the run and go; cato [blitz]

It quickly became apparent that here time was not measured in the passing hours, but by what you did with them. To someone who had spent the last eighteen years scratching marks into the wall and praying no one found them, this was much more concerning than one might think. Wasting seconds had been the name of the game until the reality of the situation hit me on my fifth day spent among the tall buildings and winding halls within them.

Pace after pace and I’m lingering in the doorway of the training center, forty-eight hours prior and I was introducing myself to a boy with a hatchet for a heart and another with a heart of lit dynamite, five seconds from detonation and all you could hear through the smoke was “Noah Bowers.”

I never fully introduced myself to them, a simple nod of the head and I was content to be on my way. Still drawn from that door I had eaten every meal alone, away from the other two from six and away from the boy with smoke for lungs.

But then again it seemed that everyone had already found the definition of clique, already caught between friendly handshakes and games of tug’o’war like the same person wouldn’t fashion a noose around your neck in three seconds flat if they were given the chance.

But today it was desolate save slightly hunched shoulders and the heavy feet upon the floor of Orion Hammerfell. Much less to him and more to me he was the living definition of a standard I would never be held accountable to—I’d never make it past one day.

Saved of appetite and sliding into the bench beside him I place both elbows on the table, chin resting on folded hands, “What’s it like to actually have expectations to uphold?”