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Who | Skye + you!
What | Skye arrives and is upset with this entire situation, to absolutely no one's surprise.
Where | Training Center, various locations therein
When | Now
Warnings/Notes | Mild language warnings.

[ District 6 Suite ]

At first when Skye wakes up she thinks Hydra must have her, and it's only the nausea and disorientation sweeping over her that prevents her from trying to physically assault one of the peacekeepers when they come to lead her away.

(Portals are such a bitch. Thanks for nothing, stupid Nordic alien gods.)

It's once they get her to the Training Center and give her the vague welcome spiel that she realizes how wrong she was. This isn't Hydra. This is, if it's even possible, much worse.

She drags herself into the bathroom and stares at her reflection in the mirror, feeling numb and cold as she tries to process what she's been told. A battle to the death. Things were just starting to seem like they'd be able to make a go for the better, and now she's here, trapped in some foreign world for a celebrity deathmatch. Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? And then: there it is, anger, bubbling up hot and fast. She wrestles it down.

First things first: she needs more information, and she needs to see if she can find her team. Skye pushes her hair back and steps out of the bedroom to meet her suitemates.

[ The Commons ]

She's fiddled with her network device by now, and already figured out the vast breadth of digital information is locked to her--for now. The Tributes list and network had no records of her team, but that doesn't mean anything. They could be here off the record, under lock and key. She knows nothing about how these people operate.

On the other hand, she did see several other familiar names and faces, and her stomach flipped nervously when she saw them. Really? They're pitting a Level 1 agent up against the Avengers? Talk about unfair play.

So in the meantime, she's stuck to good, old-fashioned info hunting. Which is to say, she'd changed into a brightly-colored dress upstairs and is now approaching strangers downstairs with a stunning, confident smile, one hand held out to shake. "Hi! I don't think we've met yet. I'm Skye."

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"Yeah, I'm kind of feeling that," she says, tossing a glance at the room around her. And yeah, okay, she can grudgingly admit that this much glitz and razzledazz is impressive. She lived on the streets and out of a van for a while, after all. But it's a facade. Any place that's this pretty and yet indulges in televised murder games is hiding some major ugly on the inside.

The last time she was in a place this rich, she shook hands with the man who shot her. She really hopes that's not going to become a pattern in her life.

"You sound like you're getting pretty used to it yourself."

For a second, there, the mask slips. His gaze flicks to the side, and there's a shadow in his eyes. "I lived and died through one Arena already. It'd suck worse than it already does if I couldn't adapt."

He looks back at her with lifted brows, once again not showing any distress. "So I do. You think you can too?"

She might latch onto that slip, if his following words didn't bowl her over so completely. Lived and died. Lived and died. And lived again, clearly, because he's standing here right in front of her. She sucks in a startled breath and feels her heart pounding, roaring in her ears.

Coulson died and came back, and she (almost, nearly, so very nearly) died and came back--and Garrett too, Garrett was breathing his last breath when Fury's alien miracle drug brought him back to life.

The Tributes die. And they can come back.

She doesn't think she can be a killer, but at least she has a chance of surviving this.

"I've seen my share of the wild and crazy," she says after a moment when her shock shows clear on her face. "I'll manage. I always do."

Her reaction gives him pause, and he gives a short laugh. "Let me guess, that's the first you've heard of that part. Yeah, most of the time, we die and we come back. Sometimes people don't. It's part of the entertainment, that kind of uncertainty, ain't it?"

He's smiling cheerfully as he imparts that knowledge, but bitterness sneaks into his voice and his eyes towards the end, too quick to be caught very well in most recordings, but there nonetheless.

"It's all right. I come from that sorta world too. It's not like this. There are heroes, superheroes in my world. But sometimes people die and come back."

So the risk of actually dying is--maybe not the same, but it's still there. It's not ideal, and sure, she's fucking terrified, but it's something to cling to. She has to be careful she doesn't become too dependent on that hope, though: guard it, hold on to it, but not let it blind her.

Death is a risk, but that risk is her job now. Serve and protect. Be the shield.

She thinks this all through as she listens, and it's that mention of superheroes that brings her back around to the coincidence of two men with the same name fighting the same fight as the star-spangled man with a plan.

"Superheroes," she says oh-so-casually. "Like, Captain America? That kind of superhero?"

There's only the slightest pause before Bucky continues, a moment where something clicks behind his eyes. He has to wonder: did she look at the network, read up on him and Steve? Or is she from one of their worlds? Here in the crowd, monitored as always, he can't really ask.

So he just shrugs a little and says, "You got a lot of other kinds of superheroes in mind, Skye? I'm not the most neutral party on the matter, but he seems like a pretty good example to me."

Later, when she has the time, she'll start to filter through the network conversations, starting with the Avengers et al. But now she needs a ground-level view of things. But there are at least three, maybe four, Avengers here, this guy knows who Captain America is, and he has the same name as a dead guy engraved on a marble wall.

It's enough that she wants to say who she is, what she stands for--but she can't. She knows better than anyone how easy it is to bug a room and monitor the public.

"Sure," she says instead, mimicking his casualness. "Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye. Deathlok," she adds last, a note of defiance in her voice. No matter what he's done under Hydra's coercion, Mike is a hero in every way that counts.

He doesn't miss that defiant tone to her voice on the last, but he's not sure what to make of it. Has she had bad personal experiences with Deathloks? No, she gave the name as if to refer to a single hero, so that's not it. Maybe she knew one of the men who laid claim to the identity over the years. "That's an obscure one to name with those others," he settles on saying eventually.

Mike Peterson was a man dealt a crap hand who just deserved a break, and instead he got turned into a living weapon. He wasn't some true believer following Hydra's orders because he wanted to, or a man who followed them because following orders was all he knew. He did it because he didn't have a choice.

And she's in part responsible. Because she trusted what she thought SHIELD was, and it turned out she'd handed Mike's son to Hydra.

She can't let herself forget that.

"Maybe it is now," she says, still stubborn even though a part of her knows she needs to reel herself in. "Give it time and he'll be so famous Barbara Walters will want to interview him."

There's a silence after that, and a look in Bucky's eyes like he's figured something out. He doesn't say what he's thinking directly, though--doesn't start lecturing Skye about the multiverse and all the different worlds that have some of the same heroes. Instead he says, in mild tones, "I don't know. There's a lot of superheroes out there. Hell, you got any idea how many different uses the Deathlok technology's been put to? I fought a bunch of mass-produced ones from the future once myself."

There have been multiple Deathloks besides Mike, she knows that. There was John Garrett, and who knows how many in the years between; there may be more out there now, that Cybertek built and shipped away to corners of the world before her team was able to shut them down.

But mass-produced from the future? She's not sure what SHIELD's "official" stance is on time travel--probably as head-up-the-butt as their stance on psychics--but Coulson, Hand, and every other high level agent she'd interacted with was as ignorant of Cybertek's bionic super soldier program as she'd been, and she's willing to bet a sizable number of voxels Fury didn't know either.

Deathloks she doesn't know about, a red-haired woman named Natasha Romanoff who looks distinctly different from the woman she suspects is the Avenger seen during the Battle of New York, and two men with the same name as a dead SSR agent. A month here named August. Time travel.

She's not even sure how to add it all up, but there's a pattern there, there is, if only she can make the connection.

"Oh yeah? Sounds crazy," she says, conscious of the fact that there are likely bugs everywhere. Her heart is hammering hard in her chest. "You know--I had a chance to glance over the Tribute lists. Pretty weird coincidence, there being two guys with the same name."

"It's a crazy world I come from," he says with a shrug. "Probably a crazy world you come from, too. But they aren't the same place. They've just got a few similarities."

A beat, and he adds, "Like the one where a man with my name was Captain America's partner in both of them." He keeps his expression calm, even though describing himself that way--Captain America's partner--always hurts a little these days. This isn't the place to go deeper into his own past. If there's one blessing to all of this mess, it's that most people here don't know about that past.

Physics, multiple world theories, that's all completely outside her circle of knowledge; she's a hacker and a pseudo-field agent, not a scientist. But everyone on Earth has had their understanding of the scope of the universe expanded drastically since New York, and even before that, when SHIELD was covering up New Mexico, Skye was on top of that intel too.

"Sure sounds like it's crazy," she says. The universe is bigger than they ever imagined, maybe with more worlds than they can count. It's mind-blowing to think that there's different versions of people on those worlds, because that's what it is.

Is there another Skye in his world, too?

"I mean, having even one world where some dude thought plastering himself head to toe in the American flag--actually, no, I can see that happening in every version of America."

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