let 'em scatter in the wind [emojis + lithe day 2 leisure]

For once, Del didn’t mind the cold cutting across his face, or the ice forming on top the hair that peeked out of his jacket’s hood.

He’d spent the better part of an hour tracing the line of the horizon through the blasts of ice. Each snow covered dune presented an opportunity to double back through their footsteps and press forward in another direction. He wondered once if they’d run right into the force field at the edge of the arena, a dream that seemed preferable for what future awaited them. Lost boys through and through, Delroy and Shy circled and zigzagged across the tundra.

“They were going to kill one of us, you know.” Del spoke to break the silence and to stop his lips from turning blue. He said it matter-of-factly, as all good denials start. Delroy had studied enough rhetoric to know he needed to build a case that he wasn’t a monster, and to do so, it started with identifying and blaming the enemy.

“If I hadn’t done something, it’d been one of us, and – I made a promise to Carmen.” Next came the sympathetic argument. Yes, Carmen Stirling had told him that Shy deserved to live, and to do what he could to make it happen. But did such a promise clear the blood from his hands? Had it meant he needed to be the one to kill, and not Shy, or anyone else?

“And it’s not like I’d meant to hit him so hard, not at first. It was instinct.” Plausible deniability. Self-defense, Delroy reasoned, cleared anyone in the arena of their sins. At least if they subjugated their morals for their ethics; what one believed could easily be tucked away behind what one needed to do. No one’s hands were clean, especially not when fighting against an oppressor that took no higher ground.

“They weren’t going to listen to me. None of these kids are. None of them want to rebel, they just want to survive.” The remaining twenty-two were pawns for the capitol, children who wanted to survive, and Delroy would never muster an army to stand against the hunger games with them. Fear permeated the ice and the snow and choked justice to ruin. He was better served speaking out against the capitol and surviving on his own.

“Shy.” Delroy called out. He stopped in his tracks behind the boy, and folded his arms cross his chest. “Would you say something?”

Del let out a cough and sucked in the cold through his teeth.

“Where the hell are we…”