thecapitol | I will never die

Entry tags:

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?"

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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?"

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He hears a voice and he words aren't addressed to him but he pays attention anyway. They're directed to another Tribute nearby, one who turns down the offer and moves on from the requester, but Bucky looks, curious as to who it is looking for a partner.

It's a woman, one he recognises as a member of staff who recently appeared on the network. Dark hair, dark eyes and an intelligent gaze. Something about her makes him want to stand up straighter, like he's in front of a commanding officer. He shakes his head a little, putting it down to the fact she had a powerful bearing about her and nothing more.

Still, he watches her, considering. It's unusual to see staff, even mentors, come into the training centre to use it for the same purpose as the Tributes.

"You need a partner?"

That voice. She knows it.

Her heart thuds. She has to breathe. It reminds her of the smell of pastures and hay, stupid games children play where they chase and push and hit (but gently, always gently, because Steve was always so fragile), and dancing in fields until all the dancers collapsed and laughed on the ground. Good days. Days of hardship, but still full of love nonetheless. All of the sudden, she feels her heart beginning to crack all over again.

It's not him, though. She knows who it is.

She forces her face to be neutral and turns to face him, and--damn it, they look more alike in person than on the screen. Same striking blue eyes, same broad shoulders, same everything--except the arm. And the demeanor. And the hair. He even looks just a few years older than hers, now that she could see him closely.

It makes her heart ache to see him and remember how much she misses her Bucky. This was why she didn't want to be near the tributes. This was why she had avoided meeting him, because he looked everything like the last person she loves and yet is not him at all.

But if she focuses on the differences, on the gleaming metal arm and the long hair and the withdrawn demeanor, she can remind herself that this is a different man.

"Yes, I do." Through many, many years of Capitol interviews and suffering, she has learned how to keep her face and voice perfectly steady even when she wants to cry. "Do you have a preferred weapon, or would you like to stick with hand to hand?"

The feeling doesn't go away as she turns to regard him directly, if anything it grows stronger and he's bewildered by it, even as his posture changes to something almost like parade rest. Legs apart but his arms hanging down by his sides rather than behind his back.

Bucky tries to push it aside but it's the strangest reaction he's ever had to a Capitolite thus far. It might be something to worry about but until he knows more he decides it's better just to roll with it rather than give anything away by trying to back out of the situation, or openly question it. She's agreed to spar with him, he better follow through.

"Hand to hand is fine." he doesn't like to use knives in sparring against another person, holding back isn't his strong suit. HYDRA didn't mind if he occasionally broke the people they assigned him to train with but the Capitol certainly would.

"Excellent. Let's go to the mat, then."

She slowly pulls off her scarf--it'd be a hazard in a fight--and puts it in her pocket. Underneath the scarf, there's a big, ugly scar goin all the way around her throat. Bucky may recognize a wound from a wire garrote that wasn't very expertly handled.

"My name is Peggy Carter, by the way," she says as she walks to the mat, taking a defensive stance. She's not sure if she has to introduce herself, but she feels the need to keep up appearances. The Capitol knows she was friends with her Bucky, but this man may not.

His eyes track her movement, noting the scar with little visible reaction. Inside he's surprised, both at the severity of the wound that caused it and the fact that the Capitol hasn't wiped it away. But then Mentor's have a little more freedom than Tribute's, perhaps even the freedom to choose what marks they leave on their bodies.

It seems obvious to him that the wound would have been made during her games but given that he has his own scars it seems better that he doesn't make mention of it. Bucky doesn't know her at all to gauge her reaction if he were inclined to ask.

"James Buchanan Barnes." he replies, giving his full name rather the abbreviated version with his nickname. The by now mundane sensation of having forgotten something is pushed aside as he takes his own stance. "Parameters?" he asks, because he needs to know his limits before they begin.

Unfortunately, the mentors did not get to choose what marks were left. It was only still there because the Capitol decided it should be.

He gave her a full name. That might make it easier to detach him from Bucky, actually. She can just call him James or Mr. Barnes. It makes it easier if she doesn't have to call someone else by Bucky's name. "First one to pin the other wins. No strikes at the throat, back of the neck, eyes, or genital region. Let's try to avoid any damage that would require a doctor's assistance." Usually that goes without saying, but that means he'll probably have to be more careful than people normally have to be in a spar. He has a metal arm, and even without other enhancements, it could probably break her bones relatively easily--and she's seen how he fights in the arena. He's trained to kill.

"Any other ground rules you would like to add?" Her ground rules are usually pretty bare bones for sparring, and she's aware of it. Her strategies are usually dirty--going for the backs of the knee, dazing opponents with clocks to the head, twisting their leg until they fall over, that sort of thing. The arena taught her to fight dirty. But she can clean up her style a little for the sake of her sparring partner, if that's what he wants.

Bucky shakes his head. "No."

More than fine, more than he might have suggested himself. Sometimes he forgets he's not as resistant or quick to heal from damage as he is supposed to be, that he should be careful with what he puts his body through on a daily basis. There's routine bruises and split skin on the knuckles of his right hand to prove this.

Rules set he waits for her signal to begin, then doesn't hesitate to strike forward, using his right hand to strike at her shoulder. Just as she surmised he has to hold back with the metal arm under these circumstances, as it has the potential to cause grievous damage even if he pulls his punches with it.

He lashes out with his human arm. That's what she was hoping for.

She ducks to the side and moves to catch his wrist, intending to punch him just above the bone of his elbow and then roll behind him. He's much bigger than her, so she intends to get him down by attacking his joints. It's a shift from her usual strategy of 'grab whatever heavy thing is nearby and hit them with it', but this is a spar, and it's generally considered rude to grab random debris to smack your sparring partner against.

(This man's movements are quick and lethal. Exceedingly precise. Not much like the way her Bucky fought with bullies a long time ago when life was still simple.)

The moment she grabs his wrist he reverts direction, pulling his arm back towards him. It might hurt if she still manages to hit him but with luck he'll have dragged her closer, enough for his metal hand to seize Carter by the shoulder and throw her down to the mat, after which he will go in for a pin.

... if that doesn't work, and she manages to get behind him, he'll cartwheel sideways, metal hand on the mat until he's shaken off the pain in his flesh elbow, then wheel to face her again.

It was a smart move to hit for the joints.

She's nimble and strong from years of training and wrestling cattle. It's not so easy to down her. It's all a matter of dancing around each other, occasionally landing blows or grabs but never quite managing to get the opponent down until--

She's slammed on her stomach on the mat, sweat making hair stick to her face and her cheeks flushed. He has his arms and pinned and is positioned away from her legs, or else she would have tried to keep fighting, but instead, she just lets out a satisfied laugh. "Okay, you got me. You win."

Between the squeamishness of the Capitol and the lack of training in District 10, she hasn't really fought anyone who could pin her in years. Now, this strange man with her friend's face can do it.

This is wonderful.

She's good, with a skill that speaks of long practice. A Victor who kept up the skills that must have won her the arena and improved upon them in the years since, admirable.

The fight ends with Carter on her front, her wrists grasped in Bucky's hand and his knee planted in the middle of her back. Were this a real fight it would have been easy then to finish her off and for a moment he is almost tempted with the motions of a thousand fights past beating through him. He doesn't.

When Carter concedes the fight he lets go of her hands and climbs off of her. Their spar lasted a little over five minutes and he is impressed, admitting so as he tugs the hair which has gotten loose from it's ponytail back behind his ears. "You're good."

"Thank you, I try."

She rolls into a sitting position, wiping the sweat from her face and neck before pulling her scarf back out of her pocket and tying it tightly over her throat, once again hiding her scar from view. There's something rehearsed and compulsive about the motion; she only ever takes the scarf off when there's a threat of being strangled by it, as in the cases of sparring or working with machinery, but she hates having her scar on display.

"You're better, though. I haven't been properly pinned in years."

She stands up from the mat and brushes herself off, still smiling, ears singing with endorphins. "Come to the water cooler with me. I think we both could stand something to drink after that."

He doesn't offer her a hand up, nor does she seem bothered by that fact. Bucky watches her re-tie her scarf and climb back onto her feet, expecting that might be the end of it unless she wanted to go another round. Carter wasn't the mentor for his district after all and he wondered if she might feed any information gathered about him back to her own Tributes.

Bucky doesn't think he cares if she does.

The request to accompany her is unexpected but he doesn't question it, agreeing with a nod as he follows in her footsteps. It's easy to fall into step with her, match their strides like he's done it before and then he waits for Carter to help herself to the water first.

What information could she possibly feed them that they couldn't see from arena footage? She'd normally be far more eager to get secrets about the opponents, but when death isn't permanent and all the secrets are available to watch... it's not worth the effort.

"You move faster in person than on a television screen. I suppose I only expected that." She pours out a cup of water for both of them before holding one out to him. Just because they're in different districts doesn't mean she can't be friendly, right? Not with this new arbitrary, deathless system. She'd normally be tempted to ask where he learned those moves, but from what she's gathered from arena footage, it wasn't anywhere good.

"I hope you understand that now I'll want to spar until I learn how to pin you." And that might not happen for a very long time, but she'd be okay with that. She is careful to phrase it as somewhat joking, somewhat serious, though, to give him a chance to politely decline any future sparring. She wouldn't want to come on too strong.

That was exactly his thought. There was more than enough evidence already of what he was capable of to be found, both with or without his full abilities. The best thing he has left to him in defence of having it out in the open is that his reputation is enough to put others off attempting to take him out.

Bucky accepts the cup with a grateful nod and raises it to his mouth, subtly pausing to smell the water first, then tip it so the water runs over his tongue and back into the cup. Only when he's mulled over the taste and found nothing unusual in it does he truly take a drink. Normally he'd bring his own bottles bought from the outside but he doesn't want to around any suspicion from her by refusing to drink the water from the cooler.

"You're a good opponent." he replies after a moment, "I'm fine with that." he needs someone who can challenge him, it's the only way he has a chance of improving to the point of being able to help one of his friends win. One of his other friends, that is, now that Tony has won. "I don't see mentor's sparring, normally."

It takes a moment for her to realize why he seems to be drinking strangely. He doesn't trust the water. Rightly so, probably--if the Capitol wanted to wreak havoc, it could easily have the water supply contaminated. If it truly wants to hurt him, though, just avoiding the food and water won't help him. She doesn't say that, though.

"Excellent. I look forward to our next match." Which may just happen to come after the water break, if he feels up to it. She should just leave him, thank him for the match and go, but she doesn't want to. Now that she's talking to him, it feels nice to be able to be with someone who looks and sounds so much like her Bucky.

"Usually, mentors don't. I'm not sure if I've ever seen one besides myself do it." She rests one hand on her hips as she drinks the water, her eyes flicking around at the training area. So many memories made here. None of them good. "I'm not sure what they expect victors these days to do, but during the classic games, we were expected to pick up a hobby after we won since we didn't have to work anymore. Camera crews would come into our homes to report on them and everything. Most people would do something crafty, but I found training to be more fulfilling. That ended up being my hobby." Training in everything. Basic strengthening and conditioning, martial arts, knives, and sometimes she'd charm a peacekeeper or two into letting her try out their gun at a state firing range. Anything to make her feel like she has the power to defend herself even if she doesn't.

He continues to drink slowly, sipping really. Drinking too fast after exertion can lead to a troubled stomach, so he's learned. Now that he's minus a supersoldier's metabolism and resilience Bucky's had to learn to be all kinds of careful with his own body in surprising ways.

In honesty, some of that is actually just the day to day care that people put into themselves but that he'd forgotten after years of ice and a prep team who took care of him. They strictly regulated his diet and health. His personal appearance had never been a concern either unless it was a necessity for a mission, something where he was required to pass within the public view without arousing suspicion.

"Practical." is what Bucky says when Carter finishes talking. It to his eyes a far more worthy endeavour than almost anything else. He can't help the way his face pulls in distaste at the idea of camera crews invading someone's home or quarters. Bucky felt uncomfortable enough with the idea they were watching even when he couldn't see them. Having a camera and crew in his face? That was a nightmare and a reason why his escort literally had to march him to any publicity event if they wanted him to attend.

"I haven't seen that here."

He's a man of few words. It makes it even easier to separate him from the Bucky of her youth, because once upon a time, Bucky never shut up. To be fair, Peggy and Steve had never been particularly quiet either, but that's besides the point.

When he pulls a face, she has to cover her mouth to hide the amused smile and the soft laugh that escapes. It's an instinctive gesture, one that she had back in D10 and she still sometimes pulls when her laughter is genuine and not for the sake of cameras.

"Count yourself lucky. It was terrible." She shakes her head and waves a hand absently, as if gesturing to a non-existent camera crew. "At least once a year--far more often if your hobby was popular--a crew of stylists and cameras and interviewers would waltz into your home and start fixing everything up. They would move all the furniture around, change your lighting, make everything look the way they thought it should. And then the stylists would dress and groom you." She's smiling at the memory, but it's a rueful smile, the sort people have when they're recalling something truly and yet humorously awful.

"They wanted me film me sparring with makeup, styled hair, and whatever impractically tight-fitting clothing the stylist liked that month. Then they would cut the cameras and style me all over again for another take if I started to sweat. It took days for them to get all the footage they wanted that way. I'm lucky that the Capitol isn't very interested in fights that aren't to the death; lack of demand to see my hobby made the crews leave me alone. I'm not sure how much longer I could have gone before strangling a stylist."

"Was that a strategy?" he can't help but ask. It made sense to him. Pick a hobby that the Capitol citizens would find boring to watch, therefore ensuring that you would be largely left alone in the future. He should keep that in mind should that situation ever be turned on him.

Bucky isn't concerned that she might not want to admit that where Capitol ears could hear, it wouldn't change the fact that the citizens weren't interested in following her that way. No, the citizens had a new distraction now in the form of the off-world Tributes who almost never stayed dead.

He could almost feel a kinship with this woman; he thinks about strangling his stylists often. Actually, Bucky thinks about that and worse about many Capitolite staff and Peacekeepers. If he could he'd rip his way through the lot of them to get himself out of this enslavement.

"Well, I was already interested in doing something physical. I spent most of my life wrestling cows and cutting up their corpses before the arena, so I guess you could say I was used to a certain amount of activity. Fighting seemed to be the logical choice." And she needed it. She needed the release and sense of security it gave her. The sense that she could keep people from hurting her, when in reality no amount of combat training can make that true. "That it was uninteresting to a public audience... might have been considered."

Yes. Yes, it was a strategy. She could have kept the obsessive exercise a secret, but she hated the camera crews, so why not just declare it her hobby? There's nothing treasonous about saying she finds camera crews in her home to be uncomfortable.

(It would be best if Peggy didn't share the true extent of her fantasies about Capitolites. There is violence and rage that inspires a certain amount of creativity in them.)

"Luckily, I doubt you have to worry about it. Things like hobbies and victory tours were used as filler for Capitol television for Hunger Games enthusiasts, since we would only have one game that would last for a week or two every year. Now that they have the never-ending game, there's no need for filler."

"Good." he grunts, with the kind of bluntness he's become famous for in the Capitol.

Bucky's ended up somewhere between the vicious killer and the emotionally stunted, damaged prisoner in the eyes of his fans. He knows because his escort told him so and, on the couple occasions he actually looked at them instead of throwing them straight in the trash, his fanmail. The letters either contained encouragement for him to kill more or were filled with offers to take care of him that ranged from uncomfortable to completely bizarre. Needless to say they all went in the bin eventually no matter their content and he's never taken the time to respond to a single one.

He'd probably be quite on board with Peggy's violent fantasies.

"How long has the never-ending game been going on?" it occurs to him he's never asked that question before. Going from once a year to constant was a large change.

She has to think for a moment, her brows creasing. "About... three years now. It's technically a Quarter Quell, which happens every twenty five years to celebrate another quarter century of the games."

She finishes up her water and throws the cup in the trash before leaning against the cooler. "It was pretty surprising to everyone. Before, Quarter Quells were just made special by a change in how the tributes were chosen or the number there would be. Suddenly not only was there a change in where the tributes came from, but a change in the very structure of the game. But I suppose that it wouldn't be very cost-effective to pull an entirely new batch of tributes from different worlds every game." Thus why they were allowed to stay alive.

Does Peggy believe for a moment that this Quarter Quell was actually what was arranged by the creators of the game? Not at all. The Quarter Quell was arranged this way to respond to the rush of rebellious activity that came with the 74th Hunger Games' winners.

Nothing about this seems cost effective to Bucky, even with his limited understanding. The sheer scope, size and events of each arena seemed like they would cost a fortune. Maybe several fortunes.

He's under no illusion, had it explained to him in fact, that the true motivation behind the Hunger Games is control and whatever brought about the significant change that Carter is describing is also about control. Three years though, that's a long time. Bucky himself has been a captive of the Capitol for ten months, almost a year. It feels longer sometimes, like the border between the Capitol and HYDRA was blurred, almost non-existent.

The sad thing is that, all things considers, his life is still better now than it was before.

"It seems better for the Districts." not having to sacrifice their own children year after year. No, now strangers who weren't allowed to truly die did the job for them.

"Well, you won't hear District 10 complaining about the change," she says carefully. "And you won't hear it from any other outlying districts. The tributes from them had usually been starving their whole lives, so they were hardly the picture of healthy competition. Districts 1, 2, and maybe 4 might object, though. Those districts are rich in comparison to the others, and winning the Hunger Games was treated as a career option that many people would train for until they were seventeen."

District 4 is harder for her to pin down because their tributes weren't always careers, but 1 and 2 had probably had grumbling in their ranks. Not that she really has asked the people of the districts how they feel about it, or any of the career victors. There's generally a tangible divide between the career victors and everyone else.

"My escort, he told me District 1 is starving now because no one has won in so long." he says it carefully, with the air of a man who in some ways regrets this fact even if he doesn't intend to change his ways anytime soon. Bucky hasn't fought to win since his first arena, back before he knew about the resurrection mechanic. He'd believed he had only one chance to survive then.

He feels repulsed at the idea of children training to be in the arena, wanting to do this. They had died doing this, so many of them, believing it was the right thing to do. It's a disturbing thought.

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