shadowboxing { golconda

[Onyx]

[attr="class","aveholder"]

[attr="class","avename"]A V E

[attr="class","avelyrics1"]I may be soft in your palm, but I'll soon grow Hungry for a fight

[attr="class","avelyrics1"] My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will Disprove your faith in man

[attr="class","avepost]

The wall of noise that presses down turbulently in this room is even more claustrophobic than the actual sloping panels trapping us within the space. I can pick out individual melodies for nothing more than a few seconds before I have to let them go again, like trying to focus on individual swirling eddies waxing and waning in a fast-moving river. There’s the sound of doors opening and closing, stainless steel panels sliding to reveal immense screens and holograms. There’s the clash of swords and the clatter of forks, almost in time with each other; the only two things they need us to do properly are fighting and eating. The former doesn’t need explanation, but the Capitol’s desire to feed us up is easy to justify. No one wants to see malnourished children, skin stretched over their bones like a drum, dying on their screens. They want to turn us into heroes, that they can paint portraits of and photograph for magazines. We’re not allowed to be haunting.

Above the metallic rhythm section, every pocket is filled seamlessly by the grunts of the fighters, the whistles of the trainers, and above even that, on another layer, blanketing over everything like a gauze, there’s the ominous hum that reminds us that this building is practically alive with energy, that a million electrical eyes observe our every movement, accompanying the fourteen or so organic ones that belong to the Gamemakers who stare judicially from their booth. The sound is, at times, unbearable. It’s there when we sleep, when we wash, when we stand alone, calculating strategy or simply suppressing our fear. I wonder if they really are trying to make us mad.

The other tributes ignore it, of course. The Peacekeepers and Avoxes seem to as well. But I have found myself more and more desperate to turn it off, turn myself off, claw that humming, groaning noise out of my ears and tug it out my head like hair from a clogged drain. I’m not the only person that’s noticed the slight tremor that’s entered my fingers when I go to thread a needle at the first aid station or attempt to pierce a pea with my fork. Thankfully, though, I’m the only person who has commented on it – and only in my own head. Paranoia has begun to loom over me like a shadow. The humming is there for me specifically – they want to stop me working on the little trinkets they know I have hiding in my room. But I won’t let them.

It’s at the corner of the gymnasium that I see the first clue towards what is, surely, the real purpose of the auditory infection that rattles in my head. The corner of the carpet here is drawn back slightly, rayed, and I can see through it to the bright flashing lights and tangles of wire like brambles, which must lie not only beneath this building but beneath the whole city. My trainer is halfway through their introduction when I become fixated with it, turning away from the station and heading unabashedly for the fault in the floor. One hand grips the pendant at my neck, feeling for the certainty of the six legs that are tucked into its metallic shell. I feel safe knowing the jewel, a mechanical scarab, is still in my possession – they haven’t realised that it’s more than an accessory yet. (Soon they’ll realise I’m more than an accessory, too).

I’m down on my hands and knees, clawing at the edge of the carpet to get a closer look at the wires below, before I even register that someone – more than one? – have followed me across the room. Thankfully I can tell simply by their posture, and the way they hang back in my peripheral vision, that they’re only another tribute. My destructive impulse, but one that will surely unlock the next piece of this challenge and finally get rid of the searing humming, hasn’t been noticed by a trainer yet. Without any concern for my own safety, I plunge my hand into the crawl space beneath the floor, feeling for some power supply, some switch – but the more I grasp around, the more I realise it’s futile.

I really am going crazy.

Resigned, I brush my newly scraped knuckles on my uniform and slump against the wall. The humming remains, infuriatingly, in the background of my thoughts, though the only ones which pass through my mind now are lethargic and slow. When I regain my motivation, my eyes drag up from the floor and come to rest on the face of the newcomer in front of me. I sit, in silence, exhausted even from this one defeat. If these apparent tests have done one thing for me at least, they’ve made me less cautious in the face of a potential threat or hindrance, less anxious to leap in before I can truly calculate a situation. Friend or foe, it’s their move.

[newclass=.aveholder]width:380px;height:460px;padding:10px;background-image:url(http://i.imgur.com/9ZlR9PC.jpg?1);[/newclass]
[newclass=.avename]opacity:1;width:368px;height:68px;border:1px white solid;background:none;font-family:Georgia;color:#fff;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:2px;padding:6px;font-size:60px;text-align:center;-moz-transition: color 0.5s linear 0s, border 0.5s linear 0s, opacity 0.3s linear 1s; -webkit-transition: color 0.5s linear 0s, border 0.5s linear 0s,opacity 0.3s linear 1s; -o-transition: color 0.5s linear 0s, border 0.5s linear 0s, opacity 0.3s linear 1s;[/newclass]
[newclass=.avelyrics1]opacity:1;width:160px;height:170px;border:1px white solid;background:none;font-family:Georgia;color:#fff;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:2px;padding:10px;font-size:18px;text-align:justify;-moz-transition: color 0.5s linear 0s, border 0.5s linear 0s, opacity 0.3s linear 1s; -webkit-transition: color 0.5s linear 0s, border 0.5s linear 0s, opacity 0.3s linear 1s; -o-transition: color 0.5s linear 0s, border 0.5s linear 0s, opacity 0.3s linear 1s;[/newclass]
[newclass=.aveholder:hover .avelyrics1, .aveholder:hover .avename]color:#000;border:1px #000 solid;-webkit-transition-delay: 0.5s;transition-delay: 0.5s;[/newclass]
[newclass=.avepost]width:380px;height:460px;background-color:white;color:#000;font-size:10px;text-align:justify;font-family:Georgia;opacity:0;overflow:auto;-moz-transition: opacity 0.5s linear; -webkit-transition: opacity 0.5s linear; -o-transition: opacity 0.5s linear;-webkit-transition-delay: 0s;transition-delay: 0s;[/newclass][newclass=.aveholder:hover .avepost]opacity:1;-webkit-transition-delay: 1s;transition-delay: 1s;[/newclass]
[newclass=.aveholder:hover .avelyrics1, .aveholder:hover .avename]opacity:0; transition-duration: 0.8s; transition-delay: 0s;[/newclass]

[kousei ♚]

The shadow of expectation grows with every passing hour of borrowed time, I've always felt an obligation to uphold such things. But to someone who's used magnificence as nothing more than a persona rather than a goal to strive for, upholding superficial expectations only comes naturally even if they are from stranger that had better be dead come this time next year.

It doesn't come as a surprise when I feel the disturbance looming over the back of my head, shadows growing across the ground in tendrils and tangible ropes and bonds closing around every muscle that dares hold a blade. Expectations the loaded barrel of a gun pressed against the back of my skull and a silent countdown - 1, 2, 3-

The Capitol knife that lands in the center of the bullseye is a plead - don't shoot.

I've bent and twisted myself in an attempt to fulfill expectations left long overdue for years, that's just how I move now. It's crystal clear what the looming shadows in the back of my mind mean, what the loaded barrel pressed against skull is supposed to be, I am a career after all. A precedent has been set to be unbroken for the last three-quarters of a century, that because of the number next to my name I'm supposed to embody skill and magnificence and exert raw kill potential, that because of the seven letter surname strewn like a flag across my shoulders I am supposed to be vicious.

Sunlight rays break shadows across the metallic blue surfaces of the training center, the whistle blow of trainers entwining with steel against false organs and grunts of efforts and cutting through any silence that once existed. I look around and see other careers wield weapons and tributes break off into cliques and groups, forging friendships from a shared desperation, and I feel my stomach churn, every organ begins to ache a little.

But I suppose while I still keep my composure and resist the instinct to dissolve, the odds become obsolete. I haven't shaken hands with a single tribute yet, nor have I thought to forge the closest things to a friendship that one can get when everyone shares the same noose as you do. I simply wear confidence on my chest and stitch a weapon to the palm of my hands and act as if I am the center of the universe, that my borrowed time will somehow definitely last longer than everyone else's and this apparent urge to sustain myself on distractions is just who I am, not an attempt to bury this tick-tick in noise because I'm wary of silence and self-reflection.

One more knife lands in the bullseye, just for reassurance.

I turn my back to my handiwork, despite the familiar motion the routine is gone. These aren't the knives from District One that once made my spin shiver when I first touched the blade at eight years old, there's a sense crashing from a high down into looming reality and being forced to face facts that comes with holding a these knives.

And no knife could make a shiver run down my spine since I was eight until now.

Numbed by self-reflection but awoken by shock my eyes widen when I spot someone doing something that seems out of the ordinary, a disturbance in equilibrium itself. I swear, Riptides on the morning of the reaping resurface.

I don't recognizer her, I don't remember her name but I do recognize the number three branded proudly onto her training shirt and she's rummaging through something in the ground, having removed a tile. My first instinct is to turn my back to her and pretend I didn't see anything and go back to holding knives and daring to test that if I leave my mark it will be in anything but shades of red, she can't be good news. However, cold curiosity floods through my body, possessing movements and I can't help move to the opposite direction rationale takes me.

Curiosity my motivator, I stop when I'm practically looming over her and my hands planted on my hips. "What are you doing, Three?"

Maleficence, gold, perfection; I've never been a flawless son despite being polarised to fit this ideal model.