We Are Legion

Copyright to Wes Craven, New Line Cinemas. I own nothing.

Rating: T, for language

She snaps awake, as though someone has kicked her in the stomach. There is something burning in her head, like a coal in her brain, spreading through her body and lighting her up. There is a surreal moment where she is thinking she is in the filthy room (boiler room?) and her body is saying she is in bed, and then she remembers.

She can still see – feel – Kristen in the fire, in horrible pain, screaming, reaching out and throwing – giving – something to her. Can still remember that thing that killed her friend. Can still taste the heavy, sulfuric power that it layered the area around it with. Can still hear it speaking, laughing, yelling in her mind.

It was just a dream, she thinks.

Bullshit, she knows.

She can still feel Kristen.

She can feel her; feel the heat from the fire and the damp from the steam.

She gets up out of bed, pulls a photo from the mirror she cannot stand to see herself in and is somehow horribly not surprised to see Kristen and that horrible man. It is later a moment of shame for her that she is not so much scared for Kristen, who she last saw dying, then she is for herself. The man-thing's eyes in the photo are staring at her and his finger is pointing at Alice, right at her – you're next, piglet -.

Then the photo burns, she looks up into the small empty space of the mirror and feels new fear, confused fear, when she sees herself. Her eyes, she knows, are nothing special. A muddy green to go with her lank red-blonde hair, but it is Kristen's blue eyes that stare at her now.

Alice knows trouble when it is coming and she knows how to get out of the way (because she is not a fighter), but this is her friend and Kristen wouldn't run if it were Alice who was in danger.

When she runs out of the house in the middle of the night in nothing but pajamas and charges into an obviously burning building for a friend who seems to be cracking up inside, it is quite possibly the first time in her life that Alice does something that could be called brave.

But it changes nothing and soon after she is at a funeral, smelling the lingering aroma of charred flesh from the coffin as it lowers into the ground.

Alice wonders why it still feels like Kristen is next to her.

Sheila has been crying. Alice can tell, even if Sheila won't say it. They all have their own ways of coping with it – can't say 'Kristen's death', no, can't -. Rick spent the whole night in his makeshift dojo and when she saw him earlier in the morning, his knuckles had bloody bandages wrapped around them. Compared to that, Alice can't really blame Sheila for spending her every waking moment cramming for exams and quizzes. It's a way to forget.

At least Debbie will get something out of it. Alice smiles a little, just a little, when she has an image of Debbie for once chasing the bugs that frighten her instead of the other way around with Sheila's latest device.

She is still thinking about that comical image, still drawing some small happiness from it, when she reaches into the pocket of her backpack that holds the cigarettes she always kept on supply for Kristen (because no one would ever call Alice, itty bitty Alice, any kind of delinquent). She draws one out, pulls a match from the same pocket, lights the cancer stick up and draws in deep.

It isn't until the first hit of nicotine reaches her virgin lungs that she starts coughing and sputtering, suddenly very aware of just what the fuck she is doing without any idea of why.

"…I don't smoke…."

Unspoken, but deeply felt, is …right?

Alice doesn't want to sleep.

It is an exam, an important one, and she is still scared of having another nightmare (even if she doesn't really believe, not really, not yet).

There is a deeper fear beneath her own. A (dare she say it) different one, that is separate and yet a part of her own.

But Alice isn't strong enough yet or scared enough, and soon she can smell his overpowering stench of charred flesh and sulfur and wrongness.

She tries not to think about what Sheila smelled.

Or tasted.

It is no comfort that the test is cancelled.

Not when Alice really, finally, accepts that Kristen was not insane or even slightly unstable. Not when her friends still only half believe her at best (God, was this what Kristen had to deal with on her final day? This horrible refusal to see the truth?). Not when she is watching them wheel a gurney out of her school with Sheila's lifeless, too young body on it. Not when she remembers that way that the thing had stood up from behind her teacher's desk, walked over to Sheila in the next aisle, murdered her not three feet from Alice and that she had not been able to stop him.

Not when she remembers the first time she saw him.

Not when she remembers Kristen hugging her in the twisted pipe room, saying "I shouldn't have brought you here. I'm sorry, Alice. It was a mistake."

Not when she remembers Kristen, her beautiful face black and melting, surging up from the lake of fire and screaming, "You'll need my power!"

Not when she realizes what she has done.

'Kristen could pull me into her dream, she gave me her power, I fell asleep, I was thinking of Sheila, how she was going to do well on the test and maybe I could copy off of her, I pulled Sheila in. I was thinking about Sheila when I slept and I pulled her in. I gave her to him. I pulled her in.'

"I gave Sheila to him and now she's dead!"

Running doesn't help, it never does, but Alice doesn't know anything else.

She winds up with the bug repelling device. She doesn't remember how it came into her hands, the whole afternoon being one long blur of crying, but she promises herself that she will give it to Debbie later.

Alice is brushing her hair and staring at the picture of Sheila hugging her when she picks up the device. It isn't pretty to look at, but most of Sheila's works aren't. She builds them to function, not dazzle. It will function, Alice is sure. A crackpot inventor Sheila was not.

'But it took a banging today, when I dropped it on the floor after I got home and started crying for two hours. What if it's broken?'

The thought hurts; Sheila's last legacy a useless piece of junk.

Alice takes the photo down (she doesn't want to see her friend's face right now, not when she remembers the deflating flesh) and sees her own bland self in the widening shine of the mirror.

'I'll test it out later to make sure it still works. If something is wrong, it might not be anything too serious. Probably just a loose battery or a slipped circuit or maybe that old piece of copper shielding the sonic emulator slipped. I'll have to disassemble it then and it'll be a bitch to put back together without any rubber gloves, because the battery line is right next to it, has to be with this design, and getting shocked would hurt like….'

The device slowly slips from her fingers and clatters noisily on her nightstand.

"… what?"

She understands now.

She's had to time to think it over and she's pretty sure she gets it.

The children of his murderers were the only ones that he could touch on his own. Kristen, Kincaid and Joey were the last. Now that they are gone, if he wants to reach anyone else (and he does) he needs someone to bring them to him.

Someone like Alice.

There is a very small, very deep-rooted part of her that is relieved. It says, "He can't kill me, not if he wants anyone else."

Mostly, she is sick.

And afraid.

School again and she is wondering why she bothered.

No, she knows why. Staying home on the excuse of Sheila's death would have given her nothing to do and she would have slept. At school she can learn. It's one of the few times she wants to. Anything to stay awake.

But Mr. Combree's voice seems tailor-made to cure insomnia and no matter how interesting the topic (and it really is. The Dream Master, Alice thinks. I need him on my side) interest can only hold on for so long.

I won't fall asleep, Alice vows.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

I won't fall asleep.

.I won't fall asleep.

.I won't fall asleep.

.I won't fall asleep.

.I won't fall asleep.

..I won't fall asleep.

..I won't fall asleep.

..I won't fall asleep.

..I won't fall asleep.

..I won't fall asleep.

..I won't fall asleep.

… I won't fall asleep.

… I won't fall asleep.

… I won't fall asleep.

… I won't fall asleep.

… I won't fall asleep.

… I won't fall asleep.

… I won't fall asleep.

… I… won't fall asleep.

… I… won't fall asleep.

… I… won't fall asleep.

… I… won't… fall asleep.

… I… won't… fall asleep.

… I… won't… fall asleep.

… I… won't… fall asleep.

… I… won't… fall... asleep.

… I… won't… fall… asl….

Alice decides she is proud of Rick.

He fought.

In the end, Dan and Debbie believe her now. It's no comfort. Not when the nightmare man is still going to kill them both unless Alice finds a way to stop him and she has absolutely no idea on how to do that.

But she has to stop him. She has to fight him, because it is looking more and more like no one else has the option of doing so. Rick, who could shatter cinderblocks on a good day, was torn open and gutted like a pig.

Alice doesn't know how to fight, can't even stand up to her own father, but she has to learn.

Strangely enough, she isn't upset about it.

In fact, there is a part of her – not her – that is downright ecstatic about it.

Her currant track record for promises is one long string of failures, but there is something behind this one that gives it weight.

"No more daydreams."

She walks away from her few remaining friends, Debbie's gift in hand, feeling a strange confidence that she isn't sure is her own.

She spends the day in the house, religiously avoiding Rick's room and the garage dojo until she can't put it off anymore. Then she cleans them both down to the cracks, packing her brother's presence away into so many cardboard boxes. When she is done, Alice returns to her room and pulls Rick's pictures from her mirror to put them away in the drawer that holds the pictures with Sheila and Kristen.

In that same drawer is a set of nunchaku, the same ones Rick tried to get her to practice with. She takes them out, more from nostalgia than anything else, and finds her hands wrapping around the polished wood as though it were a part of her.

She only freezes for a moment this time and then she goes with the feeling, stepping back from the mirror for space. It starts out as curiosity and she swings them gently back and forth. Then it turns to wonderment when she whirls them fast enough to make the air whistle.

And then there is no feeling at all but right when she is flipping the nunchaku over her shoulder, under her arm, around her side, back in front, over the other shoulder, around the other side, low, high, low, high, left, right, high, over the shoulder, stop.

It isn't Alice that Alice sees in the mirror. Alice never stood like that. Alice never moved like that. Not clumsy, shy Alice.

"What's happening to me?"

She knows she shouldn't, knows what he is going to do, but he is right there. She feels the weight of his hand on the back of her head, the thick leather and hard steel of his claws. She can see the muscles in the burned through portions of his scarred skin. She can smell his breath (rot, mold and, oh yeah, the faint spicy scent of meatball because he had just eaten her brother's head).

Even with all of this, even with the smothering presence of him so close, she still knows that she shouldn't.

But Alice is human and before she can even think 'no', she is wishing that Debbie was around to help her.

There is no warning; just a sudden knowing that she is too late, too slow, too stupid, too weak again and Debbie is dead.

She knows what is happening now. She is picking up pieces of them as they die and are taken by that monster. Kristen's power passed through him before reaching her and they are joined now in some obscene way. Everyone he kills gives their greatest asset, their brightest trait, their most beloved knowledge to her.

She doesn't want it. She doesn't want it at all. She wants them whole, not in pieces and bits. She wants them beside her, not inside her.

But this is all she gets now and when she sees a man wearing a red and green sweater in the glare of the truck's headlights, she feels a rush of hot murderous screw you rage that can only be Debbie's and it tells her to put the petal to the metal.

It seems like good advice, but then Debbie always was too impulsive.

She doesn't have much time.

All she can think is one left, he's the only one left, oh God. Beneath that, however, is a steady calm. She is, for the first time in days, sure of what will come next.

Alice is sick of burying her friends.

There is something else with her now, something that she can hearfeelsmelltaste all around, just barely out of touching distance. It is Kristen, it is Sheila, it is Rick, it is Debbie. Her friends are going to help her tonight in death just as much as they did in life.

It is Debbie who tells her to pull on the metal spiked leather belts and jacket from the bottom of her closet.

"I am not getting kill by some boogey man!"

It is Sheila who tells her to pick up the bug-repeller.

"Mind over matter. Make 'em run, screaming their antenna off."

It is Rick who tells her to tie her hair back and wrap his bandana around her knuckles for a guard.

"You gotta learn to stand up for yourself. You know, fight back."

It is Kristen who tells her to take the sleeping pills in her dresser drawer.

"I've had experience with sleep problems."

The pictures are falling away now. For the first time a long time she isn't afraid to see what she is. This girl, this person in the mirror is nothing to be ashamed of. This girl is strong. This girl is brave. This girl is beautiful.

So what if her friends are dead? They are still helping her tonight. They always have been and Alice can see that now. All of them have been holding her up when she would have folded, being so patient with her and waiting for Alice to find her own backbone.

Well, she has it now and in spades. If that man wants Dan, he's going to have to go through her first. It is very fitting, Alice thinks. On their own, none of her friends survived, but they are together within her now and maybe she can save this one. Better yet, maybe she can take all of the stolen power that has gotten through to her through the theft of her friends' souls and ram it down Freddy Krueger's throat.

The world is shifting, blurring and melting. Reality bleeds away and surreality takes its place.

Somewhere, Alice can hear Dan screaming for her.

"Get away from him, ya son of a bitch!"

Alice has no fear of her looking glass anymore.