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

"Attention, Avengers," Mockingjay's voice suddenly emerged from their radios, prompting all parties to stop and listen to their leader's latest report. "Bloodaxe, Azure Witch and myself are pleased to confirm that Monty Green is not dead; he has manifested a cocoon after exposure to the gas, and we have every reason to believe that he will emerge from it safely."

"Another-?" Clarke began, before she turned to look at her companions with a broad grin. "Monty's alive!"

"Another cocoon?" Bellamy looked at Clarke with exaggerated indignation. "I'm suddenly feeling a bit less special."

"Like you needed the ego trip?" Clarke retorted with a teasing smile. "You're still the half-brother to a demi-goddess; you don't need to be our only… crystal mutate to be interesting."

"Indeed," Anya observed, looking at Bellamy with a surprisingly teasing smile on her face, before she looked more solemn. "But it is… good to know that Monty did not die."

"You missed him that much?" Clarke looked at Anya in surprise. "I didn't think he'd be- I mean, when you said his fight was over-"

"He was a courageous warrior who faced death to save others; just because he would have died well does not mean that it would have been less regrettable to lose him so early in our time together."

"Yeah," Clarke smiled. "That's one thing I've actually liked about coming to Earth; it's let us all see what we really are when it comes down to the crunch…"

"Even when that's not always a good thing?" Bellamy asked. "I mean, Charlotte-"

"I'm not saying it's always been good, but when people have come through the experience, we've been stronger even when we don't immediately become Avengers," Clarke said firmly. "We might have lost some people to get this far, but we're not going to let anyone else down from here on, right?"

"…Right," Bellamy nodded, before his eyes narrowed and a thoughtful expression crossed his face. "And on that topic… I think we need to get to the lab."

"The lab?" Clarke and Anya looked at him curiously.

"Where I became… this," Bellamy explained, holding up his hand to generate a small fireball, "I'd just… if Monty could be like me, I'd like to make sure nobody else made it out… and that there's no more surprises down there."

"Surprises?" Clarke asked. "Like what?"

"When O came to my rescue, Tsing had a scalpel at my throat. I got so angry that my powers reacted for the first time and I ended up burning her," Bellamy explained. "She started going on this rant about humanity evolving, and then she smashed the Terrigen crystals in the room. Most of us got out of the lab before we could inhale the gas but Tsing and two guards were still inside when Octavia flash froze the doorway, keeping the gas contained inside…"

"But the doctor and the guards…oh," Clarke said, as an apprehensive expression crossed her face. "If Monty was right that something sent a signal that set those explosives off early… do you think someone did it on purpose?"

"The way our luck's been since we came down here?"

"Good point," Clarke conceded. "Lead the way. I'll call Raven, see if she can't get the air vented from the lab by the time we get there."

Why is this happening? How can things have gone so wrong? Cage asked himself as he was walked through the halls on his way to a cell. Everything since his attempt to fire that missile had gone wrong, instead of unfolding as perfectly as his plans dictated. It made no sense to him.

"Why are you people following my father?"

"Stop talking."

"Don't you understand the savages will be given free reign?" Cage shouted in protest. "They'll eat your families alive like the cannibals they are! My father is going to let them kill us to save his own skin-!"

Cage was interrupted when a guard behind struck him in the back, forcing him down to his knees.

"Like you would do any differently?" the guard asked.

"I care about our people! I care about our survival! We are the superior humanity! We can bring back America if you have the will to follow me!"

"You really are a crazy son of a-"

The guard's objections was interrupted when the other guard turned and fired on the speaker. The guard fell to the ground and blood started to pool, leaving Cage to look up at his unlikely saviour

"Really don't like current administration," the man said casually. "Figure you know enough people who don't to make a difference."

Cage smiled. "Yes I do. Your name, soldier?"

"Marshall. Your father's ordered Jefferson to move the late Doctor Tsing's work on the bone marrow samples to a storage depot two floors down."

"Late?" Cage asked in shock.

"According to the traitor, Tsing became unhinged experimenting with the death crystals during a confrontation with Loki's daughter; got herself exposed to the mist but the alien witch survived," Marshall said. "Still, all the doc's samples have been moved; there may even be a finished cure."

Cage felt a multitude of emotions, torn between being upset and confused at the doctor's seemingly senseless death even as he tried to focus on the hope he felt for his own future. "Well then, what say we liberate that cure for the people who truly deserve it?"

"Took a while to get access to the right system, but I managed to hack the lab's air filtration from one of the remote terminals down here," Raven said over the radio. "Bit of a tricky job, but all of the air has been purged from the lab. No risk once you get inside."

"Thanks Raven. Talk to you later," Clarke said while looking over the iced over opening to Tsing's lab. "Doesn't get easier, seeing sights like this."

"You're kidding, right?" Bellamy asked as he put his hands on the ice started channelling his fire through it. Slowly but surely the ice began to melt, the resulting water falling to the ground. "At least you're still basically human; I'm still trying to come to grips that I have alien DNA and powers, and that's not even counting the fact that Loki is my sister's father or the fact he was practically my step father for a few years."

"…Yeah, that's a bit of a twist," Clarke conceded with a nod at Bellamy. "Still, you can't say it's been a dull few weeks."

"Quite," Bellamy smiled, before the last of the ice melted, leaving them free to enter the lab. A quick glance around confirmed that the lab looked for the most part as he remembered, although it did seem surprisingly empty.

"Is… this what you were expecting?" Clarke looked thoughtfully at her friend.

"I… gotta admit, I'm not sure what I was expecting right now." Bellamy walked up to the table he'd been strapped to earlier as he carefully took in the room around him. "When I left it, there was a guard that had been impaled in the shoulder by an ice blade from Octavia on that back wall, another in the far corner that hadn't been able to get away… And Tsing was against this wall..." He stopped when he felt something crunch underneath his boots. Looking down, there were black chips like rock but utterly brittle, spread out in a trail leading forward. "...damn it."

"Bellamy, what are you thinking?" Clarke asked. "You really think she survived this?"

"I did. And I remember breaking out of my shell and there were pieces of rock all around me," Bellamy said.

"Okay, but didn't you say the people that didn't survive also became like stone?" Clarke questioned. "Look, we already know that it took a while for those bombs to go off, but that could have just been a programming glitch. I get that you're worried, but we can't assume that Doctor Tsing got out of this lab just because we can't find her body. For all we know this stuff just made her body dissolve or something; what are the odds that she was changed into… something that she could learn how to use this quickly?"

"I've learned how to use it rather quickly," Bellamy returned.

"You are a survivor who knows how to fight," Anya put in. "From what I have heard, that… doctor… relied on others to do the work while she played with blood and chemicals; it is not a comparable experience."

"Exactly," Clarke nodded. "Look, you said there were some guards that got trapped with Tsing. We find other dust piles, then we know they didn't survive-"

"The guards did not survive," Anya spoke up, getting their attention. "I found piles of rocks and dust, just intended to make us think that."

"'Make us think that'?" Clarke asked.

"When I hunted a traitor to my clan, he tried to make me believe that he had died, killed by wild animals, by leaving a severed hand for me to find, hoping I would lower my guard," Anya said, her distaste showing. "These piles of rocks and dust give me the same feeling as that severed hand; these are too neatly organised to be the natural traces of death."

Clarke looked over both of them and shook her head. "Okay. I get both of you have gut feelings about this but we have bigger priorities than a 'maybe' right now. There are definitely innocent people still in this facility who could get caught in the crossfire, and we only think Doctor Tsing might still be alive; with the bombs no longer a problem, we should probably focus on what we know for a fact."

"...agreed," Anya nodded. "Protection of the defenceless must come before the defeat of our enemies."

"Nice way to put it," Clarke smiled at the large green woman, before she turned back to Bellamy. "OK, so we keep an eye out for her, but no reason to look too hard when we've got more obvious priorities…"

Octavia had no idea what it said about the current team dynamic when the Avengers' leader was that comfortable going off on her own in potentially hostile territory. She wasn't exactly complaining about the fact that she was trusted enough to go around basically on her own, but what did it say about their leader that she was that independent?

She'd heard a few stories from Bloodaxe and the others about what Mockingjay had been through before becoming an Avenger, so at least she knew that the other girl was capable, but it seemed like they should be working more closely together than this right now. Wasn't the point of being an Avenger to give some of the most unique and powerful people in the world people they could rely on in a fight?

"Problem?"

"Just…" Octavia turned to look awkwardly at the one-armed axe-wielding Avenger. "How do you let your leader go off like that?"

"She's good at her job," Johanna shrugged.

"When her job is meant to be leading us?"

"She might have been trained by the world's best soldier, but there are still times when she can't quite believe that she's the one everyone trusted with this job," the one-armed woman explained. "Mockingjay's earned a lot of faith from the rest of us, but it's like there are always moments where she's not sure if she's proved herself to… well, herself."

"And you let her do that?"

"What else can we do?" Johanna shrugged. "We can't just stage some kind of intervention to give her complete confidence in herself; she needs to believe that we believe in her, which means letting her set the pace for when we'll believe in her."

She experimentally spun the axe in her hand and then turned her attention back to Octavia. "Still, she's making good progress kicking ass and leading the fold at her own pace; all we can do is deal with it and let her realise that she's become the leader we need."

"…This is a really weird team set-up you have, you know that?"

"Mockingjay'll get the picture," Johanna shrugged. "She knows that we'll trust her when we're in the thick of the action; she just needs to realise that we believe in her outside of that as well-"

The explanation was interrupted when the two women walked around a corner and almost ran into a small group wearing guard uniforms, followed by a larger group in more casual clothing, led by a very familiar face.

"Jefferson!" Octavia smiled in relief at the sight of her guard ally. "What are you doing here?"

"Rounding up the rest of the civilians," Jefferson replied, indicating the group of people behind him. "They've never done anything more than take the transfusions, and most of them would have objected to that if they'd known what we were doing; they don't deserve to die when-!"

"Hey, we're not here to just mindlessly slaughter people; I just call myself 'Bloodaxe' because it sounds good, not because I like my axe to be bloody," Johanna cut the guard off before looking at the civilians. "Get down to the dining area on the lower level; Thor's there to send everyone to safety and medical treatment."

"But just remember this," Octavia added, raising a warning hand and generating an icy blade from her wrist. "If you let anyone come along who thought it was a good idea to cut up living people to save themselves… we are not going to be happy."

Octavia wasn't sure what she'd do if anyone actually tried to defy her about that particular rule, but there had to be advantages to be the daughter of a known psycho, right?

For the moment, she'd just focus on the situation at hand and worry about backing up her threats when she had to.

Looking back at the men and women he'd gathered to himself, Cage felt a sense of pride at how much he'd managed to accomplish. The savages could rely on those so-called 'Avengers' as much as they liked, but true Americans just needed good old-fashioned ingenuity and a few decent weapons to get the job done.

He hadn't been able to get in touch with Emmerson, but he'd managed to rally at least thirty other people at last count, and he was finally just outside the depot that Tsing's work had been moved to.

"All right, everyone!" he grinned encouragingly at his forces. "Just get into that lab, and we'll have access to everything we need to emerge from this mountain once again! We can establish our authority over those primitives; all they have to oppose us are a collection of swords and shields and self-proclaimed 'Avengers' who don't truly understand what those heroes stood for! We have earned this victory; we will walk on the surface once again!"

As the men and women before him cheered, Cage refused to let himself think about the fact that those 'phony' Avengers had already killed the Abomination; an entity capable of once nearly defeating the original Hulk in battle had to have killed at least one of those primitive fools before he went down, and their 'Thor' didn't even have a hammer…

Pushing that thought aside, he walked into the lab, followed closely by his soldiers. His eyes immediately fell on the large freezers at the other end of the room that should contain the samples of bone marrow already collected; he'd need to work out who among his staff had the necessary medical expertise to carry out the procedure, but after that-

Just as the door closed behind the last of his forces, Cage heard a foreboding click from the door. Before he could properly react, there was a sudden blast of gas from the room's air vents, and Cage suddenly felt his vision dim even as others began to fall to the ground…

"What…?" Cage muttered as he woke up, trying to retrace what had just happened to him. He could tell that he was in a different room from the one he'd passed out in, and he couldn't immediately see anyone else around him, but beyond that…

"You failed," a more familiar voice said. "For the final time."

Forcing himself to his feet, Cage turned around to trace the source of that voice and soon saw his father standing behind a sheet of glass, in a twisted mirror of the scene when he had Katniss and the 'Avengers' at his mercy (had that truly been hours before?). "What happened? How..." he trailed off as he saw Marshall standing next to his father. "You!"

Marshall simply gave a jaunty wave to the man through the glass, as Dante looked solemnly at his son. "Your 'escape' was allowed because I knew you would go to supporters in either another attempt for a coup or for some other scheme."

"Where are they? My people-"

"Those poor people were doomed the moment they sought to join you in trying to take what was never yours."

"To escape this hell and go to a paradise?" Cage snapped, exasperated at his father's continued defiance of what had to be done. "Why shouldn't we have the right? We suffered long enough! After all we've done- After all I've done-!"

"All you have ever done is use what power you had to make others do the work for you," his father countered solemnly. "Even when you have lost, all you can do is think about yourself, you and those like-minded people. Now they will have pay the price for their folly."

"And what about you?" Cage practically sputtered indignantly. "Capitulating to the savages! To the freaks! They won't understand! They are murderers! We have to put them down into the ground and take back what is ours! But you have long since lost your mind old man!"

Dante simple closed his eyes and shook his head. "Is this enough now, Commander?"

Cage felt his jaw drop as he saw the Commander come from out of the shadows of the room she was now sharing with his father.

"Yes, I have seen enough to know how different the two of you are," Lexa said. "Are you ready to accept my terms?"

"I am."

"Then you must watch until it is done or we will have no deal," Lexa commanded.

"I… I understand." Cage saw his father looked pain for a moment, looking at him with grief in his eyes, before nodding in resignation. "Goodbye, my son."

The President pressed a button, and suddenly the door to the cell opened. Cage stood there for a moment, wondering what was going on, until he heard footsteps. Turning to look at the door, it was easy to see that the people coming in weren't his own, but a group of the outsiders.

Men and women he had called savages and inferiors all his life.

Some of which had knives in their hands.

"No," Cage shook his head in disbelief, even as two strong Grounders took his arms to restrain him, turning him to face both his father and the Commander. "Please no! You can't do this; I'm your son-!"

"Jus drein jus daun," the Commander said firmly, as Cage's father just stared through the window in solemn silence.

As one of the men ripped off his shirt, another began to draw their own blade over one of his arms. Even as the knives sliced into his skin, Cage could only why, why was this his fate…?

Eventually those thoughts soon faded, to the extent that all he could think about was the pain.

"So we're done?" Katniss looked around the group now gathered outside the battered control room.

"Anyone left in here now is capable of walking out of the main doors on their own accord," Anya nodded. "We have even been able to release a few prisoners from the clans who were still kept in their cells even with their plans for Skaikru."

"All who came to me at the lower levels were able to produce at least one trusted witness that they had never done anything to the twelve tribes of the Coalition before I let them through," Thor affirmed, before he looked over at Johanna and Octavia. "And yourselves?"

"Place seems empty," Johanna nodded.

"And for additional confirmation, Raven helped me sync up the suit's sensors with the mountain's own internal cameras," Peeta added. "I couldn't see everything, obviously, but I ran a check and there's no indication of any remaining unaccounted heat signatures inside this place, apart from a few people in the lower levels."

"…We have done well," Thor observed solemnly.

"As well as any of us could in a situation like this," Katniss replied, pleased to see that the rest of the team around her looked just as solemn as she did. They might have officially won, but no matter how hard they'd worked to arrange a compromise that would keep the innocent safe, there would have still been a few casualties who would have just believed they were protecting their families from ruthless primitives…

"Mockingjay," Lexa's voice said over the radio.

"Commander?" Katniss responded, shifting her radio to 'Speaker' so that the rest of the team could hear the news. "How are things going down there?"

"Dante Wallace and I have made our accord. With his witnessing his son's death by a thousand cuts, we accept his surrender."

"Hold on; Cage is dead?" Clarke cut in. "I thought he'd been taken prisoner for a later trial-?"

"He escaped and gathered his forces in an attempt to mount a final assault," Lexa explained. "We permitted him to gather them at the laboratory where Doctor Tsing's work had been collected, and then Dante Wallace… rendered them unconscious."

"An emergency gas used to ensure that troublesome test subjects were contained," Dante put in, evidently listening to the radio call himself. "Once we moved him to a private room, I spoke with Cage to confirm that he had no intention of surrendering to us or abandoning his vendetta against your people, and then…"

"And then he received the death by a thousand cuts," Lexa finished.

"Death by- and you made his father watch that?" Octavia cut in, disgust clear in her voice.

"A price I was willing to pay to guarantee the survival of the rest of my people," Dante said, with the kind of grim edge that put Octavia in mind of Thor when he had told her about him abandoning the Ark. "The rest of my son's followers will be…"

"His immediate associates will soon follow him in the same manners." Lexa finished for the former president. "Those who did no harm and seek to atone will be spared and allowed to receive treatment from Thor's people; Cage Wallace's remaining forty followers, who accepted their rulers' treatment of us, will die a direct death."

"Which is?" Clarke put in, looking anxiously at Katniss.

"One stab through the heart, quickly and without pain; murder without regret cannot be condoned, but many of these did nothing more personally to us than go along with their orders."

"That… we can work with that," Katniss decided. "What about Dante?"

"He shall be judged eventually," Lexa said. "We shall wait for you to join us."

"Thanks," Katniss said, before she terminated the call and turned to look at the other Avengers gathered around her. "OK, with that done… are we sorted here?"

"All those who expressed regret have been sent to Asgard for transfusions and will be returned to Earth as soon as they are safe," Thor affirmed.

"And everyone left here either made it clear they're sorry or tried to attack us as 'traitors to America' before we took them down; I think we worked out who's on what side," Johanna grinned as she spun her axe in her artificial hand (she was really becoming fond of that particular 'trick' since she found out how flexible her new arm's wrist was). "Only question now is what we do with this thing?"

"It's… interesting," Clarke said, looking uncertainly at the cocoon that apparently held Monty before she turned back to Bellamy. "Is that… anything like what happened to you?"

"Well, keep in mind that I didn't really see the thing until after I broke out of the damn thing, but it looks basically like what I saw of the remaining bits after I broke out," Bellamy nodded.

"So is he going to be like you?" Octavia asked, looking between her brother and the cocoon with an eager grin (I decided to assume she just wanted a second opinion rather than that she had a low opinion of my own earlier observations).

"Unlikely," Thor said, which at least assured me that my earlier guess had been correct. "From what I have heard, the mutation process caused by these crystals were always unique; no one person would come through it with the same ability, and in some cases subjects could experience significant physical mutation along with receiving a power."

"Physical mutation?" Johanna asked as she indicated Anya. "You mean like Big Green here?"

"Possibly even more extreme," Thor said grimly. "There are rumours of an Inhuman whose mutation rendered him unable to speak because his merest whisper could destroy a mountain, and another whose transformation turned him into… I believe Midgard would have called him a giant 'bulldog'."

"A dog," Bellamy repeated. "I could have been turned into a dog?"

"That was one occasion, and that dog was allegedly also capable of teleportation across vast distances-"

"OK, we'll… worry about the maybes later," Katniss cut that discussion off, before she glanced over at Anya. "In the meantime, maybe you could help us get this thing somewhere safe?"

In response, Anya walked over and picked up the strange column as easily as though it was an empty box, smiling nonchalantly at her new leader.

"Was there any doubt?" she asked.

"Quite," Katniss observed with a dry smile. "Well, let's Monty out of here and…"

Katniss trailed off, suddenly reminded of the Commander's forces still waiting outside and their well-expressed desire for vengeance. She was satisfied that Lexa would spare the children, so at least she wouldn't have to deal with the idea that she was basically condoning a new set of Games, but the thought that she had to let people die…

"…Let's just get this over with," she finished, indicating the path leading to the mountain's main exit. As the other Avengers silently walked after her, Katniss was struck by the somewhat comforting thought that at least she wasn't alone in facing this kind of decision; she might be the leader, but she liked to think someone would have spoken up if they had a better suggestion they wanted to offer.