Hunting Spider

...3...

Clint landed a solid kick to a Hydra agents face, reveling in the crack sounding as the person went down. Not far from him, Natasha joined the fray, making her way towards him. Clint quickly got her in talking distance, punching someone in the face to get there. 

"So, how gnarly was it?" Clint asked, grinning. The meeting about the mission had been brief, since they didn't have a lot of time or knowledge about the project. 

Project 001... something. Clint just remembered Hunting Spider and shuddered. Apparently the thing Natasha was extracting was a new bio weapon, untested in the field, but performing marvelously in the lab. Hydra had been meddling with spider DNA and human, no doubt crafting some gun or elixir to turn regular people into mindless monsters. 

The files Shield gave them said something along those lines; human and spider DNA, new abilities, difficult to harness and control. Other than that, all they knew was Hydra set the field testing date: only two days from then. That was why urgency was paramount, and why Shield sent the Avengers in at all. 

Natasha made a weird face at his question, round-house-kicking someone into next Tuesday. "There wasn't an... it." 

"There was nothing there? Then what-"

"No, there was something," Natasha paused, using her darts to send the next few attackers convulsing on the floor, "well, someone." 

"Oh heck, you've got to be kidding me." Another Bucky situation? Great, the compound's walls might never recover from that kind of chaos. "How big were they?" A bio weapon of extreme danger? Clint was expecting a huge lunk, maybe even someone as big as Bucky. Not to mention this was a spider-based experiment, did they have extra arms or something? 

"Not big at all," Natasha answered, the expression never leaving her face, she didn't even smile when she jump-kicked someone in the face! "The bio-weapon is a child." 

Before Clint's jaw could hit the floor, the whirring of a plane sounded overhead. Natasha and Clint quickly made their way to the middle of the room, meeting up with Steve, Wanda, Rhodes, Vision, and Sam. Bruce was on the plane already, Thor off-world, and Bucky was back at the compound for obvious reasons. 

"Natasha," Steve greeted, keeping some agents at bay while the other grabbed their ropes and were hauled into the ship, "did you find it?" 

"In a way," Natasha explained, reaching for her rope. Steve raised an eyebrow. "I found a kid. The bio weapon is a child." She finished, watching the horror cross Steve's face as he grabbed his own rope. 

Sam kept the Hydra firing squad from hitting any of them before also flying into the ship. 

Bruce wasn't waiting for them, like he should've been while Tony got them the hell out of dodge. Everyone started talking at once. 

"Did everything go smoothly?" Vision asked, as Wanda called, "is everyone ok?" 

Sam and Rhodey immediately started asking Natasha about the bio weapon, while Steve and Clint both stuttered in shock. Tony had to put the plane on auto-pilot so he could debrief them all. Natasha made a beeline for the medbay. 

The kid was sitting on a gurney, trying to make himself as small as possible while Bruce gave him as much space as he could in such a small room. They both looked relieved when Natasha walked in. Bruce actually smiled. 

"Natasha, I believe you've met Peter?" Bruce gestured to the boy swinging his legs in the corner. "Is he alright?" Natasha asked quietly, eyes on the kid. Bruce shrugged, raking a hand through his hair. "He's... physically he's... I guess the short answer is no. He's going to need a lot of meds and food to get his body functioning normally. But his bruises are disappearing at alarming rates, and none of the tranquilizers I tried worked. They made him calm and a little sleepy, but his metabolism burns through them too fast to actually knock him out."