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If there was one thing that Mohinder Suresh was good at, it was getting into trouble. He did it to himself, falling into patterns that placed him in dangerous situations and in league with dangerous people. Yes, he always meant well, chasing after research that would save mankind from and for itself, but the personal toll to himself and those around him tended to be extremely high. This time was no different. A distraction and a slip of a normally very careful hand left a jab through a double layered glove that had him throwing down his tools and heading to the sink to see if he had gotten through the skin. He had only torn off the latex when the first wave of dizziness hit.

Mohinder woke up over an hour later, sweat soaked and shivering on the floor of the lab. Nothing felt broken and for a little while, he forgot what had happened. He sat up slowly, pushed the hair back from his eyes, and glanced down at one blue hand and one skin-coloured palm. Memory rushed back to him and he leaped to his feet to call the company whose drug it was that he was testing and perfecting. There was just a dial tone and a friendly voice telling him that the number had been disconnected. He glanced up and the little red light that usually signaled he was being taped (standard procedure in this lab) was off. The door was unlocked and he shivered again, feeling something move through him.

He should be dead. The catalyst in the drug was enough to kill a man twice his size, the purest form of the component that would make the medicine work against the virus affecting evolved humans. No, he shouldn’t just be dead. He should have exploded all over these walls…and he did not.

The cell phone in his pocket didn’t have reception until he stepped, shaking, into the loading dock. He called the only person he knew might be able to help him. He hadn’t seen Bruce Banner in years. He’d become a consultant for the Avengers in the time since doing humanitarian work in Calcutta, or so the internet said, a frequent guest of Tony Stark of all people. Mohinder didn’t actually have Bruce’s number so he just called the Stark Relief Foundation, where Banner was supposed to be working. It took an hour for him to track down his old acquaintance from his time volunteering with Banner in the slums of Indian. “Doctor Banner? I don’t know if you remember me… My name is Mohinder Suresh. I interned briefly with you overseas?”

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"More accurately, they ought to have had someone here waiting and they did not. I wandered the halls long enough for anyone to come for me. The electricity had been disconnected. There were only emergency lighting by the exits."

A very tiny smile lit upon his face as he slowed down for Bruce and took his wrist somewhat startlingly. He was trying to regulate his heartbeat from outside his body. Hopefully that thunk-thunk-thunk would calm itself down to a reasonable seventy-ish beats per minute.

"But no one is here. Everyone left me. Something must be wrong." He released Bruce's wrist after that and pushed open the door to the stairwell. It was pitch black so Mohinder used his phone for light.

"Perhaps it was less attempt to see if you change and more that of an assassination attempt-" Bruce cut off as Mohinder's fingers wrapped around his wrist, leaving the older scientist to look first for someone that might be out there, going into silence as he assumed it was a silent warning, but when no other sign of it came, it took a moment or two to realize that his heart rate wasn't sky high, leaping into his throat given the possible danger, but in fact slowing down. Another second or two to realize that Mohinder might somehow be behind that, and he pulled his wrist away. That felt far too much like exactly what he had told Mohinder not to do, even though his mind told him that Mohinder would not want Him out and it was a protective gesture.

That didn't mean he liked it, though.

Why would they just up and leave all of this? Something wasn't fully adding up, and it settled badly with him more nad more with each passing second. "...What if they found what they wanted, while you were down?" Bruce murmured softly, his eyes slowly adjusting to the single light source as he strained to see or hear anything down the stairwell. "What was down here?"

Could he have been so blind? Nothing Bruce said struck him as false. He had been slated to die and had not. They left him here because they did not believe he would wake up. No wonder they had come for him. “Labs. Test subjects. Video recording devices,” Mohinder said to answer Bruce’s question. He could feel the central hub of nerve endings for every electronic device. It was as if they throbbed against the walls, as if they had a pulse.

That Bruce removed himself from Mohinder’s touch did not bother the Indian. He remembered the mousey doctor and his displeasure of actually being physically close to anyone. Strange for a healer. Understandable now that he knew what Banner was about.

They paused on the stairs, but only because Mohinder stopped, turning when he was two steps below Bruce and putting himself physically lower than the older man.

“I’m not reading your thoughts,” he said abruptly. “I’m reading your scent and your breath and your skin. I know about your father. It would be best if we do not touch again.” It was as if Bruce’s skin was made of scales like a moth’s wings and touching them made those scales rub off on his fingertips.

"...Test subjects?" Bruce whispered as Mohinder finished that statement, the idea that they could be walking into something even more dangerous. Who knew what these people had done to their other test subjects, even if Mohinder had unintentionally become one. "If there is anything to collect..." He meant more under the category of the video recording devices, but a part of his mind said that anything alive down here would need to be dealt with as well.

When Mohinder suddenly stopped and turned, and said those words of any other, Bruce felt a surge of shame and anger that left his teeth gritting and even in the darkness of the stairwell, there was a flicker of green in his eyes. "What did I say?" He said low, taking a breath in through his nose that was loud in the small space. "Nothing about my scent or breath or skin would give away that." His words were that tight, over-enunciated type of real anger, and it would have shown on his face if there was more light.

Bruce's tone turned darker and more firm that Mohinder had ever heard it before out of the doctor. "You need to learn to control this and more importantly, control your mouth. We're in a dangerous situation where someone could be listening in - you don't say those sorts of things but even more so, you don't know what those words could be doing to the other person." As much of a hint as he was giving Mohinder on that particular edge.

"Volunteers. Agents. People in the organization," he clarified three times. This wasn't like Pinehearst. He wasn't given hobos off the street to experiment on and he wouldn't do that now anyway. He was relatively sure of that at least. It had been a feral side effect of the last time he experimented on himself-- He realized, amused and a little sad, that he had a terrible pattern.

Once Bruce was back to trying to be stern, to trying to set the world back together somehow that didn't reflect the way that Mohinder now saw it, the Indian allowed him to finish his scolding. Mohinder's eyes shone in the dark. It wasn't at all like a cat's reflective gaze, it was as if there was a light source behind the lens, inside of his skull. He didn't blink of breathe while Bruce told him off. He just tilted his head to the side.

"I need you to know what I know," he started simply. "If you're to stay with me through this, I need you to understand. You're wrong about everything, Doctor. What happens to you imprints on your skin in a physical way. It changes how you smell. You leave pieces and clues on everything you touch and if anyone touches you-- You must start to believe the things I tell you. Our minds don't connect. That's the one beautiful thing about this. Everything else connects. I didn't get into the heads of those people back at the Tower, you see? I whispered a suggestion into the air and that suggestion, my breath, touched them. I think I can see and feel and touch everything if I really try..."

He turned to start back down the steps.

"But I can't control the information pinging off of my skin when you're nearby. I am truly sorry. I should never have involved you." Through it all, no matter what he knew, at least Mohinder didn't judge... Even if Bruce was judging him pretty heavily. "Perhaps you should wait here. I'll get the information alone."

Bruce was judging these new abilities heavily, with the mind of a man of science along with a man who intensely enjoyed his own privacy. He was deeply uncertain that Mohinder's abilities would work in such a fashion - given that none of it made any kind of sense, even in the realm of things he had heard of and what he had seen - but for now, Mohinder would believe as he would. No matter which way this ability of his now worked, it was potentially very dangerous for those around Mohinder and far worse, for Mohinder himself. If word spread, and it would if HYDRA had come looking for him, then it would only be a matter of time before those attacks became worse and more frequent.

"Be careful," Bruce finally said, more gentle, more friend-to-friend in the lines of his body and softness of his voice. "This... no matter what it does to function... is going to lead you down a dangerous path." From someone painfully experienced in what it was like to live on that path, by their own hand. "Let's get through this-" without touching any further, his mind added, "-and deal with what we find. I began this with you and I'm not going to leave you to finish it alone." That much he could do, and to point Mohinder towards the only person he knew who might be able to help.

It had already led him down a dangerous path and now it must lead him down a silent one. Mohinder wasn't use to bottling up his feelings or monitoring what he said already. Having suddenly so much knowledge dangled in front of him was a sweetness he could barely deny. This did not bode well for him or his companion. But he would try to keep it all to himself.

In the darkness of the stairwell, Mohinder seemed to shimmer. He led Bruce down and down and down into the bowels of the city itself, five stories and then eight and finally ten before he pushed open the door. Climbing back up all of those stairs was going to be a nightmare.

Mohinder paused and tested the air. "There are dead people here. Thirteen. Gunshot wounds to the head." He was breathing more rapidly now. They would avoid that room.

Thirteen... he could smell it faintly in the air even without Mohinder's new gifts and it sent a shiver down his spine. Death had a scent that he was all too familiar with, something sickly sweet and gagging in the air, and as if the Other Guy wasn't already on edge, he was even more so now. What was down here that HYDRA was hiding and more so, willing to end so quickly when they ran? Staff that had been offed? Staff that offed themselves? Other experiments? This had been here, so damn close to the Tower, without them even knowing. It was frustrating and awakening as much as it was terrifying.

"Move carefully," Bruce only breathed, not sure what might be listening to them. The light from Mohinder's phone was barely enough to make out the hall that they ended staring down behind the door, but Bruce could see the outline of doors that meant they were somewhere more important.

Every inch of him said that going back, getting the others, was the logical move. More safety in numbers, go through this lab like they had others they had found, scour all information that could be obtained and use it to keep fighting, but there was the horrible feeling they had gone too far and more so, that Mohinder wouldn't feel the need to bother in an over confidence of these new abilities.

Mohinder didn't want to involve anyone else. He felt badly enough about Bruce. He could have done this on his own, probably. Once he had gotten over the fact that he had essentially died, at least. Mohinder understood the physical changes a little better now. He hasn't died, he had just evolved. And not the way human's had to allow for them to develop fantastic strengths and abilities, but he had literally been physically evolved to the next stage of life for humanity.

This form would make amazing soldiers without a corrupted super soldier serum. He was strong. He was smarter. He was more agile. He could see in the dark. He could almost force his will on others. He didn't have to breathe and his heart didn't beat. He could taste and smell the future and the past. Unscrupulous people might be dangerous to the safety of the entire world if presented to them.

He wasn't sure how to move carefully so he simply gripped the door and pushed it inward. The electronic lock holding it closed broke under the pressure and a red glow spilled out. The room was empty and most of the monitors dark save for the bank focused on the labs.

Many screens showed blood and carnage. Mohinder's lab looked as he had left it. And the lab he had avoided was stacked with bodies. No. Body parts. Evidently hydra had simply shoved the remains of their kills in one room and locked them in--

Mohinder swallowed. Those parts... They were still moving. Each had been shot in the head and dismembered and they were still moving!

Bruce felt bile rise briefly in the back of his throat when he looked into the room, as the stench hit them both. It was too strong, too much, and the crimson glow made the entire thing seem like a vision of hell come to life. His heart rate climbed, struggling not to breath through his nose as strong as the scent was, but when he finally saw the movement, his heart simply stopped. He stared in horror, a part of his mind all but screaming illogically about zombies thanks to the scene set around, before he let out a sharp breath.

They could be simply not dead, and he had to check. A quick breath in, tight in his chest, before he stepped forward. "Check them," he said roughly. "We need to make sure they're- they're not simply badly hurt. Be ready if they- do anything." If they should try and attack. If they were like Mohinder. If... whatever. They had no idea.

He very slowly started to move forward, eyes wide and pupils large in the low hellish light, looking carefully over the first body he came across as he started to kneel down, prepared for anything.

The very, very last thing that Mohinder wanted to do was bend down and check on his team. How had he not known that they were dead...? How could he have left them like this? And was this his destiny? To be forever alive even without his limbs? Even with a bullet in the brain?!

He was in tears as he bent to test for vitals. They weren't breathing. They had no pulse. But neither did he. They didn't speak, but they didn't have the ability to with their heads removed.

One woman, her name had been Claudia, grasped his arm with her disembodied hand and Mohinder screamed. He might keep screaming until the touch ended but... Probably not even then.

One touch and he knew exactly how all of this had happened. He was simply overcome.

That scream.

It first made Bruce jump nearly out of his skin, his already sky-high pulse zooming into the stratosphere and leaving him standing there with a flash of crimson across his vision. He staggered as it pulsed through his whole body, that sickeningly familiar feeling as the Other Guy threatened to surge forward. He immediately fought it down, or tried to, staring at Mohinder, and saw a hand a hand! holding onto him.

He stumbled forward, internally fighting for his existence to remain on top of this situation, and quite literally kicked off the hand grasping Mohinder with a strength more than his own. "MOHINDER!" A call, trying to get through the sheer terror he saw on the young man's face, even as a roar briefly deafened him to it.

You have to stop! You'll only make things worse there's nothing here to fight! Stop it STOP IT NOW!

There was plenty in his stomach to throw up and so as soon as Mohinder was freed from the touch of his colleague, he staggered out into the hall and got rid of everything still in his stomach, one hand pressed to the wall with his palm sweating as he leaned over to avoid his shoes. Tears joined the sick before he backed away from that too and pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. “I can’t,” he whispered in Tamil, knees feeling weak. “They’re not dead. They can’t die. They’re in so much pain,” he wept.

How do you stop the suffering of those that should feel nothing? They had been shot in the head! Didn’t that destroy the brain?

He was left chilled, sliding down the wall. This is what they would do to him too.

That stench and sound, on top of everything else, did what they did with most and made Bruce's stomach roll in sympathy. He struggled in that moment, staring towards the pieces of people without the understanding of their demise that Mohinder had, before getting the even more sickening feeling that there would only be one thing they could do. He felt his own breath shaking, his own fear and horror of the situation pushing and pulling like a heaving ocean as the Other Guy caused ripples across his consciousness. They had to do something and quickly.

"Burn them," he whispered, turning his head to stare at Mohinder. "We're going to have to burn them to destroy them." There was nothing else he could think of that might be a way to end this, and even then he wasn't 100% that it would be true. Destroy it all completely, otherwise they would remain. There couldn't be pain, could there? Suffering? There was brain splattered across the room, for goodness sake!

Burn them.

Mohinder nodded. What could they do? Put them back together? Scoop up their brain matter and slip it back into their heads? It was all over the walls in the other labs. Which would go with who? Even Mohinder couldn't process that sort of data. He lifted red and teary eyes towards Bruce. He was never going to sleep again after this but he could at least help his former friends, the men and women he had worked with.

"There's an incinerator in the last lab," he said. "I'll. Let me get a gurney."

He needed a moment alone. And though they did not have the time to linger, Mohinder had little choice today. These people needed to stop suffering. They needed to stop feeling. He returned to Bruce and the bodies with syringes of high dose antistetic and a rolling table. Each injection caused the body parts to cease writhing. A touch confirmed that they were no longer in such intense pain.

Mohinder shook during the entire task but he did not vomit again. Small blessings.

Bruce helped the other in this gruesome task, his eyes hard set even as the growling behind them didn't cease. The Other Guy didn't understand as much what was going on, but he understood the scent of death, the sight of blood, but without an enemy to clobber or immediate threat to keep this fragile prison standing, he was forced to accept Banner's decision on what needed to be done. Not that he liked it and constantly made that well known.

He tried to pick the remains up instead of Mohinder, given how obvious it was that any touch somehow caused Mohinder intense discomfort, loading them onto the gurney with a near blank expression. What more could they do than given some sort of ending to their suffering? He wasn't religious to perform some sort of last rites, but he wasn't soulless to try and be utterly emotionless about it. Mohinder knew these people, HYDRA or not he had no idea, and they didn't deserve... this. No one did.

Together, they brought the gurney down to the incinerator, and there, Bruce looked to Mohinder before saying quietly, "I've got it. You don't have to do this part. It might be better if you.. got further away." If he could truly pick things out of the air, being here was not good.

The grateful look in Mohinder's eyes might stay with Banner through this task. He lifted a hand as if to touch his shoulder, but shrank away and removed the gloves he had on instead. No touching. He didn't want to touch anyone ever again anyway.

Mohinder went back to the security room. There were just purple stains on the floor and nothing else. He pulled a chair around to keep his back to them and downloaded all of the remaining footage on file onto discs. It would take some time and he flipped through the screens without touching them, eyes scanning time codes as if they could read them like a machine.

He focused on the moments after he had collapsed, running the scene forward. The camera clearly showed that HYDRA agents in hazmat suits had broken into his lab and did a quick scan. Mohinder had simply been lucky. He had fallen out of sight.

And the agents had not checked.

The reason he was here now was a fluke.

Bruce did what rated fairly high on one of the worst tasks of his life. One by one, he lobbed pieces of people into the incinerator, then closed the heavy lid at the end. A part of him, the entire time, was waiting for one of them to scream, and that might have almost been worse than the task itself. Waiting for that to happen.

When he found Mohinder again, there was sweat dripping down his temples, curling the hair streaked with grey, and he looked tired, older, grim. There had been a place to wash his hands, and he had done so several times over before coming back into the room that still reeked of blood and ichor. "...did you find anything?" he asked quietly, emotionly exhausted. There was no need to say he was done with it all, and he didn't want to utter the words either.

"I did." Mohinder gestured at the stack of discs. He would normally hand them over but he didn't want to risk his skin being in contact with the other. "More so..."

He rolled the tapes back to before the science team collapsed. All screens shifted to show a room not on this level. Men and women in sharp suits were talking. There was no audio. There didn't have to be. Mohinder knew what they were saying. Just like he knew where to find it.

"It was a final solution. Their words. They had what they wanted. It worked on a test subject. They decided to test it out on my team. Just to see. And it worked every time. With every one. None of them were soldiers. Most of them were not HYDRA. They had to go. Be disposed of."

Mohinder pointed.

"Here. They gave the order. They're watching the scientists on the screen coming too. They're watching them panicking because they had to be sure that they were going to die. And here--"

Without touching anything, the scene shifted to the labs. Each one was pulled up on a different screen.

"They're shot in the head. Single bullet. None of them die. The first guards retreat. The clean up crew gets called-- I was out. I hit my head and was out longer. I fell awkwardly. I didn't get up. They left me."

"...they used the people that made it... as a final test." A disgusted, soft whisper, unable to believe the cruelty and yet on the other hand, it was so similar to what they had seen time and time again with HYDRA. They were their own special breed of evil. But then something Mohinder said, as he was watching that horribleness carry out on screen, clued in.

"It worked-" He looked to the other, his breath caught in his throat. "If they didn't mean you, who did they mean?? Who did it work on? Where is their working test subject?" Someone out there had been a successful experiment, and they were in HYDRA's hands. This was all part of those whispers he had heard in the reports they kept capturing from HYDRA bases.

[ooc: I realized Mohinder and Wanda meeting sometime should be... interesting.]

Pausing, Mohinder pressed a hand to the console. The guy that worked here had been killed too. He did not get back up though. He was just dead, dead with diet soda and cheesy puff snacks in his belly. He had been told to erase something first...

Mohinder shook his head. "The footage is gone. We were working on a test subject though..." He couldn't help but frown. "I don't know her name. She was pretty. Blonde. We called her Agent 13."

Bruce might know the name or he might not. He wasn't exactly involved with the initial HYDRA exposure but Nat had a way of talking to Bruce about things that no one else might know about.

Agent 13 wasn't suppose to be HYDRA. She was SHIELD. So what had happened?

Bruce frowned as that name brought up familiarity, but nothing immediately more. Agent 13... where did he know that from? He and Natasha spent many hours together, which surprised him more and more as it happened, but there was something that surprisingly put him at ease and evidently, did the same for her. Somehow, he knew that familiarity had to do with her, but the connection didn't come. He tapped a finger and frowned even more. "That name... I think there's someone who can help identify her. I'll have to get a hold of her when we're above ground." No signal down here.

"We need to find out what happened to this test subject. If they have someone like you in their hands, that's... a terrifying danger. Even more, they'll be able to make more." It was beyond a danger. It could give them a way to win this war most of the world had no idea how big it was.

There wasn't a record of her. Mohinder had scanned through all of the data (yes, in the last half a minute or so) and every part of her testing had been erased. That didn't make Mohinder feel so good. "They only cared to hide her. Everything else...they don't mind who finds it."

The research is gone too. All there is left is what Mohinder took with him from his lab, which now resides with his samples inside of Bruce's heavy duty Hulk-proof case. There was no reason to stay, this place was too enclosed. There was too much suffering here.

Mohinder stood slowly.

"They know-- They know I'm like her. They're going to be coming for me. No where will be safe for you."

Bruce gave Mohinder a quiet, long look. "No where has been safe for me for a long time." Even the Tower could never truly be a safe haven for him. Why did Mohinder think he was halfway around the world when he called originally? No where was safe because he was there. He made it unsafe. "I've been on the run for years now. There's nothing that can be considered safe any more."

He gathered up the discs and shoved them quickly into the suitcase, knowing that it would be the only safe place for all of what remained of this research. "We have to find a way to deal with this before they make more of you. Whatever you've become. If HYDRA begins making more and more... that'll be the end of it all."

Where would they go? What would they do? Mohinder had a hundred questions and nearly as many answers. He just had to settle himself and feel, for lack of better terms, the vibrations beneath his feet of how the world was turning. He couldn’t predict the future, but he could at least plan for it better than others if he really tried.

So he closed his eyes. He breathed in deeply.

“I know a place in Manhattan. It’s obvious, they would think to look there for me and probably imagine that I would know that and stay clear.” The loft. The loft of a painter whose head had been sawn off. A drug addict. A precognitive who drew comics based on what was to come. It was always where Mohinder had been given a lab. Where he had first done experimentation-- Where he had changed to…

Something else. He wasn’t proud of it.

“So it’s so unsafe that it might be the safest place to go. We might-- I think you should let your friends know.” The Avengers could get a better handle on this than he could.

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aggravated - 2016-08-15 11:05 (UTC) - Expand

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