2017 goals: one short or story starter every month

January - submitted by EmmysRandomThoughts on tumblr - Natalie Prior

Editing provided by Milner and BK2U.

I give up on preparing myself. I am not important. She is important, and all I need is some ammunition and my legs. She will survive. She has to survive.

"Here they come," I warn her as I glance around the corner. Her eyes open, then squint in determination. She sees them coming. The Dauntless are advancing, their steps timed like a line of toy soldiers.

I need her to be strong, and I need her to focus. But I also need to see her. In her, I see my Caleb and my Andrew. In her, I see everyone I love, all at once. In her, I see strength.

There's only one way out, and she has to take it.

"Go to your father and brother. The alley on the right, down to the basement. Knock twice, then three times, then six times." I hate to let go of her. I touch her cheeks like I did every morning and every evening, for sixteen years. She's getting stiff, and her feet are planted. "I'm going to distract them. You have to run as fast as you can."

"No. I'm not going anywhere without you." She shakes her head.

My brave, brave Beatrice. I smile so that she knows I have always found joy in her, and joy is what I want her to remember. The kiss is more for me than for her. It's for me to fill myself with the smell of my family and be brave so that they can make it. With Beatrice, they can all make it.

"Be brave, Beatrice. I love you."

The first step is the hardest I ever remember taking. It's harder than leaving my mother. Harder than crossing into the Bureau buildings. Harder than entering Dauntless or stepping up to the bowls on my Choosing Day. It's so much harder than leaving Andrew and Caleb in the basement. Each of those times, I was reasonably sure there was a next step, a next act, a next phase. But this…

I dart out and half expect to fall immediately, but I don't. They aren't following me yet. I raise my gun and squeeze once, twice, three shots into the air. Then I feel the first hit — like a rubber band snapping into my side — but I keep moving, drawing them in to give her the cover she desperately needs. The sting spreads as I shoot back. Another snap, more stinging, and then dust in my nose. I don't feel anything besides gravity pulling my torso to the ground like I never had legs to begin with. I land on my back. The ground is cold, but the sun is warm on my skin. All of me is melding into the cold, but the sun is still warm, the sky is still blue. I know it's blue from one vast ocean to the other. It's the same blue sky everywhere: the Fringe. the Bureau. Chicago. I could be anywhere.

He's here, though I am both surprised and not. I guess I knew he was with me, but this is the first time I actually know it so unequivocally. He feels like warmth; like the sun's rays and the heat of Andrew's body next to mine at night. He feels as comfortable and familiar as my own body. More so, he makes sense.

Beatrice is screaming. I want to look. I want to crawl to her, but the Earth glues me to it.

"She's your daughter? And you are her mother?" His voice is familiar, but I both cannot place it and cannot deny I know it.

"I am."

"You were a good mother."

"I tried."

"What do you remember of your own mother?"

I can't fight the thoughts invading my entire being, like I am all brain and no body. Most of my memories of my mother are less images and more assumptions and feelings.

My mother… my poor mother. My first memory: she is sad, I am sad. Daddy is dead and we are both crying. I remember her arms secured around my shoulders and the rocking motion she repeated over and over while we cried. When I think of my mother, that is what I remember the most: sadness.

I remember being scared and hungry and cold in the open land between camps. And I remember coming into Henry's circle of tents. She was relieved to have found a place for us, but she was still sad. Henry made her sadder. I haven't thought about Henry's circle in a long time. I know instantaneously, in a hindsight I didn't think was possible until exactly now, that she stayed with Henry to keep me safe, but with him she was anything but.

An image of her bruised arms and a split lip flash, but I'm frustrated; I cannot see her face. I had long ago resigned myself to the fact that I had forgotten what she looked like, and now I'm looking, and it's so close, but it's just the deep divot of split and swollen flesh caked with dried blood. That's all I get to blend in with the guilt I have never felt so acutely as now. What would have possessed her to stay? But I know it. The chemical change right after birth augmented her the same as it did me, and motherhood is no longer a mystery.

The blue sky is above me again and the sun is bright. Beatrice's call is lingering in the air, stretched into a thousand moments, shrill and dire.

"Henry was not good to you?"

"Henry was… he never hurt me."

There is one steadfast memory I have: I relived it hundreds of times underneath the apple trees in Amity. Beneath the maples in the park down by Erudite, and under dozens of different trees on dozens of different patches of grass around the city. It's the first time I remember ever feeling safe.

My daddy died, and we wandered. Henry took us in, and I was safe, but Mother was not. I lay under the branches of a tree, on a patch of grass that had yet to be consumed by the sheep. Madge lay next to me, her arm within mine. She was my first friend; we were the only little girls in the circle of tents.

She'd grown up on mutton and sheep milk and was bigger, taller, and stronger than me in every way. She'd never really suffered or knew of suffering, and was immensely kind and generous. I only knew how to hoard and scavenge when I met Madge. She taught me to share, to like sharing. She took care of me and looked after me. Henry didn't allow me in his tent, except at night or when it was cold, so I spent most of my time with Madge and her grandmother. Then something happened, and Mother packed us up and we left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye.

"Because you weren't safe?" he prompts.

"I don't know if we were ever safe."

"Not ever?" his statements push me into the next series of memories.

Black and white flashes of stealing, running, hiding. Being stuck in the rain. Nursing my mother with scraps when she was deathly ill. Meeting Ismail.

Ismail was like a father to me. He was good to both of us. He did everything a man was supposed to do — for the little while we were with him. I remember him with an amazing affection, but this strange clarity has me reevaluating, and I don't know if he was actually like Henry or not. I am confused, and what I remember about him shifts from color to black and white.

It was different living in a real city, in a real house. But behind the solid door, something may have been wrong. I'll never know for sure. One day, I came home from playing in the streets and there was yelling. Yelling, like with Henry. I still don't remember walking through the front door, but I remember the glass coming off the wall and out through the crack between that heavy door and the door frame. When the lamp came down on Ismail's head, the thud reverberated through the floorboards and into my feet. He tried to get up on his hands and knees and the bang of the gun startled me. I was so focused on the red bleeding down his face onto his shirt that I hadn't seen her get the gun.

I ran. She shot more. I ran harder. I watched a gang of men come to the house from the alley across the street, but I never saw my mother, never knew what exactly happened. I just knew I was on my own.

I don't remember much of what happened after that. I do remember other kids, adults that took advantage… I remember being in a gang for a while that robbed tent circles. Shooting one boy to defend another.

"And the Bureau? They saved you?"

I am about to respond, but I am swamped by the cloud of gas. It has seeped through the cracks in the hovel. There are five of us, I am the oldest. I try to take care of them. I choke and hack, they choke and hack. We spill out, and there are lights flashing above and around us.

Then the Bureau swept through the dead buildings of Joliet and I was taken into a vehicle. It was like entering a time warp. Everyone walked slower. Everyone moved like their feet were sticky on the bottom. No one was frantic. I was expected to slow down as well.

"David, he loved you."

"David loved me like a child loves a pet." I didn't know those were my true feelings, but they must be, given the way I spat them out.

David first showed an interest in me because I was the only fringe child close to him in age, and I had already been on my own for years. I was only really exposed to him because I tested as genetically pure. He was the first person to love me that wasn't my family, and I made all my mistakes with him.

I am extremely embarrassed for him to see the sticky awkwardness between me and David, but I can't help that that's what's on display. I'm angry at how I felt. I thought exchanging my body and my time would secure me affection. I was sad afterwards, knowing I had allowed David to check a box on what made me his. I was all too familiar with the way men could become violent. Getting away from David, being sent into the experiment, it was an excuse to get back my autonomy from him and more freedom over my life.

I still tried to complete the mission.

I don't need a prompt to know what's next: Andrew, beautiful and cherub-cheeked when we first met. I forgot how his twenties had hardened his features, matured him into a man. Andrew, my most unlikely love. He was an unintended consequence of my lack of formal education. I could read and write, although I don't remember learning, but I still struggled with math.

Andrew liked to be near broad and bright windows. I think he really would have preferred a job like mine — outside, and in the fresh air — but he never complained about where he was assigned to serve.

We met in the back of the library at Erudite, where he sat looking out the window at the street. I had to play it off like I didn't want to be there, but without him, I knew I wouldn't get very far in Erudite — if I got through initiation at all.

I like reliving this moment: his eyebrows rising and his shoulders straightening when I tossed my book on the table. I made sure to slouch into the chair across from him. He told me later that he thought he was tutoring a Candor. I liked him from the start. I liked that he didn't attempt to flirt with me, but I could tell from the way he watched me that he liked me. He respected me.

Andrew and I constantly reminisced together about how un-Abnegation we were, long after Beatrice and Caleb went to bed. When he spilled his blood and joined me in the Abnegation section, he hugged me. The members around us had gasped and murmured. Harold, the old initiation guide, pulled me away from him and we were always assigned to be in different places.

"Did you ever lose faith?"

"In Andrew? Never. Abnegation thinks that touch is so essential to selfishness that we couldn't be close to each other until we were formally courting. But they underestimate the power of a glance. I mean, that's how I first knew he liked me, the way he looked at me."

"Was it hard, fitting into Abnegation?"

"For Andrew, yes. I liked the simplicity, but he struggled to let go of his curiosities. He still reads more than Abnegation thinks is proper. And his temper, he struggles with his temper."

"You really love him."

"With all of my being."

A pain in my core is shifting up to my chest: two faces crush in on me, and I cannot help but feel the sorrow of my situation. I see Caleb clearly, sitting up and playing with a rag doll Andrew had made. Next to him is Beatrice, struggling on her stomach, still small and helpless.

"They were twins?" I have heard that statement since they were toddlers, but from the babies in front of me, no one could actually think that. I know I'm about to relive the most anxious moments of my life.

Beatrice came three months early. I couldn't stand; I was still recovering from a c-section. I sat and held her little hand through the window of the incubator while Andrew muttered prayers over and over. She glows under the lights and her little chest pumps fast. Even though they are optimistic, a baby so small seemed unlikely to survive.

A man came, dressed in the blue coat of a scientist, not a doctor. He was frail despite his age, and looked ashen and sick. I knew before he introduced himself that he was Andrew's older brother. Our miracle under the glass reunited two brothers at a time when Andrew needed hope and I didn't have enough to share. Each day next to that glass case gave us more. Each day was progress. It was then that I learned that there is always room for hope.

I can't see the sky anymore, everything has faded to white. The cold no longer registers, but neither does the warmth of the sun on my skin. All of the warmth of my life stands beside me. He takes my hand as he takes form.

Beatrice's call is still stretched on the wind; she's further away than before. She's falling apart because she is filled with the love that we share for each other, and she is losing hope for me. I know I am brave, and I know she has always been braver, more courageous, more willing to run when others walk. While she has no hope left for me, it's all I have left for her. I know she will succeed.

"Are you ready?" His fingers have taken shape in my hand, and his shoulder is by my ear.

I am ready. I speak with a new mouth in a new world. "I'm ready, Daddy. Show me what comes next."

*The opening dialog between Tris and Natalie is taken word for word from Divergent.

I know this isn't exactly what was asked for. But if I ever did write the "Youth of Divergent" series that has been requested, this is how I would start it. So stay tuned for February's short (follow me as an author to get notifications).

Please let me know your thoughts is the comment box below.