A/N: Hokay, so, disclaimer, I don't own the songs/characters/etc. This chapter concludes Act 1, and things will get more exciting in Act 2, I promise. Appy-polly-logies for being a little rusty in the fanfic-writing area, I haven't done this in a while.

Chapter 2 - Like Refugees

The journey ended at the mouth of an abandoned subway station. "What is this?" Christian asked as he followed Gloria down the steps and into the humid underbelly of the city.

"They shut this station down after terrorists tried to launch an attack from here," Gloria explained. "Now, it's my headquarters."

"Your headquarters?"

"I told you I was a revolutionary, didn't I?"

He looked around the station, surprised to see a substantial number of haggard faces looking back at him. "You didn't tell me you had a cult following."

She gave a slight snicker at his choice of words. "Freedom of thought is a powerful rallying cry," she said. "Damn, it's hot in here…"

She pulled the tattered flag from around her face, exposing a jagged slash down her right cheek that was crudely stitched together. She'd probably fixed it up herself in front of a mirror.

Christian gasped in shock. "What happened to you?"

"What?" asked Gloria. "Oh. This." She fingered the scar, thinking back as if she'd forgotten it was there. "Got in a scuffle with a police officer last week."

"Just last week?" Christian repeated. He started to bring a hand up to brush the hair out of her face and get a closer look at her injury, but she slapped it away.

"Don't touch me." Her tone wasn't angry, though, and there was something like mischievous amusement sparking in her eyes. She pulled a couple of beers out of a nearby cooler whose ice was melting and spilling onto the floor in a slushy mess and tossed one to him. "Come here, little boy. I want to tell you a story."

"You got a bottle opener?"

"Nope." She hopped over the edge of the pavement and sat down cross-legged on the tracks that hadn't seen a train in years, cracking off the top of the bottle on the rusty metal and pouring the liquid into her mouth from the broken glass. "They teach you history in school, Christian?"

"A little," he said. "Columbus, and stuff."

"I bet they didn't teach you that in the previous generation, another world war almost broke out," she told him.

"A—a what?"

"Yeah, guess who started it? The good ol' U.S. of A-holes," Gloria snickered. "The start of the twenty-first century was marked by a massive arms race that completely depleted half of the world's funds. As a result, we've imperialized several nations, and to make sure things don't get out of hand again, we enforce peace. It seems like a sound plan, but it's actually quite sick."

Christian looked quizzically at her. This was all beginning to sound like one big overblown conspiracy theory. "How do you know all this?"

"It's obvious, for those who bother to go digging for the truth," she shrugged. He glanced from side to side, and she sighed. "You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

"Well, not exactly…"

"Your mother's probably worried sick about you, kid. Go home before she files a missing person's report."

"Are you kicking me out?" Christian asked incredulously.

"I thought you were different," said Gloria.

"I am."

"No, you're just like the rest of the perverse American culture. Soulless and lobotomized," she muttered. "Get out of here. And come back when you find the other half of your brain."

"But I thought you said they would try to kill me."

"They've probably given up. The government has a short attention span."

Christian stepped back into the world, the hushed whispers of revolution and the glorious way-things-used-to-be fading behind him, replaced by loud proclamations of the ever-powerful grace of God.

He took a subway—one that was actually still in operation—back home, quite surprised to find his parents still awake at the ungodly hour of three in the morning. They were sitting at the kitchen table, his mother holding an envelope, his father holding a bag of cocaine.

Well, shit.

"I can explain…" he stammered.

"Explain?" repeated his mother. "Try explaining how you got in trouble with the law and ended up getting kicked out of school! Explain the drugs we found in your room, why don't you try explaining that?"

Alright, so maybe he couldn't explain. But he still deserved some sort of chance to make his case, right?

Apparently not. "You get out of this house, young man!" yelled his father. "You're not going to live under my roof like this! We've tried to straighten you out, but you've proven completely hopeless!"

Christian's teeth ground together in anger. "Fine," he snarled, snatching his bag of coke and walking out the door. "I've got better places to be than this dump anyway."

He walked three blocks away from his dwelling, then paced the street for an hour until his parents were asleep. Then, he sneaked through the window of his room and filled his pockets with the three hundred dollars he kept stashed under the floorboards, On a scrap of paper, he scribbled a hasty note:

You were right all along. Well, I'm not sure if you were, but it doesn't matter. What does is, you're all that I've got now. Expect me back at the station in a few days—I'm going to lay low for a while before heading back.

He stuffed it into an envelope, penned GLORIA on the backside of it, and headed back out into the street.

That morning in Central Park, he spotted a fellow on the bench reading the Holy Bible upside-down, a sort of code that non-believers used so that they could recognize each other and talk about dissent without worrying about government intervention. Christian tossed the envelope in front of the man's text. "Do you know her?"

The man nodded his head, up and down, up and down. "No."

"Was that a yes or a no?"

"It's dangerous to be overheard talking about her," said the man, spelling out Y-E-S in standard American sign language.

"Make sure this letter gets to her."

On the third day after his disownment, Christian slunk into Gloria's subway station and snuck up behind her. She was asleep on the steps, his letter in her hand.

"Hey."

"WHAA—oh, it's just you, Christian. Don't scare me like that!" she snapped.

"Sorry."

"So, you decided to come back after all?"

"I would have sooner or later," said Christian, realizing as he said the words that they were true: he'd grown so disillusioned with his inferno of a life that he was bound to break away from society eventually.

"Do you still think I'm crazy?" asked Gloria.

"No," Christian shook his head. "I think you're serious about this whole revolution thing. And I think I am, too."

Gloria's sharp-eyed expression softened. "It's dangerous out here in the front lines. You could be killed, you know."

"I know," he replied. "But it's alright. As long as for your—the—cause. Because…call me crazy, but I think I lo…"

"You think you what?"

"Nothing," he lied, sitting next to her and resting his weary head on her shoulder. "I lost my train of thought. It must be the coke."

"Fair enough," she shrugged. "Want to know a secret?"

"What?"

"I was hoping you'd be coming back soon," Gloria confessed, patting his head affectionately. "I'm glad you did, and I'm sorry we got off on the wrong foot."

"Don't worry 'bout it," Christian yawned. His eyes fluttered shut and he drifted off next to her, making up for the last few sleepless nights.