I Know {Where I've Been} [D11 Train]

He’d remember their hugs most.

Each one to remind Delroy that no matter how the men and women in the capitol may have seen his body, how the world may have never once given him a fair shake, here was the love to lift him up to another tomorrow. From his father all the words a struggling man could offer to a boy put to death, that we’ll always love you because they’d seen what the games did to people like them. Good, hardworking folk who hadn’t the name to place them higher up, or the favor to carry them across the finish line. His mother, a kiss for his cheek and a whisper that 'it’d be all right,' somehow fighting grief with hope as the Wickershams were always want to do.

His brothers all sheepish behind his parents, still touched by that masculine fear that one of them might break if they offered love first. ‘Come on,’ He’d whispered as the eldest, because it’d always been up to him to show the way. They snaked their arms around his neck and chest while Delroy knelt. He basked in smell of soft earth on his brother Lionel’s neck, and the smell of cocoa butter in Marvin’s hair.

Swallowed up between the arms of his grandmother who clutched him so close he swore she was trying to squeeze out his soul, he couldn’t hold back the tears that he’d refused to cry on the long walk up to the stage. Maybe it was the pain of knowing this was another generation lost, or that no matter what had ever been promised, things were no better for him now than it’d ever been for her.

They’d been freer all those years ago in the war, Delroy conceded, when at least they got to choose death before someone got a rope around their necks.

His grandfather had put a hand over his shoulder and leaned in close to whisper all the things to liven his spirits,'You know how to scrap, son, you don’t need me to tell you, go on now. You’ve got the same spirit as Taylor.’ He’d pulled the little strip of dirtied fabric from his jacket pocket and slipped it into Delroy’s palm.

Delroy stared at the old man’s eyes, at all the little red veins creeping into yellow, and the history that lay behind them.

What was it, eighty, ninety years since the world hadn’t mutilated the definition of free in exchange for the safety and security of panem?

When injustice could still be met with resistance, not half-baked hopes and fear. When death was in the line of fire. When dying was not for the show of cameras, to leave a legacy, or launch a political career.

It was quiet and with honor.

A boy, bleeding out across an empty field. Alone, afraid.

But free.

He’d steeled himself for what was to come in the dining car. Wiping away the remnants of tears under his eyes and scrubbing underneath his nose, Delroy wasn’t going to turn into one of those punks that’d been sentenced to this. No. He kept thinking of his great uncle, of all the men out in those fields, of the scattered bones they’d left behind.

He’d had to have been scared, the same age as Delroy, running off to war.

And yet he’d done it anyway.

Delroy pinned the stripe on the white of his shirt for the rest of them to see, consequences be damned.

He sat fuming in one of the leather booths next to the windows.

Rebels died one way or another. He wasn’t going to let anyone else dictate the terms.