darkness among us | {legion}

Clive sat in his recliner, half asleep at 8 pm. The beer that he'd been holding between his legs had slowly started to tip over, creating a growing wet spot in his pants and, Franklin Morris was certain, souring the recliner below him. He hadn't planned on letting his foster parent know that he was leaving; he wouldn't have cared to know anyway. If anything, he would've been a dick and told him he couldn't go. At least when he was like this, Frank knew he was gone to the world for at least a couple hours. He would've still done whatever he wanted to do, but now he could do it without the threat of being kicked out.

Which, by the way, was a joke. The check Clive got from keeping Frank was half the income of the makeshift family. Without Frank, he would've been forced to move all the way back to the other side of the district, back into his Capitol-sanctioned shack of a house. As long as Frank was here, and Clive had his job, he was considered a travelling worker and could stay in the nicer place that didn't have roaches.

Frank glanced down at the emptying bottle of beer.

Yet.

He pulled his hood up and tried to close the door behind him loudly enough to wake Clive up.

Even if their new apartment was better than the old one, it still wasn't what one would consider nice. Especially in this part of District Two, with it's gorgeous snow-capped mountains, two-story lodges with smoke pouring from the chimneys and too many windows to be practical, rich careers organizing capture-the-flag wars with sparring weapons. Compared to the rest of the suburb, Clive's apartment building was just an over-sized cinder block with bad heating. And the further away he walked, the better the houses got.

By the time he reached the house in question, he was certain there'd been some sort of mistake. Julie clearly came from money but this seemed a little exorbitant. He thought it was strange that a house with seemingly so many breakable things would invite a bunch of teenagers inside to get drunk, but he supposed that, with a house like this, they could probably afford to fix whatever was broken. More money, more problems.

He glanced down at the balled up piece of paper in his pocket to be sure he'd gotten the right address, and sure enough, there it was, printed in big, curvy lettering on the mailbox: Statum.

He could hear music coming from inside, so pulled his tattered coat closer to keep himself warm as he rang the doorbell.

"What the fuck are you doing here, Morris?" he whispered to himself, trying to ignore that his breath was coming out as fog.