youngbloods {zori}

For the better part of the morning, Delroy had decided to try his hand at the first aid station. Growing up he’d learned more than his fair share of what to do with injuries big and small. A bad cut would take a stitch or two, which mean swallowing down a bit of whiskey and biting down on some cloth while they sewed. He’d seen a few men needing it after they got into a bad scrape with some of the scythes they’d been using to clear wheat from the field. His youngest brother had broken his arm from a bad fall out of one of the higher branches from an apple tree, and Delroy had been the one to help him day by day with some ice and a wrap.

Mending dummies also gave him time to look around the training station at the rest of the tributes working their way through the stations. He still tried to reconcile the feeling that he was failing his great uncle by actually trying to learn here instead of trying to recruit every last one of the tributes for a rebellion against the games.

A part of him wondered if this whole self-preservation thing wasn’t getting in the way of wanting to risk it all for a bigger message.

He’d been ruminating when the girl from nine had made her way over to his side. One of the ones that had volunteered. It still didn’t make sense to him, but then, Neysa had been like him, and he imagined there had to be some sort of value in that. Someone willing to risk it all for a reason, even if it could’ve been self-serving. Though he gave her props for volunteering for her twin.

When she mentioned the mutts and the trainers, Delroy had been unspooling another piece of cotton cloth to make a wrap. He nodded along and glanced over his shoulder at the cages.

The eighty-first had been a shitshow with a giant elephant mutt that’d killed and crushed too many. That and they let kids joy ride around on horses like this whole thing was supposed to be fun. Most of them had forgotten who they were the moment they stepped into that arena.

“Isn’t it funny how they’re afraid of letting out whatever’s in there? Needing a cage to keep them locked up so they don’t hurt them or us.” Delroy knelt down to the dummy who’d been on the ground in front of him, patched up here or there from his earlier handiwork. “Makes you remember all of them are just people like us. Breakable.”

He gave a shrug. “They have to separate ‘em so they’re not so strong together I guess.”

Maybe it was some sort of message along with having to learn how to deal with whatever they were going to be facing in the arena.

“Delroy Wickersham, private first class,” Delroy gave a little two fingered salute to the tribute from nine and smiled. “You come over here to make fun of my mummified dummy or something else?”

She pointed out that if anyone wound up looking like the dummy in front of him, they’d probably be better off dead, and Delroy couldn’t help but let out a laugh. She had an easy way about her, the way she drifted over to him, then shaded him gently enough to have Delroy smiling. He hoped that he never had to put his first aid skills to use anyway. Maybe he’d bob and weave his way out of any trouble, if he could help it. When she asked about why he addressed himself as a private, Delroy gave a nod.

“Hell no would I ever sign up for peacekeeping. The only good PK is a dead PK, right?” Delroy didn’t know what her experience was with them, but he’d seen enough in eleven to know they’d have done a lot better without them at all. It was a sore spot thinking about how as much as the mayor had done to minimize them, the capitol seemed to flood the district with more peacekeepers than ever. Especially after Snow’s death.

“Private First Class is a designation for those that were in the rebel forces that had recently enlisted. The people who signed up to fight.” Delroy tapped at the stripe pinned to his windbreaker, his token.

He’d spent enough time pouring over what he could find about the rebel forces back in the day to know that those that decided to enlist were privates, or the grunts of the forces. They were a rag tag group of militias like the capitol history books liked to make them seem. No, they were just as organized, at least for a part of the war, that they had their own structure and rank for those in the different divisions.

For farmers…

Delroy crossed his arms across his chest.

“Yeah, and? You think just because we have to shuck corn and pick strawberries we don’t know how to stand our ground?” Delroy rolled his shoulders and did his best not to growl out his words.

“I don’t know what nine’s like, but some of us can see ourselves back home. We don’t have the arrogance the careers have. Just hope and spirit.”

When she tapped her hand against her chest, Delroy could relax. He’d found someone that understood. Anyone that signed up to be a keeper deserved to be six foot under, and anyone who thought they did any good could take a short walk off a long pier. He wondered, too, if she’d been a part of anything in nine. The rumors that there’d been riots, maybe worse than what they’d had in eleven, had whispered through the fields a few summers ago.

Roy. He hadn’t heard anyone call him that, save for his brothers when they tried to tease him. He’d always been Del to anyone that’d known him, and so it chafed to have his name split in two in the wrong direction. Though he could forgive her for now. She admitted that there wasn’t anything wrong with being a farmer (like hell there wasn’t!). He rubbed a hand against his elbow and gave another nod.

As for nine, he couldn’t imagine a place more different than eleven if what she said was true. His home was far away from the center of the district, and even there the buildings didn’t reach toward the sky like they did in the capitol. It felt humbler and earnest, as though even with the freedom they lacked there was still a distance that let them be. He didn’t think he could ever survive for too long cooped up in a place with gray buildings and no fields to walk along.

“Yeah well, we got plenty of victors and whole lot of good that’s done for changing anything for us.” Delroy spoke softly. He knew they hadn’t harmed him or his kin in any way, but it didn’t stop him from venting that eleven was still – after all the promises and victories, all the slow little changes – much the same as the day he had been born. And the victors weren’t exactly leading a parade to demand much more from the capitol.

An explosion. Huh. He wouldn’t have minded learning how to cause some real trouble if he could have. But that felt a bit dramatic and probably beyond the skills he was going to learn in the next seven days. That didn’t mean, however, he didn’t have some sort of plan.

“If I could get my hands on dynamite then yeah, I’d blow all of us up. Or maybe the mines they have under the pedestals. But I doubt I’ll get sponsored any of that,” Delroy admitted. “I was thinking something different though. Something that would piss everyone off, if we decided that we weren’t going to play their game. You know?” He grinned.

“If enough of us refused to play.”