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

"Just Buddy is fine, thanks." He eyed her again, sizing up the new girl as she'd so unflatteringly put it. In Buddy's assessment, there isn't much difference between being new and old when it came to the Arenas. With the technology involved and the way the environments changed each cycle, there was no way for the Tributes to prepare, even in the Never-Ending Quell. That was part of its brilliance. Or so someone might say.

Having committed her image to his head, he made a mental note to look up her file the moment he got back to his cubical. If he was going to have any rapport with these people, if he was going to write to convince them of anything, he'd need to know them better than the small scraps they were willing to give away. Not that those weren't valuable, of course. Just that they created a sort of incomplete picture, when all was said and done. "And, if you want the truth, I don't have many friends around here either. I work with the Peacekeepers and that doesn't make for any sort of popularity."

The quickest way to acclimate to the unexpected is to get comfortable living in the dark. People think nothing phases Skye, but the truth is that rather than letting the water wash over her, she's just learned to go with the current. It's not that nothing phases her; plenty of things shake her to her core.

She deals, and she moves on.

"Wow, no kidding. Nobody likes the police where I'm from, either." A Peacekeeper. Then scary guys in ~~suits~~ bulky white body armor who look like Stormtroopers. The police of the police state. She'll have to tread carefully. "It's gotta suck. You're just doing your job."

That's a way of looking at it, certainly, and a month or two ago, Buddy might have agreed. But things change, and priorities have to be reevaluated. Eventually grand things like right and wrong, ethics and justice, come into play and bug up the whole thing for everyone.

"I think most people would say that I didn't have to choose this job." He smiles. It's the shy sort of reassurance expected in exchange for someone saying something obviously meant to play to you. "I'm not on the front lines anymore, though. If you hear any stories of police brutality, or any of that crap, it isn't me. In fact, stuff like that just makes my job all the more difficult. I'm in copy and compliance. All paper-pushing and desk work."

If Skye is able to read between the lines, she might be able to translate the carefully guarded code. She's talking to the the man responsible for any Peacekeeper-related propaganda and publicity, which would probably explain the lack of obvious jackboots.

Paper-pushing and desk work. Sure, like Melinda May was just an ink-stained secretary from admin after she left the field and before she went back into it again.

The thing about paper pushing and desk work is that those papers aren't blank. Requisition orders, mission reports, casualty lists, operations orders, redacted documents on orphans brought into the foster system.

Paper is never just paper, any more than data is.

"Sounds boring," she says, her tone carefully light. Easy. "Don't you miss being out in the action at all?"

Buddy seems to consider for a moment. He reaches up to adjust his glasses, then the stiff white collar of his dress shirt. "No. Not very much at all."

It's a lie, but a convenient one, and something he feels guilty for feeling at all. It's an easier way of life, ultimately, for all the reasons Skye can consider and more. There's a liberation that comes from just following orders. It keeps morality out of the equation. "Anyhow, my family keeps bothering me to settle down. Maybe now I can do that. Before my assignments never lasted anymore than a few months and there's no point dragging a family out to the Districts."

Following orders must be easy, but Skye has nothing but disdain for the kinds of people who do so unquestioningly. To never consider morality, ethics, the human side of the equation--no.

She's not Hydra. She never will be. And as far as she can see, there's not a whole lot of difference between this Panem Capitol and the many tentacled neo-Nazi supreme high command.

"Beautiful wife, four bedroom house with a white picket fence, two-point-oh kids and a golden retriever, the American--sorry," she apologizes by rote, not really feeling sorry at all. "Reference from home. Is that the Panem dream?"

The difference is that, ultimately, the people who get roped into HYDRA choose to be there. They aren't born into it, for the most part. They arrange their lives so that they become tentacled neo-Nazis. The Capitolites and the people of the Districts never had a chance to live any differently. They're just trying to get by.

"I don't know what the Panem dream is, really," he replies, not really minding the mention of her homeland. It's interesting to hear about far away places. They're a break in the monotony. "But if I were to venture a guess, I'd bet it would have less of the life you and I are thinking of, and more luxuriant parties with too much food, loud music, and faithless sex. My family's a little bit atypical. We aren't a society that puts much stock in anything you just mentioned, but I admit, it sounds pretty nice to me."

Maybe that's how Hydra looks on the outside, but Skye's seen some of its ugly inside: the good men and women forced into killing or being killed in return; the ordinary people who have to wash their hands in the blood of strangers or the blood of the people they love. And the others: those who had the chance to walk away and do better, but stayed beholden to the beast anyway.

It's par for the course for any kind of organization that builds its power on hurting people: having true believers isn't enough; they have to make good people do bad things too.

"I guess that's kind of the American dream too," she remarks, thinking of a different face of America. The Bieber face, if Bieber were actually American. "Who doesn't love some good old debauchery?"

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