They moved through the tunnels as quickly as they could without missing any signs as to where Karli and her group had gotten to. A whistle sounded every now and then, likely the Flag Smashers trying to find each other too. 

'You getting anything?' Sam asked, stopping at the doorway leading into another passageway.

Clara frowned, closing her eyes as she tried to pick up on the shifting energy. She huffed. 'No, the walls are too thick-'

Two loud retorts cut her off, Sam ducking instinctively at the sound, and Clara casting a shield surrounding them. It echoed around the tunnels, but Sam found the direction it had originated from and started that way. 

Clara ran after him, skidding to a stop when her eyes fell on Karli, who was aiming a gun at Sharon. The older woman was already lying on her back, her hands pressed against a bloodied shirt. 'Sam, stay back,' Karli warned him. 

'So, what's next, huh?' Sam asked, staying where he was but trying to get through to Karli nonetheless. 'You kill ten this time, then what, a hundred? Where does it end? Please, let me help you.'

'Don't try and manipulate me,' she sneered. 

'Karli, don't!' Sharon pleaded as she saw her finger tighten on the trigger. 

Sam burst forward, knocking Karli to the side and sending the gun skidding across the floor. The Flag Smasher reached out to a pile of concrete blocks and flung one at Sam with ease, throwing them into another fight. 

Clara moved forward to, but not to join the fray. Instead, she knelt beside Sharon, slapping her hands away from the wound. 'I'm fine,' Sharon told her.

'Is this your first time being shot?' Clara snorted. 

'No-'

'Then you know that without compression, you'll bleed out in a few minutes,' Clara said, feeling around to Sharon's back to see if there was an exit wound. 'The round's still in there.'

'Oh, good, so I've only got one...' She trailed off, feeling a pressure against her abdomen as Clara held her left hand steady above the bullet hole, holding the energy around it and stemming the bleeding. 

Clara looked to Sam and Karli mid-battle, Karli swinging a metal pole into the shield and sending Sam to the floor. 'Stay down!' She yelled.

Sam shook his head gently, rising back up. 'No.'

She screamed at him, bringing the pole back round and into the shield again, the metal clanging together. Sam stumbled back into a pallet, quickly adjusting his position to withstand a series of punches from Karli. 'Fight back!'

'Stop it!' He ordered, his tone scolding as he tried to get hold of her arms. 

'Fight me! Fight back!' She continued to scream, anger and fury spurring her on, and she swung her arm one final time, knocking Sam from his feet once again. The movement forced the shield from his arm, clattering to the floor just out of reach to him. 

Clara watched as Karli walked back to her pistol, picking it up and turning back to aim it towards Sam. 'Karli, no!' Clara got to her feet, taking a few steps towards Karli. She kept her focus on the compression over Sharon's wound, but held her free hand out in a placating gesture. 'Sam's right; this isn't how you want to play this.'

She switched her aim to Clara, who's muscles tensed slightly at the motion. 'What would you know? You tried to-'

'I know, and I was wrong to,' she confessed, only slightly surprised at her words - surprised she had finally come to that conclusion. Sam and Bucky were right, after all, and Zemo was wrong; Clara could see that now. There was another way to handle Karli, and it was a way Karli had been fighting for from the start. 'I'm sorry for what I did to you.'

Karli frowned, clearly having not expected that response. Clara hadn't expected it either, to be honest. But all Karli wanted was for every human being to be treated as just that - as human beings who all deserve rights equal to one another. She believed what she was fighting for was right, and Clara did too. Karli just needed to be shown a different way, the same as Clara had been.

'You want to help people. You want to make sure everyone affected by the Blip is treated fairly. Sam wants that too. He wants that for his family, his friends, even the people trying to kill him - the people who don't share his way of thinking and are, putting it bluntly, doing way more harm than good. That's you, if you didn't-'

'Clara,' Sam warned, his intervention making Karli's aim switch back to him once again. 

'The point is, Karli, you're about to kill the one person who wants to help you, and has enough power to actually do so,' Clara pointed out, seeing Karli's finger twitch against the trigger guard. 'You have hundreds and thousands of people on your side, all of them looking to you as their leader, and their way back to the same kind of normality they had before all this. Don't you want to be the one they see get them there?'

'I will be the one to get them there,' she snapped.

'Not if you fire that weapon,' Clara pressed. 'If you kill anybody in here today, you aren't getting any freedom back. Not ever. You kill Sam, I won't let you leave here. You kill me, or Sharon? Sam won't let you see the outside of a prison cell.' 

Karli's sight flicked between Clara and Sam, and she lifted her other hand to hold the weapon two-handed. 'Think about what you're doing, Karli. Are you sure this is how you want to be remembered?'

'It doesn't matter if I die,' Karli said through grit teeth. 'The movement is strong enough to continue without me.' 

'Yeah, it is,' Clara nodded, and she heard a small rustling behind her. Glancing back she saw Sharon reaching for her gun lying just out of reach. She frowned, not trusting Sharon in the slightest. 'But the movement won't survive if what's left is gunned downed in a moment of panic by the people with power. The Flag Smashers need to be shown how to handle all this in a way that isn't creating more and more fear. You haven't done that yet. They need you to show them that.'

Karli glanced at Clara, not turning away from Sam, but looking at her out of the corner of her eye. Clara felt pressure pushing back against the shield she was still holding against Sharon, and she briefly glanced down at her again. Between her glancing to Sharon, Clara swore she had seen the gun in Karli's hand lowering - just an inch, at first. 

But in the end that didn't matter, because Sharon had apparently seen the opposite, raising her own weapon against the girl. 'No!' Clara shouted, casting a shield to protect the girl that days ago she had sworn to kill. 

Three booming shots in quick succession, and Clara wasn't entirely sure what had happened as ringing sounded in her ears. The first thing that registered in her mind was the sight of Karli falling to the ground, Sam rushing to her side. 

Clara looked down at her hands, wondering how she had gotten hold of any kind of weapon. A stupid thought, really, considering she had already seen who had shot Karli.

When she saw the ground was a few feet closer to her than it had been before, she scowled towards a small spattering of red dots leading from the space between her hands, and Karli lying in Sam's arms. 

For a moment, she wondered how the blood had gotten so close to her side of the room when Sharon had shot Karli. As she did, she peered over her shoulder back to Sharon, and she didn't need to wonder anymore. 

'Sorry,' Sharon said, nodding towards her. 'I guess I lost too much blood, my aim was off.'

'Your aim...?' Clara followed her line of sight to a small hole in her jacket. Now she understood how she had been knocked to her knees on the dusty floor. 'You shot me,' she said obviously, watching a trail of blood run from her shoulder. 

'Yeah, like I said; my aim was off.'

Clara looked from Sharon, to where Sam was now rising to stand with Karli limp in his arms. She glanced over her shoulder again, to where Sharon was propped up on her elbows. She looked like she was in a lot of pain. Good, Clara thought, because thanks to Sharon, she was too. It was a petty, small-minded thought, but one she considered justified.

Clara got to her feet, following the trajectory the bullet would have had to have followed to reach Karli. Where she was lying, there was no way Sharon could have shot Karli past Clara, let alone through the forcefield separating them. 

She had shot Clara to get her out of the way; when she had fallen from the impact of the round hitting her shoulder, she had opened up a clear line of fire for Sharon, and dropped the shield protecting Karli in the process. 

Clara raised a hand to her shoulder, doing what she had done moments before for the woman who had ended up shooting her. She felt a little queasy, but put that down to the thought of bleeding rather than any blood loss itself. 'We should probably go before the police come in and see you,' Clara told Sharon, following the route Sam had taken, leaving her to struggle to her feet on her own.

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