Who Needs Powers?

Chapter 6: The Scientist in the Department

Clint was understandably terrified.

Once the creeps in black had taken his whole family in — thankfully without getting their hands on his little brother or sister, so that was something — the three of them had been separated, and he had been in a helicopter on his own, with no idea where his parents were, for what felt like an eternity.

None of the soldiers had talked to Clint since they took off, and Clint's stomach was doing somersaults by the time the helicopter started to descend. He'd recognized the black uniforms as the same creeps that had tried to grab his mom a few times now, so the fact that they had K and Logan was just not good. At all.

When the helicopter finally set down, he tried to slip out of their grasp so he could figure out what they were doing or where they were or if his parents were even close by, but he was still short enough that he couldn't see over the burly soldiers' shoulders, and he couldn't get loose enough to peer around them, either.

His heart was hammering in his ears as the soldiers dragged him along, though he didn't dare even try to ask where they were going when he knew he wasn't going to get an answer and the soldiers had already threatened him to keep his mouth shut, like, ten times.

Clint couldn't help that his reaction to being scared was to talk. He just... did it without thinking.

But Clint wasn't encouraged at all when they got to what looked like a holding area, complete with cells... and he still didn't see his parents. And he started to panic all over again, knowing that if they weren't holding Logan and K, they were doing stuff to them and... and that was just bad.

Still, the fact that they left him in one of the cells and there still wasn't any sign of Logan or K after that...

He didn't know what was going on with his parents, and he didn't know where he even was, though he was half convinced that these bozos were just keeping him there to use against Logan and K — and that was just making him feel even worse as he paced around, moving restlessly and trying not to totally fall apart. He wanted to be a hero, after all, and heroes didn't do stuff like that.

It had been long enough that he'd transitioned from being scared to being curled up and miserable when the door at the far end of the hall opened again, admitting a couple guards.

Clint got to his feet, scrubbing his eyes and nose and doing his best to look tough. "Where're my parents?" he demanded before the guards could even get to him. "What did you do to them? Let me see them!"

"Not sure if you noticed, kid, but we don't really take requests here," one of the guards said, sounding almost bored.

"Wasn't a request," Clint shot back angrily, though he took an unconscious step back from the cell door as the guards approached. Not that it kept them from grabbing him by the arms and pulling him out anyway, not giving him a choice in where he was going at all.

"Don't worry about anything, kid," one of the other guards said; unlike his friend, he seemed to be at least trying to give Clint some optimism. Maybe that was just because of his age, or maybe he just wanted Clint to be quiet... "When we get done with you, you'll outstrip those mutants."

"I don't want to outstrip them. They're my parents," Clint said, honestly panicking despite his best efforts, since it sounded like they were going to do more than just threaten him to make his parents behave.

But, again, he really didn't have any say in where they were going when they were bigger than him and he was cuffed and scared. So it didn't matter that he was almost hyperventilating V he wound up in a lab anyway, getting even more freaked out about that.