This is my first Divergent-ff and I know that it doesn't do the books justice, but I had to write something. So... please review, and thanks for reading!
They come for her at the dawning of the third day. I straighten up as they approach, every muscle going hard, my feet scrambling for hold, as if there was anything left to protect.
It works, though. I see it in their eyes – they fear me. I am still Dauntless, brave and daring and intimidating enough for the world to fall quiet around me.
All but one.
One voice that, even in fear, would never stop talking her mind. Was she part Candor, too, I wonder, but then I remember that factions don't matter anymore. That nothing matters anymore.
She has stopped talking.
She has stopped, and since that moment the silence around me is so loud that I think it will smash my head.
I don't care. If it is the silence around me or the emptiness inside of me that will kill me, or if someone somehow was immune against the serum and still remembers that I am supposed to be too damaged to live - I don't care. I am damaged, and I don't think I can go on.
But it has nothing to do with my genes.
"She stinks. We have to burn her quickly."
It is good that Caleb hasn't come with them.
"She deserves better than to be remembered as a rotten corpse", he added hastily, but that made me hit him even harder. I remember hurling him to the ground and kick his face to a bloody mess before Christina and Amar pulled me off him, but the pictures are blurring because they don't matter either.
Broken nose, three teeth missing. Caleb's damaged, too. And it doesn't make a difference at all.
She deserves better than to be remembered as a rotten corpse.
He is right. She deserves better. She deserves to live, to be free, to come home to the world she has saved, our world, our life…
Tris.
Her name breaks through the numbness I feel, her name and her face right in front of me, pale and small and strong as steel. Eyes that look right into me, or not at me at all. I remember them clouded with anger and jealousy, and I want to keep this picture, too – I want to keep everything. Every part of her.
Tris. My Tris. Birds soaring high, so high I can never reach them. She would want me to make peace with her brother, I know. And maybe one day I can, for her.
But not today.
They are here, five people, dressed in the old green and blue. Five men for a girl as light as a feather. As strong as a mountain. As unyielding as… I can't say. I have no words for her, and even if I had, it would mean nothing to these men. They have forgotten her.
All our fights, all our sacrifices… if nobody thinks of it, how can we be sure it has not been for nothing?
"Four." The first man says a word that once belonged to me. Once, before I let another person reach my heart again. Or was it my decision? She was there, blazing with life, the Stiff who jumped first, who had chosen Dauntless not out of fear but to be free. I needed some time to get close to her, but not because I didn't trust her. I did, from the first time I saw her - saw her as she really was. I did not expect her to give me back who I really was, but I think she has. She did. She made me the person my parents should have made out of me, she made me believe, in the very end, that I was alright. I was not only Four anymore, a bunch of fears. For her, I was Tobias. She made me a part of her past again, and her present, and she became mine. I should have known, I guess, that we wouldn't get the future.
"Four. Tobias." I look up at the man in front of me, look into his face for the first time.
Amar.
"Do you want to take her?"
No. I don't want to. I can't go and see her still dead, I can't hold her now only to give her to the flames. No.
This was my last fear, and my worst, and it has come true, shutting me into a nightmare I will not wake up from.
"Alright." Amar puts his hand on my shoulder and walks into the room. My skin burns where he touched me, craving for a different touch, a different skin on mine, a different heartbeat in my ears than my own.
Tris.
Then the four remaining men part in front of me, and again I feel it, so desperately and strong that I can't breathe - the hope against hope that she is alive, that she comes out and smiles at me and takes my hand and that I can finally breathe again, and stop fighting for every second, that she is here with me to heal our world
- but it is only Amar, carrying her in his arms. My Tris.
The birds on her collarbone are unnaturally dark against her white skin, as if they've already taken flight. A different horizon. Another world, perhaps, but one where I can't follow her.
My Tris.
I can hardly move with pain but the next thing I know is that she is in my arms and Amar guides me through the corridors.
Tris. I hold her gentler now than when I threw her over my shoulder that night, when we were both, for the first time, ready to live. Together.
I didn't ask for forever, then, I didn't even ask for a year. I didn't need to because I knew we were eternal that night, her and me, and that there finally was nothing to come between us.
We stop in front of a small, stony courtyard. The sun has light, but no warmth for this part of the compound, but it is not the cold that makes me shiver.
It is the slim metal bed in the middle, and the gas torches around it, waiting to consume her hygienically and efficiently.
It is Christina and Cara, Hana and Zeke and George. It's Shauna in a wheelchair next to Zeke, gods know how she came here. Then a woman steps forward, a long scar parting her face. Johanna. She holds my glance as I stare at her, suddenly shaking so violently that Tris almost falls onto the ground.
I can't let go of her, don't they see, now even less than before. How, with all of us here, can she still be dead?
How can she leave us here like that, now that we've won?
Won because of her. I am still shaking, and Zeke moves forward to help Amar pull her out of my arms and place her safely onto the bed.
No. Did I say it, or was it just in my head, screaming, from the first moment Cara told me?
No. No, you can't. You can't.
Do you really think showing me my friends will make me miss you less? Do you think any of them, or all of them, can be like you?
I kneel down beside her one more time. She does stink, Caleb was right, but I don't care.
Tris. My Tris.
"Whenever you are ready" one of the bureau members says softly. His voice is loud against the stone and the silence.
Christina straightens up, her eyes blazing as she nods at me. I know what she wants. I know she wants me to be brave and proud and strong now. She wants me to be Dauntless one more time.
But I can't, and this time it is not because of myself, even though every cell in my body is just being torn apart.
"Caleb" I whisper, hoarsely, but he hears me nevertheless and sneaks out of the corner he's been hiding at.
I stare at him. The selfish, arrogant, stupid, emotionless, genetically damaged boy who let Tris run into her death.
Her brother. The boy she grew up with, who was ready to die if she would forgive him, the boy who, with his decision to leave his old faction, made her strong enough to join Dauntless.
To come to me, and save me.
I don't say anything to him and he doesn't seem to expect me to. There are no words left in this world for us, not for today. Not for this.
Even the words I say to her sound poor, old and often repeated, but I say them nevertheless as the torches light up and force me away, a wall of fire around Tris, a flame, almost as bright as her own.
I say them because they are the only thing that remains from our life, the only truth I have inside me, the one ground I will have to build my life on from now. I say it and hear Christina's voice in it, and Tris parents, even though I can't remember even their faces.
I say it and I hear Tris in it, echoing me, saving me, making me strong. Forever. For her.
"I love you."