When Ravens take Flight
AN: I wrote this after a really bad week relationship wise, when I had to be out of the house. Christina's pov, excuse the errors (published sans beta). Just a bit of prattle. Steam of Consciousness in some parts. Part two will be up shortly.
Part One: Angel's Dandruff
The sky had been raining for days when they called me to the Hub. The city's gutters had become lakes, flooding the street and sending the litter like sailboats along the lanes. It isn't rare for us to get weather like this; it was nearly winter. There would only be so many more days like this before the snow came down and cast the city under a blanket of white.
When I was younger growing up in Candor, we loved the first snow. In part because with our what snow jackets we would play hide and seek with the others and no one could find us, but also because like our mothers taught there was the fresh start with the white but you could see it go black the longer it covered it's lies. The longer the snow sat, and dirtier it became. Snow days were their favorite object lesson. Leave it to a bunch of Candor Mothers to make something as precious and fun loving as snow and make it a twisted hunt for truth and honesty.
But that was years ago. Back when I still looked forward to the first snow of the season. It was going to be my first snow as a Dauntless. I thought I'd still like it. I'd marvel at my jet black playing through the falling white. My first nights in initiation, I imagined my three new friends and I running up and down alleyways as the snow flew. The Black against the perfect white.
But it wasn't meant to be.
Not that first year or any year after. Now, thirty years later, it was something I dreaded. Because I knew what it would make me remember. That one day that I had the last stronghold I knew fall and my world collapsed. It was symbolic in ways. The snow fell as though it was trying to cool the revolutionary fervor Four and Tris had started. But cooled it in a way none of us had planned for. It happened on the first snow of the season. I could remember little flakes, Angel's Dandruff, mom would've called it, falling from the heavens but disappearing before anything could stick.
But I couldn't even notice it.
All I could notice was the sharp pain that had been in my chest since Will died reopened again. All I could remember was pounding my fists into the terminal floor, crying and screaming at the tile until as Four stood in his own unanswerable grief.
All I could remember was the cold snow brush across my hands when I ran outside. Angel Dandruff mom said, when the angels shook their heads and questioned our decisions. As they melted on my fingers I decided they were more tears than dandruff.
And that's what it was today. Tears that were falling from heaven and flooding the Hub below.
I brush against the morning crowds, dodging the rain puddles and folded umbrellas, until I reach the reserved elevator that's meant to be for official business only and slide my access badge. Glancing to my surroundings, an old habit that even this new faction-hybrid-whatever world couldn't break, I begin typing in the code that only a handful in the city knows. Its one of those unexpected privileges of being Four's oldest, one of his few friends. Impart, because I was her friend first.
We normally meet each other today. We see each other more than just once a year, but this is one of the days we always touch base. I was half way to my office in the Department of Law and Safety when I got the phone call. His assistant had been on the other end, rather panicky "Mr. Eaton has not returned his calls since yesterday afternoon and hasn't come in this morning." She was calling from the old Euridite headquarters. One of the twists that the revolution left the city was Johanna had kept the Headquarters as the center of operations, like Four's mother had in the fortnight the factionless ruled. The assistant was new. Probably in her early twenties. She didn't know what this week was. She didn't know how much he still hated that building. Especially on days like today. There weren't many people that did. Most of them had died. Or ran away to new lives beyond the wall.
I tell him he's a sentimental sap.
He says Chicago has too many physical scars for him, that someday's he just needs to stand on the sidelines.
I tell him Stiff's aren't supposed to hold grudges, even towards buildings.
He tells me it's a good thing he's not a Stiff anymore.
I reached the 88th floor and thundered my fist on his door as though its thunder. "Enough of the melodramatics Eaton," I holler out, "My teenage daughter is more reasonable than this."
Silence on his end. It's ten in the morning on a Thursday. He should be up. Probably in his boxers. Drinking some of that black tea he's taken to in his forties. It's supposed to help with flashbacks. I think it helps him remember better, he always has a dark look in his eyes as he drinks it. I pound the door a second time, louder than the first. "Four, I know what today is too. We can't do this. Not again. We promised each other that much. Open the damn door."
After I stand there in my fuming justice for a few moments, I jiggle the handle and punch in another code and it opens. "You know, I don't think she'd appreciate the fact you've made me your babysitter on days like this," I grumble, closing the door and entering his flat. It's a standard one people in the government have. Nothing overtly lavish, but there is a splendor to it that wouldn't be comfortable to someone who grew up in Abnegation. The walls are a deep blue and the accented grey curtains nearly disappear amid the clouds outside. There's a sofa that looks as though it was slept on recently. A familiar grey blanket draping over it. I try not to look at it for too long. I thought he kept in in a box, I didn't know it was out, that he used it. Instead I focus on the blue sculpture that's been the only thing to survive the war unscathed. It looks dull in the rainy morning. Sitting atop a bookshelf next to a dying plant.
"Tobias," I call out, its been thirty years but the name still feels out of place. It's what she would call him. Not me. Four? like the Number? That was our first interaction. That's what it's been ever since.
"Four, it's Christina—" I walk past the kitchen which looks untouched other than the half empty bottle and crumbs on a plate. I glance at the shelves. He can say all he wants he's not a stiff but I can't think of many leading officials that only have half a loaf of bread and empty jar of peanut butter in the cupboard.
"Listen, your office thinks something's up, so they sent in the cavalry," his study is empty, except the messy stack of books and paperwork only he could call orderly. Computer data. Configuration from the outside fringe. Something about the archives of the factions. There's a "IV and VI" written atop one file and I put it down tucking it under other files, knowing well whose picture I could find there. I shouldn't shy away from it, but I do anyway. We can talk about her today, but I don't want to see her. Not today. It was easier on the fifth anniversary, even the tenth. But she still looks sixteen. That's all she'll ever look. When I look in the mirror, I have the creases in my brow and the grey streaking my hair. And I know she'll never share aging secrets with me. It's silly how thoughts like that can make you hurt.
He's such a sentimental sap somedays. I think, looking back to the now hidden folder. Especially on days like today.
I reach his door. It's mostly shut. The grey light of the day outside creeping through.
It's a rainy day. The kind of day you use to remember every sad thing that ever happened in your life. For people like Four and I, that day is everyday but the pain becomes alive again in the rain.
Its the anniversary of the day we went to call Uriah's family to his side. The day we returned to the city and Four was able to convince his mother a more peaceful route. In four months there'll be a celebration marking Thirty years of City peace. It'll be spring, people will go to the parks. They'll be picnics. Because they celebrate the happy balm bought for peace but forget the cost. They used to talk a lot about the rebellion in the years after it happened. Now my children might mention it, when they're asking their father for help on their homework. They know better than to ask me.
Because some of us can't forget. Some of us are still paying the cost.
It's a rainy day and the anniversary. Of when they last saw each other alive. Of what was supposed to be the first day of the rest of their forever. Of the day I stopped hating him and decided I could probably stomach the thought of the two of them together and happy, the surviving lovers of the war. Its the anniversary. Of the day when fairytales didn't come true. Of the day that became their final goodbye. Of the day I began hating snow.
"If you're moping in there you best stop unless you want me to throw you out the window," I grumble to the door, "It's been thirty years," I say. I'm forty-six. I've lived outside of Chicago and returned home time after time. I married. His name's Thomas. He was a Dauntless too, Amity born, three years older than me. He hid with Abenegation after the first Eurodite attack. Ran rebels with Zeke against the Factionless. We have children. I have a daughter named Bea who is 13 and a son named Donny who is 10. We live off of Mayfield. We argue. We laugh. We pretend things are alright. It's been thirty years. But I've moved on. Or at least that's the lie I tell myself every morning.
I push the door open unsure of what Four I'll find this year. We've kept this tradition on and off. Every year we try and check up on one another. So we don't have to do it alone. So we don't have to tell ourselves that lie. One year he surprised my husband and I with taking the kids to the park where they restored the ferris wheel. He told Bea about her Aunt Tris who climbed the ferris wheel when it was broken and helped her mom capture the flag.
Another year I found him looking down at the Pit as a few younger kids, not Dauntless or anything in this new world, laughed and sparred at one another. Like it was before. "Sometimes I don't think they'll ever realize what she did, why she did it," he said numbingly, watching a group of kids leaning over the chasm, laughing all the while. "Sometimes I think no one will remember after we're gone."
Some years her anniversary is the darkest day, and I swear his eyes go black. Others he's alright. Neither here nor there. I tried to talk him into going zip lining again for one of these days but he always brushed it off. Emphatically. Sometimes He'll spend it at the Government Offices like its any other day, but I still sneak in and he has two bottle of something on his desk, one for him and one for me. There have been the darker years—those early ones where every month seemed to be an anniversary, that I'd find him back at her house in Abnegation. The old Prior home. He can't go there anymore. A new family moved in six months after wards. She didn't have any personal effects—selfless living and all, but he took a couple things. The blanket from her bed that now drapes his sofa. The socks her mother had left half knitted in the living room. Stiff trinkets. Things she would've passed but perhaps not touched. Simple things that remind him she was real. Not just a pleasant dream that had a nightmarish end a few months when he was eighteen.
"What's it going to be this year?" I ask surveying the scene. He's just laying there in bed. As though he's asleep but I assume better. "Remember when you nearly beat your old man to a pulp to prove yourself to Dauntless? It's a good thing Marcus is dead, if they saw you now you'd have to do him in."
Still he doesn't move. His eyebrow is at ease. He looks younger when he sleeps. He's aged well these past years. He doesn't have the grey hair I do. He's still strong, still put together. And when he sleep he looks like he did thirty years ago. Back on that day. It's only when his eyes are open that I see the forty-eight year old warrior who now plays a hand in the government.
"If you wake up I'll make you scrambled eggs," I offer, my voice somewhat sweeter, hoping that he has at least that much in the fridge. I sit down on the edge of his bed. He's been there for so much of my life. He was the one that gave me away at my wedding after my dad had died. He was at the hospital when both of my children were born. He sends me a piece of chocolate cake for my birthday. I was there for when his mother died. When he took up a new government role. On days when he 'run's away' because he thinks that's all he can do. We're each other's family. We've introduced each other as "My Brother" or "My Sister." For us it wasn't ever "Faction before Blood." We just became both for each other. The movements are natural, like that of a sister. In particular, a sister who wants to through water on him to wake him up.
"Come on, we talked about this. We're not doing this again this year. Not again. I've already ordered a chocolate cake from the old Bakery. Lynn and Zeke are going to be over at my place tonight. We're going to have a dinner, make some toasts—" Try and pretend Tris is there and only stepped out for some fresh air, she's telling Bea some embarrassing story—we'll try to tell ourselves Uriah and Will are upstairs helping Donny on his homework—Still he's unmoved. "—We'll have a good time. They worry about you. And the kids want to hear about that one time you nearly wet yourself on the zipline. Tom told, not me."
He doesn't shift or stir. He's become a deep sleeper in his older years. I grab his hand and hold it hard. "Dammit Four, get out of bed!"
I grab his pillow and yank it from under him. His head hits the mattress and I'm about to beat him with the pillow when I notice the blood on the right side. My inside tense. I crouch over him and notice the dry blood that had trickled down his neck, the thicker blood pooled in his ear.
My insides run cold. I've seen that injury before. I know what's happening.
My fingers fly to the emergency button on my communicator. Government Issue. Again, a prop of being friends with Four. "Medical emergency on the 88th floor of the Hub," I'm trying to get the words out. Trying to stay calm. But its like I'm in the fear scape again. The walls are closing in and the floor is falling through.
Oh God, not him. He's all I have left of her. Not him.
I hesitantly put my hand against his forehead, fearing what I'll feel. There's body heat. He's clammy as the lakes, but he's still there. "F—Tobias, it's Tobias Eaton.Yes that Tobias Eaton. There's been an emergency. He has blood out of his ear and isn't responsive. I can't see any physical head trauma—"They're sending someone. They're telling me not to disturb him. Keep him as stable as I can. Help is on the way. They should be there on the scene in five minutes.
But all I can't process that. I can't think what their words mean. All I can think is "You Bastard, you can't leave me alone. Least of all on a day like today.'"
((*))