thecapitol | open

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."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He's on his way back into the tribute center with a large coffee in one hand and a bag with some comics in the other when the young woman in the brightly-colored dress approaches him like she's selling something.

Joel raises his eyebrows skeptically and makes no move to shift his stuff around to shake her hand. Because no.

"And you're introducin' yourself to perfect strangers because...?" he drawls in his usual Texas lilt.

She's not selling something, but she would definitely like to buy: one ticket on the express train home, please and thank you. Then a return ticket with a SHIELD team - okay, the only SHIELD team, her SHIELD team - to bust everyone out of here and run for the metaphorical hills.

His refusal to shake her hand doesn't deter her, she crosses one arm over her chest to prop up the other elbow and rest her chin in her hand. "Because it's courteous?" she replies. Maybe walking around grunting like a pro wrestler is how other people react to this situation, but not Skye. She didn't lose her confident veneer when Hydra had her, and she certainly won't now.

(When the Games start, things may change. When she's in the Arena, she might cave, might give them what they want to protect herself however she can. But for as long as she's able, she's going to hold on to who she is.)

What she doesn't know, what she can't know, is how much this is just the way Joel is. This isn't the Capitol's doing, no, his world ripped away most of the veneer of polite civilization a long time ago.

The fact that he's even addressing her now instead of just ignoring her and walking away is mostly due to Ellie's influence, and insistence.

"You wanna get to know the people here, might wanna watch arena footage, or go down to the training center," he points out bluntly. "You'll learn more."

She'd get it. Skye's lived on the streets; she's floated through foster homes and destitute communities that operate under their own rules. But sometimes when you're playing with the privileged you need to learn to play by their rules.

"Sure, and I'll do that too," she says patiently. "But actually talking to people is never not helpful. Speaking of which, you never gave me your name." Not that she can't find it on her own, but that kind of defeats the purpose of asking.

Joel would disagree with that. Sometimes, talking to people is the least helpful thing you can do, in his experience. People lie, dissemble, mask their true emotions and motivations all the time. And he's not good at playing those games.

But he doesn't bother to argue with her. Just takes a sip of his coffee - he always feels better after he's had a good strong cup of coffee - and shrugs.

"Joel," he says simply, because what's the point? It's easy enough to find his name, their names all get posted everywhere for everyone to see anyway. She can find out a lot more than that if she just watches recaps from the past couple of arenas for an hour or two.

Even when people are lying or avoiding, they're telling the truth. A truth. Some form of it. You can learn a lot about people from what they don't say.

Then again, maybe you can't always. Ward lied and lied and lied, and in the end it was only the body of a dead man trying to do the right thing that showed her what the stark truth really looked like. If she'd put the pieces together sooner, maybe Eric...no. It's no use fixating on maybes.

"See, that wasn't so hard." She smiles her most disarming smile. See, she's just a girl, down on her luck and trapped in an impossible situation. "You been here a while, Joel?"

Joel just can't play those games very well - in his world, it's just easier to kill first and ask questions never, anyway. But that's neither here nor there - here of course, he can't just put a bullet in the brain of anyone who looks at him askance.

Ellie would get upset if he did.

"A few months, two arenas," he says flatly, another sip of his coffee. "What do you want to know?" Might as well get the interrogation over with.

The idea that anyone can fight through two arenas, kill through two arenas--possibly die in two arenas--it's sickening and freaky and frightening all at once. How do you do that and still hold onto yourself?

Coulson could do it, she thinks. He could do it with his integrity and soul intact. Even May--May didn't die in the literal sense, but she died inside, and she put herself back together anyway.

She doesn't want to find out what that's like, but if she has to--if Coulson and May could do it, Skye has to. There's no other alternative but to survive.

"What you've seen, what you've experienced--anything you'd be willing to share, if you feel up to talking about it."

Joel snorts. "Well, there was the museum with the live, active volcano that erupted. Or the abandoned town full of monsters that got hotter'n an oven periodically. The environments are just as dangerous as the other tributes, and you never know what it'll be like until you get there."

There's something about his blatant disdain that bothers her, even though she tells herself it shouldn't. He has a right to be irritated with a total stranger coming up and prying into the crap he's gone through here, but she's also trying to get what she needs to survive.

She smiles thinly. "So if we don't kill each other off, they can make the environment do the job for us. Got it. I've always wanted to be mauled by a mountain lion."

"Starvation, exposure, that's what you gotta worry about," Joel mutters darkly. "Heat stroke or hypothermia, dehydration, the stuff that kills you slow and painful. A wild animal will just rip your throat out and be done."

So basically, everything she hasn't been trained for in the field yet. But she's resourceful. She can feed herself, she can find water, she can keep herself warm. She learned how to do all that when she ran away from the orphanage and foster care and never looked back.

"Do not discredit wild animals. Haven't you ever seen Outbreak?"

"They don't put regular animals in these things, anyway," Joel says with a shrug. "They got scientists to make weird mutants and monsters. Arena before I got here, they had goddamn dinosaurs."

open

lolll this is gon be gud

hi uncle beardy mc bearderson

he's heard worse!!

grizzy beard

bears everywhere are jealous

he should be jealous of bears. they get to hibernate.

he does sleep a lot in canon. TIRED OLD MAN

if he was a bear he could sleep all the time

he would love that tbh

who wouldn't

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