thecapitol | I will never die

Who| Peggy and D10 tributes; Peggy and Open
What| Peggy is evaluating her new tributes, and in between evaluations she bugs people to spar with her.
Where| Training Center
When| Soon after Peggy arrives
Warnings/Notes| Maybe from violence from sparring?

Closed to D10ers

"I want to evaluate each skill you may need in the arena." Peggy Carter is large and in charge, perfectly composed and stepping like an army woman with a clipboard at her side. Today, her scarf is black, and her clothes are suited for training. "I want you to sit at each station--not just the combat stations, but all of them--and complete whatever task it is set up to allow you to practice. I will time how fast it takes you to complete and take note of any particular problem areas, and we can work together from there to set up a training schedule that works for you. Do you understand?"

Open to All

She's put away her clipboard, but not the training clothes or the black scarf. She's doing a circuit around the training center herself, working at the survival stations, evaluating what she can learn and what she already knows, but most of all, she spends her time with the combat training equipment. Exercise, weights, axes, arrows--and even, though she spends some time staring at them with an inscrutable look in her eye, knives and swords. Work. Work. She goes through it with the methodical air of a woman who's been doing this for a very long time, even if she hasn't been in the arena for years.

But obsessive exercising can't take the edge of for her anymore. She's back in the tribute center, back where her life had been consistently destroyed year after year after year, back where she and Bucky and all of the tributes she had mentored before had scrambled to survive. She couldn't sleep here, and she had to force herself to eat. Not even destroying herself with exercise will remove the horror now fresh on her mind.

Eventually, she abandons the weights and weapons, instead approaching the nearest person. "Do you feel up for a spar?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"What, me?" Stephen asks, raising his hands. "No, no, no. I'm just looking for one of my Tributes, that's all."

His clothes are just as outrageous as they've been all month: it's a business suit, but made of translucent rose-tinted material, with a nude-illusion bodysuit underneath.

"Have you seen her? Tall, red hair, eyepatch?"

"The woman with the heart eyepatch, you mean?" Molotov Cocktease? The woman whose name is so ridiculous that it must be made up?

Peggy slowly looks Stephen up and down, because wow, that is over the top for a casual setting even by Capitol standards, but she doesn't comment. "I'm afraid I haven't seen her."

"That one exactly," he says. "Well, if you haven't seen her today, you'll see her here soon. She practically lives down here." Stephen waves a hand like I'll never understand it.

Then, he gives her a broad smile. "Welcome back to the tower, by the way. It's good to see you."

Peggy gives him a smile of her own. Even dressed ridiculously, Stephen Reagan has a way of making people feel welcome. "It's good to see you too, Stephen. How has the job been treating you since I left?"

She pretends she hasn't heard the gossip. She knows that Stephen is... something of a mess, but not quite as much of a mess as some of the other people she's known, so she doesn't judge.

"It's had its ups and downs," Stephen says, with an I'm pretending I don't know that you're pretending you don't know raise of an eyebrow. "But it's on the up."

...against all the evidence.

"Really? You have to tell me all about it over drinks some time." She has a feeling he might need a steadying influence at the moment. He won't help any tributes when he's flailing around uselessly. They don't share a district, so she probably shouldn't care about his performance quality, but she feels a need to help him out and give his tributes a fair shake.

Or his brother could pull him out of his job. That could happen too. "I suppose you enjoy all the new tributes, then?"

"I would love to." He seems cheerful enough, and it's mostly his dress that betrays how unstable he is.

"And as for the new Tributes -- let me tell you, it has been an exercise in patience," Stephen continues in that same carefree way. "But it's ultimately been very rewarding."

"With the way everyone talks about the tributes, you'd expect we were dealing with wild animals." Her experience has been mostly pleasant thus far. It seems like some of the tributes needed the mentor system explained to them, which in and of itself was worrisome, but otherwise they were mostly just regular people who were disoriented and upset by being drafted into the games. So basically any like any other tribute she's mentored. "Any tips to pass along to me? I can't say I know much about the different ways I should handle the off-worlders from the district citizens."

He wags a finger at her. "Ah ah, aren't we supposed to be on competing teams?" he teases. It's not the kind of thing that actually matters to Stephen Reagan, but he's very carefully keeping the tone light. Behind his cheerfully vacant expression, his mind is racing: he wants to find a way to say this that can't be construed as anti-Capitol. "But since we've always been on good terms, I suppose I can give you a few helpful hints. The biggest thing I've noticed is that they don't know the system." There's an emphasis on system. "The old Tributes, especially the ones from the industrial Districts -- they were almost all frightened children who knew exactly how strong the Capitol is. With only a few exceptions, these new Tributes are adults, and they respond best to being treated that way. They are also, uh, a little slow, sometimes," he goes on, phrasing it delicately, "to understand how absolute the Capitol's power is."

Stephen's taking no risks; he's toeing the party line. But the useful information he is hoping to convey is that the new Tributes are not afraid. Not all of them. Stephen believes in them, and he thinks that they and this District 13 can change the way Panem is run for the better.

"Mm, you caught me. I'm a cheater."

She listens, and what he says supports what she's witnessed so far. For years, she mentored frightened children with absolutely no experience with weapons or survival. Only one tribute she was involved with mentoring had ever won the games, and then he faked his suicide almost immediately after he got back home, so it didn't feel like much of a victory. She knows well how the old system worked. Yet now, instead of hugging crying twelve-year-olds and telling them that they have to be brave and strong because no one else can be for them, she's talking to grown men and women calmly about strategy and politics. Some of them don't even care to even moderately participate; the lack of permanence in death has given them room for civil disobedience that would kill any tribute and their family years ago.

"I've noticed that. I'm curious why the Capitol allows some of the rhetoric I've heard around here." Because they would not have tolerated it from previous tributes. Why would they give these new tributes special treatment? "I suppose it comes from not having grown up with the Capitol." But that still doesn't explain why the Capitol wouldn't take great pains to teach them exactly how to behave.

Stephen flings his arms wide. "Damned if I know," he declares in a tone that is genuinely bewildered. "I always kind of figured that with so many Tributes, it was hard keeping track of what every one of them said all the time. With so many people saying so many stupid things, it must have been hard to figure out how to punish them all."

He shrugs.

"Luckily, Cyrus laid down the law last week, so we'll probably start hearing less of that."

Stephen sounds blithely cheerful about it; he gives no indication that there is anything wrong.

"Hopefully." She plays along. Nothing wrong with a healthy dose of censorship, especially with a population of eclectic individuals who had all been pulled out of their worlds without warning to play in their own hopelessly fucked up culture.

"At the very least, this new format of games has given us time to train everyone. How did we ever deal with just a week to get our tributes into shape?" Oh yeah, by just crossing their fingers before tossing a bunch of unprepared children into a slaughterhouse. That's how they dealt with it.

Stephen's smile flickers -- barely, but it's there. He's thinking along the same lines: by hoping they happened to have talents that would save their lives.

"I'm glad the new format is making your job easier," he sniffs; it's the tone that keeps it in lighthearted-banter territory rather than ungraceful whining. It's treating a terrible subject very lightly. Stephen is conscious of this. However, he's also being careful to look clueless. "Oh, but I can't complain. More time has its benefits on my end, too -- more time to get to know them, more time to build a fan base..." He shakes his head, suddenly.

"But speaking of your job, I shouldn't keep you from it." He nods at the training center behind her. "I hope you find a better sparring partner than me."

She's grown somewhat numb to talking about the lives of children as though they were tokens. Nearly a decade mentoring does that to a person.

"And I hope you find Ms. Cocktease."

Peggy smiles and nods to him before walking off to find someone else to beat up on the mat.

I will never die

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hrf that HTML; the italics end at "exercise"

Happens to the best of us!

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