My mother's embrace is warm, comforting. As I feel myself sliding deeper into the darkness, I hear noise, chaos. It sounds oddly like people screaming. But peace shouldn't sound like this, I think. I shudder, burrowing deeper into my mother's warmth.
Suddenly, there is a jolt. Then another. Then another still. Suddenly I am ripped away from my mother's arms, away from the warmth and comfort.
"Tris!" My mother calls out.
I try to cry out for her, but the words can't—they won't—escape my mouth. It is dark; everything is black, the darkness stretching to infinity beyond me.
Is this what death is? I wonder. Emptiness, nothingness? Where are my parents, where is Will? Tori? Lynn and Marlene?
In the distance I hear voices again, this time more muted, quiet. I can't make out a single word being said. I should go toward them, but somehow I can't move. So I remain, floating in the darkness.
"Tris"
I start, awakening from my daze. My name, called out to me.
"Tris"
I hear is again, and this time I recognize the voice. It is a voice I would recognize in a thousand lifetimes, a voice who says my name with love and longing. My instructor, my friend, my lover…my Tobias.
"Tris, please come back to me," he pleads.
I smile sadly. People can't come back from the dead, I think, no matter how hard they might yearn.
…And I continue to drift in the nothingness.
"Tris"
"Please, come back to me"
Tobias' voice comes to me again, muffled but still clear.
"Tris"
"Come back to me now"
His voice is more demanding now, louder.
I yearn toward the sound of his voice wanting to hear more of it, storing it in my memories for the time when I won't be able to hear it anymore.
"Tris, follow my voice…follow it back to me"
"I know you can hear me, Tris. Just let my voice guide you back to me"
Oh, I can't bear to hear the pain in every word. I wish I could just touch him one last time, tell him that everything will be okay, that I love him and I didn't want to leave him. I wish with all my being that I could say these things to him.
"Please, please don't leave me," he sobs.
His voice sounds closer now, so much clearer.
"I love you, Tris"
"I need you"
I need you too, I think, so much more than you will ever know.
My eyelids flutter, and suddenly they are open. Bright fluorescent lights glare down at me from above, the beams painful to my eyes. I'm lying in a hospital bed, a few pillows tucked under my head. There is plaster covering my right arm from shoulder to elbow. My body feels stiff and sore, like I've just gone through battle. But then again, I have, haven't I?
But all that fades into nonexistence when I see him, sitting in a chair beside by bed. Asleep with his head near my hip, my left hand cradled between the two of his.
"Tobias," I croak, my voice hoarse from disuse.
He opens his eyes slowly, smiling at me as if he has just woken from a beautiful dream. Then he realizes that it is not a dream, that I'm awake, that I'm not as dead as I apparently thought I was.
"Tris!" He shouts my name with such joy and jubilation. And then he grabs my face in his hands and kisses me.
His kiss is filled with love and longing, bleak despair, heartbreak and, lastly, hope. It is filled with everything that I myself feel, but cannot express in words.
They brought me back. Cara and Caleb. They found me, and they brought me back. My heart had just beaten its last. Still, they managed to bring me back. She found a defibrillator in a first aid kit against the wall. They hooked it up to my chest and jumpstarted my heart. He said I had been gone for 3 minutes. Any longer, he told me, and brain damage would have been unavoidable from the lack of oxygen to my brain.
I was in a coma for 5 weeks. Tobias had sat at my bedside for those 5 weeks. He never left my side, not to eat, not to rest. Christina told me that he had talked to me endlessly. Deep in my coma, in that unrelenting, never-ending darkness, I heard his voice and I had followed it back to him.
Once I am recovered, I ask Tobias to bring me back to that place that holds so much darkness over me. At first, he is hesitant about it. We argue, but eventually I win, and he comes with me.
"Be brave, Tris," he whispers while sliding the syringe into my neck, mirroring the words once he spoke to me the first time he put me under the simulation.
…
I nod to Tobias as I come out of the simulation, confirming his thoughts. Six. Instead of seven, I now have six fears. I have gone through Hell and back, faced my fears, and I have conquered one. Tobias smiles, his eyes crinkling at the edges. He reaches to hold my hand and no words need to be said, for between us, touch is enough. Four and Six.