the thorn of it | {kari/dars}
Jun 8, 2020 0:36:42 GMT -5
Post by umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars] on Jun 8, 2020 0:36:42 GMT -5
Cause and effect. Action and reaction. Everything was so circular, in so many different ways, and he'd realized it as he drank his morning coffee in the dining hall. The kitchen staff filled up the buffet, people came and fixed their plates, sat at a table, ate, left. The kitchen staff wiped down the tables and refilled the buffet. Over and over again.
And it followed him throughout the day: the doors to the elevator would open and someone would step off and look in both directions as if they were pulling into heavy traffic. The elevator would close, and when it opened, someone else would do the same.
There were always slight variations: sometimes someone stood while eating, sometimes more than one person stepped out of the elevator at a time. The illusion of choice was one of the cruelest things about existence; it never changed what happened. The tables would still be wiped clean, the elevator doors would still close.
He stared at the length of rope in front of him. He'd already tied and untied a dozen different knots and though the lesson wasn't over, far from it by the way the instructor was speaking, he'd stopped tying. He liked the idea of leaving it as it was: a start point to an end. Things would be much more simple if they were all like that, he thought, rather than being twisted and confusing. The rope was still the same, just less easy to navigate.
He looked at the girl next to him and made a face.
"Do you think this actually helps?" He already knew the truth; there was a peace to cynicism; far less to lose, "Or is it just to distract us from what's to come?"
From the circular truth: tributes were reaped, and they trained, and they died, and then more tributes were reaped again. He decided that since there was nothing he could do to change it, he'd be the variation: every once in a while, a tribute lived, after all.