seekevolution | (no subject)

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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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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.

Bruce looked vastly dubious on this notion for a time, but as he stared down at the nearest screen without reading anything on it, he finally decided he had done something similar enough in coming back to see Betty and perhaps Mohinder was right. Not like he didn't come back and hide in New York every so often as it was.

"If you think it'll work," he finally relented, "but the others have to know. They-" there was a quite sound, almost a laugh but something stranger than that, "they would search for me and draw more attention than I think we'd want, otherwise. If they know where, not only will they not... panic," Tony, "but I think they can help. There's information I'm almost certain that they'll know on this."

Something in his mind kept linking Agent 13 and Natasha, but he couldn't have said how without sitting down and really placing it.

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