For the first time in quite some time, things seemed to be making sense again. Avelina’s tired hands were making movements that she committed to muscle memory long ago, the disinfected needle swiftly and cleanly piercing through flesh and sewing it back together as the other members of Jacob’s crew were looking at her with a mixture of suspicion, amusement and relief.

Currently, there were seven people in the group, not including her. She had heard all of their names but had a feeling that she would be forgetting them soon if she didn’t spend some more time committing them to memory. She was a fast learner, but her ability to place names on faces always had been rather lacking. It had caused her quite a few awkward moments in the past.

As her hands finished the job, her eyes glanced around for a short moment. Jacob, Monica, Jennifer, Klaus, Max and Jay. Monica didn’t have the same rough edge as the other 6, making it clear that something was going on there, but she hadn’t the time to ask it yet. The others she assumed were former guards like Jacob, given that they were wearing roughly the same style of clothes.

“So-,” she had spent the last few minutes gathering her courage to ask the question that had been lingering on her mind, “How did you get this wound.”

Once more she inspected the wound. It was a simple gash on Klaus’ right bicep, but if it wasn’t properly taken care of it could get infected and cause the man quite a bit of trouble. Even now it would hinder his ability to use that arm to its full potential.

“Weird question, ya know?”, It was the ever-smiling Jacob who replied to her as the others clearly let him do most of the talking, “Given that you still have a wound yourself, probably from the same thing.”

“Apologies.”, she replied, not planning on pushing a matter if they didn’t want to share.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”, Jacob leaned forward, “Good, cause I was lying through my teeth.”

“Don’t you think that if you are lying that you shouldn’t at the very least have one back-up excuse, or perhaps not give it away the moment the other looks mildly unconvinced.”, she countered out of habit.

“Ha! Got you there, Jacob!”, a loud slap echoed through the room as Jay smacked Jacob on his shoulder

“Psh, what’s the fun in that”, the former replied, “We don’t even have a reason to be all mysterious. It just sounded fun, but I’m curious, what gave it away?”

“Tell us, some mad doctor skills or something?”, Jennifer cut in.

For a moment Avelina hesitated, but as she looked around and noticed the fact that they seemed to be genuine she decided to let her guard down slightly and just go along with the flow. Perhaps this conversation was the most normal thing she would do for the rest of the day so she didn’t want to waste it.

“A guess really. I wouldn’t think that any of you would get cut by someone who well, wasn’t a security guard here before all of this stuff happened and you were in too good a mood to have lost someone-”, her voice trailed off as she explained the matter. Avelina was a perceptive person and more often than not this got her in trouble, “So I just assumed you’d have ended the culling faster than me as well since I was pretty slow. Combine all that and well-”

The blonde medic shrugged, “The cut was rather fresh and there was some rather insane amount of tension between you and that Craig guy. It just led me to assume that you all came to blow with him before I arrived.”

Jennifer whistled while Klaus looked somewhat impressed. Only Jacob wasn’t smiling for once.

“Now, do you also know why we fought with them?”, Jacob asked

“No.”, Avelina admitted.

“You don’t know and you still followed me here?”, his smile returned, more obnoxious than ever, “And here I thought I wasn’t going to be the only person in this group with half a brain, shame to be disappointed again.”

Suddenly a can of soda flew through the room before impacting against the back of Jacob’s head, causing him to flinch and wince as he turned around, his eyes burning with fury. The perpetrator of this was Max who had just returned with a bunch of drinks and some food, a half-smile sprawled across his face.

“Sorry, I thought I heard a fly buzzing.”, Max finally added.

For a moment of silence, it seemed as if a fight would break out before Jacob burst out in a round of genuine laughter. After a few moments, the others started to join in and even Avelina found herself joining in, simply enjoying something so normal.

The found was slowly handed out and Avelina found herself with a Pepsi and a few candy bars. She never had been one for too sugary things normally, but when you were running on an empty fuel tank, you’d stuff your face with anything. Besides, she was craving some sugar.

The quick meal only lasted for a few moments and the one to finish first was Monica who had been silent so far. Finally, she eyed Avelina and broke the ice, ruining the mood with just a few words.

“Food.”, she admitted in a small voice, “We stole their food.”

Some members of the group, Jay and Klaus looked away rather uncomfortably at this admission while others simply kept eating or focused on the reaction of Avelina to this news.

“Yeah. Food.”, This time it was Jacob who took over, “What? Don’t act like that after you eat said food. There wasn’t much in this shitthole and I knew that it would pose an issue in the long run, so we took it.”

An uncomfortable silence once more took hold of the room that they were sitting in. In hindsight, Avelina realized that she should have seen it coming. There wasn’t much that people would fight over in a situation like this and she doubted that everyone had simply decided to happily start bashing each other's head’s in for the experience as if this was some kind of bad video game.

“Why did you bring it up, Monica.” Max snarled at the woman, anger clear in his face.

“Because it was wrong!”, the weakest looking defended herself.

“Max, calm down-”, Klaus tried stepping in and calming the situation down, raising his good hand to pat Max on the shoulder.

“Oh, shove it Klaus.”, Max finally spat out, “Stop defending your girl every single time she pisses someone off.”

“The fact that she’s my girl has nothing to do with it.”, Klaus called out, his voice still calm and restrained, “The doctor needs to know. It was wrong what we did.”

“No-”, an unexpected voice called out, drawing the attention of the others, “No. I get why you did it.”

The person who had just spoken up was none other than Avelina as she felt Adrian’s jacking bearing down on her shoulders, constantly reminding her of the wrongs that she had done herself and the fact that she most likely would need to commit many more in the future to not make the sacrifices she made in the past worthless.

“It is only logical. There probably isn’t enough food for everyone here and well, I don’t think I would want to leave this building with all that is going on.”

“Can’t. Not don’t want to.”, Jacob finally said, looking pleased, “We tried. We can’t open the doors or windows anymore. We assume that this ‘culling’ isn’t over yet and that we are locked in here till it is over.”

“Ah-”, Avelina unintelligently mumbled.

“Yeah, it’s fucked ain’t it?”, Jennifer added again as she downed the remnants of her drink before crumpling the can up and tossing it to the sides. For the third time that day, an awkward silence hung in the air.

After a few moments, the group got back to finishing up their drinks and meals while some of the others started to silently talk to each other. Klaus and Monica were sitting off to the side, touching and inspecting his wound while the others were playing with a set of cards in the other corner of the room. That only left two people, Jacob and Avelina.

“So. How many days do we have.”, Avelina finally asked.

“You know-”, the smiling man replied, “I’m pretty happy. You’re a lot like me.”

It was strange to hear, but somehow that compliment had cut deeper than any insult she had received in her life. After all, she didn’t know much about Jacob, but she knew that he wasn’t a good person. He was a man very willing to use violence to get his way and who put the good of his own friends far above the collective good and was willing to get nasty for it.

“I'm appalled by that sentiment.”, She finally replied with a mutter.

“That is why I call you just like me.”, He replied with a shrug, “But you’rre talking back a lot ya know? What happened to the cute meek student I escorted out of the room;”

“She realized that you all probably aren’t psychopaths who want to kill her in her sleep or do worse-”, Avelina muttered before looking up, “And that if you are like her that you’d consider her too useful to harm.”

“Ah, now I don’t like the comparison anymore either”, he replied with a small frown.

And so the two exhausted survivors sat in front of each other as Avelina couldn’t help but wonder what Adrian would have done in this situation. A shame that she didn’t know the slightest about him and frankly, she didn’t want to find out more. She liked the man that she had met in that arena, not whatever person he had been before it. She didn’t know why, but her subconscious told her she would be disappointed if she learned more about him.

“You never answered the question.”, Avelina pressed after a few moments as she realized that Jacob had carefully switched the subject.

“Tsk,” He clicked his tongue and scoffed, “Too attentive for your own good. 6 days for the 8 of us. After that, we’ll need to find more somewhere else, but if we can’t leave this building by then we are in deep shit.”

It took a moment for the realization to set in as she had a feeling on why exactly that she, as a medic, had been dragged into this group, even with the limited food resources, but frankly she didn’t want to even think about that being the case. Yet it seemed that her eyes betrayed her realization as Jacob’s face suddenly grew darker.

“Too much like myself.”, he finally scoffed again.

“You can’t really be planning on doing it. That is inhumane.”, she found herself arguing against it, keeping her voice down with great difficulty as she didn’t want to alert the people around her. From the way that Jacob had been acting, she doubted that the others knew about what he was planning just yet.

“Ya know it makes sense.”, he finally answered, “As more time passes they’ll eat the stuff that they have with them up and it will be too late.”

“But there is a good chance that it could be over by the time-”, Avelina countered his point, her voice weak as she already knew the issues with her own argument. Still, she couldn’t just agree to something like this.

“Could.”, Jacob finally said as he pushed himself up, “Get some sleep, it will be tonight. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

Jacob was going to steal the food of the other survivor group.