On the other side, I see Cara. The side of her face is badly bruised, and there's a bandage on her head, but that's not what I'm concerned about. What concerns me is the troubled look on her face.
"What is it?" I say.
Cara shakes her head.
"Where's Tris?" I say.
"I'm sorry, Tobias," Cara says.
"Sorry about what?" Christina says roughly. "Tell us what happened!"
"Tris went into the Weapons Lab instead of Caleb," Cara says. "She survived the death serum, and set off the memory serum, but she… she was shot. And she didn't survive. I'm so sorry."
On the other side, I see Cara. The side of her face is badly bruised, and there's a bandage on her head, but that's not what I'm concerned about. What concerns me is the troubled look on her face.
"What is it?" I say.
Cara shakes her head.
"Where's Tris?" I say.
"I'm sorry, Tobias," Cara says.
"Sorry about what?" Christina says roughly. "Tell us what happened!"
"Tris went into the Weapons Lab instead of Caleb," Cara says. "She survived the death serum, and set off the memory serum, but she… she was shot. She managed to survive that, too, but she lost a lot of blood. Too much blood. She's in the hospital now, dying. She hasn't got much time left."
My knees hit the ground hard as I slide down the wall I had been leaning on. I cover my face with my hand so no one can see the tears. This isn't real. Cara is only joking. Tris isn't dying. Tris is not dying. This is just my fear landscape. This is my fear landscape. If I calm down, it will go on to the tall building, or the box, or Marcus. It's not real. It can't be real. It can't be.
"Take me to her…. Take me to Tris, please," I say, but Cara doesn't hear me through my hands and my sobs.
I'm only dimly aware of the strangled cries coming from Christina as she covers her face with her hands, trying but failing to stifle the tears, trying to stifle the sobs, trying to stifle the agonizing pain.
"The doctors said that if she got a blood transfer, she would make it, but apparently she has a very rare blood type, and they haven't found a match yet. They've tried most of the people in the compound. You guys are only hope left, if you match and you're willing to donate some," Cara says.
A spark of hope leaps in my heart, but it is quickly put out. If no one in this compound matches her blood type, what are the chances that one of us is going to match?
"Of course we're willing," Christina whispers through her hands.
So Cara leads us to the hospital.
"Only one visitor at a time. Not that she'll be able to tell," says a doctor with a clipboard in his hands. Tris's doctor.
I glance over his shoulder, through the glass window of her hospital bed. She looks so small and pale with the blankets pulled up to just below her shoulder, her arms resting at her sides, hooked up to a dozen machines. My stomach ties into knots when I look at the heart rate monitor. Too slow, it's going to slow, there's not enough blood left to pump through her body.
I turn back to find Christina looking at me. "You first, Four," she says.
"No, you go first. You're her best friend. You knew her before I did. She would rather if you went in first," I say. We both know she would not rather that.
"I agree to disagree with that statement, and she'd beg to differ," Christina says sharply, but she goes in anyway. The door snaps shut behind her, and I am left alone in the hallway.
I slump into a chair by the door and run my hands through my hair in frustration. I should have stayed with her; I was stupid to believe she would actually let Caleb go into the Weapons Lab.
I think about the first time I ever saw her. When her body first hit the net, all I registered was a gray blur. I pulled her across it and her hand was small, but warm, and then she stood before me, short and thin and plain and in all ways unremarkable- except that she had jumped first. The Stiff had jumped first.
Even I didn't jump first.
Her eyes were so stern, so insistent.
Beautiful.
But that wasn't the first time I ever saw her. I saw her in the hallways at school, at my mother's false funeral, and walking the sidewalks in the Abnegation sector. I saw her, but I didn't see her; no one saw her the way she truly was until she jumped.
And I find myself wondering: If I had known her like I do now, would I have even left Abnegation? Would I have gone to Dauntless at all? I went to Dauntless to escape Marcus, but I would rather live with Marcus and his abuse for the rest of my life than watch her die. I would rather die than watch her die.
A tap on my shoulder drags me back to the present. A doctor with an empty syringe stands over me.
"We've already collected blood from all the others in your group, trying to find a blood match. Are you willing?"
Instead of answering, I stick out my arm, turned up, and expose a vein, swiping the syringe out of his hand. Before he can say anything, I insert the needle into the vein and pull the plunger up until it's filled with blood. Then I pull it out and hand it back to him.
"It'll take about an hour to find out if your blood type matches hers," the doctor says, turning to leave.
"The others. Did any of them match?" I say.
"No. You are her last hope." He walks down the hallway, finally disappearing through a doorway.
My hope crumbles. I close my eyes as the doors open. They snap open to see Christina looking down at me, wiping the tears from her eyes.
"Your… your turn, Four," she says. "My blood… it didn't match." She bursts into tears. I have never seen Christina cry like this, not even when she had to hang over the side of the chasm for five minutes as punishment for giving up a fight.
I pat her shoulder before walking in, pulling the door shut behind me. I take a seat in the chair beside the bed. Tris looks so peaceful, so serene. I reach out and brush my thumb over her lips, expecting them to be warm, but they are cold, cold as ice.
I rest my lips on her forearm. My eyes find her bird tattoos. Three birds, one for each member of the family she left behind. She told me that since Caleb betrayed her, she had no family. I had assured her that I would be her family. One bird for each family member she doesn't have any more.
I reach down to entwine our fingers, but her thumb, I can't find her thumb. I glance down. Her thumb is curled up under her hand, leaving four fingers resting on the covers. Four fingers. Four. I feel a tear roll down my cheek. I unfurl her thumb gently and entwine my fingers in hers. Like her lips, they are cold.
"Please, Tris, you can do this… please," I whisper. I raise my eyes to the ceiling, begging anyone who will listen. "Please, don't let her die like this. Tris… she doesn't deserve this. She deserves to live. With me. Please."
I sit there for who knows how long, staring at our entwined hands, until I hear Christina burst into sobs so loud I can hear them under the door. The door opens and the doctor comes in, but Cristina shoves him out of the way and runs over to me.
"The blood… your blood, Four… it matched… she's going to be okay," she says, grabbing my free hand and jumping up and down, tears of joy streaming down her face. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding as I smile so wide my mouth hurts. I jump up as Christina starts laughing through her tears, and I hug her.
Then the doctor speaks. "You'll have to come with us immediately, so we can get your blood to give with her. You too, miss." I follow him out. Tris will live. It is going to be all right.
A week later, I am finally allowed to see her again. The moment the doctor comes to the dormitory to tell me, I am knocking him away from the door with a swipe of my arm and sprinting down the hall at top speed towards the hospital. Her door is already open, and I nearly collide with the doorframe in my haste to see her again, but I stop cold when I see who's already there. Caleb. The boy who was supposed to give his life to get the memory serum, but let her do it instead. It's his fault she's like this. And yet there he is, chatting with her like he didn't let her run into that lab, like he didn't betray her to Jeanine Matthews.
She see me in the doorframe, because she inhales sharply and sits up straight suddenly, crushing Caleb's hand in her small yet strong one. I pull Caleb away from her, across the room to the doorway, by the collar of his shirt, ignoring his grunts of protest, and walk back towards her quickly. I hold on to her face with my hands, pressing her lips to mine. She tastes familiar, like home, like Tris. In my chest, I can almost feel my heart mend itself, all those days of worrying about whether she would make it suddenly dissolving into distant memories.
She pulls back, breathing heavy, and wraps her arms around my neck, burying her face in my shoulder, pulling me closer.
"I thought you were gone," I whisper in her ear.
"I know. Everybody did. I'm so sorry," she whispers into my shoulder. I can feel her warm breath through my shirt.
"Don't be sorry, Tris. You did it. The city is safe. We're safe. You're safe. We're going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay."
I can feel her smile through my shirt. I can also feel the warm, wet stain that her tears are making.
"I saw my mom when I got shot, Tobias."
"What?"Her statement catches me by surprise.
"I told the doctors about it, and they told me I had been hallucinating from blood loss, but I know it wasn't a hallucination. She was there, and she told me that I had done well, and that it was time to go with her, and I... I told her no. I told her I had to stay here, with you. "
A year later, everything is okay. Except my stomach, while feels like it is about to fall off a building. Ironically, I am actually about to fall off a building.
"Are you sure about this, Tris?" I say, biting my lip worriedly as I look at the edge of the building.
"Of course I am, Tobias. Soon to become Two," she says.
"Two?" Christina asks, sounding confused.
Seeing the expression on her face, Tris laughs. "Yeah, two fears." She holds up four fingers. "He's not scared of Marcus anymore." She puts a finger down. "And he's about to conquer his fear of heights. Hence, the nickname Two."
"I'm pretty sure I'm just going to scream the whole way down, throw up my lunch, and leave more scared of heights that I was before."
Christina snickers at my remark as Zeke straps Shauna into a cord on the zipline. Shauna has new leg braces, and she is slowly learning to walk again. When Zeke lets her go, I hear her shrieks of joy as she flies through the air, which only makes the butterflies in my stomach multiply. Christina straps herself in upside down, which makes me sick, then Zeke goes next, and then finally Amar, leaving only Tris and I on the roof.
"Hey, Tris, how about one more kiss before I die?" I joke. She smiles and puts a hand on my shoulder. "Yeah, one more kiss before you die will be in about seventy years. I hope," she says, but she stands on her tiptoes and kisses my cheek anyway.
Then she straps me in, pushes me away from the ledge, and I'm falling, falling, falling through the air. But I'm not. I'm flying, flying like the birds that make up the tattoo on Tris's shoulder. And I love it; I love that I can fly, even though my stomach is telling me otherwise. I laugh out loud. Why was I scared of heights again? I can't remember anymore. All I know is that I'm no longer scared of them.
All too soon, I'm on the ground, being unstrapped by Zeke, helping the others catch Tris. I help her unstrap herself.
"Still scared of heights, Three?" she teases breathlessly.
"Nope." She smiles.
"Gonna do it again then, Two?"
"Of course."
"I think this one will do, Maureen," Tris says from beside me. The lady nods at her pleasantly, still looking at me strangely. She only moved to Chicago after the factions broke up, so she doesn't know that it went against Abnegation tradition for the groom not to see the dress of the bride before their wedding. Even though it's considered bad luck to the world outside the factions, in Abnegation it was selfish to us to want that good luck.
Tris glances over at me, and she smiles, reaching out her hand. I take it with mine and entwine with my own fingers. The lady comes back with the dress of Tris's choice in a black bag, and she hands it to Tris. Together, we walk out of the shop and towards our apartment, which is only a block away from the small bridal boutique.
I'm nervous about telling her what I did yesterday, but I have to. I don't want to go back to the time where we constantly lied to each other.
After I unlock the door, she goes to hang her dress in the spare bedroom. I fix sandwiches for both of us. We start the meal in silence, with me looking down at my plate, trying to work up the courage to tell her.
"Something's troubling you, Tobias. What's wrong?" I look up to find her gray-blue eyes on me, so stern, so insistent, the same eyes that stared back at me when I pulled her from the rope net after she was the first to jump into the pit, during Dauntless Initiation. Beautiful.
"I… I went to the old Dauntless Compound yesterday while you went with Christine, Cara, and Shauna to pick out their bridesmaid dresses. And I went through my fear landscape." Her eyes brows arch slightly.
"Why would you do that, Tobias?"
"I just wanted to see if my fears have changed since the last time I did it."
"And did they?"
"Yes. I still got confined in that box, and I still had to kill someone, but I wasn't on the edge of the building, and Marcus wasn't in there."
"So you only have two fears now?"
"Um… not exactly. You were in there. You… someone was torturing you, and I couldn't do anything about it."
"That's ridiculous, Tobias."
"Is it really?"
"Yes. If anyone was torturing me, I would kick their… never mind. But anyway, I would kill them all. If you didn't get there first. Which you would. So don't worry about it." I smile. Of course, I would never let anyone so much as lay a finger on her.
"What we really need to worry about is if I look good in that dress. The neckline of the dress covers the birds." She touches her collarbone. "It doesn't cover the Dauntless flames and the Abnegation hands. What we really need to worry about is if I look good in that dress."
"Are you crazy? Of course you don't!" Her face falls. I grin.
"You look more than good. You look… beautiful."
"You really think so, Tobias?" I lean across the table and kiss her forehead.
"Of course I do. You look beautiful every day. Actually, you look more than beautiful. You look like Tris Eaton."