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.
Denver groaned as sunlight filled the room enough that she could no longer grasp at the last edges of sleep. She pushed up from the cot, and her back popped as she stretched, though not enough to be satisfying. It was never enough to be satisfying. She rolled her shoulders and threw on the robe she'd salvaged from what appeared to be a dressing room of sorts her first night here. It was bright and colorful and, of course, far too big on her.
She yawned as she walked through BEEF toward its kitchen, and then laughed when she saw that Monty was already awake and eating some of their toast reserves.
"You know the early bird only gets the worm if there are worms to catch," she noted. "There's no reason not to sleep in when we can't do anything." She grabbed two slices of bread for herself and popped them in the toaster, copying Monty's breakfast. "Cain out on a supply run?" she asked.
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.
