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 looks--confused, she thinks, but that's not quite right. Confusion is simple: confusion is what you feel when you don't understand a basic problem. On him, it looks bigger than that.

But he asks her a question, and she won't pry--not here, not now. Later, she'll start digging

"Information," she answers. "Can't survive without it. They tell me I'm fighting in their Hunger Games, but I don't really even know who they are. So, got any personal insights to share?"

Mission report. He can do that, he's grateful in a way to do it, to slide back into the comfort of what he knows to do.

Bucky's left hand slides out of his pocket, glove covered but possibly offering the smallest sliver of gleaming metal between where the cuff of his sleeve ends and the glove begins. He lets it fall to rest against his thigh, the right hand matching it on the other.

"The Capitol, controlling government of Panem, comprised of this city and twelve districts which manufacture resources for the Capitol's use. The Hunger Games are provided as entertainment to the citizenry." If there's something quietly scornful in his tone it doesn't show up on his expression which has settled into bland emptiness.

She's not looking at his hand, so she misses that glint of metal; instead she's watching his face, rapt and attentive.

Because she wants this information. She needs it. It's everything she's already learned so far, but she soaks it up like a sponge anyway, and keeps needing for more.

"I got that much. And now they want us to fight in them to the death, on the chance we may or may not come back to life later." She says this last bit calmly, almost flippantly; the news shocked her and then sank in quickly; it's not exactly outside her area of experience at this point.

"We come back." he nods to her assessment, "I don't know how." Bucky assumes Skye would want that knowledge, a piece that is out of any tributes grasp so he tells her before she can ask. "It's discomforting."

An understatement. There was no pain to waking up again in itself, not like what happened beforehand but there was shock to it like there had been when they took him out of storage. Waking up with memory of death fresh on the mind, the feeling of breathing again when the last thing he had registered was his heart stop beating.

FitzSimmons could figure it out, but so far as public records show, FitzSimmons aren't here.

Skye thinks of two bullets in her belly, pain searing through her and her body failing, an alien miracle drug injected into her blood stream and convulsions on a death bed as it worked its magic. She doesn't remember the last part, of course, but Simmons described it to her, and she can picture it in her head clear as crystal. She remembers bleeding out on a cellar floor thinking how much she'd let Coulson down, and she remembers waking up afterward with the memory of Quinn's face at that moment burned into her eyes.

Her hand starts to drift towards her stomach, but she catches herself and drops it at her side.

"Hey." The impulse to reach out with a comforting hand is there, but she has the feeling it wouldn't be welcome. "If it's too much to talk about, or anything..."

Bucky's gaze tracks her hand's movements, he finds it impossible not to, aware always of the presence of those around him. The weapons instincts and battle readiness are second nature, always looking for the sign of an oncoming attack. But he doesn't acknowledge the strange gesture more than that, it seems harmless whatever the meaning behind it.

Her concern is strange for one who wanted information, he thinks she would actually back off he asked her to. But the memory of his death in the arena pales frankly to the half-remembered dream of falling that occurred after and so he decides he is okay to discuss it.

"It happened." he shrugs, a small gesture he's begun to pick up from others. "It may happen again." Probably, his goal in the next arena isn't supposed to end with his survival after all.

It may happen again--and it shouldn't, because this entire scenario is screwed up and sick. "Too bad they don't give that in the welcome speech," she says, and she wonders how many Tributes go into the Arena not knowing there's a chance they could come back.

Maybe she'd have pushed more for her answers before, but she pushed Mike, and look where that ended up. She's learned better since then. You can catch more flies with honey than with napalm, after all. And anyway, it's not like she hasn't been there too. She can respect how calm he is about it.

Now she just has more people she's got that in common with besides her boss. Maybe everyone else has weird alien mojo juice pumping through their system too. God, wouldn't that just be her luck.

"And in the meantime, we get to enjoy the high life and get wildly trashed on expensive liquor."

"There is no welcome speech." If he carries on like this he's going to get a reputation for dry humour when mostly he's obviously stating fact. "They threw me straight into the arena when I arrived, they explained nothing."

Only that he was supposed to kill everyone else there. The rest of it however, about the sponsors, about the fact that they would come back to life after? They told him none of that. It was no wonder he had thought it might be some test of Hydra's, that he had been recaptured and was being punished for his disobedience. When Steve died he had -- and then when he had felt himself die he had thought it was finally the end for him.

No such luck.

But it's a step that he volunteered that information of his own accord. "We can do anything outside but fight or leave." Not that he knows much about Skye's example.

So in other words she's got it lucky, getting this downtime to get acclimated before the Games actually start. That she can even apply the word lucky to anything about this whole screwed-up mess is a feat in and of itself.

"Yeah, I guess 'welcome to our country, enjoy fighting in Panem's Next Top Mass Murderer' doesn't really count as good freshman orientation." It's said with a little too much vitriol: she's not checking herself completely.

There's so much there in a single sentence that just flies over his head. Bucky thinks he gets the general gist of what she means though, talking down the Capitol for how they handled things.

"It's inadequate." he agrees, his handlers were never so sloppy in preparing him for a mission. Bucky hated not having the parameters clearly set out for him the way the Soldier was accustomed to. Since she's not asking anymore questions though his eyes go over her head for a brief moment and look at the elevator he'd originally been aiming for, flicking back down to Skye immediately after.

"Is that enough?"

She catches the direction of his gaze and follows it to the elevator, and she wonders where he's going. Up to his room to hide? Down to the training rooms to practice murder? So many options and so little time.

But she just looks back at him and smiles apologetically. "Sorry, am I keeping you from something?"

The first option if you amended the location, not that he'd have taken kindly to the implication of hiding if Skye had voiced that thought aloud. Bucky shifts his weight slightly uncomfortably at her question.

"Yes." it's more or less true. "There are... better people to ask."

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