It was Test Day and the Hub was filled with hundreds of 18-year-olds, waiting for their turn to take the test. The test would show them where they belonged and for most of them the results would not come as a surprise. For those people, Test Day contained nothing more than getting the confirmation of what they already knew and had made peace with ages ago.
It wasn't so simple for Katherina. She felt like the only person in the room that actually had no clue of where she belonged. She could make peace with all AND none of them. They all suited her equally as much as they did not and it confused her to no end.
Erudite, for example, - the faction of the smart - would suit her well because she loved knowledge. Ever since she could remember she would pass most of her free-time reading. Not that she'd had much free-time but alas, that was beside the point. The factionmembers of Erudite were all highly intelligent and spent their days researching, inventing or reinventing things in one way or another. Katharina loved gaining new knowledge and applying it to better certain aspects in her life and as she had always been a top-student she figured she would probably be intelligent enough to survive the Erudite-initiation. On top of that, Erudites loved out-smarting each other and she had always loved a good competition as well as intelligent debates. Choosing Erudite would be a rather good option and she would enjoy her job, whatever it may be.
The only downside Katherina saw in Erudite were the people. They valued knowledge above anything else and were willing to cross some ethical bounds for that. They were cold and calculated people in every aspect of their lives. Most marriages were solely based on genes and IQ to make genetically superior children who'd hopefully out-do their parents one day. To Katherina it looked more like a breeding program than anything else and she didn't think she could live without love, no matter how Amity that made her sound. Of course, there was the option that Katharina would be one of the rare lucky ones to marry for love but was it a risk she was willing to take? Of course, choosing other factions didn't guarantee a happy love life either. No matter where she went, she could always end up alone.
Then there was Candor, the faction of the honest. Honesty had something very noble about it and it was nice to be able to trust people on their words. Katharina hated blatant liars, she preferred the painful truth over a sweet lie any time. In her early years alone, too many people had raised her hopes and dreams with lies only to crush her down with the truth later on. She'd developed a firm resolution to never hurt people that way at the juvenile age of only seven. She hadn't spoken a lie ever since, yet she had become a master of deception. In Katharina's experience, lying was a form of deceit, where deception was not.
"Lying" involved one person verbally telling another person something that is false in an attempt to make the second person believe this falsehood as a truth. It is done with the specific intention of causing harm to another person - even if this harm only exists of misknowledge, making it a form of deceit.
"Deception" is more closely associated with the accomplishment of purposeful misguidance or misdirection. Often done in a physical way through mimicry and camouflage, it serves Katharina in a way to protect herself, but carries no negative nonnotation of willful malfeasance. People simply make their own false conclusions but are not urged to believe these falsehoods by the conformation of it through lies.
This was where Candor and Katharina clashed. Candor saw deception as lying, where Katharina saw it merely as a form of hiding the truth. Candor demanded every member to bare their souls out on the table, but Katharina wasn't willing to do that. She liked the no-lying concept of Candor, but she also really liked privacy. Although you would never catch her in a lie, she had her ways to divert attention from an asked question, simply to not having to answer. If people would persist on her answer, she would simply not reply, but in Candor you couldn't do that. Katharina would never be a crystal-clear person you could read like an open book and she was pretty sure she didn't want to be either. This meant, Candor was out.
Which faction was also very much out of the question was Abnegation, the faction of the selfless. Katharina just knew she didn't belong there, that much she was certain of. It was not that she wasn't a selfless person, because she was... most of the time. She did after all sacrifice her own childhood for the sake of her siblings and she also always did the right thing of helping others out where needed and standing up for elderly, kids or pregnant woman on the bus. But she was only selfless when someone needed it. It was a way of kindness, but to people just as much capable of herself to do something, she wasn't ready to obliterate herself. Becoming an Abnegation would mean living minimalistic and she would have to offer up her books, running trips and - not to mention - sex. Abnegation were very shy on the touch department, which, frankly, she was not. So, yeah, choosing Abnegation was a no-go.
Then there was the option of joining Dauntless, the faction of the brave and to Katharina the faction of her day-dreams. As a little girl she had often watched Dauntless-members jump in and out the trains as if it was their second nature. She had even tried it herself a few times when she hadn't had siblings to look after really had no obvious cons to it and choosing Dauntless would definitely give her that piece of adventure and physical activity she so craved and longed for. But she was smarter than to think of it merely as an one-way ticket to a life of adventure and excitement. That mindset would never get her anywhere. She had to make sure it was more than just a passing fancy to escape the boring domestic life she had had so far. No matter how much she liked to be in a physical challenge, she needed some mental challenge as well and se didn't know Dauntless good enough to know if they were able to provide that challenge for her.
Would she even be allowed to read or would that be too Erudite for them? Honestly, she didn't know. She had read quite a few books on fighting techniques, so in a way reading could be seen as helpful for the physical and tactical strenght a Dauntless needed to possess. That said, that kind of valuable knowledge logically should be accepted, right? Or would it be seen as a act of faction-traitory? The truth was, it was all speculation in her own mind and she simply did not know. There was only one way to find out how Dauntless looked upon the subject and that was trying it out. It really was a risk of 'try and might die', but she would definitely not belong in Dauntless if that risk would stop her for choosing Dauntless.
Last but not least, was Amity, the faction of kindness. Frankly, in Katharina's experience, the faction focussed more on peacefulness than kindness but those were minor details. It was also the faction she grew up in. Leaving this faction would mean leaving her five younger siblings behind, who she loved so very dearly. Katharina had been eight years old when her first brother was born and when he had been 5 weeks old, her mother had left the house. This was nothing new to Katharina as her mother had never been home much, but this time she had left the eight-year-old Katharina to raise a baby by herself. At first her mother still came around every other day to drop some bottles of milk in the fridge. However, every other day turned into days into weeks into months. At last, her mother only came home when she was heavily pregnant with yet another baby, only to leave her kids right after recovering from giving birth and so the cicle restarted.
Needless to say, Katharina was like a mother to her siblings and they were like kids to her. She had raised them all to her best ability and now, ten years later, she could tell herself proudly that she had given them a good foundation to become the great people they were destined to be. Yet, it didn't make the prospect of leaving them any easier.
For a long time, Katharina had just assumed she would stay in Amity forever, to be there for her siblings. But as she grew older, so did they and she had started to notice certain traits of other factions in some of them. Thomas, the oldest, had quite a knack for getting himself into dangerous situations and had the fiery spirit to match a real Dauntless. Oliver, the second, was extremely intelligent and the quite boy always had his nose in one of his mother's books. Then there was Aaron, a sweet and kind natured boy, always looking for a way to help her, he'd do well in either Amity or Abnegation. The youngest two, Dylan and Marilee, where somewhat too young to match up to a faction yet, but she was sure they were going to thrive wherever their hearts lay. The point was, even if Katharina decided to stay in Amity for her siblings, there was no way that she would want her siblings to do the same for her and the prospect of being alone in Amity made her really, really sad.
It was not that she felt like she didn't belong there, she did actually. She just felt like she didn't belong there enough - as was the case with all the other factions. Although Katharina loved the harmony and kind people and had always acted accordingly to the rules Amity implemented, she couldn't help herself from getting restless from all that harmony. She missed a passion and sense of excitement that made her glad to be alive. She was always rather bored after spending some time with fellow-Amity, even if she'd had a good time and she also couldn't help experiencing some negative and angry feelings from time to time. All her emotions had always been very severe and because that was something frowned upon in Amity, she held it all bottled up, hidden behind a smokescreen of meek kindness and smiles. It was all a façade though and she needed to lash out from time to time to release all of that negative energy.
As a child she'd beenallowed to run through the fields from time to time, climb a three or two while she was at it, but as she grew older, those liberties of 'disrupting the peace' were not given kindly anymore. Instead, last few years, she went off with a boy from time to time, to release that energy through some other physical exercise, more common in Amity. Yet again, most of those guys had done little to ease her boredom.
So practically, her siblings were the very only reason of even concidering Amity. The question now was; was she Abnegation enough to chose Amity? Katharina bitterly laughed at the irony.
She was shaken out of her review as the girl next to her tapped her finger on her shoulder. Another reason why Katharina couldn't be Amity. She would've simply nudged the girl with her elbow.
"You're Katharina Hyde, right?" The Amity girl asked sweetly. "They just called your name."
"Oh, thank you. I was too lost in my mind to notice." Katharina admitted blushing as she made her way to the front.
'Well, this is it; The moment of truth.' Katharina thought nervously as she stepped inside a white room without windows and a large dentist-like chair in the middle of it. There were wires from an attached computer dangling over the armrests as well. It looked quite the bit intimidating yet fascinating all the same.
"Name." A Candor man said bored from behind the computer, he didn't look up from the screen.
"Katharina Hyde." she answered politely.
The man's head snapped up at the mention of her name and Katharina was sure she saw a guarded curiosity in his eyes as he looked her up and down.
"Take a seat, Katharina."
The man typed something on his computer before walking over to her. Attaching the wires to her head she asked him a few questions about the wires and duration of the test, which he answered politely and, of course, truthfully as a smile crossed his lips. He handed her a bottle containing a bright blue liquid. It didn't have an odor.
"Drink up and the test will begin."
"What does it do?" Katharina asked suspiciously.
Not that she was suspicious of the liquid, she was merely curious about that. It was the man she was suspicous of. He looked at her as if he were an all-knowing God. It wasn't an uncommon look for a Candor. In fact, it was how most Candor people looked at not-Candor people. She was just frustrated that she was at the end of that look, was she really so easy to read?
"It brings you into a simulation." He answered shortly. "You're a curious one, I see, just like your mother." He pointed out with a ghost of a smile on his face.
Katharina narrowed her eyes at him. She didn't like it when people brought up her mother, especially not men she had probably fucked around with. This could very well be the father of one of her siblings.
"Amity-transfer I see," she shot back. "Or are you just one of her temporarily lays?"
"You really have no idea who I am?" The man looked genuinely shocked for a second.
She shook her head before understanding dawned onto her. Her eyes wide as saucers as she locked gaze with him. Her eyes demanding an answer to the unspoken question she didn't dare to ask aloud. She didn't even know if she wanted an answer at all.
"I am." The man said truthfully. "I am your father, Katharina."
Nope. She most definitely had not wanted an answer, she knew that now.
Without another word she swallowed the liquid and everything went black.
