I believe there is beauty in death and in sacrificing your life for others. But this is written for Emily and Sam, and anyone else who needed a happy ending for them. But...perhaps that means their world won't have one?
Beatrice Prior and Tobias Eaton, both dressed in Abnegation gray, work side by side with other survivors to sift through the rubble of their city and retrieve what is useful.
It has been thirty-two days since an earthquake damaged their city, killing a disproportionate amount of the Abnegation and Erudite. The lost include many leaders of the factions, including Jack Kang, Andrew and Natalie Prior, and Jeanine Matthews. No one can recall the exact details, but the leaders must have been meeting together when the disaster struck.
It has been thirty days since a sickness, no doubt brought on by damage to the water supply, swept through their city causing high fevers, hallucinations, and fuzzy memories. Amity were the least affected and, with the aid of Erudite serums, they were able to restore the majority of the city's residents to health fairly quickly.
The loss of so many lives is unfortunate, but their society remains strong. The beauty of the factions, after all, is in the way they balance each other and allow people to offer their own special skills to the society as a whole. Their history shows that, at one time, there were large sections of society cast out of the faction system. No one in this modern age can imagine such cruel exclusion and they are thankful to have moved beyond such ignorance. In their factions, they will find order, comfort, and the will to recover.
Beatrice cannot remember exactly how she was injured, but the puncture wounds to her side and back are now healed enough that she can move with care, if not yet with ease. Her brother, Caleb, has stopped by regularly to bring her 'newer and better' serums from his Erudite lab. At night, when she prepares her dinner and sets the table of her childhood home for only herself, she misses him. But she reminds herself not to be selfish and that she is glad he has found his place in another faction where he can be happy and productive. It is a good life for him.
Sometimes, as she sleeps, she has strange dreams of jumping from trains like the Dauntless she used to watch. Of throwing knives and punches. Sometimes even of guns and being shot. Sometimes she wakes with the itching feeling that there is something just on the fringe of her memory that she must remember. But that urge is accompanied by a fear so crippling that she is never brave enough to dwell on it. Thanks to the medicine Caleb leaves for her pain, she falls back asleep quickly and forgets.
Those dreams, though, are better than the dreams of her parents. Even the good dreams of ordinary things like her mother cutting her hair or her father smiling at her during dinner hurt her heart. She wakes in tears and tries to be glad that they are at peace. Every evening, she lets herself miss them for a little while before her eyes fall on her gray clothing and she reminds herself not to be selfish.
She has hope, though, that she will not be alone for long. At seventeen, she is of the right age to begin to think of courtship and marriage. Without her parents to arrange a match and with her brother now belonging to Erudite, the rules of her faction give her full right to choose a husband for herself. When she thinks of who she would like to sit by on evenings like this, reading a book or mending clothing, there is only one face that comes to mind.
Beatrice has always known Tobias Eaton. She can remember his mother's funeral, can recall seeing him in the halls at school. Almost as clearly as if it were a real memory and not a result of over-active imagination, she can feel the touch of his hands on the skin of her back, the brush of his lips against hers, the way it would be if she was gathered in his embrace. Just the thought of it makes her cheeks heat. She almost feels selfish for wanting him to notice her, but...perhaps that is what it means to fall in love? Surely if she can offer him her love, then wanting his love in return is beautiful, not selfish.
And when he looks at her, his smile shy, his cheeks and the tips of his ears also turning pink, she thinks that perhaps he might think the same things about her.
Perhaps he should miss his family more, but Tobias finds his standard Abnegation home to be an oddly welcoming and cozy place these days. He should be used to the quiet. He has never had siblings to add noise and clutter to his family's space. His mother died when he was young, so perhaps he only feels the absence of the evening's routine of dinner and dishwashing with his father. Marcus Eaton did not survive the infection that followed his injuries during the earthquake. Tobias doesn't mourn him, as he believes that mourning is selfish. Instead, he will take up his father's place in Abnegation leadership. He gets along well with several of the leaders from other factions - most especially Christina and Zeke from Dauntless. It is odd that people so young as themselves should be in leadership, but in the wake of the recent disasters, many of the young have been appointed to lead.
As comfortable as he finds the quiet, he hopes that soon enough he will not be alone. He would like to take care of Beatrice, if she will let him. They barely know each other, but sometimes, when they are working side by side, he imagines that he already knows the way her hair would feel against his fingertips or the way she would fit just under his chin if he embraced her. He doesn't like to think of her alone in her home, surrounded by quiet, but the rules of their faction don't permit them to "date" as some other factions do. They will spend time together in groups or in public spaces until their marriage.
He smiles as he realizes that he thinks of it as certain and soon.
He only hopes that she will not mind his scars. He can't recall exactly how he was injured, but his back is now webbed with scar tissue. Oddly enough, a few of the scars resemble the symbols of the factions. Perhaps it is fitting that he bears these marks on his skin, as he knows that their society remains strong because of their five factions. He smiles as he thinks that it's almost as if he had joined the Dauntless and gotten tattoos. Preposterous, but amusing.
In the control room of the Bureau for Genetic Welfare, the screens of the monitors observing the Chicago experiment are mostly dimmed for the night. With the factions all once again observing energy restrictions, their lights are out and the streets are quiet. There is little to see. The only things to keep an eye on are the few homes with the potential for trouble, most of which are found in the Abnegation and Dauntless sectors.
The memory reset of the city went well, despite the intervention of the few who tried to thwart it. The people inside the city knew little enough about the world around them that none of them have noticed that the damage to the city is inconsistent with an earthquake. The former factionless have been reset along with the rest of the city, and either relocated to the fringe areas or absorbed into the city's five factions. The data had been altered to hide this glitch in the society's functioning so the government will green light its continuation. The disloyal staff within the Bureau have also been treated and quietly relocated, their attempt to reset the memories of the entire Bureau itself having come to nothing.
He'd had high hopes for Natalie's daughter upon her arrival. After all, a GP like her was a rare specimen. But with that rebellious streak in her, she was more trouble than her genes were worth. Certainly much more trouble than her mother had been. It was interesting, from a scientific point of view, that she was resistant to so many of their serums. But it was terrifying, from an organizational point of view, to have someone so determined and defiant.
He could have left her to bleed out on the floor. After all, she was the only person he'd ever seen resist the death serum and he did not want anyone else to know that there was a chance it could be defeated. No, it was better to let it be known that the serum had not activated and, as a result, he'd had to shoot her to stop her from destroying the lab. She was only little more than child, after all, and hadn't been thinking clearly.
It had been much needed exercise for his chemistry skills to tinker with a combination of fear and memory serums to alter what and how she would remember. Using the same technology used in the fear landscapes, he observed as he let her brain cycle through her memories of changing factions, of running away to the Bureau, of her near-death experience, and then dosed her with small amounts of raw fear serum on the second time through. If he was correct, even her divergent brain would not work too hard at accessing those memories, now so cloaked in fear. The brain naturally wants to protect itself. Logic suggested that safety would be more appealing to her brain than the truth, in this instance.
He'd been tempted to reduce her intelligence or do permanent physical damage to the portion of her brain that held memories, but every time he thought of harming her he would remember Natalie. If the circumstances had been different, perhaps Tris would have been his own daughter. So he did his best to hide the truth but leave her with the potential for a good life.
Or a good enough life. It was for her own good, as much as for the good of society.
He thought that maybe he should be concerned by how quickly Tris and Tobias had gravitated toward each other. For now, though, they were acting within the norms of Abnegation courtship. Hopefully there was nothing to worry about. If there was, the near constant surveillance they were under should provide enough warning to do something about it before it became a problem.
Feeling very confident that he was, once again, king of his little genetic kingdom, he wheeled himself out of the control room and off to bed.
Author's note: I did try to write a pure happy ending, but the reality of Roth's society was far too dark to allow it. Personally, I find beauty in the ending of Allegiant. But I know that, for many readers, the idea of the heroine and hero not making it through the suffering to live a long and happy life together is unbearable. Thank you for reading.