Time. [hernani]

In the Training Center, the first day of Hunger Games season is comparable to watching a dam rupture. The lobby is, for one moment, vacant. All that moves are the Avoxes as they wax the floors, fluff the cushions – the gentle sounds of their preparations echoing weakly throughout the empty rooms. The ticking of the clocks echo louder than they, because the sounds of the clocks are ceaseless, they follow one from room to room, they converge into one sweep of sound that dominates the building.

Like an ambush, red flashes across the clock-faces as an audio system within their bodies scream and roar with the urgency of a fire alarm. The Avoxes jump as though to seek refuge. They have an hour and a half to get into position. They swarm broom closets and laundry rooms, shoving away the cleaning supplies still in their hands, before scattering to their stations, crouched, waiting.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Twenty minutes later, the clocks blare again. The front doors barge open of their own accord. A tidal wave of voices flood the lobby before the people do. People telephoning, people talking face to face, people talking into microphones as cameras track their movements. Yet no voice is recognizable, nor an individual conversation fully understandable. The noise of them, as a mass, sweeps those singularities aside into collective sound, until it is just the mindless roar of a mob, babbling away at nothing.

Hernani blunders in, materials hugged to his chest, bent forward like a turtle as a way to prevent them from sliding loose. He stops short to raise his head on its bent neck so that it crouches tightly against his shoulder. The bleached walls and tiles that seem to exude their own light, the people that splatter color across the white-washed lobby. He raises his eyes higher – the architecture of the lobby makes it a natural, subconscious action. They find the great art deco clock, hands as long as his own body, churning mechanically as they tick across brass minutes shaped like piano keys. It reminds him of an eye, but all clocks kind of do when they’re round.

Everything flows around him in fluttering patterns. He realizes he’s become an obstacle – a rock jutting out from the river-bed for the water to babble around. With a flinching motion, he dislodges himself and follows the current of bodies, thinking one moment that that is what is meant to be done, then realizes in the next that he needs to be aware of where exactly he’s going. He ends up following without the realization of following – the herd naturally migrates to the elevators, each marked numerically so as to represent district, and there the herd peels itself apart, becoming like water at the fork of a river. People cheer at one another as they part: “See you! Bye! TTYL and all that! Goodbye, ladies!”

Hernani Hugo stands before the elevator, marked with a five. Briefly, he remembers that tributes tend to be lifted into arenas on metal plates that act similarly to elevators. The memory gives him pause – but then he senses someone coming up behind him. His hand fumbles the elevator button; the things he so carefully balanced in his arms now go sliding to his feet, and he hurries to gather them as the elevator doors slide open.

jay! <3