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They stirred a song in the yawning woods: a frantic song of expelled breath and leaves that muttered where bare ankles, legs and elbows passed. Twigs broke and mud squelched beneath the pairs of feet; whatever sounds they made, whoever followed, was not important – as long as they kept running.
The world stretched on forever, and its size burned in their lungs and in their legs.
The boy with the red eye collapsed against a sighing tree, its boughs stretching and sheltering and waving overhead. His body grew and shrank in the rise-fall alternation of exertion, until the gasped-in air erupted in a bout of laughter. He doubled over and clutched his sides and stained his red-flecked shirt with fresh patterns where his hands bunched the fabric. The trident he had been carrying clattered to the ground.
"Oh," the red-eyed boy breathed once he's found enough air left between his lungs and mirth, "that was fun."
The two boys with him also clutched their sides, not from laughter but from pain; they breathed and breathed and stared at him. Their faces betrayed nothing beyond flush, sweat and grimaces. They hardly understood him – the rush in their ears was too loud, and that word he had used was unknown to them.
They were unaccustomed to speech, having only raised their voices to scream in agony or lower it to whispers, repeating words the adults had let slip around them, when they thought they couldn't hear.
The red-eyed boy pushed himself off the tree, plucked his trident from the ground and put one foot in front of the other. "Let's move on," he said, voice more even than before, "the further we can get, the better."
"Where are we going?" the boy with the scarred face asked. A good question, although the broad meaning of 'where' is lost on them; the locations they have been to were limited, all walled in, with a slab-grey ceiling for a heaven. Pain had been their compass, the rooms distinguished by its ebb and flow – and what did they have now?
No destination, that much was clear; none of them had.
"It doesn't matter," the red-eyed boy said. "Somewhere far away from here."
The trees around them whispered their encouragement, urged them to move on, and waved good-bye. It might be dangerous.
The world stretched on forever, without walls to lock them in and all that open space was frightening – exhilarating.
Strange were the bonds that shared experiences created. These boys had only just escaped together, but already a strange kinship skipped hesitation with each other. Nothing held them back.
The bandaged and the scar-faced boy fell in step with the red-eyed one. They had as little need for words as for a road to take.
The red-eyed boy studied his right hand for a while, where a dying colour crusted his fingers and forearm. A raindrop fell onto his palm and he closed his fist around it. He looked up with a wide smile, his red eye glinting in a patch of moonlight.
"The rain will wash away our sins," he said and spread his arms.
The other two would not argue; cheap absolution was preferred to life-long penance. They were free now, they could taste the rain instead of only hearing it.
And nobody would take that away again.