Time to Party!!// (Wonder, Open)

He’d done it now. Peri’s temper had always been one of his downfalls, but it had never gotten this far before. How had a little headache hurt his attitude so much? It was too late anyways, his fate was sealed. A whipping, a beat down, Peri didn’t even know.
Whipping was pretty uncommon in District 1, the Peacekeepers would give someone a couple of lashes every so often just to remind the public that it was still there, still active. But, the whipping post, the stocks, they were barely used. District 1 was the best District for that, children of the Capitol. The post had probably gathered up quite a bit of dust, Peri couldn’t even remember the last whipping he’d seen, it must have been at least a year ago.

The thought hit him suddenly, he could be killed. Battle wounds weren’t his thing. Some of the Careers wore their scars around as if the wounds were the greatest thing one could have with them. Better than any trophy, better than anything that the world could provide to the dimwitted idiots, except maybe a victor’s crown. Scars were an imperfection, a constant momento of the things that one did wrong. Peri almost winced at the thought of the traces that a whip would leave, the trails that would run down his then swollen and bumpy back. Peacekeepers never went easy on whippings, it was all or nothing and the brutality didn’t stop on a single strike.

The blow had hardly even damaged the Peacekeeper, he just stood there, in the snow, as if Peri was a fly that simply needed to be swatted and killed. Maybe he was that? If Peri couldn’t even make a lousy low life Capitol official take a step back, what kind of damage could he do to a measly District 12 girl? Nothing. He smiled, the Peacekeeper. That was his response. The calm before the storm: a simple malicious smile and then a shove.

The shockwave from the shove travelled throughout his body sending him flying backwards before he could even put up a single defense. He was going to die. Attacking a Peacekeeper would never end in a simple whipping, never. They could do what they wanted, they were the officials. The Capitol always seemed to turn a blind eye to their workers as long as they kept the pigs in the pen. The grab came as quick as the shove had. Peri was screwed.

Spit flying, the larger male threatened not only him, but his mother. Mother who raised him, who provided food to the home, who let his father do whatever he wanted in life regardless of how little it paid. The most respectable woman that Peri had ever met. He threatened her and there wasn’t a single thing that Peri could do to defend her, or himself. He’d done enough already. Peri wasn’t even conscious of how hard he was biting his lip until he felt a deep, thick liquid seep on to his tongue.

There was nothing he could do except whimper and mutter ‘please’ over and over again hoping that the punishment would only be a whipping. Only a whipping. The threat of his mother seemed to make being scarred so much less relevant.

It seemed as though the dusted whipping post would have his lifeless body into it, but what was there to do?