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It’s a few hours past noon in Ormond when the members of the Legion make their way into the abandoned lodge up in Mount Ormond they call home, talking and laughing and generally just hanging out with each other. The sun is high in the sky right now, although one wouldn’t be able to tell past all the snow clouds. It’s snowing fairly harshly, today, piling up more snow on top of what’s already there, and the Legion track snow into the chalet as they gather around the unlit fire pit in the center.
There’s no honest reason why they’re here in the lodge. It’s Wednesday--school is very much still in session right now.
But “honest reasons” have long since stopped meaning anything to the Legion. They’re undoubtedly and unashamedly skipping class. The members of the Legion are rulebreakers and troublemakers, and they’re perfectly fine with that.
At the moment, their topic of conversation is how they’ve gotten away with skipping yet again, but Frank soon turns the topic to other things. He looks over at Joey from where he’s sprawled himself out on a couch.
“So, Joey,” Frank begins and Joey sits up a little and looks over at him.
“Yeah?” he says.
“I heard you got fired today.”
Frank catches Susie sitting up at his words out of the corner of his eye, looking over at Joey. “You did?” she says, obvious concern in her tone.
Joey chuckles. “It’s fine, Sue. Yeah, I did, but I can get a new job easy.”
“What’d you do to get yourself fired?” Julie asks, a smirk in her tone.
Joey laughs at her tone, shifting back to the position he was in before on the couch as he replies, “Nothing, actually. Got fired because of complete bullshit. I’m not torn up about it. I hated everyone there anyways.”
Frank’s not surprised at Joey’s reaction. They’ve all heard him complain about that job enough to not be. He does, however, tilt his head back and start to grin a little, an idea starting to form in his head. “Hey, Joey.”
“Yeah?”
Frank lifts his head back up to show the grin that’s been forming on his face in full force. “Dare you to vandalize the place that fired you,” he says.
He can tell he’s caught everybody’s attention with that little statement. He knows his friends well enough to know that they’re always up for a bit of late-night fun. It’s why they’re the Legion, after all.
Joey responds without hesitating. “Oh, fuck yeah!”
Frank glances over at Susie to see her absolutely grinning, bouncing on the couch and swinging her feet in her excitement. “When are we gonna do it?” she asks.
He leans back, then, considering. They could go for something earlier, at 7 or 8 PM, but... nah. He’s not in the mood today to cut their plans so close to closing time. Besides, it’s more likely that the other three’s parents will be asleep if he chooses a later time. They’ll have an easier time sneaking out. “How’s ten sound?”
“Good!” Susie says. “May parents are occupied tonight. I’ll be out pretty easily.”
“My parents should be asleep by then,” Julie says, before turning her attention to Susie. “You want me to meet you under your window?”
As Susie and Julie work out what they’re going to do tonight, Frank turns his attention back onto Joey. After all, they’re targeting his old workplace. This vandalism’s more personal to Joey--he should be the one to decide the details and all. “So, Joey,” he begins. “Got any thought on what you wanna do tonight?”
“Do we have any of that spray paint left?” Joey asks.
“Graffiti isn’t usually your style,” Frank responds. It’s true; the whole deal with spray cans and paint fumes are more Susie’s thing than anything.
“I know,” Joey says, before grinning at Frank. “But my boss is gonna be mega pissed when she sees everything’s painted up. She hates graffiti. I can already imagine the look on her face.”
Frank grins back at him. “In that case, I should grab some spray cans too. Hey, Sue!”
Susie glances over at him from where she’s been talking animatedly to Julie. “Yeah?”
“How much spray paint do we have left?”
“A bunch. Most of the cans are only a quarter empty. What colors do you want?”
Frank glances back at Joey. “Black and red?”
“You know it,” Joey says.
“So black, red, and pink for me. Do you two want any paint?” Susie asks.
“I’ll take green,” Frank says, glancing over at Julie, thinking of her eyes and withholding a small little smile. It’s been his favorite color for three years, after all.
“Sure, why not?” Julie says besides him. “Everyone else is taking some. We have purple, right?”
“Yeah, of course!” Susie says, walking off to go retrieve the paints. She comes back holding a couple of the cans in her arms, starting to pass them off to the other three. They usually do this when they bring stuff for plans like this. It’s much easier for multiple of them to bring one or two cans than Susie having to carry it all.
Frank takes the green spray can she hands to him and sets it besides him for now. His pockets aren’t as big as Susie’s; basically his only option is to set the can down somewhere or hold it in his hand or tucked under his arm.
He should really look into getting a backpack like the one Joey has.
Once Susie’s finished handing out the paint and she’s settled back into her spot on the couch, Frank speaks again. “So, guys, here’s the plan,” he says, tucking an arm behind his head as he grabs their attention. “At nine-thirty, we all sneak out of our houses and meet up at the usual spot. Joey picks us up and drives us over to the hardware store. We sneak in, paint up the place, whatever else you guys wanna do, and leave. Sound good?”
“Hell yeah,” Joey says, and the others soon follow with their affirmations.
Their conversation soon drifts off into other topics as their planning time fades into just time where they’re hanging out and enjoying each others’ company--but there’s a certain anticipation in the air now that can’t be ignored. Frank can tell they’re excited for what’s to come--can tell that none of them can wait for nine-thirty to roll around--and it makes him want to grin. They’re excited; as ready for their upcoming plans as he is.
This is gonna be fun.
A few hours pass. The Legion have now long since left the lodge, obeying their curfews for once, and now they start getting ready to slip out of their front door or their windows. Their preparations have long since become routine for the four of them. They’ve been at this for three years, after all. They’ve been the Legion for long enough to know the drill.
Frank is the first to make it to their meeting spot. The place is nothing fancy, really--just some abandoned lot that they’ve been using to meet up in for a while not. It’s close enough to Susie, Julie, and Frank’s houses that the don’t have to walk too far to get picked up by Joey, who’s the only one of them who actually has a car. It’s normal for Frank to be a few minutes early for their meetings. His house is the closest to this spot, for one, and he’s always found it the easiest out of the three of them to sneak out of his house. He’d say he he was on the loosest leash out of the three of them if it wasn’t more like he wasn’t on a leash at all. His foster dad’s out of the house more often than he’s actually there, after all, and Frank can take care of himself well enough that he counts it more as a perk than something bad nowadays.
One of the few, few perks to having a shitty, absent drunkard of a foster parent is that he gets to make his own rules.
At least his current “dad” is a lot better than the people he’s had as parents in the past.
He’s snapped out of his thoughts by the sight of Julie and Susie walking down the sidewalk, chatting to each other. It seems that Julie’d decided to meet Susie under her window, tonight. It’s not strictly necessary, really. Susie can make it out of her house and over to the meeting spot just fine on her own--but Julie’s protective enough of Susie to want to accompany her for things like this.
They’re all protective of Susie, really, but that’s besides the point.
“Hey,” Julie says, and the quiet excitement he can hear in her tone makes him smile. After all this time doing this, it’s nice to know that he can still make her anticipate what’s to come with some simple late-night plans.
It’s nice to know they’re having fun because of him. “Hey, you two,” Frank says, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Are you two ready for tonight?”
“Yeah!” Susie exclaims, grinning and bouncing on her heels, and he can’t help but start to grin at her excitement. It’s good to see her all happy like this.
“Good to hear,” he responds.
The three don’t have to wait long in the lot before the sound of a car driving down the road reaches their ears. Nobody’s driving this late at night, especially not with this much snow--the flurry from earlier’s still coming down, and Frank gets the feeling that it’s only going to get heavier from here--but Frank still looks up to confirm that it’s Joey’s car that’s pulling into the lot and watches as the car slows to a stop next to them. Joey rolls down the window, leaning out of the car to give them a wave. “Hey guys,”
“Hey,” Frank responds in kind.
“I call shotgun!” Susie says, running over to the side door of the car, opening the door, and slipping in.
“I call shotgun on the way back,” Frank says, getting into the back seat of the car alongside Julie.
“Thought you would ask to drive,” Joey says, starting to pull out of the lot.
“Nah,” Frank says. “I don’t feel like driving tonight.”
“So you’re gonna leave me to do all the work, huh?” Joey says teasingly.
“Yep,” Frank responds, no hesitation or remorse in his voice as he drapes himself over Julie’s lap. He hears Susie start giggling from the front seat, and Julie snorts.
“Traitors, all of you!” Joey exclaims.
“Hey, that’s what we’re here for,” Frank says, grinning.
The rest of the drive takes only a few minutes--minutes which Frank spends looking out the window at the snowfall, laying down on Julie’s lap as he watches the snow get harsher and occasionally pitching in on the conversation the rest of the Legion’s having. It doesn’t take long before Joey’s car is pulling into the parking lot of the hardware store. Frank spares one more glance out of the window, nothing how the snow’s begun to pick up a little--just like he guessed; it looks like it’s going to come down pretty heavily, tonight--before sitting up and rolling his shoulders. “Masks on,” he says, although he hardly needs to give the order--the others are already slipping their masks on even before he’s said the word.
Once everyone's got their masks on and their hoods up, Frank slips out of the car--followed quickly by the Legion. He turns to look at the storefront, trying to see if he can glimpse anything through the windows. He can’t see much. The store’s completely darkened; all of the lights within have long since been turned off for closing.
Then, Frank turns his attention to their immediate surroundings, looking around. He can tell the others are doing the same. They seem to be the only people present outside. Joey’s car is the only car in the lot. The only footprints in the snow are their own. There’s no sign of anyone there--but, still, he stays on guard. He can tell the others are alert, too. Despite the casual way the four carry themselves as they make their way towards the store, there’s a certain air about them that can’t be ignored. The atmosphere between them is excited, yes, laden with anticipation, but there’s also a certain tenseness there, too. The members of the Legion are wary.
“I’ll get the door,” Julie says softly, breaking the silence that’d begun to form between them. Frank nods, feeling a little spark of fondness and pride at her offering. He was the one that taught her how to pick locks, after all. He remembers the first time he handed her a lockpick to the first time she actually managed to pop open a lock. Seeing her confident in her ability to pick locks now makes him smile softly.
He’s proud of her.
As Julie slips a few lockpicks out from the pocket of her hoodie, Frank turns his back to her, acting as lookout while she breaks into the store. Besides him, Susie and Joey do the same. They don’t strictly need this many eyes on their surroundings, of course--but Frank would rather be safe than sorry.
He knows the others would be, too.
The door behind him unlocks with a now-familiar ‘click’, and Frank takes one more moment to glance around the area--just to be sure--before turning and trailing into the store behind Julie and the others. His heart starts to flutter with anticipation. He can’t help but start to tap his fingers on the side of his jeans, fidgeting out of excitement.
This is always the best part.
Frank pauses in the doorway of the store, taking a few moments to look around and assess where everything is. At his side, he hears Susie and Joey talking quietly about something, but he’s more focused on looking around the store at the moment to pay any real attention to them right now.
He relaxes slightly, after a few moments, sparing a glance over at the others before making his way towards some boards on one side of the store. As if by a silent command, the other three begin to spread out, heading one way or the other. Susie and Joey seem to be sticking together--Susie’s probably showing him something--but Julie heads more towards the back of the store. He keeps their positions in mind even as he turns his attention back to his own act of vandalism.
Frank shakes the can of spray paint up, does a little test spray, and then starts painting. He’s never been the artsiest of the group. He can’t draw with the same kind of surreal eeriness that Julie’s drawings take, or the kind of simple yet cute art that Susie does. He’s never been interested in art, really--but there’s still something satisfying about taking something and adding onto it, making it one’s own, in a sense. There’s something satisfying about spray-painting jagged lines and dots and the occasional smiley face onto places that they shouldn’t be, and taking a step back and knowing he did that, that he made this whole artwork happen. That he’s the reason the graffiti he made even exists in the first place.
He listens, quietly, to the others’ movement as they work, too. They’re not all that loud, really. They haven’t broken anything yet--haven’t snapped wood in half and stomped on merchandise or broken into the register. That’ll come later. Right now, they’re just painting quietly, the soft sounds of spraying paint and footsteps on the floor filling the store. If it weren’t for the illegal nature of the whole thing, giving what they’re doing that underlying thrill they love, it would be almost calming.
Frank’s listening as he works, still trying to keep a tight awareness of what’s going on around him, and it’s because of this alertness that he catches a noise. A simple little noise--but one that sends panic through his veins.
A hollow clatter of wood against tile.
The sound makes Frank’s heart stop, because he knows that none of his friends are actually handling any of the stuff they’re painting up right now. They didn’t drop anything--and even if they were in the position to do that, the sound’s... off. Hollow. Too distant.
He’d been too focused on seeing whether anyone was outside the store to even consider the realization that’s now becoming very, very apparent to him.
There’s someone else in the store with them.
He spins around, eyes wide, his free hand already reaching for his knife--the other hand drops the can of spray paint, he isn’t even giving a single consideration to that right now, because there’s someone in the store with them and it’s sending his mind and heart into overdrive--as his legs tense and he prepares to bolt.
Once upon a time, in the past, Frank wouldn’t have reacted like this. In the past, if there was someone in the store with them, his reaction would have been calmer--more along the lines of a simple ’Oh, shit,’ rather than the utter panic he’s in now.
But there was an incident in the past, and Frank can’t help but remember it vividly as he spins around towards the sound.
Three years ago--one of their first break-ins. A robbery, rather than a vandalism--they were bored and just wanted to get some stuff for free, a ‘five-finger discount’, if you will.
They had thought they were alone then, too.
The owner had come in, and flown into a rage. Ambushed Susie, who had been closest to the door at the time.
He’d had a weapon. A blunt object, something improvised--but still enough to hurt.
And he’d used it.
Frank remembers the way the man had thrown Susie to the ground, pinned her underneath his weight and brought that weapon down, square in the center of her mask.
He remembers the crack that had echoed through the store, that night--a crack born of inanimate materials, of the plaster of Susie’s mask, rather than bone, but still just as sickening to hear.
He remembers the way she had screamed.
He remembers the way that she cried, afterwards, saying that her eye hurt so much as he held her close and tried to comfort her.
He remembers finding out that she was slowly going blind in that eye.
He remembers how many times they’ve had sleepovers at the lodge and Susie had woken up in the middle of the night, crying because of her nightmares of that day.
The thought of something like that happening again--happening to any one of them--is enough to make him almost want to cry.
Remembering that day only takes a few moments--moments in which he’s beginning to sprint across the store, towards the sound--but the sound had happened quickly, distantly. It was hardly any sort of warning--hardly enough for him to run across the store in time to prevent anything from happening.
He starts running because of his fear of what happened in the past, what had happened to Susie.
Then he hears Julie crying out, quietly, her cries stifled by something. Someone.
Now, he’s running because he’s terrified of what could happen to Julie.
Oh, God--
He approaches the scene--and there, in the darkness, is the one in the store with them.
He’s grabbed Julie. He’s grabbed her--Frank can’t see exactly what he’s doing, the man’s back to him but he can tell that he has one arm up, his hand over Julie’s mouth, stifling her screams, and he can tell she’s struggling against him but it’s not enough. It’s futile. She can’t get out--he’s got her locked in a hold so tight he doubts she can reach her knife--and the scene is heart-stopping.
The seconds seem like they’ve slowed, for Frank, each one lasting an eternity. It’s like some dark influence has come over him, cast its shadow over his mind. His hand tightens on the grip of his knife. The terror in his veins boils over into protective rage. He’s never felt this way in his life--never felt so intensely the urge to kill.
Everything happens at once, in the span of a few moments, but in that haze of fury and fear, the urge to protect mingling with that urge to sink his knife into the cleaner’s back, Frank swears it feels like eternity.
The knife swings up, as he lunges.
The knife swings down, and sinks into flesh, drawing blood as easy as a thought.
The only thing burning in Frank’s mind in the seconds between hurting, really hurting someone for the first time, with the intent to kill, and Julie stumbling out of the man’s grip with a sound of utter shock, is the thought that once the man finally chokes on his own blood and dies, is how satisfying it will be to see him dead on the floor and know that he did that--to know that he is the reason he is dead.
And then the man slumps to his knees, on the floor, blood absolutely pouring out of his back where Frank’s stabbed him, and time seems to almost... restart, for him. It’s like a haze has cleared from his mind. He feels no remorse for his actions--no guilt, over hurting the person in front of him so badly. The action was satisfying. It was to protect Julie--but the sudden bloodlust that had come over him has faded, now.
The three around him stand in shell-shocked silence. The cut Frank had torn into the cleaner’s back runs deep and jagged. They’ve never hurt someone this badly before, not in all the time they’ve called themselves the Legion. The store is cold and silent, save for the man’s ragged grunts of pain.
Frank watches as the man spins around to face him, a look of utter terror on his face as he looks up at him. He shifts back, starting to stumble to his feet, and at the attempt to escape, Frank finds himself planting a foot into his chest and shoving the man back down to the ground hard. He keeps his foot there, pinning him to the ground.
The bloodlust and hate that had filled his mind is gone, now. Frank feels like his mind’s cleared; become lucid in the aftermath of all that panic. He is the one in control of the situation, now. They are the ones with all the power, here. In a few short minutes, the balance of the scene has changed from one end to the other.
A moment passes in silence, the man looking up at him with wide, terrified eyes.
“Finish the job,” Frank commands.
His tone is dark, cold, but inside, his mind is spinning with a thousand thoughts. He’d said that on an impulse. They can’t risk letting him go, they know--but in that moment, he’d said it purely because he wanted him dead--
--and because he wanted his Legion to be a part of this, too.
Just like he’d seen them for the first time so, so long ago, and thought that he wanted them to be a part of the crimes he’d wanted to do for so long; breaking into stores and getting into fights and breaking all the rules.
Joey is the closest to him, and he holds out his knife to him. They all have their own weapons, of course; but there’s something more... personal about them all using the same weapon to kill the man. Something binding.
He can’t see their expressions behind their masks, but he can still tell a lot about what the others are feeling through their body language. He watches as Joey sets his shoulders and takes the knife, fists clenching tight around the grip. He watches as Joey slowly kneels before the man--Frank shifts his foot off of his chest so Joey can hold him down--and raises the knife. His movements are slow, methodical, uncertain, like Joey’s trying something new and he’s still hesitant about it. In a sense, he is.
Without warning, Joey throws his weight forward, putting all of the strength he can into the swing as he brings the knife down and buries it violently into the man’s ribs with a distinct squelching sound, twisting the knife a little after it’s in. The cleaner cries out, loudly, in pain--he doesn’t scream like in the movies, only makes a sound of pain that’s so distinct he doesn’t think he’ll forget it--but Frank hardly acknowledges it, all of his attention on Joey’s actions.
He can’t see Joey’s face, but he can still tell that Joey’s grinning like the devil underneath his mask. Frank knows his body language far too well to have any doubts about that.
Joey shifts back, standing and slipping away from the cleaner, and for a moment, Frank’s concerned that the man will be able to struggle to his feet, watching as he struggles to crawl away--but then Joey passes the blade off to Julie, and she steps forward almost immediately, bending down and slowly pulling the man towards her by his ankle, making the few inches the man had managed to crawl useless.
The man speaks for the first time as he attempts to struggle away from Julie. His voice is ragged and broken, interrupted at times by his sounds of pain. “Pl-please....” he begs. “Please!”
Julie’s hand tightens on the blade like Joey’s did, and Frank watches as she uses her other hand to push the blade forward and drive it, slowly, into the man’s gut.
One more left.
Frank turns to Susie. He can’t see her eyes behind the mask from this distance--her mask’s design means it’s hard to see her eyes properly at all unless one’s up close and personal--but her hands are over the bottom half of the mask, over where her mouth is underneath, and she’s bent a little, watching in what Frank can only presume is a mix of nausea and horror.
He watches as she sinks to her knees, the noise of the man now choking and sputtering after Julie had stabbed him in the gut becoming just white noise to Frank as he makes his way over to her. “Sue...” he says, and despite the violence of the whole situation, the subtle dripping of the man’s blood making its way to the floor, the fact that Frank’s hand wraps are now stained with flecks of red, his voice is gentle.
She looks up at him, her breath beginning to hitch with sobs. “I--Frank, I can--can’t do this!”
“Sue...” he says, kneeling and reaching for her hands, interlacing his fingers with hers.
“I can--can’t! I can’t!” she cries out. He looks up at her, into her eyes, and the tears he sees glimmering there makes him want to hold her close until she stops crying.
But he can’t. They don’t have the time to, right now.
So, instead, he stands, slowly, pulling her up with him. “You can,” he says.
He knows she can. She has to, because they’re all in this together, now. Because they are killing someone, not just him.
Frank’s movements are soft as he leads her over to the body. Julie passes her knife to Susie before she shifts off of the man, and this time, he doesn’t even try to struggle away. He can’t; his wounds are too deep. They’ve all hurt him so badly.
And, now, they’re going to kill him.
He kneels off to the side as Susie straddles the man’s body. He watches as she clutches the knife firmly and points it at the man’s throat.
He watches as her hands inch closer, her muscles tensing.
Frank watches as Susie breathes out raggedly, her grip relaxing as the knife dips a few inches lower. She gives up silently, turning to Frank.
He can see tears running down her chin and neck from beneath her mask and staining her hoodie as she says, her voice so, so far from steady it hurts Frank to hear, sounding almost broken, “I can’t do this…”
Susie’s sobbing grows louder. “I can’t do this!” she screams, and the sound of her voice is heartbreaking to Frank.
Frank leans forward and gently lays his hands over Susie’s own. He can feel her shaking underneath his touch. “You can,” he repeats, guiding her hands forward, and Susie relaxes under his guidances and leans forward as he lets him guide the blade into the man’s throat.
The noises of his pain that have long since become background noise become choking, flickering in and out of audibility, and then, abruptly, they stop.
He’s dead.
The blood that’s long since soaked into both Susie’s leggings and Frank’s jeans is still so very warm, and it’s hard to believe that they’ve killed the man in front of them with their own actions, even with the stab wounds in front of them.
He’s dead, and it’s because of them.
Nobody moves, for one long moment. The air in the shop is still and cold and quiet. Everybody is frozen--they stand, looking down at the body in what must be at least some disbelief, shocked into stillness.
Frank stands slowly, glancing around the shop, assessing the others for their reactions. His heart’s still pounding--he’s still riding on the adrenaline from killing someone--but inside, he’s nervous. This is something new for all of them--something born out of pure impulse--and he’s secretly so very terrified they won’t accept it. That this will be the event that breaks the Legion.
But he wouldn’t admit his terror in a million years, and so he tries to bury it the best he can and puts on a facade of authority. They need him, right now.
“Everybody alright?” he finds himself asking, and he’s quietly surprised that that line was the first thing to come to his mind, but waits for the others to respond nonetheless.
“Yeah,” Joey says. Frank can tell he’s breathing heavily, and he can see Joey’s hands are still clenched into fists, but there’s a dark undertone in his voice; a certain thrill that makes Frank want to grin.
“I think so,” Julie says, shuddering slightly. There’s a moment’s pause where he can tell she’s taking in the situation--really taking it in now, not just acting in the moment. “...yeah. I am,” she says.
And then he looks to Susie, who hasn’t quite responded yet, and he walks over to her and holds her hand. She’s still, right now, her other hand over her mouth. She’s bent slightly, looking at the man’s body as if she might throw up, and Frank stands a little on his tiptoes and reaches up to gently turn her head away from the scene.
Susie’s never had the greatest gore tolerance. He wouldn’t be surprised if she did actually throw up.
His actions seem to have been enough, though, and Frank watches her with concern in his eyes as she looks down at him. She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and lets it out. She hesitates, for a moment, and then looks him in the eyes. “....no.”
Frank shifts forward and hugs her.
She relaxes in his embrace, leaning down and into him, wrapping her arms around him and sobbing loudly. He pulls her closer, holding her tightly in an attempt to comfort her.
He can hear the others coming closer, even though his face is currently buried in her hoodie, and he glances up for a moment, watching the other two hug her, too, before returning to his original position.
“It’ll be okay,” he hears Julie say, and he feels Susie reach around to start tracing lines between the scars on his back, like she always does when she’s cuddling with him.
Frank wants to reach up to start stroking her hair, to comfort her a little more, but he knows he can’t reach from here without making their positions a little awkward, so instead he chooses to reach up and start tracing circles on her back.
“...You alright?” he asks, softly.
She’s so shaken. He doesn’t need to read her body language or make guesses or any of that to know, deep in his heart, that killing someone has shaken her up. She’s still crying, even if her sobbing has become softer now that the rest of the Legion is comforting her.
It makes his heart ache, knowing that.
It makes his heart ache to hear her cry, however softly it may be.
She begins to respond, but can’t even get a word out, cutting herself off with a sob.
It takes her a moment to get her words together, and then Frank hears her murmur, “I failed you.”
“No,” Frank says, without hesitation. “You didn’t. You never have. You never will.” There’s a certain kind of righteous force behind his voice. Never, not in a million years, would he ever think that Susie had failed him. It’s such an impossibility in his mind that he can’t help but be forceful about it.
Susie tilts her head up a little to look into Frank’s eyes. “I--I did! I couldn--couldn’t do it! You had to--” Her words are stopped in her mouth for a few seconds by another choking sob from her, and he holds her closer and waits for her to be able to continue. “You had to help me! I’m a failure!”
Frank opens his mouth to speak, to reassure her--No, you aren’t, and you never will be--but Julie speaks first.
“Sue... why would we ever think that? Just because you had a little help doesn’t mean you failed us. You will never be a failure to us.”
She sniffles. “Never?”
“Never.”
As much as Frank wants to linger in this group hug for a good while longer, to hold Susie close until her tears have all dried and she’s okay, they can’t just stand here forever. The man’s body is still behind them. They need to hide the evidence.
He pulls away from the hug slowly, speaking in a more commanding tone than the soft one he’d taken just a few moments prior. “We need to hide the body.”
The sound of his voice seems to snap everybody in the store back into reality, and he sees the other two let go of Susie just as reluctantly as he did. They’re watching him attentively, waiting for his command.
“Sue, will you be okay with stashing the body, or would you rather do cleanup?”
He watches her glance down at the body--only a glance, this time, she can tell she doesn’t want to look at the scene for long--and then says “....I’ll carry the body.” Her tone has a certain element of resignation in it, a certain amount of ‘it’s better than the other option’, but he can’t have her just standing around, no matter how much he just wants this to be over with so Susie doesn’t have to deal with all the blood and gore.
“Okay,” he says. “Joey, Susie, you carry the body out to the car. Jules, you’re staying here with me for cleanup.”
He’d much rather have Susie and Julie stick together, if he’s being honest with himself. But it’s Joey’s car. He’s the one with the keys--and, besides, Joey’s pretty strong. He’s not entirely sure if Susie and Julie’s combined efforts would be able to move the body all the way out there, anyways. They’d parked a decent distance from the store, this time around.
They all nod, Susie and Joey moving to the body and picking it up--Frank watches Susie carefully, and she seems repulsed but he thinks she can make it, but he doesn’t look away until they’re out of the store anyways--and then he’s left alone in the store with Julie.
They clean up the mess--there’s so much blood, far more than Frank ever expected--in silence. There’s simply nothing to say between them; only a dark sort of quiet that fills the air between them. It’s not that they don’t want to speak to each other. It’s that there is quite actually nothing to say. There’s no words that’ll do anything but break the silence awkwardly for a few moments, or go over something they already know.
It’s only when they step back from the scene and look around for anything they missed that Julie finally speaks. “Frank?” she asks, her tone uncertain.
He turns to her. “Yeah?”
“Are we going to get caught?”
He takes a few steps forward to hold her hand, squeezing it once. He’s not concerned with how much blood is on his hands right now. After all, hers are covered in the same amount. “We won’t. I promise.”
She squeezes his hand back in return, using her free hand to shift her mask to the side and smile gently at him. “If you say so.”
He mirrors her action, smiling back at her. “I know so.”
They shift their masks back into place, and the two of them walk out of the store--out into the flurry of snow that’s begun to act almost like a fog, blurring the distance with a layer of grey--hand in hand, not wanting to let go of each other now that they’ve started holding hands.
Susie and Joey are waiting for them, leaning on the side of the car, and if it weren’t for all the blood on their hands and clothes, one wouldn’t be able to tell that they’d just killed someone at all.
“Hey guys,” Julie says, giving Susie a look that Frank can’t see but guesses it must be concern.
Susie shifts her mask to the side to give her a soft, genuine smile. “I’m fine, Jules.”
“You sure?”
“...yeah. I’ll be okay.”
Susie’s tone hurts Frank to hear--that same quiet resignation he’d heard earlier, a tone saying ‘I’ve been through a lot today, but it’ll get better’--and he breaks away from Julie to give her a quick hug.
She hugs him back, holding him tightly for the few moments that they’re locked in an embrace, but eventually Frank does have to pull away. They’re not in the clear yet, after all. They still have to bury the body.
“I’ll drive,” he says, leaving no room for comment as he walks around the car over to the driver’s side and slips into the front seat. Joey moves into the seat behind him. A grim silence fills the air. The only sound in the car at the moment is Frank starting the engine and beginning to drive. Nobody dares to break the quiet.
The drive to Ormond takes only a few minutes, but the tense air in the car makes it feel like hours. Occasionally, Frank glances up from the road to look in the mirror, seeing Susie curled tightly in Julie’s lap. They’re holding each other tightly. Susie’s all but clinging to Julie, and he can see that Julie’s pulled down Susie’s hood to run a hand through her hair, stroking it.
Comforting her.
The sight both warms Frank’s heart and hurts him to see.
He just wants her to be okay.
He knows they all do.
When Frank finally pulls up to the lodge, he glances out of the window and realizes it’s dark out. Darker than he expected--what time is it? How long did they spend in the store, back there, at the scene of their murder?
He can’t tell, and he knows nobody with him has a watch, so he doesn’t ask. Instead, he slips out of the car, glancing up at the snow-choked sky. He can’t even see the stars, tonight--it’s all blacked out by the flurry of snow coming down.
He hears the others leaving the car, and glances back at Susie and Julie, silently gesturing for them to go on up ahead. The two start walking, Susie all but wrapping herself around Julie’s arm, and Frank moves around to the other side of the car and gestures for Joey to follow him to the trunk. “Come on,” he says, quietly, the first words any of them have spoken for minutes.
They carry the body up past the chalet, towards where Susie and Julie have begun digging a grave. By the time they’re up there, both of them are panting and exhausted. The body is far heavier than he’d expected. Even with his and Joey’s combined efforts--neither of whom were particularly weak or out of shape--the body had been hard to carry.
The two of them drop the body near the grave the two girls have carved out, Frank looking down at it and assessing the progress they’ve made. Honestly, the grave itself could hardly be called a hole, at this point. It was more like a scrape in the frozen ground than any sort of place to hide a body, but it was a start.
They still had plenty of time in the night to carve the hole large enough to bury the body, after all.
Frank and Joey grab the two shovels Susie and Julie had set aside for them and start digging as well. The frozen, muddy ground is firm, harsh--it takes all of Frank’s strength just to wedge the shovel in and pry out a clump of dirt. It’s hard, tedious work--but it’s also distracting.
Because of that, he nearly misses the movement in the woods.
Nearly.
He spins around, letting his shovel fall to the snow as he starts reaching for his knife. Fuck.
“Frank?” he hears Julie ask behind him, concern in her voice.
“I saw something in the woods,” he replies, his tone dark. A potential witness.
He’s killed once, tonight. He won’t hesitate to kill again, if it means saving their asses.
“Keep working. I’m going to check it out.”
His tone leaves no room for questions, and Frank hears them start digging again as he starts walking. It doesn’t take him long to enter the forest itself, and he slips his knife out, navigating between the trees as he searches for that movement he’d caught out of the corner of his eye.
Where are they? Was it just some animal?
No, something’s telling him it’s a person.
That doesn’t make sense, though--why would there be someone out in the woods near an abandoned lodge, this late at night?
But that same something keeps telling him that it’s a person, it’s a witness, and Frank rationalizes it by thinking to himself that it’s better safe than sorry. He keeps walking, bouncing his knife a little in his hand as he continues deeper into the forest, looking around for any signs of this witness.
A fog begins to roll into the forest, twirling around his ankles and filling his vision of the distance with white. Damn it. He’s not surprised one’s rolling in--with the weather like this, it was only a matter of time--but he knows it’s going to make it a lot harder to track someone in these conditions.
But that rapidly becomes the least of his concerns as the fog begins to thicken, rising up and quickly making it so he can’t see more than a hand in front of him. His vision is slowly being blocked off by a roiling cloud of white. He’s never seen a fog roll in so quickly before. Just a few moments ago, he could see perfectly fine, but now…
....something deep inside Frank is telling him something’s wrong. Something’s off--he’s in danger. His heart begins to pound as Frank takes one slow step backwards, then another, before turning slowly, trying to retrace his steps.
He’s been walking into the forest for far longer than he should have been. The forest isn’t that big, is it?
Something’s wrong. Something’s off.
The fog clears so suddenly that it might not have been there at all, leaving just a few distant clouds of mist--and revealing a mysterious trail.
He’s never seen this in his life. It feels wrong, to look at it. There’s something... off, about the scenery, about the ground. At first glance, it looks normal; but at second, it looks like something’s completely fabricated it. The ground is too eerily barren of anything but grass and the occasional flowers. There’s not enough foliage and brush to make it look natural.
Something’s wrong. Something’s off.
The trail that the fog has parted to reveal seems to be calling to Frank. It’s beckoning him. He feels a hint of that same dark impulse that had come over him back at the store wash over him now, except instead of urging him into bloodlust, urging him to kill, it’s now just telling him to go, to follow the trail.
It’s almost like something wants him to follow it, and Frank hesitates.
No... there’s something wrong here. This isn’t right. This trail shouldn’t exist, here--he needs to go back.
Something’s wrong. Something’s off.
Frank spins around, legs tensing, intending to run--only to be met with that same thick wall of fog he’d seen before.
Something--something born of his own instincts, not something playing with them, pretending to be them--is telling him that he can’t go back. He can’t run.
There’s something evil here. The trees are wrong--how did he not notice that before?--stretching far too tall, far too high into the sky, their branches like claws, reaching down for him, or perhaps spiderlegs, descending upon its prey trapped in the web.
Something’s wrong. Something’s here.
He looks up, further, past the false trees, and sees that the sky is completely and totally clear.
Frank can’t run. He can’t escape. He is trapped--like a mouse in a cage.
He feels like prey beneath whatever’s trapped him; just some plaything for that dark influence’s means.
Just a pawn. Just a servant.
He feels like an ant beneath a boot.
There’s nothing he can do except comply, and it tears at him.
He’s leaving his friends behind.
He doesn’t want to--please, he begs internally, but knows there’s nothing around that will listen to his pleading.
Terror begins to run through his veins, now.
He needs to go.
He spares a glance down at the dirt before he turns to run, and sees footprints, footprints left in the snow, footprints that belong to him.
They’re so clear, despite everything.
Maybe... at least he’ll have his friends.
Maybe.
Frank turns and walks into the Fog, and lets it take him.
-----
It only takes a few minutes of Frank being gone for the rest of the Legion to realize something’s wrong. The forest isn’t that large--the woods aren’t that deep--but Frank hasn’t come back yet.
One by one, the members of the Legion stand up, leaving the body and their shovels behind, expecting to come back to it later once they find him.
Three members of the Legion walk into the woods with the intention of finding their leader--their friend.
The Fog tries to push them away, to disorient them, to lead them back to where they started and separate them from their friend.
They do not let it.
They were not--were never meant to be taken. The Entity saw the way Frank was willing to murder, the way that Frank could get other people who had never even considered killing someone before to follow in his wake, and designated him and only him as a Killer.
But the Legion’s bonds run far too deep and far too strong to let the Entity separate them.
They push through the Fog, force their way through, following the footsteps that Frank had left--the footsteps that the Entity never meant to let persist, but had persisted anyways--and they stumble upon the same trail Frank had followed.
The trail does not call to them like it did to him. It tries to dissuade them, filling the three with a sense of complete terror, of foreboding.
“Get out--leave!” it seems to say.
They ignore it in favor of following his trail.
They won’t and will never abandon Frank, not in a million years.
Three members of the Legion walk into the woods with the intention of finding their leader--their friend.
They don’t walk out.
Whether that is for the better or the worse, well... it’s hard to know for certain.
All they know is if they had to make that same choice again, knowing what comes after... they’d do it without hesitation.
They’d follow Frank into those woods every time.
When the members of the Legion didn’t come home that night, their parents came up with a myriad of theories as to why their children had disappeared.
They all knew their kids had fallen in with the ‘wrong crowd’. They knew they had become delinquents and troublemakers, even if they didn’t know to what extent.
They theorized many things, but they all thought they’d just... run away with their leader--the guy they’d hung out so much with and mentioned so many times. It made the most sense.
The mood of the town--and the mood of their theories--changed, however, when they found a body up near the abandoned lodge on Mount Ormond.
Who could have thought that four teens could have become murderers? Even as far from innocent as they were, they were only just troublemakers, right?
And yet... here the proof was.
They’d killed someone, and Ormond would never be quite the same again, after that.
After all... who would have thought that something like that could have happened in such a small town?
(but it could, and it did.)