Denver leaned her head back, and then after a moment looked forward again, her head swimming slightly before she could focus on the cards in front of her. An ace and a six. Ace and six. Six and ace. Hm. She bit her lip, and ten eyed both of the men at the table.
They made for a weird group. And they didn't always get along. But they were far from strangers now. They were partners. Partners in crime. Except without the crime. Unless thieving was a crime. It might not be, in this strange new world. Rebelling wasn't. Murder wasn't. So what if someone stole a loaf of bread? Partners in cards, then. Or friends. They were friends.
"Got any....threes?" she asked. She was still largely unsure of the rules of the game, or even of what game they were playing, but she was fairly certain she was winning. She took another sip from her bottle of...something alcoholic, and not her first bottle...and waited for them to answer.
Before the dark days, it was said that bad things come in threes. Well apparently, at least in Denver's situation, so do fugitives. It was an odd band, the three of them, but none could risk long enough in the streets to go home, let alone risk going home. So Cain, Denver, and Monty stayed together, for a few weeks at least, and tried to survive.
The nightclub wasn't one Denver had been to before. BEEF was a gay club, so she wasn't the target audience. Despite presumably having been abandoned in the middle of the night, it was fairly clean, for which Denver was grateful. She didn't know much about cleaning. She also didn't know much about survival. She did, however, know about revolutions. So, in her own mind, though it was never discussed, Denver appointed herself leader, and determined that it was her job to keep her little alliance safe.
They slept in shifts, and went out individually for supply runs. They told stories and played with a deck of cards they found behind the bar. They never forgot where they were, or why they were there. Some days were easier than others.
Cain had the most questions. Denver would have thought she'd been prepared for them all with her years of scholarship, but there were too many flaws in her logic. Nothing made sense anymore. And that wasn't good enough for Cain. He went back to the Tower, to join the Vox, the new regime. Denver didn't hold it against him. She'd probably try to go herself, if her convictions were anything other than a tangled ball of twine, stuck without any direction.
Maybe their "new friend" was the voice of god. Maybe the people of Panem themselves were the gods. Maybe there were no gods. But a god-like wielding of power had created Panem, created Arenas, and a god-like show of force brought it all crashing down. Which side was the right side when both sides had iron fists they brought down on any who disagreed?
Denver didn't know, so she stayed in the bar. She listened to Monty recount his adventures. She took over Cain's watch shift. She went on supply runs. She kept notes of what she saw, so history wouldn't forget. And she waited for answers that part of her knew would never come.
Denver couldn't believe her eyes when she saw him. She let out a strangled cry, startled, her heart gripped with terror that she might be wrong, and hope that she might be right. That after everything, everyone, that Denver had lost, she hadn't lost him.
"Cain!" Denver practically screamed when he turned and she saw his face fully. She fell to her knees rather dramatically, her tears hitting the ground before her legs did. No, no, she needed to get up, needed to know that this was real. So she scrambled, heaving herself to her feet and sprinting toward him, throwing her arms around him. "Cain," she repeated through her sobs, softer this time. "Cain, you're alive. You're okay."
Denver hugged the walls of the city as she tried to keep away from the fighting. The guns, the friends....she wiped away more tears, still not sure where she was going. She was a known loyalist, worked for the damn museum glorifying the damn games. Sure she wasn't high up, but she was in the Tower. She was there, and wasn't that enough? Hadn't that been what Enna had seen when she looked at Denver?
Denver couldn't think about that. She just knew she couldn't go home, couldn't return to the Tower, had to keep moving. That was the only thing. Keep moving. And then she saw him. And the clump of Vox soldiers headed in his direction.
"Cain," she cried, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. "Cain, over here." She gestured him over to the shadows. He couldn't be Vox. He wasn't with them. He didn't have a weapon or any kind of uniform. He had to be safe.
Denver was listening to Sheen's album, humming along to the now familiar tracks as she stared out the windows at the setting sun. She wasn't sure what the future would hold, which was very strange for her. She wasn't used to uncertainty. Damn rebels. And she wanted to go home, to see her neon yellow goldfish and sleep in her own bed. Denver took a deep breath, trying to focus on the lyrics and letting her friend's music at least attempt to take the bad mood away.
Denver was bored. She wasn't even sure why the kiosk was open in the first place, though she was grateful for it. She did want to be here, in the Tower, even if she didn't want to be in a half-filled kiosk that hadn't sold anything in hours. She was leaning against the counter, but straightened when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, in case it was her manager. She was already bored; she didn't want to be bored and yelled at.
"Cain!" Denver called when she realized who it was. A distraction, thank Snow. And a friend, too - or at least, someone she could have a conversation with. "How are you doing?"
