Hill said coldly, waiting for Daken to get K's fist away from Norman's head enough that it was reasonably safe before she hit the control for the other two captives in the room, and the shock that went through K also went through both Norman and Daken.

Hill cleared her throat the slightest bit and stood up straighter as she found herself the only conscious person in the room — then reached for her comm to call for a medic.

…..

Translations from Russian:

YA ustal ot etogo - I'm tired of this

Yastreb - Hawk