Embrace the Fire: The Avenger Games, Chapter 17 - COMPLETE

[lorata]

GUYS IT'S DONE IT'S ACTUALLY DONE

I HAVE WRITTEN ACTUALLY-LITERALLY OVER A MILLION WORDS OF AUS IN THE TIME IT TOOK ME TO WRITE THESE 150,000 BECAUSE THAT'S HOW MY BRAIN WORKS BUT WHATEVER I DON'T CARE IT'S DONE

Title: Embrace the Fire: The Avenger Games
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence, character death
Summary: "Trust me, and I'll give you something better than a Mockingjay. I'll give you The Avengers." "What's that supposed to mean?" "Trust me, and you'll see."
Author's Notes: Don't forget the post-credits stinger! Scroll all the way to the end.



The sky roiled above them, the clouds a shifting mass of purple-black-green like the formation of an ugly bruise; they spun in a lazy arc that grew faster and more frenetic as though the Gamemakers stood on the other side of the dome and stirred them with a massive paddle. Light flickered behind the wall of clouds, and as they spun they pulled away from the centre, leaving a gaping black hole that struck Loki to the heart with instinctive terror even as he fought to swallow it.

The forcefields shivered -- the hairs on Loki's arms did their best to rise beneath the thin coating of Arena grime -- and the barrier between them vanished. The walls around them remained, penning them into the same spot, but as Loki staggered forward and Thor to meet him, they stood face to face with nothing between them.

Loki flipped two daggers from his belt and brought them up to bear, but the energy pumping through him moved with a sluggish reluctance. He sought the thrill, the purpose that snagged his bones and propelled him to action but found nothing but confusion. He'd dreamt of this a hundred ways, how best to slay his brother, and now his heart pounded and his fingers clenched on the handles of his knives, but he missed the rising joy and anticipation he had expected would flood him at this moment.

"They wish us to murder each other," Thor said dully, perhaps speaking for the audience even now, trained into providing context for the less astute viewers even as the world crumbled around him. His fury had already evaporated, as it always did; Thor shouted, he railed, he flung words like javelins only to regret them later when he saw the damage they had wrought, but he did not hold his anger long. Even now -- even faced with the truth that their entire lives, their very existence had been one carefully manufactured trick after the other -- Thor did not hold his rage. Now he dragged a hand over his face, pushed his dank blond hair from his eyes and stared up at the sky with jaw taut and eyes shadowed. "I will not do it."

"If you have a death wish then I am only too happy to fulfil it," Loki said, the words bursting forth from him after years of habit, and yet -- and yet. They rang hollow, the low thud of a fingernail against flawed crystal when he'd expected the clear, beautiful ringing sound that spoke of perfect craftsmanship. He'd expected one more stair and jarred his ankle against the unyielding ground, and in moments even that would shift and become a quagmire. Loki grasped for certainty and caught nothing but cobwebs.

Thor shrugged. He nudged his hammer with his boot though it did not budge, and this only served to draw the darkness nearer. "Be that as it may, I will not kill you, not for their sport nor anyone's. I will not punish you for a treason you were all but led to commit."

"I made my choices," Loki said for the hundredth time, and look at him now, an automaton spouting catchphrases. He disgusted even himself; where had his conviction gone, the only thing that bore him through years of slowly freezing in Thor's shadow?

"Choices were made," Thor agreed, jaw going tight. "I cannot say you truly made them."

Loki did not respond -- how could he, what answer lurked beyond his grasp that would turn the world right-side up again -- and moments later the sky creaked. It groaned with warning like the ersatz treehouse Loki and Thor had unwisely attempted to construct in their boyhood, and a moment later the sound intensified as the heavens tore themselves in two.

Something emerged from the gaping maw, the artificial light of the Arena shimmering against metal and plastic as the Gamemakers' latest creation dropped through the hole in the sky.

No more thinking, no more talking; the moment required action, and Loki slammed the door on the whirling in his mind, parcelling it away for later. He could kill Thor later, once he set his mind to rights, but that would be moot if both of them fell prey to some mechanized madness in the meantime. Prioritize, the Centre taught them; making allies at the start of the Games never precluded their murder later.

Decision made, Loki stepped close to Thor and drew his knives; Thor, close enough that the heat radiated from his arm and invaded Loki's consciousness with his presence, unsheathed his sword and held it at the ready. The creature did not fall to the ground but rather flew to the forcefield as though drawn to it, and it skittered down the side of the invisible wall, hesitating now and then to monitor its surroundings.

"What manner of beast is this?" Thor muttered, lifting his weapon and arranging his stance to position himself between Loki and the creature.

It was ever thus; apparently a lifetime of training and cultivating a special brotherly hatred did not erase Thor's idiotic and unwanted need to protect. Loki clucked his tongue and shoved Thor aside without tearing his eyes away. "Does it matter?" he asked. "Analysis hardly seems your style. See thing, kill thing, all ends well, yes?" The creature appeared constructed of overlapping metal plates like an armoured insect, and it scurried down the forcefield on a myriad of legs, lashing a scorpion's tail behind it and chittering with gaping jaws. "No eyes," Loki murmured in spite of himself, and Thor nodded his assent. "Though I would not trust it to be blind."

"Sound, smell, any manner of thing, I should think," Thor said, and thank the gods for that assessment, no one else could possibly have imagined such wisdom. "Well, no matter, I shall soon dispatch it!"

"Thor, wait --" Loki burst out, for the Gamemakers would not send something so small and unassuming were it actually so.

As always, too late. Thor swung his sword, catching the creature between two plates and splitting it in twain. He finished the stroke and swapped the sword to his free hand, spinning around to grin at Loki with a triumphant "ha!" --

-- that keeled up into a harsh scream as bile-coloured liquid burst out from the gash in the metal, spraying over Thor and his sword and the cement, hissing and smoking wherever it touched. Thor shouted and tore his gauntlets from his arms, kicking them away as the acid burned through them. His unprotected skin blistered and peeled, and Thor sucked in hard breaths of pain and staggered back, bringing his weapon back to bear.

"So," Thor said, staring up at the sky and taking ragged gasps, and he and Loki shifted positions to press their backs together, the forcefields on either side. Above them, the hole in the sky shimmered, and from it a line of creatures began their jerky descent. "This seems straightforward enough. Kill the creatures, avoid being torn to pieces or scalded by burning acid. I'm sure we've fought worse."

"I'd like to see your research," Loki shot back. He aimed a strike at the underbelly of the nearest creature, scooping it with his blade and flinging it away so it bounced off the forcefield and righted itself with a fury of twitching legs and angry chitters. It scuttled toward him on the ground, and Loki stabbed it through from the top so that it screeched and collapsed without coating him in its corrosive bodily fluids. Two down. Infinite more to go.

Everything hurt. A lot. And Clint didn't just say that to be a whiner, he'd been in training since almost before he could walk, and he knew pain, all right. This hurt like being run over, pulled back to his feet, turned inside-out, and being told to stand still at attention while live scorpions walked all over him.

Okay, maybe he was exaggerating a little, but you try stabbing yourself in the gut to disguise the insertion of a freaky untested nano-bio-device that would block out the tracker's life signals, because the Gamemakers would get suspicious if the life signs cut out without a dip first. So in order for Tony Stark's magic device to work without throwing half the Capitol onto the plan, Clint had to bleed out enough that it looked like his life signs failed on their own, then still manage to keep it together enough to jam the little voodoo machine inside the oozing hole in his gut to cut off the life signs and activate the cannon, and then not actually die while he waited for the girls to stick him full of adrenaline cocktail and restart his heart.

Yeah. Try doing that and then make sure to keep smiling while the rest of the team on the ground played with their dolls or did a few rounds of football with a decomposing skull or whatever it was they were doing, because it sure wasn't keeping to the plan. Clint wasn't kidding when he said he was going to demand one hell of a raise when he got out of this.

Clint bit back a curse of annoyance and wiped a hand over his face instead. It came away wet and clammy, and fresh Snow on a shit-heap but they'd better get out of here fast or Clint's death might not be so for-the-cameras after all. "What the hell is going on down there?" he said finally. He sat slouched in the pilot's seat, conserving energy, and he looked over his shoulder at Jean, who stood closest to the communications console. "Can someone check the underbelly cameras and tell me what's going on? We should've gotten the signal by now."

Jean stared at the console. "I've never seen this many buttons in my life," she said, uncertain, and oh right, she was from the backwoods where they, like, took baths out of metal tubs heated over the fire. Now Clint felt like a dick. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Here," Sharon said, moving in close, and she pressed her hand over a series of controls. "I had to run a lot of machines at the factory," she explained when Jean gave her a startled look. "It's not really that hard if you know what you're doing. I bet Jenny could do it too."

The kid had hardly said a word since her district partner went to the big hovercraft in the sky, but now she shrugged. "Probably," Jenny said, but she didn't move. Normally this would be where Jan would pipe in that if they could do it, she could do it, but after Hank she hadn't managed much better. She sat in a corner with her head resting on her knees.

A lot of deaths on Clint's watch, and the fact that Hank Pym had gone full child-slapping crazy at the end didn't make Clint feel better about it. "What's happening?" he asked instead, because there'd be time for a performance review later, and only if he made it out alive.

Jean swallowed. "Well, they're -- uh. They're fighting a giant metal monster thing?"

"What?" Clint sat up straight, but the pain shot through his gut and this time he really did let loose a blue streak. "Metal monster what now?"

"That's what it looks like," Sharon admitted, pushing her hair out of her eyes. It hung down lank and filthy like the rest of them -- Clint itched in places he didn't even want to think about, and he'd been without showers on ops before but never anything this long -- but she didn't seem to notice. Her voice was tight but not panicked, and Clint had to give these kids credit. The outer districts made 'em tough, no matter what the trainers at the Academy in One said. "Nobody else is dead, though, I don't think, they keep moving. I think they're okay for now."

"Okay then. I guess we wait until we can figure out what to do." A normal hovercraft might have defensive weapons, or bombs, or something of the like, but not a corpse wagon like this one. Their hovercraft would be equipped with the barest supplies since its only job was to pick up dead tributes and hold them in refrigerated storage until they could come back to the Capitol and sent to the morgue or the labs. "Sharon, you still have the thing?"

Sharon patted the utility belt at her waist, which held the last thing Bruce Banner had done before his death; the device to knock out the forcefield which, in theory, would let them all fly out of here and go home. They had to be close enough to the force field to make contact, and that meant not even standing on the top of the highest skyscraper would do it. When the time came, one of them would have to go out the roof hatch and set it off within a few feet of the field itself.

Once the field blew, they'd only have a few seconds to grab everyone and get out. Everyone downstairs fighting, their job was to get themselves into what could pass for a defensive circle, then Nat would set off a flare to let Clint and the girls know it was time to take down the forcefield. After that, all they had to do was position while Clint deactivated the field, then he'd fly the craft down, pick up the rest of the team, and blast off up and out of there before the Gamemakers could bypass Banner's system and turn the field back on.

Easy peasy, no way it could go wrong, right, ignore the man behind the curtain and the cracks in the ice. This mission already had enough liabilities to set up its own discount shop: complications 50% off, now with a side helping of giant killer robots! Sometimes Clint thought the entire Gamemaker staff must be made up of angry virgins, because nobody else could ever be so sadistic for no reason.

"It looks like they're trying to get into position, but every time they get too close, the robot-thing fires at them and they have to scatter," Jean reported. "I don't know how we're supposed to get them like this, they keep moving. It's like trying to set fire to an anthill."

"Did anyone ever tell you only disturbed kids do that?" Clint asked, just because he had to talk or the pain might overwhelm him and drag him down. Of course he'd been killing actual people as a kid, so maybe not the best time to point fingers. Across the hovercraft Jan flinched, and oh yeah, her district partner had been into bugs, or something like that. Well, shit.

"Shut up," Jean shot back, but then Sharon shushed both of them, flailing her hands.

"There's something else!" Sharon yelped, and Clint let out a hissing breath. Looks like the Gamemakers figured out that this was meant to be the finale, and they weren't content to wait and see whether the alliance would really fracture and kill each other off. "It's another robot -- I think, it's moving too fast -- but it's not like the other one. It looks like it's not done."

"It looks like somebody built it in their basement," Jean said, frowning and squinting at the screen. "Seriously, it's a real hack job. It's like somebody made a flying robot out of spare parts that were just lying around in the street --"

She stopped, looked up and met Clint's gaze with wide eyes. "So," Clint said neutrally. "Anyone see Tony Stark down there?"

Tony was never meant to be the hero.

Not his game, not his bag, and not his job either, not with suicidal idiots like Steve Rogers lining up around the block to take a bullet for the cause (any cause, it hardly seemed to matter to these people, as long as they got to martyr themselves for it). He'd gone into the Arena pissed as hell and made it through most of the Games the same way, feeding himself on expired energy bars and terrible coffee and cheap analgesic whiskey, determined to let the rest of the world go to hell because what did it matter? What did Tony Stark owe a rebellion that had put him into the Arena on purpose so they could leverage his hatred toward the Capitol for their own gain?

Nothing, that's what, and that at least, hadn't changed. Tony owed the rebellion absolutely dick all, and just let them try to tell him otherwise.

Outside the iron giant kept firing, huge blasts that tore through the air and rattled the foundations of the building where Tony was hiding, and he just hoped Steve and the others could keep themselves alive for a few more minutes. His gear was in piles all over the room, stuffed into various backpacks and collected over the course of a week so that no one would suspect he'd been gathering anything but supplies. Now Tony grabbed a gauntlet here, a piece of plating there -- a chest piece, a pair of boots, the stabilizers -- and strapped them down, yanking the ties tight over his arms, his thighs, his chest. He hadn't had time to test it anywhere near to his satisfaction, not even compared to the times he got drunk and challenged himself to change the world of technology before he sobered up, but no time now.

Tony picked up the helmet and clicked it together, joining the faceplate with the curved back piece and flicking the locks into place. It stared back at him, the slitted eyes blank and empty, and Tony took several long, not-ragged-nope breaths. "Here we go, Jarvis," he said, slipping off his sunglasses. Without his HUD everything looked like a mausoleum, and Tony shuddered and lowered the helmet over his head. "Okay, transfer power now," Tony said, and he folded up his sunglasses and slipped them into his pocket because what the hell, he'd made them and he liked them.

"Initiating," Jarvis said in his ear, and Tony stood there in his slapdash, makeshift, untested suit of armour, staring at the black screen and the limited physical field of vision until the transfer clicked on and his HUD returned, complete with data feeds and external camera footage.

"Yes!" Tony checked the relays in his chest, tapping the arc reactor and wiggling the connections. Nothing like a few loose wires to send him plummeting to the ground. "Here goes nothing."

Steve's voice filtered through the sounds of the fight, barking out commands to the others, and Tony shook his head as he moved awkwardly toward the door. He didn't have time for proper joint articulation, something to work on if he survived and made it to a lab and decent technology.

Tony had built the suit for himself, back when he thought the rebellion and everyone involved could jump in a lake and stay there. He'd given himself weapons and a means of escape -- easy enough to breach the forcefield long enough to let him through, just not enough for anyone or anything else -- and he'd planned to take it. Once he had everything ready he would leave this place and all the idiots inside and find himself a home somewhere on his own terms, beholden to no one.

But the thing was, while Tony might not feel anything to an ambiguous cause -- they hadn't even bothered to talk about their end game, just asked for his trust that it was better than the current regime, which, break out the crayons and colour him skeptical -- the rebellion might be a thing, but people were people. There were kids in the Arena with him, good kids, smart kids, kids who'd fought and scrapped and almost died and lost their loved ones until they should be in tears on the ground but they weren't. They were still fighting, including Steve and his idiotic heroic streak that should have gotten him killed weeks ago but somehow hadn't.

Tony could still do it. Chances were the team could pull the rest of it off without him, with Nat at the helm; what good was a super-soldier spy if she couldn't take down a few killer giant robots anyway, right? Tony could make his getaway even easier now, what with all the commotion, and set himself up as an independent arms dealer when the inevitable war broke out. It would be a good gig, steady and solid, nothing like whatever he was guaranteed if he joined in with Fury and his shadows built on shadows.

He was never supposed to be the hero. Tony stepped outside, took one last, lingering look at the flickering forcefield overhead, then activated the flight mechanisms in his boots and flew straight for the metal monster, setting his gauntlet weapons for maximum firepower.

The first blast hit it right in its metal helmet, knocking it back a step. Tony swooped around behind -- nearly flying straight into a building -- and fired again, landing a shot at the back of its legs and bringing it to its knees. Steve ducked out from behind his shield, which he'd flung over him and Sam to stop the robot's next attack, and stared up at Tony with open shock on his face.

"Sorry I'm late to the party," Tony called out. "Guess the invitation got lost in the mail."

Steve pushed a hand into his hair, smearing grime across his forehead. "A fashionable entrance is better than none, I guess," he said, shooting Tony a relieved smile. "You think you can finish this thing off for us?"

Behind him the creature clanked to its feet, pistons groaning, and Tony fired the stabilizers in short bursts to keep himself in position. "My pleasure," he said. "You guys just get out of the way."

"Show off!" Natasha yelled up at him, and she did a running leap, backflipping off a broken building to land on the thing's shoulders, flinging her weight backwards and unbalancing the big tin colossus so it collapsed onto the ground again.

"Look who's talking, honey," Tony shot back, and she grinned at him, sharp and fierce and comradely, before darting off to the side and hauling Steve and Sam with her. "All right then," Tony said, checking the power levels on his gauntlets and cycling away some from the display to maximize his next shot. "Let's send you back to meet your maker. Too bad for you he won't be as handsome as yours truly."

The only problem with fighting robot monsters is that they never appreciated a good quip, but Tony supposed he'd survive. And more importantly, so might everyone else.

The pile of creature-corpses shifted under Loki's feet, and he cursed and danced to the side to avoid tumbling onto the ground. Too much acid-blood had spilled on the rooftop now; the ground lay pitted and weak from it, girders showing through the holes in the concrete, and even where the acid pooled too thin to eat through the roof itself, it showed no such compunction about doing so to the soles of Loki's boots. One false step early on had burned away a good portion of the leather, and while years of training and endurance tests had inured Loki to the pain of a little blistering, it would not be wise to allow that to happen again. Not even forbearance could counteract a foot eaten away to the bone.

He and Thor fought as they had not since childhood: as allies, back to back and shoulder to shoulder, and it took all the remaining power of Loki's attention not to revel in it. He had forgotten, years and years of fighting alongside no one but Mother -- and recently, not even she -- that a well-matched partner brought nearly as much satisfaction as a worthy opponent. He and Thor knew each other better in combat than any other, and they cut through creature after creature until the ground lay littered with their corpses.

"Old times," Thor called back over his shoulder, swinging his weapon in an upstroke that knocked one of the little beasts away and into the building behind, where it struck the brick hard and sparked, lifeless, on the ground.

"I don't recall ever fighting off a horde of mechanized mini-leviathans," Loki said, but the fight sang in his veins and wrested a fierce grin from him. He darted around to take out a creature that moved to strike Thor across his open left side before spinning back around to kill yet another.

"Details," Thor scoffed, though a moment later he gave a grunt of disgust and flung his sword away, the metal finally corrupted by the acid so that it melted in on himself. He drew another from the sheath on his back and returned to the skirmish a moment later.

Loki found himself laughing against his will, but the sound soon died. The creatures crawled from the sky in ever-increasing numbers -- one here, a pair there, soon they would come in threes and fours -- and this was not a fight that could be won. He and Thor would be crushed beneath the Gamemakers' inexorable boot, an example to all who sought to defy the Capitol and their decades-forged roles, unless Loki could conjure up a miracle and escape.

Yet there had scarce been a problem Loki could not talk his way out of. Perhaps he and Thor could twist the story to their advantage even now, find a new niche to slot themselves that would assuage the Gamemakers' wrath. He only required the time to come up with a plan, if Thor could buy it for him. All they need do was hold their own against a never-ending metaphor for the Capitol's all-consuming power; how difficult could that possibly be?

The carapaces beneath them writhed again, and Loki stumbled as one creature, stunned but not slain, crawled its way out from below its fallen brethren and did its best to devour his feet. Loki kicked it away, then lowered himself into a crouch and leapt as far as he could, barely missing a steaming puddle of acid. He stabbed the creature through as it scuttled after him, then turned back toward Thor --

-- who collapsed to his knees with a guttural cry, one of the creatures on his chest, driving its spikes-studded tail straight through his abdomen. Thor toppled backward, landing hard on the cement as the creature pulled itself free -- blood shining bright and red against the silver surface -- and prepared to strike again.

Loki killed it ere he knew he moved, and flung the still-twitching body away from him, sending it skidding it through a pool of acid. He hauled Thor's massive bulk over his shoulders, staggering beneath the weight of it, and dragged him back into the middle of their enclosure as far away from the forcefield walls as possible.

"Loki." Blood bubbled at the corners of Thor's mouth, and the hole in his midsection stank of blood and copper and seared flesh as the the acid continued to eat its way through him. Loki spared a glance at the downed creature's tail; it had unfurled a row of flanges on either side, likely tearing through Thor's organs and turning them to ribbons. "Loki --"

Loki collapsed to his knees, Thor's blood soaking through the fabric of his Arena uniform. Acid hissed against his knee, too little to gnaw through flesh to the bone but enough to sear his skin, but Loki did not move -- could not.

Thor lay dying in front of him, bleeding and gasping and retching, as he had in Loki's thoughts a hundred times over, but no sweet satisfaction swelled in Loki's breast. Nothing but bile and bitterness, and when Loki wet his lips he tasted ash and salt.

Dreams of Thor's defeat had been Loki's bedfellow for many years; for those last half-crazed, desperate months in Twelve, he had imagined the triumph of Thor's death a hundred times, but somehow he had not imagined this. The final blow -- a sword strike through the heart, perhaps honourable and mocking, or a knife across the throat in a traitor's kiss -- and then, somehow, skipping ahead to the victory. He had soothed his growling stomach with the promise of the light fading from Thor's eyes, to be sure, but had not dwelled on those awful moments beforehand. Not the death rattle of blood and saliva caught in the throat as Thor struggled to draw breaths, the stench of punctured viscera curling in Loki's nostrils. However Loki planned to do it, any of the myriad half-formed ideas that swam in the back of his mind, he had never intended this.

"Loki," Thor said again, and Loki caught the hand that rose, shaking, to clap his face, holding it against his cheek as the fingers slipped in liquid. "Loki, I'm sorry --"

He could slit Thor's throat now and end his agony (not even training for years could give Loki a grip powerful enough to snap his brother's thick, muscled neck) but his hand froze at his side and could not draw his blade. Loki tightened his hand over Thor's, gripping the strong fingers as they twitched and faltered, and struggled to call even a handful of the words that had flowed so easily at his command before. None answered.

Back at the Centre, the trainers had warned of Arena madness, of the creeping desperation that might take a tribute and compel him to acts he would not consider otherwise. They warned of easy suicides -- leaping from a precipice, slitting one's own throat, drinking poison meant for one's opponents -- and spoke of testimonies given by those who had attempted to take their own lives but failed at it. There is a moment before death, the trainers said, giving them all dark, intent looks, where the suicide realizes his mistakes and feels them keener than he ever felt despair; the moment where there is no turning back, no rescinding what's been done, when he would give the air he now forfeited for the chance to change his mind.

As Thor's final breaths gurgled in his throat -- as the film clouded his eyes, as his spine stiffened and his muscles tensed -- Loki knew regret more deeply than all the hatred that had fuelled him for so long. That he had not struck the blow brought no relief. Above him the creatures waited for the cannon as the Gamemakers granted them their final moments, as demanded by the hungry audiences no doubt falling out of their seats.

And so Loki liesmith, Loki of the silver tongue, Loki the trickster -- he who once compelled a man to death with nothing but his words -- sat in silence, mute and helpless as his brother died.

Sam darted in under the robot-thing's swing and jammed his sword up through the slats in its armpit, wrenching the blade to the side in the hopes of messing up some of the electronics on the way out. He pulled the blade free, gritting his teeth against the screech of metal on metal, and ducked as the arm fell straight to its side, satisfyingly useless. Above him Stark fired again, and on his far side Natasha and Steve hacked away at a leg. A little longer --

In the distance, a cannon fired. Sam's heart jolted in his chest, but nothing but the resurrected tribute-corpses lay on the ground around them. The hovercraft, then -- Clint, the girls, what was happening?

Natasha let out a stream of curses so vile that Sam expected the robot to collapse under the weight of them and nothing else, but Sam couldn't blame her. Not when her district partner had stabbed himself for the greater good and might've just bled out now. "Stark?" she demanded. "What's going on?"

Stark touched the side of his helmet, flying back out of the way of the thing's fire blast and nearly slamming into a wall by accident. "The guy from Two," he said, voice coming out tinny from behind the mask. "Huh. I kinda forgot they were still around."

Natasha's expression tightened, but then she rolled her shoulders and forced whatever it was away. She'd spent the first half of the Games with him in the alliance, and she hadn't spoken of him since. "Not important," she said. "Keep going."

Not her mission, she meant. The guy from Two might've been creepy and bloodthirsty and scarily friendly in the way that Twos seemed to be, but Sam still couldn't dredge up anything more than a dull heaviness at the news. So much death, and nobody woke up in the morning and decided to become a Career tribute. They made him and they killed him, and more than anything Sam just wanted this to be done.

"It won't take much more," Steve shouted, and the robot's gears ground together as it tried to stand and its knee gave out. "Let's just finish this."

Loki stood, lowering Thor's head to the ground. He left the eyes as is, wide and staring up toward the sky, so Thor's face remained contorted in a warrior's grimace. Loki stood and turned his face up to the maelstrom in the centre of the Gamemakers' sky, the corpse who had once been his brother slowly cooling at his feet.

Whether or not he regretted Thor's death in the abstract meant nothing. Even had Loki still burned with revenge, they would have stolen that from him, too. No permutation existed that could soothe the writhing fury inside him.

"Well then?" Loki called out. He strode forward, picked up Thor's fallen sword and twirled it in his hand. He sought each lens hidden in the crumbling walls, each invisible flying camera where the air shimmered against the field that hid it from view, and skewered them with his glare. "Let's finish it, then! No more games!"

The black hole widened, and creatures poured forth from it as maggots expelled from a months-old wound, far too many for even a full complement of Career tributes to hold back. Loki swiped a hand across his eyes and down his face, smearing tears and Thor's blood across his cheeks, and bared his teeth.

"Father, I hope you're watching," Loki said, and while he meant to snarl it, to fling the words like his favourite daggers, instead they came out calm, cold steel instead of molten iron. It no longer mattered. He scrambled for something to say to Mother -- Mother who may have understood him best after all -- but came up empty, the words eluding his grasp yet again. A noble death in vengeance for his brother's own would have to be enough.

The creatures swarmed down from all sides, and he could wait, he could stand and let them tear him to pieces, a monument of strength and endurance in a sea of futility, but while Loki had his tricks, he had never been wise. Instead, Loki raised his sword and charged.

The second cannon sounded as the metal behemoth crashed to the ground, the lights behind its faceplate flickering and dying, and for a second Steve thought a Gamemaker had a twisted sense of humour and decided to count it as a tribute. He dropped his sword, blunted all to uselessness by now anyway, and stumbled back, running a hand over his hair. "Tony?" he called out, heart thudding in his chest. The girls should be safe inside, but that didn't mean --

"The other brother," Tony confirmed, meaning Loki from Twelve, and Steve nodded. "Looks like crazy and crazier are both down for the count. What do you say we leave this party before we overstay our welcome?"

Steve nodded, curling his fingers around the leather handhold on the inside of his shield, his arm wrapped in just below the seven letters scrawled in black across the metal. BELIEVE, Fury told him, and believe he would. He would deal with Fury if it turned out to be a trick, but until then, Steve clung to the threads of hope. He didn't have much else. "Let's get out of here," he said.

Natasha nodded and tugged a flare from her belt, holding it up as the flame hissed and sputtered so the hovercraft cameras picked up the signal.

A moment's pause -- what if Clint really had died, what if the hovercraft hadn't been unmanned, what if the girls hadn't made it there after all -- but then the hovercraft whirred back to life and lowered, the hatch opening. Jean stood in the gap, clinging to the support strut. "Better hurry," she called down. She was pale and looked exhausted and smeared with Clint's blood but she was safe, and Steve's chest lurched. "Sharon's up at the top about to kill the forcefield, and Clint has said more swear words than actual words so I think he's hurting."

Sam leapt up onto the platform as it lowered, Natasha following soon behind with an assassin's grace. "After you," Tony said to Steve, waving him forward with a sweep of his metal-covered arm. Steve stared at him for a long moment, the cocky, devil-may-care genius who condemned the rebellion for its principles but stayed to fight anyway, but they didn't have the time, and so he grabbed hold of the piston supporting the entry hatch and swung himself inside.

Tony flew in after him and immediately yanked off his helmet, hair sweaty and sticking up in all directions. "We're in," he called. "Let's get out of here."

"Far ahead of you," Natasha said from the pilot's seat, where she had one hand on the controls and the other in Clint's hair. Her partner sat on the floor, blood-soaked and grey-skinned but still breathing, and he leaned his head against her leg with his eyes closed. Jan curled up on the floor beside him, her head resting on his thigh, and Clint rubbed one hand absently over her back.

Sharon dropped from the ceiling. "It's done," she said, and Sam clapped her on the shoulder, giving her a congratulatory shake. "It doesn't look any different, though, so I don't know if it worked. It just looks like the sky."

"Forcefield is invisible," Clint said tiredly, not opening his eyes. "We'll know when either we make it out or we bounce off and die a fiery, crashy death."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, sunshine," Tony said, and he clumped over to where Jenny sat on a bench against the far wall, staring up at the ceiling in a blank attitude of grief. "I could use some help getting this off," he said, and the girl blinked back into consciousness and reached over to unbuckle the straps holding on his armour.

Natasha hissed a sharp breath and pulled the controls back, steering the hovercraft up. The sky shone bright and blue in the front viewscreen, and Steve strained his eyes for any sign of the telltale shimmer of the forcefield but caught nothing. He inhaled and held it, but the seconds ticked on and their craft kept flying. Finally Natasha glanced at the instruments, and some of the tension ratcheting her body flowed away, her shoulders loosening and her head tipping back against the seat. "We're clear."

Tony let out a long breath, flopping into the corner and running a hand over his face. "Son of a bitch," he said in a strained voice. Steve waited for the followup but apparently that's all he had.

Sharon staggered over and tucked herself into Steve's side under his arm, and he squeezed her shoulders. "Is it over?" Sharon asked, looking up at him with her blue eyes bright in her soot-smeared face.

Steve dropped his shield, where it clattered against the metal floor before he tipped it over with his foot against the edge and flipped it, painted side up. He stared at the rings of red and white, the bright white star against the blue centre circle, and tried to think of Bucky, but all that swam behind his eyes were the bodies of those he'd left behind. "I don't know about over," Steve said, thinking of Fury and the Rebellion and all the promises that could now be cashed in. "But at least we're past this part."

"Where are we going now?" Sam asked, sliding down to the floor with Jean collapsing against him.

"District 13," Natasha said, taking the hovercraft up and away from the streets. For a moment Steve was tempted to find a window, to look down and watch his home district recede into the distance, but his insides squeezed and he stayed in place, running his fingers through Sharon's greasy hair.

"Fine by me," Sharon said, surprising Steve, and he glanced down to see her grin up at him, cheeky despite the shadows ringing her eyes and hollowing the sockets. "Thirteen has always been my favourite number."

"The district bombed to nothing and left festering in its own nuclear radiation for decades," Tony said, opening one eye and squinting at Natasha. "Remind me never to let you pick our date spot."

"Hey, you don't like my plan, I'll be happy to drop you off and you can walk somewhere else," Natasha retorted, and Tony made a rude gesture as Jenny's mouth flickered in a hint of a smile.

"As long as they have showers, I don't care where you take us," Tony said in a light tone that fooled no one, but Steve didn't try to argue and neither did anyone else.

"Fight you for it," Clint said, and they bickered back and forth as the first wisps of cloud whipped past the narrow windows.

The hovercraft touched down in the middle of the ruins; Steve fought back a small twinge of disappointment that it hadn't flown into the side of a mountain or through a waterfall into a hidden base. Then again, District 13 hadn't shown much of either of those, boasting long stretches of empty, overgrown fields or swathes of dark forest and not much else. The platform lowered to the ground, and Steve stepped out with the others onto a bare stretch of rubble, doing his best not to stumble on the uneven ground as a pebble skittered away underneath his boot.

He was still squinting against the sun, sitting just above the line of trees, when Natasha sucked in a hard breath and curled her hands into tight fists. Steve shaded his eyes, and there, heroically posed with one foot on a broken corner of concrete, stood a tall, dark man with an eyepatch and a long black coat that fluttered in the breeze. Nick Fury, Director and Gamemaker and orchestrator of the Rebellion, in the flesh.

"Natasha," Fury said in a deep voice, holding out a hand.

Natasha let out a quiet, desperate sound and broke into a run. She actually flung herself at Fury, and he wrapped his arms around her while Steve tried to scoop his eyes back into his head. Beside Steve, Clint leaned against Sam's side and tossed off a wry salute in his employer's direction. "If you want a hug from me you'll have to come get it, boss," Clint drawled, and Fury's mouth twitched. "I'm a little tired."

"I can carry you if you'd like," Sam said in the first show of humour he'd displayed since he pulled his district partner's body from the rubble of the building that crushed her, and Clint flipped him off.

"Maybe we should get inside," said a shorter, officious-looking man in a trim suit, and Clint shot him a toothy grin of recognition. "Shall we?"

They moved inside, and Steve hung back to let the girls go first, surprised when Tony dropped back beside him, eyes darting to the side. He'd removed his makeshift armour and stuffed it into an empty canvas bag from one of the storage lockers in the hovercraft, and he held it slung over his shoulder. "Listen, Rogers," Tony said in a deceptively nonchalant voice. "Whatever they ask, be careful. You've gone through hell for them already, you don't owe them anything. All right?"

Steve glanced at him sidelong. Tony had replaced his sunglasses, and he carried himself with studied nonchalance, but the tendon in his neck stood out and a muscle twitched in his jaw. "I know," Steve said. "I might not owe the Rebellion anything, but I do owe the country. The Capitol needs to be taken down, and if these people are the ones to do it, I'm going to help them."

Tony released his breath in a huff. "I figured you'd say that. Well, good thing I'm sticking around, somebody's gotta put a damper on that optimism."

Steve ground to a halt as they turned a corner, and Tony's voice continued in the background but none of the actual words made it through Steve's brain. Instead he stared ahead at the person standing in front of him, dressed in a grey uniform and looking a little thinner, a little paler, but still one hundred percent the boy who stood in the Justice Building and begged Steve to come back.

"Hey Cap," said Bucky, shuffling one foot against the floor. "Geez, you're tall, but you look awful. Didn't you get my present?"

Now it was Steve's turn to race forward, and he crashed into Bucky so hard they both staggered and nearly toppled. He flung his arms around his best friend and held on, burying his face in Bucky' clean grey uniform as Bucky's hands fisted in his filthy shirt. A sob tore its way out of Steve's chest before he could pull it back, and he gripped Bucky's neck and pressed his thumb against the vein, feeling the flutter of pulse that marked Bucky as alive with every beat.

"Good to see you too," Bucky choked out, and the tears burned through Steve's shirt, hot and damp against his shoulder. "I missed a lot of it -- they came to get me right after you left, all these scary guys in white uniforms, and they took me away for days before Fury and his guys found me."

Steve pulled back, and he held Bucky's face in his hands, searching for any scars, but his skin seemed clean and unbroken, not even a bruise. "You're all right? They didn't hurt you?"

"Nah, they didn't touch me," Bucky reassured him, reaching up to hold Steve's wrists. "I had some nutty dreams, but other than that it was like a vacation in a really boring, white hotel." He exhaled, and his fingers tightened. "I just -- Sister Catherine, everyone else. They're all gone."

Steve closed his eyes and took several long, deep breaths. "Yeah, they are," he said, swallowing hard even as his chest ached. "But maybe it doesn't have to be for nothing."

"Everybody dies for nothing," Bucky said in a bitter voice that sounded much older than the fourteen-year-old Steve left behind. "But yeah, I get what you mean."

"C'mon," Steve said, slinging his arm around his best friend's shoulders. "Why don't you show me around?"

Bucky knocked his head against Steve's chest and altered his stride, jostling him hard with his hip. "Sure," he said. "I'd start with the gym, 'cause it's amazing, way better than the one on 37th, but it looks like you don't need that. I swear, Cap, you're the only guy who went into the Arena skinny and came out huge."

Steve had forgotten all about the adjustments his prep team had made to his physique; the muscle growth and height had come naturally, but now he held out one arm in front of him and examined the hard curves of muscle. "Huh," he said. "Well, it's a long story, so why don't you find me somewhere to shower and I'll tell you about it after?"

"You do stink," Bucky said amiably, and Steve laughed until his eyes stung.

Sam leaned against a pine tree, pressing his fingers against the roughened bark. With the whole district hidden underground he didn't get much surface time, but apparently one of the perks of doing the rebellion's work for them in the Arena was scrounging an hour aboveground every afternoon. The soft, woody scent of pine was nothing like the stuff back home but at least it wasn't the sterile plastic and concrete halls of the tunnels down below. Sam loved the city well enough but even cities had their own kind of life to them, bustling and chaotic and nothing like the quiet, almost mechanized efficiency of the Rebellion.

He glanced up at the trees as the branches rustled. "Come on you," Sam said, pushing himself off the trunk and stepping back. "We're almost at an hour, and as they keep reminding me, we're pushing it by having you with me as it is."

A falcon's shriek pierced the sky, and Sam rolled his eyes and held out his arm. "I mean it, you big baby," he said, and finally Redwing dropped from the trees and landed on his shoulder, digging in his talons and tearing at the fabric of Sam's uniform. Sam clicked his tongue and reached back, smoothing the soft feathers at his bird's neck. "Those are regulation, I hope you know. I'll have to sew that up myself or they'll make me do pushups."

Redwing nipped at his finger and let out an insolent chirp. Sam laughed and scratched Redwing's head as he headed back toward the compound.

Everyone in District 13 had routines to follow except for the girls. The rebels saved the boys because they were big and strong and handsome and important, and they could be useful to the fight or in making those videos or creating special machines or technology or lots of other things, but not the girls. Janet heard some of them talking once; the rebels saved them because the boys asked them to, because they were poor little girls who needed help or they'd die all on their own.

Now that they'd all reached the rebel base, nobody really knew what to do with them, and Janet didn't really care. Daddy was long dead and she'd killed Hank herself, she'd jammed a handful of poison right into his leg with her own hands and watched him die. None of the other girls could say that, and not even all the boys, either! They fought mutts, sure, but mutts weren't people, and neither were the creepy dead things that came back at the end of the fight, not really. None of the boys had to kill their friends. None of them had to watch as the one person who'd looked after them as long as they could remember -- the most important person in the whole world -- died in their laps.

But little girls know nothing about war, or pain, or death, and Janet kept her mouth shut. Sharon and Jean disappeared together after the first day, and Jan and Jenny mostly locked themselves in their shared room and didn't talk about anything much. They sure didn't talk about the boys who went into the Arena with them.

She saw Clint sometimes, but they kept him busy. She tried going up to the surface with Sam when the walls moved in close and the recycled air turned sour in her nose, and at first it was nice. The pine trees reminded her of home, even if she'd never see it again, and Sam put a hand on her head and ignored her sniffles. Except that soon after that they walked right underneath a tracker jacker nest, and the humming sound dug itself under Janet's skin and filled her mind with Hank's screams and his face all purple and swollen --

She'd woken up in the hospital, arms bandaged from where she'd clawed at them with her fingernails, and she hadn't gone outside again. The next time Sam went out he brought her back a vase of pine branches, and the light scent of home made her room smell a little less like the inside of a box of new machine parts. Not much, but good enough, and Jan was long getting used to that.

One morning, as Janet and Jenny sat in the cafeteria and poked at their food, Sharon and Jean stopped by the table. "Hey," Sharon said, sliding onto the bench beside Jan. She looked like a rebel, dressed in the grey uniform, and she'd kept her hair short in Eight so it wouldn't get caught in the machines and rip her scalp off and now she left it that way. "You guys should come with us."

Jenny glanced over, shaking her head so her hair hung down in front of her face. "It's okay."

Jean rolled her eyes, and Janet fought the urge to roll hers right back because Daddy always said it was important to be mature. "You've been moping way too long," she said. She looked good too, less starved-skinny, the bones of her wrists and collar not sticking out so far. She wore her hair pulled back from her face. "You should come down to the range with us. They've been giving us lessons."

The what? Janet frowned, and Sharon explained that the 'range' meant not chickens or a gas stove but a place where people actually gave them guns and let them shoot things. Janet gawked at them, but the girls just grinned. "No, really," Jean said. "The other day they let me fire one the size of my arm. I nearly broke my shoulder on the kickback and they busted themselves up laughing, I guess they do it to all the young trainees."

"Why are you firing guns?" Jenny asked, curling her fingers in her sleeve.

"Why not?" Jean shrugged. "It's something to do when I'm mad, and it's way better than kicking the wall. I've been running, too, now that they've given me medicine so I can breathe better, same with Sharon. They're training us up and you should join."

"Training you for what?" Jan asked, and the first stirring of curiosity in weeks started up in her chest.

"To fight," Sharon said, lifting her chin. "Not yet, we're too young, but they start training early here so that when we're old enough we can just start fighting. We'll be able to go out and actually do something. You should come with us."

Janet let out a long breath, imagining curling her fingers around a trigger and pulling, imagining the other person falling to the ground in a spray of red. A shudder ran through her, but she pressed her fingers to the table and did what Clint told her, waiting four seconds between each inhale and exhale until it passed. "I don't know," she said.

Sharon reached over and covered Janet's hand in hers. "You didn't kill Hank," she said. "The Capitol did. You can make them pay for it."

Jan mulled that over, but Jenny shook her head. "I don't know if I want to kill anyone. I -- I think I've seen enough of that."

"So don't kill anyone," Jean said. "There's lots to do. I bet they'd love to have angry little girls in those propos they're making to show everywhere. Show the Capitol that kids get hurt too but we're still here." She shrugged, and her eyes shone hard and determined and maybe, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to be like that. "Jan, remember what you told me that one night, what your stylist said? You're not a butterfly, you're a wasp. Show them you can sting."

"You don't have to shoot at anybody," Sharon reassured them. "The targets aren't real people. Just come to the range and learn how to shoot. It'll make you feel better, I promise."

Janet shared a glance with Jenny, who pulled her lower lip between her teeth. "I do feel angry a lot," Jenny said in a low voice. "I try to make it go away, it doesn't feel right, but when I do it just sits sick inside me."

"Shoot something and I promise it'll go away," Jean said with a wink. "You can figure out the rest after that."

Janet let out a long breath. She would never, ever touch a blow gun again, never use any weapon she had to bring to her lips. Nothing with poison, no more darts or tiny knives. But guns -- that might be different. Maybe she could hold a gun and feel strong without the ghost of Hank whispering in her ear. "Okay," she said, and dug her spoon deep into her porridge, scooping up a large mouthful. "But I want to finish breakfast first."

Tony slumped over his workbench, poking at the half-finished projects lying scattered over his desk. Fury and his guys had left him a whole pile of things they'd love to get their mitts on, and some of them at least seemed like they'd be interesting enough to hold Tony's attention under normal circumstances, but weirdly enough, he didn't really feel like working for commission anymore. Instead he rested his head on one arm and flicked a pencil at the far end of the table, where he'd rigged a mechanism to catch it and roll it back to him.

He hadn't bothered to build anything with any intelligence since coming to Thirteen. He'd tried -- Tony had Rogers and Wilson if he felt like chatting and being an audience to the Best Friends Forever show, and Fury had scooped up Jarvis when the Arena showdown kicked off and brought him to Thirteen, but somehow they didn't make up for his bots and their puppylike devotion -- but as soon as he sat down and picked up the wiring, he'd frozen. Tony couldn't shake the memory of pulling handfuls of wires loose from his bots in the Arena as the storm built overhead; any time he even came close to designing a replacement, his stomach churned.

He'd killed people, too, but Tony didn't have nightmares about that. When he closed his eyes, Tony didn't see Bruce lying on the ground in a pool of blood; instead he saw the light wink from Vision's ocular panel, or Baconator butting into the wall in its attempts to get away.

"Sir," Jarvis said from the door, and Tony rolled his head to the side and gazed at him sideways. "I apologize for the interruption, but I believe I have a project that would interest you."

"I doubt it," Tony said, but Jarvis was half the reason he sat here, buried under tons of steel and concrete but alive, instead of lying in a Capitol morgue somewhere. "All right, what is it?"

"I had the liberty of commandeering a salvage mission," Jarvis said, and Tony raised his eyebrows. "Teams routinely scout out abandoned spots across the districts to pull any technology that might be useful to them, you see. I had a hunch that some of it might be of particular note to you."

Tony swallowed and massaged his chest, trying to shove down the flutter of hope, because hope was a nice cheap way to make sure he never wanted to get out of bed in the morning. "Yeah?" he said instead, forcing himself to be noncommittal.

Jarvis slipped back out into the hallway and came back pushing a large cart, piled high with broken electronics. Tony frowned, scanning the heap of junk, but then his eye snagged on a familiar claw -- then the elbow hinge of an articulated arm, then a well-worn tread.

Tony leapt to his feet so fast the chair fell over backwards, clanging against the ground. "Which ones?" he demanded, and damned if his eyes weren't watering, but Jarvis had seen worse -- and so had the bots who lay in pieces in the cart in front of him. He'd built all of them to see him through the worst times of his life, and never even thought to consider they were anywhere but in a Capitol lab or abandoned in a scrap pile.

"All of them," Jarvis said warmly, and he closed his hand over Tony's shoulder, giving him a gentle squeeze. "Dummy, You, Butterfingers, taken from your laboratory before the Capitol authorities confiscated your research. And here, salvaged from a particular neighbourhood in District Six, are Vision and, ah --"

"Baconator," Tony said, doing his best to speak around the hard lump in his throat. "Jarvis --"

"I suspect this will take you a while," Jarvis said, giving Tony a small smile and stepping back before he did something embarrassing like hug him. "Shall I fetch you an assistant? I believe several of the younger techs here would be happy to join you on this."

"No," Tony said, grabbing the handle of the cart and hauling it back toward his table, and he might still be underground and at the mercy of a group of people with just as much demand on him as the Capitol ever had, but somehow it didn't matter so much now. "No, I'm going to do this one myself."

He wakes to white.

White ceiling, white walls, white blankets; thin white gown covering his body, white tape holding the needles and tubes against his skin. White lights above him, shining down until he blinks. White in his head, cleansing and reassuring in its purity, free of confusion and doubt.

He sits, easing himself up with his hands against the mattress, careful not to jar the equipment fastened to his arms, his chest. He holds a hand to his head, steadying the spinning, and his stomach churns and the contents threaten to make an exit but the wave passes. He doesn't risk attempting to swing his legs over the edge, but leans back against the wall and takes stock of his surroundings.

Another sleeps on a bed across the room, freshly-washed blond hair fanned out across the pillow. The monitors around the bed beep in a soothing, even rhythm, pronouncing all is well with every high-pitched chime.

A large mirror comprises nearly the entire wall in front of him, and a round, grey speaker sits on the bare stretch of white above it. It crackles and a voice comes through, professional and neutral. "Good morning," it says, and he inclines his head. No clocks to confirm the time, but an easy confidence rests in his breast; it is morning if they say it is, and all is well. "How are you feeling today?"

"Thirsty," he says without thinking, and once the word leaves his lips the parched scratching in his throat becomes impossible to ignore. He reels, bracing himself against the wall.

"We'll send someone in with some water very soon," the voice promises, and his anxiety eases. "Can you tell us what you remember?"

He frowns. His thoughts are white, white, white, clean and empty and open like the pages of a book yet written. "Nothing."

"Try," says the voice, soothing.

He wants to please the voice, everything inside him itches for its approval, and so he does. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the whiteness in his head, searching for any ripple in the smooth blankness until --

His eyes snap open. "My name is Loki," he says, and conviction floods him with a welcome certainty. A second thought follows close on the heels of the first, and for the first time he feels a pang of urgency. "Where is my brother?"

"Thor is with you," says the voice, and Loki turns to the sleeping form on the far side of the room with a stab of relief. His mind may be empty, but one thing sits inside him like a knife wedged into a rock: Loki loves his brother and wishes him safe more than anything else. "Now tell me, Loki, and this is very important. Where does your allegiance lie?"

Loki frowns. He traces his fingers over the tape on his skin, peels away one edge and flattens it back down again. A moment later he finds the answer, and he exhales in relief as the truth flows through his mind, clean and cool as water from a mountain stream, clear as the blast of trumpets. "I serve the Capitol and President Snow," he says, raising his head and fixing the mirror with a proud stare. "My allegiance lies there and nowhere else. I will do their bidding with my last breath."

"I am glad to hear it, Loki," says the voice. "We have many plans for you."

Loki smiles. He is always happy to serve.