@helliotrxpe
Perhaps if Frannie had been wiser, they would have avoided this rundown building like the plague. The abandoned dock house had gone through various owners through its years, from rich whackers to bands of street pickpocketers, and yet it still ended up decrepit and unused. But to Frannie, this had once been their home, before the sleezy mob their group had worked for sold them out to the coppers.
Now, most of their best friends were probably sent off to ‘fixing camps’, or worse, locked up alongside older criminals...
They shouldn’t be here. Not where mobsters and policemen alike would recognize their face, the lone child that escaped their grasp. But when tempted by the idea of revisiting old memories of when they had friends to laugh with, to be guided by, to be protected by... Frannie simply couldn’t resist. The small human enters through the open doorway and into the darkened dock house, coughing a little from the dust they stirred up with their movements before they took in an eerily similar scene that lay around them.
Scattered dirty blankets, newspapers flung about the floors chaotically, empty wooden crates bashed in leaving splinters everywhere... yep, the coppers had definitely ransacked this place. Any personal belongings had most likely been stripped of the building and tossed away, but at least the blankets were still there. Blankets that had served as beds to many children and teenagers, kept them warm through many nights...
Frannie knelt beside a tattered blanket and picked it up gently, running their thumbs over its dusty cloth with a somber look on their face. Maybe they could wash some of these off, use it in their own little den they called home now. Sure it wouldn’t be the same, but having some piece of this place felt important to them.
So absorbed by their thoughts, Frannie didn’t notice the figure which appeared in the doorway they’d just entered through.
