Chapter 1- Prologue
(A/N; The first bit will be from page 309 of Insurgent to page 314. It will all be in italics so you can tell the difference. Enjoy!)
Tris pov (Obviously)
After dinner, I try to go back to the dormitory where I've been sleeping, but I can't quite walk through the door. Instead I walk through the corridors, brushing the stone walls with my fingers, listening to the echoes of my footsteps.
Without meaning to, I pass the water fountain where Peter, Drew and Al attacked me. I knew it was Al by the way he smelled-I can still call the scent of lemongrass to mind. Now I associate it not with my friend but with the powerlessness I felt as they dragged me to the chasm.
I walk faster, keeping my eyes wide open so it will be harder to picture the attack in my mind. I have to get away from here, far away from where my friend attacked me, where Peter stabbed Edward, where a sightless army of my friends began its march toward the Abnegation sector and all this insanity began.
I go straight toward the last place where I felt safe: Tobias's small apartment. The second I reach the door, I feel calmer.
The door is not completely closed. I nudge it open with my foot. He isn't there, but I don't leave. I sit on his bed and gather the quilt in my arms, burying my face in the fabric and taking deep breaths of it through my nose. The smell it used to have is almost gone, it's been so long since he slept on it.
The door opens and Tobias slips in. My arms go limp, and the quilt falls into my lap. How will I explain my presence here? I'm supposed to be angry with him.
He doesn't scowl, but his mouth is so tense that I know he's angry with me.
"Don't be an idiot," he says.
"An idiot?"
"You were lying. You said you wouldn't go to Erudite, and you were lying, and going to Erudite would make you an idiot. So don't."
I set the blanket down and get up.
"Don't try to make this simple," I say. "It's not. You know as well as I do that this is the right thing to do."
"You choose this moment to act like the Abnegation?" His voice fills the room and makes fear prickle in my chest. His anger seems too sudden. Too strange. "All that time you spent insisting that you were too selfish for them, and now, when your life is on the line, you've got to be a hero? What's wrong with you?"
"What's wrong with you? People died. They walked right off the edge of a building! And I can stop it from happening again!"
"You're too important to just… die." He shakes his head. He won't even look at me-his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry.
"I'm not important. Everyone will do just fine without me." I say.
"Who cares about everyone? What about me?"
He lowers his head into his hand, covering his eyes. His fingers are trembling.
Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to.
I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and a thousand other things besides. And I can't erase those things.
"You would be fine." I don't look at his. I stare at his T-shirt between my fingers and the black ink curling around his neck, but I don't look at his face. "Not at first. But you would move on, and do what you have to."
He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. "That's a lie," he says, before he kisses me again.
This is wrong. It's wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I'm about to do.
But I want to. Oh, I want to.
I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around him. I press one hand between his shoulder blades and curl the other one around the back of his neck. I can feel his breath against my palm, his body expanding and contracting, and I know he's strong, steady, unstoppable. All things I need to be, but I am not, I am not.
He walks backward, pulling me with him so I stumble. I stumble right out of my shoes. He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him, and we're finally eye to eye.
He touches my face, covering my cheeks with his hands, sliding his fingertips down my neck, fitting his fingers to the slight curve of my hips.
I can't stop.
I fit my mouth to his, and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back, and put it under his shirt. he kisses me harder.
I knew he was strong: I didn't know how strong until I felt it myself, the muscles in his back tightening beneath my fingers.
Stop. I tell myself.
Suddenly it's as if we're in a hurry, his fingertips brushing my side under my shirt, my hands clutching at him, struggling closer but there is no closer. I have never longed for someone this way, or this much.
He pulls back just enough to look into my eyes, his eyelids lowered.
"Promise me," he whispers, "that you won't go. For me. Do this one thing for me."
Could I do that? Could I stay here, fix things with him, let someone else die in my place? Looking up at him, I believe for a moment that I could. And then I see Will. The crease between his eyebrows. The slumped body.
Do this one thing for me. Tobias's dark eyes plead with me.
But if I don't go to Erudite, who will? Tobias? It's the kind of thing that he would do.
I feel the stab of pain in my chest as I lie to him. "Okay."
"Promise," he says, frowning.
The pain becomes an ache, spreads everywhere- all mixed together, guilt and terror and longing. "I promise."
When he starts to fall asleep, he keeps his arms around me fiercely, a life-preserving prison. But I wait, kept awake by the thought of bodies hitting pavement, until his grip loosens and his breathing steadies.
I will not let Tobias go to Erudite when it happens again, when someone else dies. I will not.
I slip out of his arms. Almost immediately, Tobias shoots up from bed. As he quickly rubs the sleep from his eyes, I stand there frozen. I broke my promise, and he caught me. So many different emotions crash down around me, shame being the most prominent. The moment he spots me, he jumps from the bed and has me in his arms in less than a second, his face buried against my neck.
"You promised me Tris! You promised me!" his voice is thick and cracks on the last sentence.
It takes the small drops of water on my neck and shoulders for me to realize something; Tobias is actually crying. Because of me. Because I hurt him. He trusted me with everything-even his life-and I still hurt him, possibly more than his father ever did. Guilt pulses through me and it hurts more than the bullet in my shoulder, a deep ach in my heart where Tobias now resides. Because although I haven't said it yet, I do love him. But how can I say that if I was about to leave him? How could I bear to break the heart of the boy who now has so much control over mine?
I realease a sob that I didn't realize I was holding in. So there we stand in the middle of Tobias's apartment, neither of us trying to be strong anymore. Tobias pulls away for a second to look me in the eye.
"Please Tris," he begs, "please don't go. You're all I have left that's worth fighting for; I can't lose you." Another tear escapes those deep blue eyes that I've grown to love. Love? Do I love him? Yes.
"Tobias," I say slowly, "I love you, and I promise that I won't try to leave again. I'm so sorry" I choke out. And by the way he looks at me, he can tell that I truly mean it this time.
Jeanine pov (WHAT?)
After waiting several hours for little-miss-selfless to turn herself in, I realize she isn't coming. With a heavy sigh, I buzz my assistant.
"Send young Mr. Prior into my office." I tell her. "We have to send him on the next train to Dauntless so he can collect his sister." I practically purr with a smirk playing on my lips. This should be fun, I think to myself.
A/N: so here's the first chapter, it will probably be the longest one but who knows. Sorry for the majority being from the book but I wanted u guys to have context. Please review! Thanks for reading!
