I will never die

[impaledqueen]

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?"

Comments

[whatisay]

"I was helping him up off the ground. It's not my fault that whatever traumatized part of his brain decided to interpret that as a threat decided to respond by hitting me in the face with a piece of glass. You know how Mentors are." He beckons the Avox to bring him a glass of water. He'd say present company exempted, except it really isn't.

"Not that I know of. I mean, I'm not involved. I only know what people are too careless or too stupid not to cover up." Because that's how the world is, Jason knows. No one is to be trusted because they all are just a sheen over a rotten core. People look down on his family but he knows every family has their tragedies and secrets, that the Compsons were just the unlucky enough pustule to be lanced to ease the swelling of an infected patch of flesh just a little.

"Who is it in yours- Sigma Klim, Tom Cassidy, Arya Stark, Clara Murphy, Jack Spicer- no, you're actually lucky, your Tributes like to cozy up to the Capitol in legal ways. Two petitioning out and one a Mentor. Not bad."

[impaledqueen]

Peggy has a distinct feeling that that's not the whole story, but she's not going to push it. She can ask Linden what horrible thing Jason has been doing later. (Not that, she supposes, Linden going into a violent flashback is too unrealistic. She does the same thing sometimes.)

"Oh, thank goodness. It's hard enough to mentor people when they're not trying to get their tongues cut out at every turn." She starts counting off on her fingers. "Klim and Cassidy are the petitioners, correct? And Clara seems pleasant enough. I suppose we've had some luck in this whole venture. I'm not sure how well I could mentor seven or eight unruly tributes alone." Mentoring one or two subservient ones is hard enough. At least her new tributes are just complaining rather than overtly treasonous, and there's another person who can mentor with her.

[whatisay]

"Try Escorting them," Jason snorts. "At least they aren't assuming you're against them from the very start. They cut you some slack, give you the benefit of the doubt."

Which, he supposes, isn't something that's changed from Peggy's day. He remembers her as a teenager, treating him with the suspicion a wild animal would to someone freeing it from a trap, and him with an even worse temper than he has now. They came to blows more than once. She once made him bleed with a blow from her fingernails; he got a reprimand after a Stylist reported having to hide bruises from where he grabbed her upper arm, not because it was damage to the Tribute but because it made more work for the Stylist to add sleeves to a dress. Phillips intervened more than a few times.

Phillips has been gone a long time now, but so has the violent tension between him and Peggy. They've settled into something near pleasant. Jason drags from his cigarette, exhaling a smoke ring. "I'm doing alright in Seven, though. Emily's alright enough. A little too softhearted for other Districts' Tributes, but maybe I'll let her call home a few times so she can remember what she's training them for."

[impaledqueen]

"Not the ones who don't even know what a mentor is. I think one of my tributes mistook me for some kind of TV producer for the district. They think that I'm just there to tell them how to kill things in the most entertaining way."

At the very least, the tributes from the classic games generally treated their mentors far better. Mentors were established members of the district's community, and every little district child knew the function of the mentor within the Hunger Games. Even if the tributes resented their Reaping, they paid attention to what the mentor said. Peggy had been no exception--even though she had taken out her anger on her obnoxious and cruel escort, she had hung onto every word her mentor said, and he was the only one who could break up their fights.

Now he doesn't need to be around. Their fights, when they happen, are confined to passive aggressive jabs or sometimes verbal confrontations, but they happen rarely as they've gotten comfortable with one another.

"A call home should fix it up. I imagine it can be hard to remember the importance of our work when we're not faced with a person who could die from our negligence every day." Instead, they're faced with dozens of grown adults, freely mingling between districts they were arbitrarily sorted into, some of them not even caring about winning the games in the first place. She's already been talked to by a ton of tributes from outside of her district for one reason or another, something that never happened before. "And it must be hard with how friendly some of the other districts' tributes try to be."

Peggy has a heart of stone, or so she tells herself, so she feels she can resist the urge to get invested in other districts' tributes, regardless of their friendliness. (She might not be able to do it for the Bucky she met or the Steve if she meets him.)

[whatisay]

Jason laughs, now. "Apparently where some of mine are from, 'escort' is a polite term for a whore. I've had at least three of them assume that I was their intimate companion when they first met me. I'm not sure if I should take it as an insult that they were relieved that I wasn't."

It's always a gamble to joke about prostitution with Peggy, but Jason's one of the ones who usually knows where her limits are, and this is far from them. He slings one ankle over his knee with that aqueous sprawl he has and drinks some more of the coffee.

"I'm thinking of making some sort of network post to them all about why they shouldn't be involved in inter-District alliances. I've tried talking to them individually and I think they're willfully misunderstanding me, like a child sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming 'not listening!' until I shut up." He shakes his head. "I says maybe if they don't want to take a survival tip they should see it blow up in their face in the Arena, but you know me. I'm too generous to keep good advice to myself."

[impaledqueen]

This is still within Peggy's limits. She gives a laugh of her own, covering her mouth instinctively as she often does when a laugh is real. "Oh no, that would make the Hunger Games very different." Personal prostitutes for each tribute to make sure they don't die virgins, she supposes? The thought of grumpy Jason giving his escort spiel in that context makes her start giggling. Giggling. (She would insist it's perfectly adult chuckling, though.) "Not sure how useful the Escorts would be like that, but I guess the tributes would enjoy dealing with them more."

Her giggles recede, now becoming actual chuckles instead. "So generous, Jason. I don't blame them for not really seeing the difference between their districts, since they've been sorted arbitrarily and have been given no reason to care about the people they've been assigned to any more than the people others have been assigned to. How many of these tributes know that their districts are rewarded for their victories, anyway? One of mine didn't know that was the case."

[whatisay]

"To be honest, there are some Sponsors who'd glut up the District budget more if I'd sleep with them. They don't understand that just because I butter them up to get into their wallets doesn't mean I like them."

When she giggles, he can't help but grin a bit back, as if their happiness is both intensely elusive and contagious, something they must catch together like a woodland creature between hounds.

"Whoever's grabbing them from whatever swamp they crawled out of and is bringing them here isn't giving them even the faintest explanation. Sometimes I'll just assume they know something and it isn't until halfway through the conversation that I realize we're talking past each other. Pamphlets, I say. And history lessons." He nods his head tightly and then rests it backwards, leaning the back of it against the rest of the couch. He takes a long suck of his cigarette and exhales through his nose, coming as close to relaxing as he has all day.

[impaledqueen]

"That seems to be a thing with Sponsors. It's like they don't understand that we don't sit around with them all day spinning poetic about our districts because we enjoy their company."

She leans back and crosses her ankles, looking at the ceiling as she thinks. "In that case, pamphlets wouldn't be so bad. Maybe I should put together a binder and leave it in the District for new arrivals to look at."

[whatisay]

"Ugh." Jason doesn't push that part of the conversation further, knowing that there's a time and place that Peggy's receptive to bitching about the way Sponsors smell and their tendency to throw their weight around as if their wealth could buy away their improprieties.

"You might have to put a gun to their head to get them to actually read it. They have no initiative on their own. It's not even like they believe everything they're told, they just don't bother to inform their disbelief." He waves the cigarette again. "You tell them about the government here, they'll say all the reasons they think they could do it better but don't even crack a book."

He checks his watch. "But I should be getting back downstairs. Escorts actually have to work these days. Imagine that."