The boy understood the beating he would receive if he didn't work, so he lowered himself back into the barbed vines. He looked and found the largest thorn he could get his hands around to stab the vines around him. With the hole formed it was only a matter of twisting the vine and pulling it apart.
Though his hands found something to do, his mind was trapped in the question of, "Why do I suffer like this?" His mind, without his consent, dragged him through memories of his theft. "But that was to survive..." He whispered an excuse to remove his guilt.
His mind, as if answering his rebuttal with one of its own, fluttered through memories of the people who they stole from, and how they were found dead in the morning, or died soon after in the fields. The final nail in the proverbial coffin of this debate was the memory of his mother's stiff fingers, and her cold, pale face twisted in agony. With gasps of pain and hands covering his ears the boy cried in terror of something he didn't know.
He never once had he considered how it felt to have one's life stolen, or what it was like to lose something truly precious until now. Then suddenly, like a dying candle, his vision faded and his knees buckled. The only thing he could hear was piercing ringing until he hit the ground. It had been three days since he had anything to eat, so he fainted.
His vision returned after 5 seconds past and hear soon after. The boy's dim blue eyes locked on the crop he had been trying to save all day, a stalk of barley with its head low. He tried reaching out for it only for his hand to be stepped on by a man with brown hair.
The foreman's eyes were green, figuratively and literally, as he leaned low enough for the boy to hear his whisper, "This doesn't belong to you, slave. Be patient, your scraps will come on the last day of the week."
With a cross look, the foreman twisted his heel into the boy's hand listening to the whimpers as he said, "Until then, endure, or at this rate die like your mother." The foreman continued as he stood up at 6 foot and 2 inches, "It was a shame too; I liked her."
The boy fumed grasping his bruised hand. Unable to speak the words born of hatred towards his mother's greatest abuser, he just sat there and glared at the ground. "This may be the capital, but these people are the real monsters," the boy whined.