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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AN: In advance, this chapter is very focused on exposition, but the time has come for Steve to fill the new Avengers in on some of the specific details of exactly how the original team fell. Just keep in mind that Tony, Nat, Clint and Bruce were drawn into the future in 'Man Like No Other' from a point shortly after the Battle of New York and at least a few months before 'Iron Man 3', with Steve's words inspiring them to do things differently to what he remembered when they got back, and hopefully the events discussed here will make sense.
Falling Hope, Rising Threat
The only frustrating part about Steve's last statement was that he refused to elaborate on it until we had gathered all our resources, which meant getting the whole team together. The sheer intensity of Steve's expression had cut short Clarke's initial plans to look for her mother before she left the camp, and while Octavia had been torn regarding what to do, when Kane had promised to ensure that Lincoln was treated well, she had decided it was best to let him focus on getting well while she stayed with the rest of the team. Once she had made it clear she was coming with us, even I could see that Bellamy would insist on coming along as well. Anya was suspicious at Steve not sharing more details so far, but she had accepted his and Thor's desire to wait until they were ready to tell us more about the situation, and Clarke's loyalty to the group almost went without saying right now.
Kane had obviously chosen to stay behind to make sure everything went well back at the Ark, but I had to admit that I'd been surprised when Raven and Monty had also volunteered to come along. Clarke had been prepared to turn that offer down, but Steve had simply observed that technical skills would be useful if he was right about what we were up against and had accepted that decision. For the moment, the two of them had settled into the lab at the back of the hovercraft to do more work on the hard drive we'd retrieved from Doctor Tsing's lab, leaving the rest of us to talk with Thor and Steve about whatever had them both so worked up, which included his decision to collect our final teammate for this mission.
"We really need to bring Prim for this?" I looked uncertainly at Steve, unused to Prim feeling comfortable sitting opposite me rather than cuddled up beside me. "If this is as dangerous as you say it is-"
"I've been training, Katniss!" Prim looked at me with an indignant glare that would have made me smile if it wasn't for the black suit she was wearing. "Doctor Griffin's been teaching me some new medical techniques while I was at the Ark, but I don't just call myself 'Black Widow' because I liked Natasha; I want to help out in the field too!"
As much as I hated the idea of Prim putting herself in danger, I had to agree that she'd been doing well in the training simulations Beetee and Steve had created for her back at the compound. She hadn't had much opportunity to go out in the field so far, but I already knew that if I brought that up, Steve would just point out that there would never be a mission where I could guarantee her safety, so it was best to let her get started on a mission where the entire team were available to help if something came up.
"Out of curiosity, why do you want to find this Jaha guy anyway?" Finnick looked curiously at Clarke. "I mean, if Kane's the Chancellor now, do we need the old one hanging around?"
"Maybe not, but Jaha's son was my best friend," Clarke explained with a brief shrug. "Wells was one of the first victims of life on Earth, and… I know it's probably stupid, but I feel like I owe it to Wells to make sure Jaha gets a fresh start even if he can't."
"I've heard worse reasons to save someone," Steve gave my new second an understanding nod before he solemnly looked around at the rest of the team. "But right now you need to understand what we're up against."
"Which is?" Bellamy asked.
"To start with," Thor put in grimly, "the circumstances that led to the fall of the Avengers were not as simple as you believe."
"So it wasn't just Natasha dying and Big Green going psycho?" Johanna asked.
"Bloodaxe," I glared over at my axe-wielding teammate.
"…Sorry," Johanna winced as she took in the glares from the rest of the team; evidently, even she knew that she had just crossed a line or two with that particular comment.
"…No," Steve spoke up, giving the axe-wielding Avenger a pained glare of his own before he continued. "For the Avengers, things started to go wrong when Aldrich Killian attacked Tony."
"Aldrich Killian?" Finnick repeated in surprise. "Now that's a name to run away from."
"Killian was once just another aspiring scientist, but a chain of events led to him having a significant breakthrough and developing a grudge against Tony for 'neglecting' him during a past appeal for funding," Steve explained. "To cut a long story short, Killian created a fake terrorist group using a nanite serum that enhanced the subjects' strength and gave them some pyrokinetic abilities, but could also cause them to literally explode if their bodies couldn't regulate the process."
"Oh," Bellamy said, looking at his hands in apprehension.
"Your transformation is a natural part of your physiology, Bellamy Blake; I doubt that such a fate could befall you," Thor reassured him. "Killian's soldiers were dangerous because he was trying to force such a change on them; such is not the case with."
"OK, so the guy had an army of superstrong firestarters; how'd you take him down?" Johanna asked with an eager grin.
"Firstly, it was only Tony who faced him."
"Only Tony?" Peeta looked at Steve in surprise. "Not the whole team?"
"You have to keep in mind that after we defeated Loki, it initially seemed as though there was no immediate need for the Avengers to remain active as a group, so we… did our own things for a while," Steve explained. "I was working on adjusting to life after seventy years on ice, Clint and Natasha were back at SHIELD, Tony gave Bruce somewhere safe to stay, and Thor…"
"I was assisting Asgard in re-establishing our influence after the destruction of the Bifrost," Thor explained. "My people had spent over two years cut off from the worlds we were supposed to protect; it had required considerable power on my father's behalf to get me to Earth in time to participate in the Battle of New York alone…"
"OK, so you were all busy back then; what does that have to do with Killian?" Clarke asked.
"Tony had made a few new suits since the Battle of New York, but he hadn't really committed to a new model; he'd just made a few variations of his original suit with the idea that he'd be able to pick which one to use in whatever crisis came up," Steve explained. "As a result, he was caught off-guard when Killian's forces attacked his house after he called them out when a friend of his was injured in one of their 'terrorist attacks', and had to use a more basic suit that was intended to be more of a stealth prototype than an outright weapon."
"He was trying to be Natasha?" Prim perked up.
"That's… a slightly disturbing way to look at it, but I guess that works," Steve smiled at my sister before he continued. "Anyway, he was able to get away from the attack and make contact with his home computers to get the other suits ready for him, but while he was tracking Killian's fake terrorists, Killian himself managed to capture Pepper Potts, Tony's… well, she was officially just his girlfriend, but we all knew there was more to it than that."
"Things didn't work out?" Bellamy asked.
"In the sense that Pepper died as a result of Killian's machinations," Steve confirmed solemnly, the memory clearly still a painful one even after all these years. "Tony was able to have his other armours sent to him to face Killian's Extremis-enhanced soldiers at the docks, but the suits were overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers; Tony was having to ditch one suit for the next as he tried to find one that could do enough damage in one go. In the end, the only way Tony could stop the Extremis soldiers was to set the damaged suits to self-destruct, taking care to trap Killian in one of the last suits before he blew it up… and he didn't realise that Pepper was also at the docks as well until he'd given the command."
"Oh no," Finnick said, a rare display of raw, open emotion on his face as he looked at the original Avenger.
"He blew up his girlfriend?" Prim looked sadly at Steve.
"And that was just the start of things going wrong for Tony," Steve nodded, even as he gave Prim a grateful smile. "As much as we all valued Stark as an ally in the field, as a businessman…"
"Like me, Stark was not well-suited for the responsibilities of running his chosen kingdom," Thor took up the explanation. "Lady Pepper had always been able to keep the relevant parts of his company running smoothly while allowing him to focus on his suits, but with her absent, it did not take long for his company to flounder. That said, he would have done better if one of his most significant investments did not turn out to be the result of an elaborate deception created by another old foe."
"Who?" Anya asked.
"I told you about SHIELD, right?"
"Yeah…" I put in, nodding in contemplation as I recalled what my mentor had told me about them. "They were a kind of… secret security force that handled the strange and unusual, right? Their leader was the guy who brought the Avengers together in the first place to face big threats like Loki and the Abomination?"
"Correct," Steve nodded. "Except that the organisation had been subverted from the beginning by HYDRA."
"HYDRA?" Peeta repeated, reminding me that I still hadn't shared all of Steve's old stories with the rest of the team. "What was that?"
"In a nutshell, a group that believed the only way to protect the planet was to completely control it," Steve explained grimly. "Part of their plan for control involved three helicarriers- think larger versions of these hovercraft with an arsenal on each- equipped with a flight system developed by Tony himself. Once launched, the helicarriers would have been able to basically patrol the entire world, eliminating anyone HYDRA had identified as a threat, while also being impossible for anyone to stop from the ground; their originally-planned launch would have included sending those helicarriers out after several key targets, including the Avengers."
"But… you stopped them, right?" Prim asked.
"To a point," Steve confirmed solemnly. "I realised that something was going on in SHIELD before the helicarriers were launched, but I wasn't able to work out what until I was captured by… an assassin working for HYDRA. They underestimated me just enough that I was able to get away and take one of their agents captive; I interrogated him with some help from the original Falcon for help, but even after I was able to confirm that the other Avengers weren't HYDRA…"
"You didn't get to them in time?" Clarke asked.
"We were able to come together in time to destroy the three helicarriers, particularly with some aid from the original Falcon, but in the process…" Steve sighed, a pained expression on his face. "It's lucky that things didn't go worse; let's leave it at that."
"OK," I nodded in understanding; if Steve didn't want to talk about something that clearly gave him such pain even after this long, I wasn't going to press the issue.
"Anyway," Steve continued with what even I realised was a forced grin, "for various reasons, the destruction of the helicarriers further compromised Tony's financial resources; he barely had enough money to maintain the few armours he had left, never mind funding the team as a whole. We managed to get enough support from what was left of SHIELD to start hunting the remnants of HYDRA, but when we tracked down the group that had taken custody of the sceptre Loki had used during his invasion, which allowed him to control minds…"
He shook his head sadly at the memory before he finished. "Long story short, HYDRA's experiments with that sceptre provoked a brief mental breakdown from Tony that gave him the push to use the sceptre's energy to create a new artificial intelligence program that could theoretically help us protect the world."
"I take it that didn't work?" Clarke asked.
"In the sense that this intelligence named itself Ultron, destroyed Tony's existing intelligence system and then managed to create a body for itself using the remnants of some of Tony's old armours," Steve affirmed grimly. "Fortunately, with most of Tony's existing data access privileges lost after the collapse of Stark Industries and SHIELD reduced to more basic resources, Ultron wasn't able to harness all of HYDRA's resources to use against us, but he managed to gather enough power to try and go after a major nuclear stockpile."
"Hold on, I thought you said that Snow was the one-?" Johanna began.
"He was," Thor confirmed. "Ultron's actions likely inspired the Maestro's own assault by affirming how easy it would be to do such a thing, but at the time, we were able to defeat Ultron's assault and destroy his army of robot drones. After we destroyed his final body and his human allies, Stark speculated that Ultron's consciousness would have been able to retreat into the internet, but he assured us that he still had enough business contacts to be kept informed if anyone attempted to recreate Ultron physically."
"Which… might not have stopped Ultron from just… talking to someone?" Peeta asked tentatively.
"Potentially, yes," Steve nodded. "Stark assured me that there were physical limitations regarding data storage capacity that would stop Ultron from being able to do much from any one location, but he could still disperse himself across other computers if he wanted."
"Huh?" Octavia asked.
"I think Tony told me a bit about something like that, actually," Peeta said thoughtfully. "Basically… Ultron was so complicated that it would take a very large or very powerful computer system to hold him in one form, and… there weren't many people capable of building a computer like that?"
"And he couldn't just try and make such a body himself without us noticing the physical resources or the required power supply being diverted to activate it," Steve affirmed. "From what Tony told me after Bruce… snapped, he was aware of reports of a scientific research team looking into artificial intelligence programs on the scale of Ultron, but they were focusing on digitally uploading the program to be holographically projected rather than creating a fully autonomous body for them. As Tony explained to me, he was able to do… something technical… that basically trapped Ultron and any other artificial intelligence that this team might have developed before it could escape onto the internet again-"
"Didn't they mind about that?" Peeta cut in. "I thought you and the other Avengers were all about defending freedom…"
"True, but there are some mistakes that you can only make once, so it's best to ensure you don't have the chance to make them in the first place," Steve explained. "Besides, once Tony explained that Ultron was in their system, they were willing to let him lock Ultron down in their computers, even if they rejected the idea of destroying their own program. Considering that we were already in a difficult position with the public at the time, it was decided that it would be better for us not to press the issue regarding what they did with Ultron and their other program later. Tony was always concerned that Doctor Franko would make his own mistakes and give her program too much freedom…"
"Wait," I held up a hand as I looked between Steve and Thor, turning over my memory of my first meeting with the four time-displaced Avengers when I'd initially learnt Steve's name. "I thought you told me when… we were talking about the original team… that the original Avengers collapsed after Jane Foster and the Black Widow died and the Hulk went crazy, after which you went to Asgard, you were put into cryogenic suspension, and Tony was just left feeling guilty?"
"In my defence, I was… streamlining things a bit," Steve explained.
"You lied?" Johanna looked at Steve with one of those stares that made it hard to properly judge what she was thinking.
"Well… would you want to relive the full details of learning that everything you had been fighting for had fallen and that you had lost the team that was basically your family for the second time in your life?" Steve said, a hurt, defensive edge to his voice. "I gave you all the facts; I just… adjusted the timings a bit."
"In what way?" Finnick asked.
"In the sense that more time elapsed between my return to Asgard and the nuclear war initiated by the Maestro," Thor explained. "I had maintained semi-regular contact with Asgard after I made Earth my home to confirm that matters at home were under control, but when I returned without Mjolnir, my father was forced to place me in my version of the Odinsleep for the first time."
"The Odinsleep?" Octavia asked.
"At a certain time, I am required to enter a deep state of rest so that I may replenish my energies and restore my natural power reserves. This was the first time I had entered such a state on my own, but with my father preparing to officially pass the throne to me… coupled with my poor condition when I arrived on Asgard, he was required to keep me in that state for longer than would be usual."
"And by the time you woke up, Bruce had become Snow?"
"Essentially yes."
"It took… well, it took a few years," Steve put in with a grim edge. "From what Tony told me, after Bruce had killed Clint and… well, crippled me… he basically went underground for a while. Tony did his best to find where Bruce had gone, still holding onto the hope that he could find some way to help our friend get over his mental breakdown…"
"Really?" Johanna looked sceptically at him. "After the guy killed one of your team?"
"Bruce was always in a… delicate mental state because of his condition; it wasn't hard for Tony to defend his initial actions as just a brief breakdown that Bruce could have gotten over if he was given a chance," Steve explained with a wistful smile. "Of course, that idea was basically over after the bombs…"
"Can we get back to the City of Light?" I asked, realising that Steve was becoming particularly melancholy when talking about this particular point in his life even if he hadn't been an active participant in these events. "What does it have to do with anything?"
"Right…" Steve said, nodding briefly at me in thanks before he continued. "Well, after he helped Doctor Franko's team trap Ultron, Tony kept an eye on their research for the next few years to offer what help he could. A few years after Tony 'put me on ice', Doctor Franko's daughter, Doctor Rebecca Franko, was able to complete her father's research and complete her own artificial intelligence program, apparently independent of Ultron's attempt to configure it to share his own perspectives. Part of that program was what she described as the 'City of Light', which was apparently intended to be a virtual reality network that would allow her to communicate directly with the A.I. program in a kind of digital world. Tony offered Rebecca Franko some help cracking the challenges herself, but… well, the last message he had from her made it clear that she preferred to tackle such problems completely on her own."
"And you think that the 'City of Light' Jaha was looking for has something to do with the City of Light Doctor Franko's program was talking about?" Bellamy asked.
"At the very least it's worth making sure," Steve nodded. "I may not have met with Doctor Franko myself, but Tony's references to her in his surviving notes… well, the term 'City of Light' cropped up almost disturbingly often, with some worrying implications for the associated context."
"So either this Doctor Franko's program is still active now or someone/something's maybe picking up where it left off?" Octavia put in.
"Either way, it's worth checking," I nodded at Steve and Thor in understanding before I turned to Finnick in the pilot's seat. "So where exactly are we going?"
"The captain and I were able to ask a couple of people about what direction Jaha's group were taking when they left the camp and what he was expecting to cross, but beyond that-"
"You have this," Raven's voice called over to us from the back of the hovercraft, followed by the HUD display in front of Finnick activating to display what looked like a map of the country that soon focused on a particular area, a red line vivid in the middle of the display.
"And 'this' is?" Anya looked sceptically back at the mechanic.
"Map to the City of Light," Raven grinned as she and Monty walked up to join us, the hard drive we'd taken from Tsing's lab in her hand. "We were already checking if this thing had anything interesting on it, so I decided to run 'City of Light' through the search engine just to see what came up, and… well, here we are."
"They had a map to this place?" Clarke looked sceptically at Raven.
"More like they'd worked out approximately where it was; Raven and I just ran that through the ship's computer to give you a clear route," Monty explained, shaking his head with a slight smile. "I don't know if I should be grateful or disappointed that computer tech hasn't advanced that much since the Ark…"
"Just be grateful it all works," Finnick observed as he glanced over the map. "If we keep up an even pace, we should reach the compound in a couple of hours…"
"Compound?" I repeated. "So we're not talking about an actual city, then?"
"It doesn't look like it," Monty confirmed. "From what we could translate from the records, it seems like the whole 'City of Light' thing isn't a physical place, but more of a… well, even they weren't entirely sure…"
"I think we should see for ourselves before we start making assumptions and plans about what we're going to be dealing with," Steve cut the young man off, even as he looked at Monty in approval. "Good job, Mr Green; at least now we have a better idea of where we're going."