Soli Deo gloria

DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Divergent. I read Allegiant straight through. Don't do that. Don't finish it. Don't even touch it. I don't want to spoil it, BUT DAMN THAT BOOK HURT I LITERALLY SOBBED SO HARD. 10/10, would recommend. :)

This fic will spoil it, though, so SPOIL EVERYTHING.

Here's some angst, huh? Because we all so obviously need that in our lives.

~ Tobias's point of view ~

The place is Chicago now. But it will always be the home city that never had a name but was mine. I tried to get rid of it when we went past the fence, but it pulls me back like a magnet. Transformed in more ways than one, it slowly becomes different, closer to what it once had looked like. The buildings slowly take looks of their own, being built back up again. The streets become cleaner. Remnants of whatever warfare between any of the factions and the factionless are gone, leaving nothing but permanent scars that can't help but want to be noticed.

The apartment set-ups are different. No longer are there only so many of this color-clothed people in this sector of the city. The Abnegation sector is full of people who wear purple, and blue, and red and green and yellow, and grey as well. I try to stay away from that part of the city. Too many bad memories that outweigh the good ones overwhelm me, and I don't trust myself to not give in to the agony marked on each building, each street.

The city has changed, that much is true. But there are still parts of it that remain wholly like they were in the times of the factions. The underground Dauntless compound remains, all ruins and paintball splatters. The Amity farms don't change much. The Merciless Mart still reeks of Candor colors, black and white. Honesty and darkness.

In the Dauntless compound, in that marked room all too familiar to me, I fall to my knees. The vertigo still clutches at my stomach, making me gasp and hiss, trying in vain to calm my heart. It pounds almost out of my chest, then slows its pace.

Next is the box. I'm in its center, feeling the wood pressing into my body, determined to kill me slowly and intimately, cutting off my air as my breathing turns ragged and quick, harsh. It presses closer, hard and harder to push away, and I try in vain to kick away the walls. I remember all the ways to escape, but they pass before me as options that I cannot reach my hand out to grab. I remember going through this time and again, remembering how I had gotten out before. I've calmed my heart. I've forgotten I was in a box. I had Tris make the walls disappear.

I close my eyes. Try to breathe. But my heart throbs. Concentrate on that. Just that. My heart. The blood pumping. Breathe.

The wood pushes deeper. At least it is not cold, heartless metal coming slowly towards me, making me smaller, squeezing me into a tight ball and hammering at me from every side.

My arms wrap around my head. Just barely, for I can barely move. I can barely breathe. I can barely think. Even after years of running through my fear landscape like a well rehearsed routine, it still hits me anew every time when I experience the fears again. It's haunting and terrible and I hate having such a fear—

It vanishes. No longer are my limbs trapped. I'm lying on a cold, dark floor. My heart pounds as I pick myself up, dust myself off, feel every tremor wash off my body as I inhale and remember. Remember exactly what my next fear is, and not look forward to it at all.

My fingers grow longer. They look disgustingly like his. The skin stretches over the hands, the clothes become tighter. I see the mirror in the corner, there for my torture. My hair, fine and dark, falls into a greyish color, ragged and long. Like he must look like now. My face turns into his, old and angry, full of lines and darkness and anger. Easily able to slip into a mask for the benefit of his reputation. But easily able to slip back into its truest form, the face of an unrelenting monster. He's gone now from my life, but like everything that has ever happened to me, he is embedded in my brain, imprinted there as with an iron brand.

I can't look at myself without disgust. It's a horrible form of self-loathing. Literally. I am Marcus. I am his son, gaining more traits than I could ever want of his.

I need to get rid of him. So I try to forget what I am. Try to forget the monster I lived with. To forget. I swallow. I wanted to forget. But I won't. I can't. Christina won't let me. So I need to endure this nightmare. I need to get rid of this fear, in order to live.

I look myself in the mirror, straight in the eye. Eyes that tortured me stare back, and his image melts away, revealing a broken man in front of me. Young, and grey and white and black. Haunted. Aching. Me.

I'm left in a dark room, looking ahead with grim horror and guilt for my next fear. The one that will never go away, because there is no way to overcome this fear. Not when I can see her.

I can feel the pistol in my hand, the object of death against my skin. I can see her in a pale silhouette against the darkness. She steps forward into a spotlight of pure light, which, with an ache, I realize must mean something. Some light pouring down from heaven upon the girl staring at me with grey eyes that I have memorized. She still looks the same as she had when I had left her. Wearing a long sleeve shirt, black pants, her short blonde hair out. Her body is so tiny, so irreplaceable.

Her eyes search mine. They ask me a question. Why?

My body shakes. That's the question I want to ask her. Why did she have to run off to her death? Why did she take Caleb's place? Why was she so self-sacrificing? Why couldn't she have been selfish and not gone?

But that's not Tris. She is selfless, especially in times of great peril.

I stare at her, feel the cold press of the metal in my hand. I shake my head. I can't do this. I can't.

I can't have her die twice. I can't have her die by my hand.

Her eyes search me. There is no voice above us, yelling at me to shoot at her. Jeanine's voice has been erased from everything, like she hasn't ruined the lives of so many. No one seems to remember her now. I remember her. I remember how she almost killed Tris.

But I have killed Tris. I've killed the girl I love so many times. And not just in the fear landscape, when I try to win.

She smiles.

I wish I could die. Just looking at her, a mirage in front of me, across a vast desert, is even too much. Too much to bear. But not seeing her at all becomes too much, and I give in and come to see her. She never says anything. But she is still there. A mere reflection. An image cast from my brain, strong and lithe and bird-like, and all too familiar in my mind.

This is a hard fear to pass. Not only does it take every ounce of courage and strength to shoot her, to blast a bullet into her head, but I despise the sight of blood streaming from her head wound. The blood that shouldn't be there.

I don't want to shoot her. I want to wrap her up in my arms and hold her tightly against me, and never let her go.

My body can't, won't, calm down as I wrap my other hand around the pistol. I shift into a shooting stance, and my throat aches. Everything in me aches. I can feel tears in my eyes, tears that won't go away.

Her smile is sweet, my Tris's smile.

And it hurts when I close my eyes, not brave enough to watch as the shudder of the gun rolls through me. I hear her body fall to the floor. I don't open my eyes. I see on the insides of my eyelids instead her smiling face, her hands slightly cupped at her sides, her hair cut unevenly. Her eyes.

I open my eyes to a cold, dank floor. The automatic lights come on, showing me the graffiti on the walls, the open pipes that drip water.

I'm on the floor, sprawled, my legs in strange positions. My body is shaking, and my hands are gripping each other, almost as if they are attacking each other for doing such an awful, awful thing.

"You can't keep doing this," I hear. Christina comes out from the viewing station, where Amar once stood. Her hair, grown out to nearly the length of Tris's, is in her face as she steps out from the shadows. Her arms are folded, her eyes bearing a questionable emotion.

Empathy. It's been long since I've seen empathy. Sympathy, yes. Pity, malice, disgust, dismissal, plenty of times. But Christina is one of only a few who can emphasize with what I have done, what I am going through.

She sits next to me, sprawled as well.

I shake my head and sit up more, straighten. Breathe. I can feel the sweat on my body, the memory of her smile in my head. I close my eyes, imprint her on my mind.

"Was she still there?" Christina asks.

She's always patient with me. I am patient with her. We have to be.

"Yeah," I say. I sigh. "And I had to kill her. Again."

"Is there a way, you think, to eradicate that fear?" Christina asks, sounding older and more Dauntless than she had when she was just a loud-mouth Candor initiate. No. Not Candor. Not Dauntless. The factions have melted away. They no longer matter. They never should have mattered.

"How?" I ask. How? How can I become stronger than the fear, the absolute, choking fear, the one scene in my fear landscape that I look the least, and yet the most, forward to? There is no way. There is no way, despite the fact that Tris is dead. That I have never actually laid my hands on her and wrestled the life out of her, shot her and watched the life, that beautiful life, drain out of her eyes. There is no way.

I shake my head. "There's no way. She's dead, Christina. I can't get over the fear of killing her all over again, having her death, her blood, on my hands instead of . . . David's." It's a good thing I never go back to the Bureau. The risk runs high that if I meet David I will strangle the life out of him, throwing his body to the ground and watch life leave it. Even then, I realize my fear. That would be me turning into Marcus, if I did what he would do.

So I stay out of the way of the temptation. Otherwise the urge might be too overwhelming.

"Why, Tobias?" Her voice is coercing. When Christina wants to know something, she gets her way. "What is the point of going through that torture, because it is torture, honestly, FYI, if you can't use the fear landscape the way it's supposed to be? To get rid of your fears, to get over them? How can you do that when you just . . . can't?"

The real question she is asking me: Why do I put myself through that torture?

"I can only see her then," I say, my voice gruff and surprisingly raw. I tighten my lips into a thin line. But Christina nods.

I have no pictures of Tris. I feel myself losing sight of her as the days slip away. Her eyes become less piercing, her image less striking, in my mind, despite how I urge myself to remember everything about her. I want to remember her tiny hands in mine, her lips against mine, her words, soft and forceful all at once, talking to me. Laughing. She and I used to laugh together. Those days seem like a million years ago.

I can't forget her. Not when she is the first person, the very first to catch the person behind the walls, the one who wasn't Four or Abnegation or Dauntless or even Divergent. But Tobias.

I can't forget her. And I don't want to forget her.

Christina shifts in her sitting position, and she says in a low voice, one that is purposely low so I can't hear the tears she has, "Come with me."

She offers her hand and I catch it in a death grip. I leave the syringe on the floor as I turn the lights off behind us.

In her apartment Christina searches through her dresser. She smiles as she pulls something out.

"Here," she says. She walks to my side and says, "While you were off getting drunk or whatever the heck you with your Dauntless buddies, Wi . . . Will and Tris and—and Al." She swallows. Each word is hard to say. I know the feeling. She opens her eyes and says, "We went roaming around the Dauntless compound, and we found a photo machine. I got these with Tris. There are others, er, were. But there are these."

I hold the tiny set of photos in my rough hand. It's a chain of four, all flashy and smiles. Tris, tiny and overshadowed by larger-than-life Christina, smiles tentatively, getting bolder with each click of the camera. She laughs. She has a tranquil air about her, with her blonde hair still past her shoulders, the peace of the factions all alive and strong within her. When days were good, that was when she was happy.

She was happy with me, too. Even in the darkest of times, we had each other as a bright pinpoint of light. Something bright in the black.

"You can keep it," Christina says slowly.

This must be hard for her. I shake my head. "I can't take these."

"You will, though. I'll get copies made. I'll take the second set, and you can have these. How's that sound?" Christina says.

"And?" I say.

"What?" she asks innocently.

"Nothing you want me to do in return?" Not in terms of money. No. Christina and I keep each other accountable, still breathing, still pushing forward. Something like this is being used as motivation.

She stares me head-on with Candor honesty, something that will forever remain in Christina no matter. "I want you to look at these every time you want to go through that fear landscape. And I want you to remember, okay, Tobias, that there is no point in going through a ton of pain to see more pain. The factions are gone. Yes, your fears are still there. But you don't have to get rid of them. Not entirely. After all, you can learn to live with them and still live, right?"

I stare at the pictures in my hand. Tris is looking at the camera. She is smiling.

For her. She'd want me to.

"Fine," I say, my voice more confident than I am.

Christina notices this. She grips my shoulder, nods. "Remember, Tobias."

I will. I will remember for Tris. And I will not forget.

There are literally too many feels after this book. If you value having a good mental health, do not read this book. But you already have, haven't you, or else you wouldn't be reading this. In that case, my empathy, dear reader, is yours.

Thanks for reading!