**All characters owned by Veronica Roth. Since the end of Allegiant was so traumatizing, I wrote down a little headcanon I have about life after the end of the trilogy. This little story takes place around 10 years after the end of the novel.**
I sigh as I re-lace my boots and get ready to jump off the train. This war is supposed to be over, there aren't supposed to be any more crises.
Someone touches my arm lightly. I look up to see Christina, grim-faced. She hates this as much as I do. There are tiny lines extending from the corners of her eyes. They are the marks of her years struggling through each day. I have the same wrinkles on my own face, but they were brought on by grief. Hers are the symbols of constant worry for her family and the stress of her high position in the reinforcement division of the city.
See, Christina and I stayed away from Chicago. At least, we tried. Outbreaks of violence always bring us back, though. The city is less of a genetic experiment and more of an observation of human nature at this point. People are allowed to leave if they wish, but so many chose to remain in the faction system. Is it the safest option? Who knows.
Occasionally though, we get wind of an uprising brewing. If determined to have a malicious intent that would restrict the freedom to choose the faction system, it's our job to take care of it. Christina and I developed a sector within the system outside the city to take care of threats like this. She and I rarely go ourselves, though. Together, we refined the initiation system the Dauntless used to train us to get young men and women in shape to work in reinforcement division. This particular situation has been going on for far too long, though, so Christina and I decided to go in ourselves in order to execute a carefully structured strategy. Not that we don't trust our division's soldiers, but we both felt that it would be better to eliminate the threat than to inflame the rebels with a failed attempt.
I've come to realize that I was meant to lead. Christina and I spent many hours growing closer after she caught me trying to erase my own memory to get rid of the pain. Some of our co-workers expected a relationship to rise from the amount of time we spent talking and grieving together. It never turned romantic, though. We just depend on each other for a bit of strength when one of us cannot bear the weight of her death nearly a decade ago. But Christina told me something important.
"You're not meant to follow others, Tobias. Okay? You have to make the decisions that are right for you. You lead yourself, and others will follow you. Tris always knew that about you."
Christina gave me a fierce look as she said that. She had grabbed my hand, and when she said Tris's name, I remember her squeezing it, hard.
I see Christina has the same fierce look in her eyes at this moment. I take a deep breath and stand, signaling to the others it's time to go. My body drags a bit to one side as the train slows down, which is the signal from the driver that it's almost the right place to jump off. I wait for the grass of a new park in the lower portion of the city to appear. Then I jump.
The moment of weightlessness never fails to lift my heart a bit. I land on my feet and absorb the shock and crouch a bit. Christina makes a rough landing and summersaults about two feet to my right. I grin as I hold out my hand to help her up. She grabs it and hauls herself to her feet.
"I haven't done that in a while, okay?" she growls.
I shrug. Doing a quick headcount in the darkness of the park, I motion to the group to come closer.
"Okay, we need three groups: one to attack from the north, one from the south, and one from the east. Walk three streets east and then split. The warehouse is four more blocks into the southeast sector of the city. Everyone understand?"
There's no sound short of everyone's breathing, but I see that they've nodded at me.
"Christina, stay with me. Megan, take your team, and James, you can lead the south squadron. Go!" I break away from the group.
I start off at a jog, and Christina stays right next to me. If she's wondering why I want her by my side, she hasn't asked. Christina was the first person to get close to me after Tris died, and I'm not taking any chances with her. Truthfully, I'm not ready to see her get hurt.
We slow to a stealth walk as we approach the designated warehouse. I see the vague forms of the other squadrons approaching from their directions. We know that the rebels stay in the upper floors, so it'll be tricky to surprise them. The north and south squadron are going straight in, but Christina and I are leading the east attack by scaling the walls and entering from the top of the building.
My fear of heights has lessened since my yearly trips to the zip line, but I still feel a shiver down my spine as I start climbing the building's side. Christina checks in with me, but I tell her I'm fine. As I throw my leg over the ledge of the roof, I breathe deeply in relief. I crouch and double check my gun and ammo.
"Everyone up?" I whisper.
I get nods and thumbs up as a response. I wave forward my squadron, confident that the entry will not be a problem. We're not sure how much weaponry they possess, but we've brought more than sufficient reinforcement. I kick down the door and quickly run down the stairs. I get onto a platform landing with only one door, labeled "R6". My heart gives a lurch at the number six, Tris's old nickname, the one I gave her. I swallow hard and motion for everyone else to get behind me.
I shoot at the lock and Christina kicks open the door. The room we enter has a few flickering fluorescent lights, but is otherwise empty. The tables have the appearance of ones that have been cleared in a panic, and papers with boot prints litter the floor. The rebels evacuated quickly.
Christina barks out a laugh. "Guess they forgot to use filing cabinets, huh?" She crouches down to pick up a paper with blueprints of a building on it.
"Give me that," I say. "Everyone, spread out. But don't go through any doors." I snatch the paper from Christina and turn it around until it makes sense.
"We just entered from here," she points to a door on the far left of the drawing. I nod, but I'm far more focused on an awkwardly shaped room that's diagonal from our position in the building.
"Christina," I say. "Tell me that doesn't look like a control room."
"Where? Oh." One of her fingers traces the strange room. "Yeah, it looks like that's where a bunch of screens would be set up, almost in a semi-circle, right?" She looks up to my face.
I grit my teeth. We can't send our soldiers in there. It's probably where the rebel leader is holed up, and our division trainees would only kill on sight. I need to negotiate with whomever is behind this.
"You and I have to do this, Christina. What do we do with the others?" I ask quietly.
She shakes her head a tiny bit, but then she says, "You're right, you're right. Okay, we send them in to investigate these rooms on the edges here, maybe get them to go downstairs to help out anything that might be going – " she's cut off by some gunfire from below us. All heads swivel to me.
"Okay," I shout. "Split up and get the rooms on the edges of the building, but do not hit the northwest corner! Go downstairs and help your comrades if you don't find anything!"
They scatter almost immediately. Christina's hands shake a bit as she folds up the blueprints. I check my gun again and lead the way to the suspected control room. A few doors and hallways later, we're there. The thought of the airborne death serum flits into my mind, but I quickly dismiss it. There have been no serums provided to Chicago since we took down the genetic engineering program.
Christina must have the same thought, though, because I see her tug down her shirt over her mouth and nose. She plays it off as if she was wiping some sweat from her upper lip, but I give her a quick nod to acknowledge her thought and reassure her. I shoot the knob of the door and enter a tiny room with another door and a keypad.
The walls feel as if they're closing in on me. I take deep breaths but before I can calm myself, Christina has already attached an explosive to the keypad and grabbed the front of my jacket and pulled me to the floor. I cover my ears as quickly as I can but I'm not fast enough. I feel a wetness in my right ear and touch it too see blood on my fingers. I see Tris doing the same thing, after I threw a knife too close to her head. A lump rises in my throat, but I shake my head to get rid of the memory.
I stand quickly though and hold my gun in front of me. I step through the smoke and try to gather my bearings. I see computer screens ahead, but I don't see anyone in the room. I hear a movement though, and turn quickly only to realize it was just Christina getting up from the rubble of the door.
"Easy," she says, and jokingly nudges me with her elbow. We both walk into the control center and spread out. The room isn't large, and we clear it in no time. I'm disappointed we didn't find the leader in here, but it's all right.
"What do you think they're doing, anyway? The rebels?" she murmurs. She brushes her hand across one of the keyboards.
"No idea," I mutter. I look more closely at one of the screens. It doesn't even look like it's on. Usually screens have a dull glow if they haven't been used in a bit, but these all look dead, like they're completely shut off.
I turn to ask Christina if she sees it too, but just as I look, she presses the space bar on the keyboard.
And then the explosion. It's so loud, so powerful. I'm immediately thrown against the wall on the other side of the room. Luckily, I hit it with my shoulder, so I'm still awake as I hit the floor.
"Christina!" I yell through the smoke. "Christina!"
I crawl until I reach her body. I can barely see from the smoke, and I find myself retching in the midst of floating debris. She's completely unconscious.
I grunt as I reach under her armpit and haul her around my shoulders. I stagger out of the room, aware that my left knee is unbelievably painful and probably going to swell enormously from landing on it earlier. I limp unevenly out to the hallway and turn back to where we came from. I must be so disoriented from my injured ear though, because I don't immediately register that there are people fighting here. I see the black clothing of our own squadron but I also see white shirts and even some blue clothing. It's mostly desperate fist fighting, but occasionally I hear a gunshot.
"Tobias!" one of my own soldiers screams. Jeffrey, I think. He takes a punch to the mouth just after he calls to me. I realize I need to get Christina out of her and move to go back to the hallway we just exited, but she comes to and mutters something.
"What?" I yell to her. "Christina!"
Her head lolls a bit but she's able to focus on my face.
"Christina, we have to go! Come on, stand up!" I hear a gunshot and instinctively duck. A bit of the wall to the right of me takes the bullet.
Christina desperately tries to stand on her own, but I end up taking most of her weight. I pull her along to the next door, miraculously avoiding any stray bullets. I manage to get her to a stairwell near the doorway which we first entered the building, and slowly we pick our way down to the street level.
She's breathing heavily, and I register that she's hurt somewhere. I sit her down against a wall, close to an exit, and desperately try to find where she was injured. I finally locate a bullet wound in her calf. It went straight through, so that's fortunate. But she's bleeding quite a bit. I shrug off my jacket and take off the vest I'm wearing so I can rip my t-shirt into a tourniquet for her leg. She grunts as I lift her calf to bind it, but I keep saying that it'll be okay, that she'll be okay.
And then her eyes go wide in fear. She starts to say my name but I'm already turning to see the threat. My hand reaches for the gun on the floor. I see people in black clothing, our division, entering the room from the far side, but the enemies in white and blue are upon us. I do all I can to shield Christina. I begin to extend my arm to shoot the rebel closest to us, but I feel something catch my shoulder. And then another bullet rips into my abdomen. I feel my whole body take the impact, and then the third gunshot is when I know. A terrible pain and a crushing sensation begin in my chest and I cough up blood. I see my soldiers start taking down the rebels, but it's too late. My eyes begin to close. I hear Christina screaming my name.
And then I see something coming from behind the fighting I see in front of me. Dressed in all black, with a shirt that reveals the three birds on her collarbone, Tris walks toward me. I can see where she was shot, all those years ago. Her hair is the same though, and her smile just as I remembered it.
I reach my hands out to her. "Tris," I choke out.
She's here, she's here my whole body sings for her.
"Tobias," she says gently, evenly. She takes my hands and smiles.
I feel a tightness in my throat. She's here to take me away, to take me to be with her again. I feel tears well up in my eyes, just like the last time I saw her body in the flesh.
"You are so brave," she whispers and she reaches up to hold my face in her hands. "You saved Christina, Tobias."
I swallow hard. "I couldn't let her die." She reaches up to wipe a tear that escaped my eye, and I see that she too has tears in her blue eyes.
Tris would have wanted me to live a long, fulfilling life, but this moment was what my life led to. And it's okay. Suddenly, it's okay with me. In her arms, it's okay that I am leaving this world, because I'm with her. She's here, she has forgiven me for dying, and I'm going to be with her now. The last moments of my life were for saving someone else, someone I loved. And now I go to be with the person that made me whole again.
And Tris smiles again, is drawing my face closer to hers. When her lips touch mine, it's like kissing her for the first time. It's like kissing her for the last time. I leave this world for hers. I go to a land of the forgiven, a land of the loved. With her lips against mine, I go.
Reviews are always welcome!
Much love to my Divergent friends,
kateconnollys