Disclaimer: Avengers, Hunger Games, and all other elements belong to their relevant owners; I merely borrow them to write this story
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Falling Hope, Rising Threat
With Clarke leading the way and Thor keeping a tight grip on Cage, we marched our way down to the bottom of the mountain. I had briefly thought about leaving Cage with the soldiers we'd knocked out before capturing him, but Thor had pointed out that it would be best to keep him 'on hand' in case we needed a bargaining chip, and it was probably safer to make sure he didn't try anything else anyway.
In the end, however, it was almost embarrassingly easy to reach our destination; we had run-ins with a couple of pairs of guards as we advanced, but it didn't take Clarke and I long to put them down for the count while Thor held our prisoner, leaving us to continue on our walk. I was slightly surprised that Cage kept quiet all the way down, but it wasn't hard to see him as the type of leader who underestimated his enemies until it was too late; considering that he'd been desperate enough to release the Abomination when he learned we were the Avengers, I doubted he had anything better on offer.
Finally we reached the lower level and made our way to what Clarke had identified as the mountain's main dining area, where I found Raven, Peeta and Monty standing patiently outside the locked door with various anxious expressions on their faces.
"Everything OK here?" Clarke asked.
"Depends on what he's doing with you," Raven indicated the president.
"We captured him and don't have anywhere to put him," I clarified.
"Fair enough," Peeta said, a certain satisfied edge to his voice that I wasn't used to hearing from him, even after he became Iron Man and started seeing the darker side of the world. "Anyway, Monty told us that Jasper and Maya already gathered most of the anti-transfusion faction and got them to hide in that room for security-"
"Security?" Cage cut in incredulously. "You're trying to protect a bunch of fools-!"
"Who have actually held onto their moral integrity in a difficult situation," Peeta countered, before he raised his arms and lit up his palm repulsors with a smile. "And after that, it wasn't that hard to hold the line once we got here."
"Seriously, that armour?" Raven stage-whispered, indicating Peeta with a broad grin on her face. "Wow."
"You like it, huh?" Clarke smiled in response.
"Like it?" Raven repeated, looking at Clarke as though she'd suggested it would be a good idea to cut off her own head. "Girl, I would join your team's cleaning crew so long as I got to touch that armour every day for a week!"
"And she had a few ideas to offer about how we might be able to compartmentalise the system while we were waiting," Peeta noted, a smile on his face as he raised the faceplate to look at me. "She was thinking that we could adapt this suit to give each system its own power supply so that I don't need to wear the whole armour to use its weapons. Obviously I'd still need the whole thing for the big fights, but maybe we could make a few modifications so that I can just use a gauntlet to break down a door or launch a couple of quick punches if I was caught by surprise when I'm off-duty, something like that…"
"OK, not that I'm not glad that Raven's found her niche, but maybe we should focus on getting these people out of here?" Clarke indicated the door.
"Right…" I nodded at my new second before looking at Monty as I indicated the door. "I take it Maya and Jasper are in there?"
"Jasper thought it would be a good way to reinforce our support for this plan, and Maya went in there with him to explain the situation," Monty nodded. "I just stayed out here to make sure the door stayed locked; I set up a few new codes and then destroyed the lock to stop anyone on their side from forcing me to open it up from here."
"Is that not an extreme response?" Thor asked.
"Considering that this guy and people like him have spent years treating people as commodities?" Monty indicated Cage with a pointed glare. "I have to take things seriously if we're going to get anyone out of here."
"You don't need to do all this; we just need-!" Cage began.
"To make others suffer so that you can get what you want," I cut him off. "We already talked about this, Cage; you treat people like things, and we're not willing to tolerate that. Believe me I recognise that there are times when extreme solutions are the only option, but you need to balance how far you want to go versus how far you need to go. I nearly killed half of my current team because I was basically stuck in a life-or-death contest and certain there was no other way to get out, but I realised afterwards that people might have been willing to explain the plan to me if I'd been more open from the beginning."
"You nearly killed-?" Monty looked at me in shock.
"But she didn't do it," Clarke stepped in, looking contemptuously at Cage as though warning him not to say anything before she placed a hand on my arm and gave her old friend a reassuring smile. "We've all done things we're ashamed of, Monty; we can't just keep judging other people because they're not perfect."
"And talking of teams, where are the others?" I asked, looking around to confirm that nobody else had an immediate answer before activating my suit radio. "Mockingjay to Bloodaxe; what's the situation at your end?"
"Hey, 'jay," Johanna replied. "We're tracking a few guards, but I don't think we're going to have any big problems so far; unless they kept something else in reserve, I think we can concluded that they already wasted their big gun on Big Green."
"Which I'm definitely grateful for," another voice put in.
"Who-?" I began.
"Bellamy?" Clarke cut in. "Are you all right?"
"Still dealing with the fact that I was just subjected to the whole 'blue crystals of death' thing and spent a few hours in some kind of cocoon, but-"
"Terrigen Crystals," Thor cut in, the Asgardian king looking solemnly around at the other Avengers as he spoke, keeping his voice loud so that he could properly address everyone on the other end of the radio. "I have not seen the crystals you have been exposed to, but from what I have heard about your experience, including your survival where others died and acquiring powers from the process, it is likely Terrigen Crystals."
"You know about- OK, just what exactly are Terrigen Crystals?" Octavia asked. "Another Asgardian creation that you forgot to clean up?"
"No, they were the result of another alien race known as the Kree," Thor explained.
"More aliens?" Peeta asked in surprise.
"On Earth?" Raven grinned.
"They're… those things are alien?" Cage looked incredulously at Thor.
"Eons ago, their empire waged a very long war against a fierce enemy," Thor explained, making it clear that he was ignoring Cage as he addressed the other Avengers. "The causalities were high and they needed more soldiers, and so a faction among the Kree began conducting unsanctioned experiments across worlds, modifying the DNA of the residents of those worlds using Terrigen Crystals. These modifications proved to be fatal failures in most cases, save for one world."
"I'm guessing that would be Earth?" Johanna inquired. Once again, I found myself admiring what my team had achieved since we'd become Avengers; we'd gone from being a collection of teenagers rebelling against the local government to a group who were taking the genuine concept of alien interference on Earth in stride.
Thor nodded. "The rogue Kree constructed a city to carry out their work, gathering those individuals who gained power from their process, until their people came and shut down their work, and it appeared as though that would be the end of the matter. That only changed when Sif returned from a mission to Earth, sent there while my brother posed as my father for a time after the defeat of the Dark Elves. She told us of how the crystals affected humans, that an agent of SHIELD had become Inhuman, and as we came to learn, there were far more Inhumans living on Earth than we could have expected."
"But you just left them alone?" Clarke asked.
"It was not as if they lived in a city where we could have approached them and opened dialog. The city that Kree built ages ago was long abandoned and deep underground by the time Sif had come to Earth. Many Inhumans retained the appearance they had before exposure to the crystals and were able to remain in human society. There were a few cases where the mists would radically change one's appearance to align with their new gifts, but these tended to remain discreet. That said, I am unsure of their current status at this point; those few public Inhumans retreated underground after Hydra's initial assault, even before the Maestro initiated his final war."
"There could be… more like me?" Bellamy cut in, a tone in his voice that I could only think of as tentative awe.
"We'll… work that out," I said, cursing my initially hesitant tone as I looked around at the others. "Right now, the priority is to get the innocent out of here-"
"We only wanted to survive-!"
"In a manner that is unacceptable to all other civilised beings on this world," Thor cut Cage off.
"The point," I interjected more firmly, "is that we have more immediate concerns right now; once everything's secure here, maybe we can work out where any other Inhumans might be hanging out these days."
"I agree," Clarke put in. "The first priority has to be getting these people to safety before anything else happens. Lexa's willing to let us do what we can to protect anyone living here if we can assure her that they didn't personally do anything to anyone outside the mountain, but that still leaves us obliged to at least let them kill several soldiers and scientists."
"Just like a savage…" Cage muttered before Clarke slapped him over the head.
"Seriously?" Octavia asked. "We're still going to kill people-!"
"If you think there's a better way to deal with this crap, I'd like to hear it," I informed the newest Avenger. "I had to make it clear to Lexa that we wouldn't stand for her just killing everyone in this mountain and draw a clear line between who everyone would accept as innocents and who had actually done something to hurt the people out there."
"And what about the ones who just don't have a choice?" Octavia asked. "There are a lot of guards in here who're just doing their job because they think we'll kill them first…"
"Let's just let Mockingjay and the others get the known innocent out of here and we'll deal with the rest," Johanna said firmly. "And on that topic, what's the plan on the 'get them out' front?"
"You said you could take them up to Asgard for treatment," I looked over at Thor. "If we know where they are-"
"We must transfer them directly from here to a secure location in Asgard until they can receive the appropriate transfusion," Thor explained. "For this to work, without Mjolnir to help me direct the Bifrost, I must be standing within a group of them so that Heimdell can focus the signal appropriately."
"You can transmit that thing through all this rock?" Johanna asked. "Without just breaking the mountain, I mean?"
"The power of the Bifrost goes beyond terms that your science can understand at this stage; a concentrated blast would breach solid matter, but a brief connection is safe," Thor replied with a slight smile. "It will be difficult to transfer them from one point to another without them materialising in the Bifrost control room itself, but Heimdell assures me that preparations have been made."
"You could take-!" Cage began.
"I regret many of my past actions already, Cage Wallace; I will not risk further guilt on my conscience by saving unrepentant murderers," Thor pointed a cold finger at Cage's face.
"I shall join you to help break that door down-" Anya began.
"In a society that has taken this many precautions against any kind of outbreak?" Monty cut in. "If I thought it was as simple as breaking this thing down, I would have asked Thor to start hitting it already, but we can't believe that they're going to make it easy for us. Break down something this secure and we could trigger some kind of explosive defensive measure I haven't found yet."
"Really?" Johanna asked.
"Well, I can't be sure, but… better to be safe than sorry, right?"
"Right…" I nodded, looking at Cage for a moment before deciding that it wasn't worth interrogating him; the man would draw out any opportunity he had to feel like he had power over any of us, so it would be best to just assume the worst and deal with this all ourselves. After a brief talk with Clarke to confirm what we knew of the mountain's internal layout so far, I passed Monty one of the guns I'd acquired earlier and turned my radio back on. "OK, Monty's going to head to the nearest staircase and start heading up; Anya, you can join him and make sure he gets to the control room without any problems."
"The control room?"
"He disabled the control panels down here after changing the codes; he can only open the door safely from there, and you can help him clear it out," I explained. "Octavia, Johanna, Bellamy, you just keep on searching to make sure who else is down here; we don't want there to be any random civilians hanging around who might be… OK, I get that 'eligible' is probably not the best term, but it's the closest I can come up with right now."
"And if we find anyone who tries to kill us?" Anya asked.
"To be blunt, anyone who tries to kill you at this point is probably so fanatically committed to hating us that they're probably going to get executed anyway, but just… try to just knock them out unless they force you to kill them before they kill you," I said. "I mean, considering what we've done so far, who would try to kill us if they're not at least a bit crazy?"
"Good point," Anya observed. "So, Azurwicha, shall we split up?"
"I'll take the wolf and you take the hacker," Octavia said.
"And I'll go with the Asgardians to keep things under control," Johanna added. I heard a faint noise that I took to be Fenris before the radio fell silent, leaving me to nod in confirmation at Monty before he hurried off deeper into the mountain.
Anya might be only slightly less new to the team than Octavia was, but I had faith that she could protect Monty and stay focused on her current task, where Octavia might need Johanna to help her assume a more pragmatic approach to anything she might find.
We had established control of the situation for the moment, so now all the rest of us could do was wait for Monty to finish his work so Thor could do his part…