thecapitol | she got legs

Entry tags:

she got legs

Who| Susannah and OPEN
What| Susannah's got some mechanical legs
Where| all over the Capitol!
When| Oh, starting from yesterday, probably, and going up to the Crowning.
Warnings/Notes| Ian C, Eddie, and Felicity will all have closed threads, but feel free to make your own underneath theirs

Eight deaths caused by her hands (including her own) equaled eight envelopes of killmoney. Perhaps it was a bit callous for her to turn around and use it as a downpayment on robot legs, but she wasn't a mentor like Maximus. She couldn't just get them for free. And really, she was lucky to find someone willing to craft and fit them for that little upfront--although she was going to be a walking advertisement for their product now, as well as an actual advertisement in a couple days. It was better than to have to beg the rest of the money from a sponsor--she'd heard some things about what they expected in return.

She was glad, now, that she'd asked Maximus how it felt to use his mechanical leg. It had prepared her.

So now here she is, walking around on a pair of porcelain robot legs with blue detailing, wearing a skirt just far enough past her knees in length for her to really show them off. And she's definitely looking to show them off.

Wheelchair tribute is no more--Susannah's got legs and she (mostly) knows how to use them!

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"White," she corrects, "with blue flowers. Until today, I'd had no legs for about six years, so I feel that's an improvement."

She looks the tribute--or at least she assumes he is, she thinks he's one of Eddie's--up and down. Her eyes keep going back to his hair, which is styled in a way she really hasn't seen much of since she left New York.

Interesting.

It was blue enough to call it blue, but he wasn't going to argue about colours, that was silly. "That is an improvement," he agreed. "How on earth did you manage with no legs?"

"Crawling," she says with a shrug. "I can move surprisingly fast that way. And last arena they left a wheelchair for me behind the ticket desk." She's assuming he means in the arenas.

He meant generally, but he assumed the arenas would be much the same. "That was good of them," he said surprised that they would want to help anyone like that. "They must like you to have done that."

"I'm given to understand that there's one or two who made a lot of money illicitly betting on me," she offers. "For some reason, nobody expected a crippled woman to last all that long in the arena."

"I can't imagine why," he said, and chuckled. He wouldn't have expected her to. "I'm surprised there isn't more betting on tributes."

"I'm sure there is," Susannah says. "We just don't get to know about it and it's probably all hush-hush." She smiles at him. "I'm Susannah. Susannah Dean. And you're one of Eddie's tributes."

"I am," he said, smiling back. "Ian Chesterton. Nice to meet you." He had seen her about, but not with those legs and not to talk to. "You're a friend of Eddie's."

"Mmhm," she says. "He's my man." After a moment she adds, "Mind if I ask when they got you from? It's just... your hair. It's so normal."

He chuckled. No one had ever described his hair as 'normal'. Although he couldn't disagree with that, since he didn't do anything special with it.

"The last time I was home it was 1963," he said a little wistfully, thinking of home. Since he didn't know what year it had been on the planet he'd been on before he found himself here, it seemed best to go with 1963.

After a moment, Susannah nods. "That explains it," she says. "Last time I was it was 1964."

"Really?" He looked excited at meeting someone from his own time. "I had no idea there was anyone else from the sixties here."

Susannah grins at him. "Neither did I! I suppose there could be others and we just don't know it, but they mostly seem to be rather before or rather after."

"I'm not in the habit of asking everyone what year they're from," he said, chuckling. "But quite a few do seem to be from a time after the 1960s."

"I'm not either!" Susannah protests, laughingly. "Just, there was something about you that seemed familiar, that's all. And I'm glad I figured out what!"

She's still grinning. "So, Mr Chesterton, what were you before you got scooped up here to Panem?"

He grinned back, happy to have met someone from his own time. A year out hardly made much difference from here. "I was a secondary school teacher. I taught science. Not much call for that in the arena," he added, chuckling.

"I was part of the Movement," she says, quietly. "I'm not sure if there's a place for civil disobedience there, either. Not that... not that I was really practicin' it directly before I came here."

"That was civil disobedience in a way, though, wasn't it?" For the good, but then the same thing could be said of civil disobedience here.

She shakes her head. "I'm sorry. I wasn't clear. I meant, I'm not sure if there's a place for civil disobedience inside the arena. There's always a place for it in the Movement. It's what it was founded on." It occurs to her that being British, he might not know what she's talking about. "I guess you'd call us the Negro civil rights movement? That's what I did back home. Protested, went to rallies, tried to sign people down South up to vote. I just... I hadn't been home for a while before I came here."

"I see," he said in understanding. He thought civil disobedience could work in the arena - or was at least better than just doing what they're supposed to, but here wasn't the place to say that.

"Where were you just before you came here?" he asked curiously.

It wasn't that she didn't think it couldn't work. It probably could in the short term. But if she wanted to elude final death long enough to find some way to bring this place down--and she very much did--she'd have to play the game well enough they'd want to keep her in it, not give them a very good reason to forget about her.

"If we were anywhere but where we are, you'd probably think I was crazy to tell you this," she says. "But... I was in another world. A different one from the world of New York. A different one from here I'd been drawn there."

That sounded a lot like this place. "You're right, it doesn't sound crazy." It did, sort of, but a normal sort of crazy. "A different New York on Earth or on another planet?"

"That's a good question," she says. "I think it might have been a different Earth? Or a world close enough to Earth. But it was very different from the one I knew, even so. The world had moved on. Civilization had, too. It might have been the world I came from originally, only thousands of years in the future." She shakes her head. "Like here, I guess, though I doubt we're as far forward as Mid-World might have been."

He nodded. "I think thousands of years in the future the world will be very different. At least if all the science fiction I've read is to be believed." He chuckled. "We'll be taken over by robots and men from Mars."

"Or we'll have blown ourselves up," she agrees. "I think I'd rather have the robots and Martians, though. At least you can do something about those. You can't really do anything about being blown up."

Re: susannah's vocabulary is a bit sixties

splendid_roman - 2014-05-11 19:12 (UTC) - Expand

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dividedgirlofmine - 2014-05-26 03:47 (UTC) - Expand

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she got legs

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susannah's vocabulary is a bit sixties

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