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

Oh, yeah. Definitely awkward. But Skye follows the other girl's lead, keeping her handshake gentle, her body language disarming.

"You could say that, more or less." Less of the fighting with and more of the fighting against, if what they told her is true. But there has to be a way out before things get that far. There has to be. "I'm not keeping you from something, am I?"

"Only more or less?" Eponine repeats with a laugh. "Nah, Miss. You'll find here that it is more. It is not just to fight, but to kill with us and be on their screens with us and go to their parties with us. All with us."

She smiles sheepishly at Skye's question. "I have lost my dog. I forgot even that I had it and I do not know where it is. It don't really matter though. Orc is so stupid and he gets me a poodle because he thinks all French women have poodles. They are stupid dogs. Not dogs for me."

"No, I meant--" she begins, then rolls her eyes and cuts herself off. There's no point in explaining. "You know what? Never mind."

But when the girl mentions being French, Skye notes that and files it away. The information could be useful; at the very least, it gives her a broader sense for the geographic and cultural diversity of the Tribute backgrounds.

"Guys tend to make stupid assumptions about girls all the time. I'd offer to help you find your dog, but--kinda new, kinda don't know my way around."

"'S alright, Miss. I know this place better than I know my hands Every place to hide - well, perhaps it is that I spend my time hiding. I think I know better than any other Tribute, but they do not know!"

She pauses awkwardly. Not so many people particularly like Eponine very much. And perhaps - perhaps - she has told a lie there, about knowing the Capitol best out of everybody. Certainly, though, she knows the city well, the back streets and the alleys in particular.

"You know people here, Miss? You have friends?"

Every place to hide, huh? She'll have to find this 'Ponine later. For now, though, she drops her voice, more serious suddenly. "You might want to keep your voice down when you brag about stuff like that," she advises. She might be new, but she knows police states and what happens when you try to fight them.

She thinks back over the list of Tributes she'd perused, the names that had stuck out: familiar names, iconic names. No friends to Skye, but people she thinks--maybe, she can trust them. Not just because they're heroes, but because Coulson trusted them, and if there's anyone in the world she trusts completely, it's Coulson.

"I might have friends here," she adds, and smiles. "We'll see."

"Miss, they hear you even when you whisper. You know, in the arena, I put my mouth right to Miss Worthington's ear and I say to her my sins so nobody else can hear. But Miss, everybody knows what I did. They manage to hear it. "

Eponine has no idea how, but she does know that her confessions were broadcast for all to hear.

"I used to have a language, Miss. French, of course, but a nasty language from the gutters that hardly none understand. But they take it from my head with their chips."
Chips that Eponine imagines as being potato chips, having no knowledge of the other sort . She doesn 't even think on how it works, beyond surpressing her linguistic abilities.

"It is good you have friends, though. It is nice to have friends, and you shall need 'em, Miss."

She talks like someone from some last-century novel--Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Darcy, or Holmes and Watson. Weird, flowery turns of phrase that belong on a page and not...coming out of somebody's mouth.

And she ticks suppressing innate skills with possible lobotomies off on her list of terrifyingly wrong things Panem is capable of.

"What about you? Do you have friends here?"

"Me? Sometimes yes,sometimes no. So many do not like me so much." Eponine pauses a little awkwardly. "There are... gentlemen here, from Paris with me. But we're not friends. They're gentlemen, proper gentlemen. They're not friends with beggars. Some of 'em are nice though. Mr. Joly is nice. Mr. Courfeyrac tried to help me in the arena, but he don't like me even still. I suppose that is how good he is though, that he'd help me even still. I wouldn't help somebody I disliked. My brother were here, a long time ago, but they didn't bring him back proper when he died."

Skye's judgment of Eponine so far: she seems nice enough, if a little scatter-brained, a little too open with her words. That she should even qualify the last part as something negative is a sign of how far she's come since she joined SHIELD.

"I'm so sorry." She doesn't have a brother - not a real one, at any rate - but she does have Fitz, and maybe Trip, and she doesn't want to think about them trapped in the Arena. Trip could probably handle it--physically, at least, if not emotionally--but Fitz...

She has to hope Fitz isn't here. He wouldn't stand a chance.

"Do you believe in anything? Like God, or Heaven?"

Eponine shrugs Skye's apologies away, but she looks cautious when Skye begins to speak of God.

"Why, Miss? Are you a nun? You do not look like a nun." She shakes her head. "You don't need to tell me that I ought not to think of him. I know God is not for women like me. Perhaps you too, Miss, when you have killed a man. I do not know. Perhaps he turns an eye to nuns and lets them do as they wish - he does to priests, no?"

"Me, a nun?" She pulls a face that clearly shows how well that mental image sits with her. Skye and religion? Not things that go well together. She has so much respect for people who can have that kind of faith, but the world doesn't work that way for her.

"Some people find comfort in that, when they lose someone they love. Believing that they're in a better place and all that."

"I think any place is better than this, Miss." Eponine cackles. "You don't need no God for that." She, unlike Skye, is completely not bothered about the Capitol hearing her slander their city.

"Even Paris, where I am from, is better, and there, there is no food and no clothes and no homes. But perhaps it is better that the king does not care at all. I think your real home must be better as well, Miss."

The Paris Skye knows from her time and place is...okay, not perfect by a long shot, but compared to the US it's basically a liberal's wet dream.

"It has its ups and downs," she says. She thinks about Coulson and May, Simmons and Fitz, Mike, Trip, Fury, Koenig. "There's good people there, but I'm of the firm belief there are good people everywhere if you know how to find them."

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