Disclaimer: Avengers, Hunger Games, and all other elements belong to their relevant owners; I merely borrow them to write this story
Feedback: Always a pleasure to receive.
AN: This chapter marks a shift from the existing POV, as we shift to the events of 'The 100'. For fans of the show, this section diverges from canon around the beginning of the episode "Many Happy Returns", focusing on Anya and Clarke's escape, so anything that happened prior to the events depicted here was the same as in canon, with certain exceptions that will be explored later. For those who haven't seen the show, I'll try and cover the essential details of the first season or so before we get into the main action; hope you like the results.
Falling Hope, Rising Threat
Ever since she had been removed from her cell and told that she was being sent to Earth, nothing had unfolded exactly as Clarke Griffin had expected. Aside from the personal revelation that her father had died because her mother had betrayed him, she'd lost Wells before she could even decide if she'd forgive him for lying to her, she had that whole mess with Finn before Raven arrived, her attempt to negotiate for peace had fallen apart because some people had itchy trigger fingers, and then, just when it seemed like they'd found allies, she'd found out that the residents of Mount Weather were draining the Grounders to sustain themselves.
Even now, Clarke wasn't entirely sure why she'd chosen to save Anya and escape rather than just accept the status quo as the grounders getting their 'just deserts', but she wouldn't change what she'd done; nobody deserved what they were going through, and she couldn't be sure if her people were the next 'targets' for the mountain's experiments if they stayed there for too long.
She might have grown out of her old days of hero-worship based on Callie's old stories, but the principles that those old champions had lived by remained with her; whatever else Anya had done, nobody deserved what was happening in there, but Anya was the only person she could find who might have been willing to listen to her.
Like that worked out the way I hoped, she mused, as another jerk on her arms reminded her of what had really happened. Just when she thought she'd been making progress with Anya after getting them both out of Mount Weather, the Grounder leader had knocked her out, tied her up, and was now forcibly leading her back to the Grounder 'commander' rather than consider the possibility that she might have something useful to contribute to this mess they were in at the moment.
What happened to the days when people just thanked you for saving their lives, rather than blaming you for everything?
"Anya," she said, trying to contain her indignation despite feeling like her arms were being yanked out of their sockets, "we've been walking for hours; where are we going?"
"Quiet," Anya said firmly, even as she continued to walk through the forest.
"Why not just kill me and get it over with?" Clarke asked; she was almost certainly going to be executed when they reached their destination, but she'd like to know why Anya was taking this long about it.
"You can tell the commander what the mountain men are doing to us in there -" Anya began.
"So let's work together," Clarke countered, tugging on the rope to bring Anya around to face her as she tried to make her point. "We don't have to be enemies."
"And unite with someone as weak as you?" Anya said scathingly. "I have what I need."
"Hey!" Clarke protested, deciding not to point out that she was the only reason Anya was even outside Mount Weather right now when she was trying to get the other woman on her side. "We both want the same thing."
Further conversation was cut off when Clarke saw a green light on Anya's chest, followed by Anya glancing over her shoulder and dragging them both to the ground as a dart hit a tree behind the spot where Anya had been standing.
"They found us," Anya said, grimly assessing the surrounding Mount Weather forces, clad in dark all-encompassing body-suits and carrying weapons. "Run."
With that command, Anya got back to her feet and began to run further into the trees, Clarke only just managing to grab the previously-fired dart from the tree where it had struck; it wouldn't be much of a weapon, but it would be one that nobody would expect her to have, and that was what mattered most right now.
Even after spending the last couple of months on the ground, it was still hard to keep up with Anya in their current circumstances. Clarke did her best to match Anya's pace and motions, even stepping where she stepped as best she could in case there was some trap or trick that she might have missed on her own, but she didn't need Anya to confirm that she had made a few mistakes. Admittedly, she was surprised and disturbed when Anya paused to insist that she and Clarke cover themselves with mud to increase their chances at avoiding detection, but she appreciated the intent behind the disguise; at least the Grounder leader wasn't planning to abandon her.
With their camouflage opportunities further improved by that 'disguise', they had continued their escape, but the guards had just continued to remain just a few crucial steps behind them, never actually seeing them but always able to keep up. Anya had led them on all kinds of complex trails as they made their escape, sometimes even risking doubling back on their path to confuse their opponents, but they still seemed to be just a short distance behind them no matter what the two young women did.
"How are they still following us?" Clarke asked, looking back at their pursuers incredulously as she and Anya paused at the top of a steep hill.
"Because of you," Anya said, panting as she reached over to pick up a nearby rock. "Time to end this-"
"Anya!" Clarke protested, raising her hands defensively while keeping her voice as low as she could despite her panic. "I'm stepping where you step, we're covered in mud; we're not leaving a trail."
"They're following something," Anya said, keeping a hold of the rock even as she didn't seem as inclined to use it now.
"They're not following us… they're tracking us," Clarke realised, as a sudden thought came to her; she was fairly sure nobody had planted anything on her, but so far she hadn't had a real reason to check herself over. "Search yourself; if I'm right, it should feel like a… a small bump just under your skin."
Clarke was still checking her upper body when Anya suddenly pulled down one sleeve, revealing a small bump of twisted skin on her left forearm.
"It's you," Clarke said, as she and Anya exchanged glances before Clarke got down to business. "OK, I could remove it, but you need to untie my hands; I just need something sharp and sterile-"
Plans for an impromptu operation were cut short when Anya lunged forward and bit into her own arm, letting out a brief groan of pain before she raised her head and spat out what Clarke sincerely hoped was the tracker.
"I will not go back there," Anya said firmly.
"All right…" Clarke began, just as she heard something loud in the sky above them. Glancing up in apprehension of another Mount Weather weapon, Clarke saw what she initially thought was a missile heading right for their position, but then it zoomed past them and landed on the ground, half-way up the hill that Clarke and Anya had just climbed, revealing that it was actually a figure that Clarke had only ever seen in Callie's old history books.
The colour scheme wasn't an exact match, and it seemed slightly disjointed in a few places, as though parts had been cobbled together from other sources rather than assembled all at once, but if she wasn't looking at someone wearing the armour of Callie's personal hero, Clarke would eat her stolen dart.
"Hi there," a voice came from the Iron Man armour as he looked at the Mount Weather soldiers before him. "I don't suppose you'd care to explain what you're doing here?"
In response, the guards raised their guns and fired at the new arrival, only for the darts they fired to strike the strong red armour and fall to the ground uselessly.
"OK," the figure said, looking down at the fallen darts before he looked back at the guards. "Thanks for clarifying where you stand."
With those words, the man in the armour raised his hands and fired what Clarke could only describe as bursts of energy at his attackers, the blasts coming from the palms of his hands with such ease that Clarke couldn't believe what she was looking at. She barely had time to process that the attack had started before all four men were lying on the ground, still and unmoving, as the man in armour turned to look at them.
"Hi," he said, holding up his hands in what was probably intended as a calming gesture, but just made Anya tense beside Clarke as she looked at him. "OK, for the record, I know that this probably looks bad, but I promise, I won't attack you if you don't attack me…"
"Who are-?" Anya began defensively.
"Are… are you Iron Man?" Clarke interjected, staring at the suit in shock as she finally managed to ask the most important question.
"You've heard of me, then?" the man in the armour asked, sounding like he was smiling as he turned to face her.
"Well, I've heard the stories… I always preferred Captain America…" Clarke admitted, suddenly feeling embarrassed to be discussing her childhood heroes with Anya right beside her.
"What are you talking about?" Anya asked, looking between Clarke and the man- Iron Man- in confusion. "Who is this man?"
"As your friend here just confirmed, I'm Iron Man," the man in the armour said, nodding briefly at Anya. "I'm one of a team we call 'the Avengers', tasked with protecting Earth from threats beyond the normal range of things; we've been a bit busy in our area before now, but we detected the Ark coming down-"
Clarke was saved from making any stupid responses to the revelation that the Avengers were still active in the present when there was a loud clanging sound from just behind her, prompting her and Anya to turn around to see a young woman dressed in black, standing up and sliding a shield over her right arm.
If Iron Man had been unexpected, this woman's appearance was just strange. The shield she carried was large and round with a pattern of contracting circles on it, but unlike the red-and-white pattern that Clarke had seen on Captain America's shield in Callie's book, this shield was painted in orange and black circles, with a symbol in the centre that looked like some kind of bird with a long thin beak and its wings spread. She was also dressed in what Clarke could only think of as some bizarre combination of armour and a bird costume, with white wing-like folds under the arms and a helmet that resembled a bird, although Clarke doubted from the style that the costume would actually be capable of real flight.
Looking up, Clarke tried not to stare at the sight of some kind of hovercraft silently waiting above them, an open hatch underneath it that seemed to be angled just right for the new arrival's position…
Had this woman just… jumped out of that hovercraft?
"What are you doing here?" Iron Man said, looking sharply at the woman. "I thought we agreed I'd make first contact?"
"And we did, until I saw that the shooting had stopped and concluded that it was my responsibility as team leader to be on-site at a time like this as well," the young woman said, looking at Iron Man with a slight smile. "We've still got aerial support if things get ugly, but I thought it might be a good idea to get an on-sight assessment once your radio went down."
"What?" Iron Man said, before he raised one hand to the side of his helmet in realisation. "Oh yeah; must have been a lucky shot…"
"What provoked the attack?" the woman asked.
"I landed and said 'hi'," Iron Man said.
"Ah," the woman said, looking at the soldiers before she turned to smile at Anya and Clarke. "Hi there; call me Mockingjay."
"Mocking…jay?" Clarke repeated, looking at the woman in confusion.
"Oh, I'm with Iron Man on the Avengers; it's just that I decided to take on a new identity rather than take up an old one," the woman called Mockingjay explained.
"Who are you?" Anya said, looking sharply
"We were just heading to Mount Weather to see what was going on there when our hovercraft picked up your tracker signal; when we traced it back to its source and found two unarmed young women being chased by a group of men with guns, it didn't take a genius to work out who was the victim in that situation."
"We are not-!" Anya began, before gunfire suddenly filled the air around them. Clarke barely had time to realise what was happening when Mockingjay stepped forward and forced her to the ground, her shield suddenly a barrier between them and the new wave of attackers as Clarke dragged Anya to the ground while Iron Man started to return fire.
"They're using guns?" Clarke said, looking at the new woman incredulously. "They were shooting tranquiliser darts earlier-"
"Which wouldn't do them much good against the kind of animals that can be out here," Mockingjay said grimly, keeping the shield up between them and the bullets. "If they were tracking you, I assume they just wanted to capture you; with us, they're going to want to take us out fairly quickly."
"Which won't- be- that- easy!" Iron Man yelled as he continued to fire back at the approaching guards, hurrying down the hill with loud clanking steps as he moved his arms rapidly around himself. From what Clarke could see around Mockingjay's shield and their current angle, the various forces from Mount Weather were mounting a spirited attack, but Iron Man was just taking aim and firing too quickly for them to get past him…
The sound of something coming up from the side prompted Clarke to turn around, her eyes widening in horror at the sight of three additional guards coming at them from the side. However, she had barely opened her mouth to warn her strange protector before the woman had practically shoved her shield into Clarke's hands, stood up, drawn a bow and arrow from her back, and started firing arrows even as the soldiers began to fire their guns.
Even after seeing the Grounders in action, Clarke had never considered a bow and arrow to be a particularly effective weapon compared to a gun, but Mockingjay's abilities quickly caused her to re-evaluate that thought. The woman had barely stood up before three arrows were in the chests of the three guards that had tried to take by surprise, and only one guard had managed to get any shots off before being taken down by the arrow to the heart.
Smiling in relief, Clarke turned to look at Anya, but her glee was replaced by shock as she noticed a rapidly-bleeding wound in the Grounder's side, where a bullet from the last attack must have struck.
"Anya!" she screamed, thoughts of the paradox of being this concerned for someone who'd been threatening her earlier forgotten in the face of the urgent desire for the Grounder not to die. The bullet itself wasn't that serious, but on top of all the blood that Anya must have lost during her time in the mountain, the blood loss she'd be suffering right now…
"They're down!" Mockingjay said, turning back from her final shot only to realise what had happened to Anya. "Oh."
"We have to help her!" Clarke said, looking urgently at the woman in black. "She's the only one who might be able to help me talk to the Grounders-"
"Already on it," Mockingjay said, turning to call down the hill. "Peeta! We need evac!"
Before Clarke could ask what the first word meant, Iron Man had flown back towards them, landing just long enough to take in the scene before he walked forward and picked Anya up, cradling her in his arms before he hurtled into the sky towards the hovercraft that was still stationary above them (Clarke guessed that none of the Mount Weather teams had brought anything capable of damaging something that big).
"Hold on," Mockingjay said, reaching over to pull Clarke towards her, waiting for the younger woman to wrap her arms around her before pulling out her bow and arrow and aiming it upwards. Before Clarke could ask what the other woman was doing, Mockingjay fired the arrow with a long cable trailing behind it, hooking the other end to her belt before both of them were hauled up towards a hole in the floor of the ship above them.
As the two of them landed in the ship, Clarke briefly took in her surroundings, noting that Anya was lying on a bed on one side of the craft interior with Iron Man standing anxiously over her- his helmet now removed to reveal a warm face with light blonde hair around Mockingjay's age- before her gaze fixed on the only person in the ship she hadn't seen before; an old man, wearing a dark blue outfit with an artificial right hand, sitting at the craft's controls.
"What's the situation?" the old man said, looking back at Clarke and Mockingjay as the other woman detached the cable-arrow from the ceiling while the hatch closed below them.
"As Peeta reported, we had several armed guards chasing two unarmed women, and the guards opened fire on us when we tried to ask what was going on," Mockingjay explained as she walked up to the front of the craft. "When they opened fire on Peeta after all he'd done was introduce himself, he felt that it was safe to conclude that they were the bad guys and open fire."
"Fair point; the good guys tend not to start shooting unless they have reason to believe the others will be hostile," the old man said, smiling at her before his gaze shifted to Clarke and Anya. "And these two?"
"The people those guards were chasing," Mockingjay explained firmly. "Maybe I'm just assuming things, but neither one strikes me as deranged serial killers, and the amount of men they sent out to get them back is far too excessive for anything else; I'm going to assume they're the victims here."
"Yes!" Clarke said, too eager for help to feel insulted at being classified as a victim after everything she'd been through. "We were being held captive, and they're taking blood, and…"
Her voice trailed off as she looked around the hovercraft for a moment before her gaze settled on the old man, the only person present she hadn't been introduced to yet. "And… who are you?"
"You remember how you said you preferred Captain America?" the fair-haired young man in the armour said, looking at Clarke with a smile as he indicated the old man sitting at the ship's controls. "Well, you're in luck; this is him."
Clarke could only blink incredulously at that news.
"You… you're Captain America?" she repeated, staring uncertainly at the old man.
"I used to be, anyway; I thought about renaming myself 'General Geriatric', but it felt a bit too… 'on-the-nose', if you will," the old man said, smiling warmly at Clarke before his expression became firmer as he stood up. "Now then, before we do anything else, can you explain why your companion here seems to be so short of blood from one wound?"
"It's the treatments she was subjected to at Mount Weather," Clarke said, no doubt in her mind that she was doing the right thing; if these people were part of some complicated trap set by Mount Weather, there had to be easier ways to get her and Anya back than posing as two long-gone heroes that Clarke may not have even heard of and attacking their own men.
"Treatments?" the man in the Iron Man armour repeated curiously. "What were they doing in there?"
"Taking her blood to cope with their own inability to leave the mountain," Clarke explained. "From what their president told me, they've spent so long inside the mountain that their immune systems can't cope with even the standard background radiation that exists out here on the surface; the Grounders have evolved to cope, and everyone from the Ark's even better off because we spent decades being exposed to cosmic radiation, but everyone in the mountain…"
"They're out of luck, huh?" the old man- Captain America?- finished for Clarke, looking grimly at Anya. "From your story, shall I assume you're from the Ark and this woman here is one of what you referred to as 'Grounders'?"
"Yes, that's- hold on, you know about the Ark?" Clark asked, looking between the three in surprise as she registered their casual reactions to everything she'd been telling them. "How-?"
"One of the station fragments crash-landed near our main research facility," Mockingjay explained. "We were able to recover a few survivors from the crash, and one of them- Callie Cartig- was able to tell us more about the last few months."
"Callie?" Clarke said, looking at the other woman in surprise. "She's alive?"
"You know her?" the man in the Iron Man armour asked, looking at her in surprise.
"Yeah, she was my mom's best friend up on the Ark…" Clarke said, shaking her head incredulously as she looked at the three people. "And… that's why you're here?"
"Precisely," the old man- it was easier to think of him that way than to think of him as Captain America- said with a firm nod. "Getting back to Mount Weather, can you explain what your companion's loss of blood has to do with anything?"
"I'm just guessing, but I think… ever since they started trying to go outside again, they've been using blood transfusions from the Grounders to let themselves leave the mountain," Clarke explained. "It's only effective in the short term and they still need protective clothing, but their president speculated that we might be the key to helping them leave…"
"Which means they'll probably start using you sooner or later," the old man noted grimly. "Once you make a decision to see some people as a resource, it's only a matter of time before everyone not allied with you becomes expendable in the name of your own goals…"
"In other words, we've found the bad guy?" Mockingjay asked with a slightly grim smile.
"To say the least," the old man confirmed.
"Really?" Clarke said, looking between the two in sudden apprehension, unable to believe what she was hearing. "You… you'll help us?"
"The three of us came all this way to find out what happened to the crashed Ark fragments; your people sound like an interesting group from what we've heard so far, we don't like what we've heard of the Mount Weather residents to date, so we're not going to leave your people alone to deal with something like this," the old man said firmly, tapping a few controls and getting up from the control panel to walk back to Anya. "In the meantime, prep for blood transfusion; if the problem with Anya here is a shortage of blood, I'm fairly sure I'm still a universal donor."
"You're going to give her your blood?" Mockingjay said, looking apprehensively at the old man. "I mean, you've got that serum in you-"
"We came here to try and negotiate some kind of peace between the Ark residents and these 'Grounders'," the old man said firmly. "Whatever the risks of giving Anya here access to the serum, we're not going to let someone die if we can save them."
"I'll start prepping for transfusion," Mockingjay said quickly hurrying over to a nearby cabinet, leaving Clarke to look anxiously at the injured Grounder.
She knew that Anya was strong, but after all the blood she'd lost already…
AN 2: For the record, for those who are fans of both 'The 100' and 'Agents of SHIELD', I am aware that the same actress played Anya in 'The 100' and Jiaying in 'Agents', but despite Jiaying's virtual immortality (By which I mean she could live forever if she isn't completely torn apart and left to rot), the resemblance between the two is just going to be a coincidence with no connection between Anya and the MCU Inhumans, although she will have ties to someone else, as you'll learn in the next chapter…