Work Text:
Prologue:
The Pogues, originally a group of four teenagers looking to have a good time all the time now they were a group of three haunted teenagers that had lost one of their members following a very traumatic month of summer. Having been beaten multiple times by the Kooks, a revenge scheme that ended up with one of the members owing a Kook twenty-five thousand dollars, the loss of millions of dollars worth of gold, and to top it all off the loss of one of their best friends, John Booker Routledge after he was framed for the murder of Sheriff Peterkin. In Outer Banks, North Carolina, one thing was clear, the Kooks held all the power while everyone that lived below the cut, the Pogues, was a servant to their every wish and pleasure. With the kind of money they held, the Kooks could get away with anything and everything, even if that anything and everything was murder.
They were powerful enough to frame a Pogue for assault and murder, and powerful enough to get a government official to believe them. All those perks came with being a Kook, the wealth and the power with none of the responsibility. Living a life of luxury and no worries, it was once a dream that the Pogues wished to obtain. By the middle of July, they no longer wished for that dream anymore.
Facing death is something that all of humanity deals with, no one escapes from it. The Pogues couldn’t help but the imminent onslaught of emotions that faced with the loss of both John B and Sarah. Physcologists say that there are seven stages of grief and they are as follows: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and finally, acceptance. Everybody experiences these stages at different paces, everyone lingers in different stages for different lengths of time, that is life. For JJ, Kie, and Pope, the thought of John B and Sarah actually being gone, dead, deceased, whatever term you’d like to use, was a foreign concept to them because they didn’t deserve it. Sarah and John B, in their minds, did not deserve to die at the age of sixteen. They had so much more life to live, it was never supposed to turn out like this.