Chapter Text
In the Entity’s realm, its adolescent servants get tired of the rinse and repeat affairs of slaughtering prey to appease it. Every now and again, they decide to cause some havoc around the realm.
Once, they had made it a past-time hobby to shank other killers.
They commonly targeted those who couldn’t defend themselves against the four, and more commonly those who provided their desired reaction. Usually they all took part, unless someone was in a trial, or if Joey sat out when a certain target was too sad or wrongful.
Their favorite victim seemed to be The Twins. Charlotte would hold the boy to her chest, and fight back until wounded to the point where Victor himself launched out to latch onto one of the teens. Of course they would just fling him off and crush him, doubling her rage. When it got to that point, The other two would ambush and attack the older twin simultaneously, kicking and stabbing at her while she cried and screamed.
They’d inevitably get bored again, wanting a newer experience. They talk about these desires for newer experiences over the campfire at the center of the resort’s building. They all have different ideas; some too mediocre, some too obvious, some that they already tried.
But when Susie had the ingenious idea to re-enact a tragic event in another killer’s past, they were immediately all ears.
It was a damn good idea. Even Frank and Julie were taken aback by it; especially since it came from Susie. Joey would get irritated and tell them off. It was too f*cked, he kept saying. What if one of them were raped? You’d be cool with that?
They already murder every day. Frank would appoint him the new title of “pisswagon,” originally assigned to Susie in the past.
The remainder of the Legion ventured forth, while he kept at the resort listening to his mixtape and carving into the rotted wooden walls.
Susie went off the few stories of the people she knew. The most passable of them was the thin man who lived in the car wreckage.
Their initial idea is to split. Frank and Julie ran off to find the man, while Susie looked for the supplies near the gas station’s store.
The charms above the door chime upon entrance. From the entrance, Susie skims over the store once, then twice, then spots the required items by the third. Susie crouches and quickens toward the back upper shelves behind the counter thrilled. Heading to the back to retrieve the gasoline canisters, until she collides face first into a hard wall of nothingness.
A bead of blood trickles down her nostril. There wasn’t anything in front of her. Until… she sees a faint shimmer of a silhouette.
“What are you doing here.”
The silhouette fills itself out with the remains of a man, the mouth concealed by a dark shadowy wrap adorned by streaks of dried paint. A charcoal military cloak held together with a seatbelt buckle veiled the upper half of his body.
The man seizes Susie by her neck, leveling her to his vacant eyes. He knows that whatever reason one of those kids would be here, it isn’t a reason he’d see to kindly.
“What… are you doing here?”
He puts a cleaver of curved, broken metal to her exposed midriff.
“Uh, h-huh? I-I was- I, um..?” Susie struggles to articulate herself.
“What.”
“I-I-I’m… here t-to borrow s-some stuff…”
“……Stuff.”
“Y-yeah. we n-need a few things f-for like, an… event.”
She, when met with authority, would always devolve into a stuttering mess; a part of her she could never truly overcome. She practically feels his doubt cleave into her behind that solemn stare.
Time was no longer a concept in this realm, but could’ve been an eternity before he asserted his next warning.
“You will not get them here,” he finally says, lowering the weapon, but still holding her. “Find them somewhere else. Leave my yard, and you will have no qualms about me.”
“Wait, hold on…”
“No. Go now, girl.”
“Hey, wait, wait!”
“………”
She struggles in his grip as the man wordlessly waits for a long overdue response. It was instead superseded by a knife to his shoulder. The knife tears through the clothing, but he stands firm, impervious to the assault.
She looks down at her gripping hand, and realizes she’s holding only the hilt. Further below, she sees that his body was all scrap metal and chains. The cold steel infused into his bare body acted as armor; armor that was impenetrable by the common blade.
…He couldn’t even be stabbed?
They stare at each other; Susie with faux anger, and The man is still with solemness. The taller figure drops the girl, who falls to her weak legs, and then to weaker knees.
“Please. Just go.”
But she wouldn’t waver so easily.
Unheeding, Susie swipes the hiltless blade and lunges to his throat in a frenzy. His swiftness allows for him to receive a gash in his cheek instead. He grabs the wrist holding the blade with enough force to make her let it go, and snatches it from the air. He yanks her into the blade and the tip pierces into her skin.
“Leave…… my……. yard……”
The man had given the absolute extent of his leniency. Dissatisfied with her lack of affirmation to his demand, he slowly pulls her in halfway from the base of the blade.
“AH! AAAGH! f*ck! Ok! I’ll go—”
A glass bottle hurdles in from the entrance of the store, cracking onto the man’s head and spilling the sugary contents all over him and Susie’s hoodie. She frees herself from his loosened grasp, falling on her rear.
As she hurriedly scoots back from the stunned man, she watches Frank and Julie sprint in to tackle him into a window next to the counter. Both assault him with their knives, pointlessly stabbing at the metal form, but then Frank’s blade meets an opening in the gap of his armor, lodging itself in the man’s left arm.
The man yells and slams the boy into the counter and socks him in the stomach. Turning his attention to the other ambusher, he grabs his scrapyard ax and swings it into Julie’s mask, cutting through chipped wood and moderately slicing into the face underneath.
Frank bounces back quickly, but is slammed over and over again, never gaining the upper hand.
She doesn’t realize Julie hunched down in front of her, lifts her arm over her back to carry her to the nearby garage away from the man.
“I’ll be fine, you know I will.” Susie spat, fueled with anger from the wound.
“Uh-huh.” Julie affirmed.
Nothing dies here. They knew that well, ever since they were abducted by The Entity. Anything seemingly dying or dead, always returned to it’s initial state.
Still, it doesn’t stop Julie from cutting the leather off her jacket, and pressing it to the slit in Susie’s stomach.
“It’d hurt more if I didn’t cover it.”
Frank’s hissing through teeth grows into pained growls in the adjacent room.
When Julie peers around the doorway, she sees them both just in front of the entrance. Frank was assumed in the same position Susie was in during their first encounter. His shirt had been cut to expose his bare chest and stomach, and The man dragged the scrapyard ax on his chest.
“sh*t, sh*t…” Julie panics.
“We need those jugs of gas. Behind the counter.”
“Forget about it.”
“But the game—“
“Are you serious? That doesn’t matter now. Stay here. When you’re good and ready, come help us deal with him, and then we leave. And don’t be a smartass.”
Julie finishes with Susie, and returns to the former room in a crawl.
Making her way to the man and her leader, looks at them, then searches for some form of attack. She surveys the shelves to her right and comes across an eight-pack of party starters. To her left, she sees
The man completes the line on his flat chest, and moves to start a new one. He continues carving into the younger man as he slices and punches the air while in his iron grasp, until finally finishing a ferocious symbol on his belly.
“….Warrior….” The man mutters.
“Haa…. I’ve got somethin’ for you in a second, f*cker...” Frank strains.
The man scoffs.
“I know what you’ve done to survivors and killers alike. I see the wandering specters that follow you and your friends. There is no vindication for those who take lives to enrich theirs. But you…”
He looks him up and down.
“…You are an unbolted vice of depravity.”
Frank gives him an accusing look.
“Tch. Piss off. You’re here too, y’know.”
“I am not a vile man… rather the vileness of humanity shadows me.” The man pulls the sharp tip of his ax from Frank’s belly. “Yet… it doesn’t pardon my sins.”
“No one gives a sh*t about your place in all this. That doesn’t matter anymore. Just remember, it’ll always come back to bite you. In the worst way possible.”
“Yes… It will…”
The man pulls the knife from Frank’s hand, and pushes his own blade into his lower stomach, next to the symbol.
“Deep Wound.”
He juts it in and out again and again—
Julie lodges her knife to the man's lower jaw, reinforcing his rage. He lets the boy loose and grabs Julie in the recurring neckhold the other Legion members were in, and stabs Julie in her breast.
The man begins to turn the knife into Julie, but halts himself. He reflects down to the girl, and then onto the boy, and pauses for a short moment.
Julie brings the eight-pack of party starters held together with a loose copper cord in the man’s face. A beacon light envelops the two, burning into the thin man, making him drop his quarry, and dissipate into the ashen clouds he once came from.
Julie, as recurrently as her fellow members, falls to the floor and lies weakly on the floor. Her eyes, canopied by violet-gray specks of sweat and blood, urged around to find Frank.
Susie had been watching through the whole ordeal, with her wound barely healed.
Susie stands up, waddling backwards so as to not fall over again, and leans onto the car behind her. She steadies herself, holding the leather to her stomach, and stumbles sparingly to Julie and Frank, both down for the count.
Dammit… The one time she’s had the edge, and she botched it completely.
“Guys, guys!”
“Susie?” Julie groaned.
The girl rushes to Frank and picks him by his underarms.
She raises her palm with his head in it, meeting to meet each other's gaze. Frank’s pupils almost rolled completely back, and he deliriously muttered incoherent sentences as if drunk.
“I took a bunch of fireworks and lit him up. Is the guy gone?”
“I think, but I dunno how long. Can you stand?”
“I… can't see anything.”
Susie looks over at Julie, who lurches herself up on her feet, but mistfully motions her arms around until they meet a nearby shelf, propping herself.
“We gotta hurry up and go.”
Susie unmasks herself and unsleeves her right arm, giving both to Julie.
Susie drags up the incapacitated leader with Julie following at the sleeve of her jacket. She gently rests him on a hill at a considerable distance from the gas station. Fumbling around in his jacket pocket, she picks out a zippo lighter.
“Stay here, I’ll be right back.” she says, sitting the other girl down next to him.”
Susie hurries through the shop, picking up all of the items she and her crew discarded. On her way back to the entrance, she takes three canisters from the back shelves in her arms, opening them and spills the flammable contents out from the center of the shop, to the entrance, and in front of the hill that Frank and Julie were on.
Out of the ashen cloud, the man reappears in front of Susie.
Susie swipes the unlit zippo lighter from her inner stocking and holds it to the puddle leading to the gas station.
“Don’t test me. I’ll light it all up if you try anything.”
“I…” he trails.
He looks up at the two atop the hill. “They are both lost. Lost in their delusions of a bygone lifetime. Lost in the everlasting labyrinth of perversion.”
For the first time, the man had shifted out from his solemn stare…
…and into a sorrowful one.
“But, through our exchange earlier, through my wrath, and through the blood, I realized…”
The thin man hopelessly falls to his knees.
For the first time, the man had shifted out from his solemn stare…
…and into a sorrowful one.
“I am no better.” he finishes.
Susie looks at the man with fright… and bewilderment.
“But that doesn’t mean the same for you.”
“W-What…?”
“Why do you do this? This slaughter? Aside from servitude, what drives you to kill?”
Susie is wordless.
The man puts his head to the ground in front of him.
“You are better than us.” he states.
No, I’m not.
“You don’t need to do this.”
She has to do this.
“End this needless violence.”
She can’t let him down—
“Look where it’s gotten us. Susie…”
Susie looks down at the man, the crimson blood from his body almost matched the carmine and mahogany pattern on his uniform.
“Oh f*ck. Oh f*ck, oh f*ck. Holy f*ck…”
Joey dejectedly looks back at Susie. He weakly reaches the knife in her direction, but at the last moment hands the knife to Julie, who jabs the knife into the man’s chest..
It was time for her to complete her part of the pact.
“Come on, now.” Frank says.
She shakily takes the blade, looking at her Julie in disbelief.
……
“Hey, don’t look at me like that...”
Her hands tremble in rhythm with her quivering mouth, and brittle legs threaten to collapse underneath her.
…………
“..n-nn—“
“Come on! DO IT!” Frank yells.
…
Frank growls and clasps his hands over hers, and together they slowly plunge the blade into the man’s lower jaw.
“Look at that.”
His finger gently moves her chin down to look at the man, heavy-lidded, mouth ajar with a knife protruding through, holding his otherwise motionless body in place.
“Listen. She would’ve been caught.”
Susie steps back from the man’s body.
“Come on, Susie,” said Julie, unmoved by her actions. “We’re in this together.”
She positions herself parallel from Susie.
“…Haven’t we always been?”
She snaps back to the hill. Her eyes agape and slick with tears. The zippo sits next to the small pool the man was bowing in.
She’s so unsure of so much…
The man lifts his head, meeting her gaze again.
There was a non verbal agreement between them.
She stands to get the two on the hill—
The enraged and nearly blind leader stumbles over the edge of the hill, and snatches the lighter from the ground.
“In the worst. way. possible.”
The small ember from it enlarges with its contact with the pool.
“No, Frank! No!!”
She kicks his hand. But the flame had already been lit.
It quickly onto the arm of her leader, and envelops the rest of him. Fire trudges through the thin man at her feet, around the garage and into its origin point. The gas station is set ablaze, and the various gasses and kerosenes trigger an eruption of firewood, glass and smelted metal out from the harrowing fire.
The man emerges from the flame, transformed, His now green cloak hangs down to his lower legs, carrying an evermore fire burning unto the scorched fabrics.
His body, no longer metal, instead had hot red rags draping over his chest, with coal flaring his forearms.
The man’s knees surpassed by military boots stay at the ground, and his incandescent eyes fix on the girl.
“Now… get out.”
With no further challenge, Susie escapes with Julie to the basem*nt.
True atonement occurs when remorse results in virtue.
Such is the essence of redemption.
