A/N: here's the next part! and the last day of my exams is tomorrow, chemistry and physics! wish me luck, oh gosh.

Reminder: this story shall take a sad, whump-ish hurt/comfort romance feel to it. and it seems that i'm tearing all characters asunder, so good luck to you and good luck to me!(;

disclaimer: disclaimed.

"This is only the beginning."

The same words that Jeanine had said, that Evelyn had said, both echo in my head. They should sound melodious, full of Erudite-like pride and similarity, backing the other up. They should sound great together, like how two people with the matching voices go perfectly well together in a duet. But they don't. It might just be my distaste for the faction, or my general distaste towards both of them, period. All in all, they sound horrible, words included.

I wonder what Tobias thinks about it all, but then again, I don't bother. He walks only in silence, staring either at the ground or at the road ahead. My guess is that he's too tired to talk, or too upset to, and I know that my questions will remain unanswered and shelved somewhere in the middle section of my brain. We have already been through so much today, and we are both just as tired of talking and arguing, shouting and screaming at each other until he's pissed and I'm breaking into fiery tears, of thinking of words to retort back and bruising each other's pride. I leave him to his peace.

I look around me, at the Dauntless that are in black, and the Erudites that are in the same blue as I am in. The colour is barely obvious now, hidden in the shadows of the cast night. I count the number of Dauntless at the very back of my head, subconsciously, and there is a hollow feeling when I realise how we started with so many Dauntless when I first chose the faction, and how we have ended with less than half of our faction, the rest of them lost to the war.

How is it that I try almost too hard to put myself at death's door and take one for the team, but I am not with them? Instead, I am alive and walking back to the home I once used to share with my friends and my Dauntless family. Now, at least half of them are gone, and several others are injured. How will Dauntless feel as whole as it had been before?

The emptiness starts to grow, the closer we are to Dauntless headquarters. We walk there, and my feet hurt, but the time it takes to accept that half of us will be gone, and that The Pit and the cafeteria will be half as empty, I cherish this time. I look around me now, under the shadows of night, at the people I know. Cara and Marcus help to support Christina's weight as she walks, and she cracks jokes to push the pain to the back of her head.

Then I look at Uriah, and the men carrying him. He must be under severe shock from the bullet in his collarbone, since he hitches in laughter from time to time like it doesn't hurt. I grin inwardly at the sight, since he's always been one to cheer others up. I bet a high rate that whatever he's mumbling about now, it is definitely about cake. "Tris!" He giggles in a singsong voice. "Triiiiis! Come'ere!" This time, he whines. He reminds me of when I was in Amity headquarters, under that serum they injected me with after my fight with Peter.

I leave Tobias' side - I think I may have caught him glancing at me - and jog up towards the men and Uriah. He beams at the sight of me, though I can see the glimmer of tears at the rims of his eyes, and dried little streaks staining the sides of his face. My heart wrenches at the sight of him. He is such a miserable man, just as miserable and as tortured as me. Over a short spam of just a few months, he's lost Marlene, Lynn, and has to live to see the sorrow in Lynn's now handicapable sister, Shauna. So much has changed over a matter of time, and I can see the same torment in his eyes as the one I recognize in my own.

I purse my lips and frown as I force a smile, pretending I can't see the snake behind his ear that is now bloodstained. Nobody told me he had been struck down by the butt of one of their guns, too. "Hey Uriah. How are you feeling?" I ask. He copies me pursing my lips and frowning, and holds it for only a matter of seconds before he cracks into a fit of giggles - one that would never ever go well with him, ever - once more. "Perrrfect!" He slurs, then accents himself on the last letter. "What 'bout you? You passed out just now... I think!"

I am not liking this. I fight the urge to grin at Uriah. No, I am so not liking this. But it just might be something good enough to relate to him when he's well and sane. Well, humiliating enough. "I'm fine. Just a little exhausted I guess. How about this? When we're back at Dauntless headquarters, you get to eat all the cakes and muffins you want! Just rest for now, alright?"

Uriah's bright eyes turn a little darker, and it flickers over the time he stays silent to think. "Marlene loved cake..." He pouts, anguish invading his features. His lower lip quivers. "A-And Lynn... I-I re- I remember how..." His pauses start to form the same giggles he had a minute ago. "Lynn didn't tell... Anyone but she l-loved muff-ff-ffins!" Uriah continues giggling, inhaling and exhaling at an uneven pace, until his laughs are half sobs. His body wracks in both laughter and violent sobbing, and I realize how watching this war, of coping with his grief, waging within him is just that hard. I sympathize with him.

He has no-one. Maybe Zeke, but not anyone else that he loves. His best friends, Marlene and Lynn, are dead, and there is nobody else to comfort him with compassion and affection. Uriah is alone. It hurts me to say that, to think that, but he is. "They're dead..." The panic starts to seep into his tone, and his voice wavers, devoid of any laughter. "They're all dead, Tris. Th-They're all dead!" I watch as his eyes start to swell with more tears, and I hear him repeat the same words again and again; They're dead.

There are things about grief that many do not understand. The only people that have been through such grievances learn that we never lose a person as a whole, but we watch them go piece by piece - The way the bed is never slept on to have to be made, the way the closets remain untouched. How their voices start to get vague and old when there are no fresh ones. The way their scent fades from their pillows, their clothes, and even their closets and drawers. Everyday, it gets a little harder to get back who they are, as when we gain one we lose two others. It is always receding until it's gone. We wake up, and another empty space fills our hearts, until the part is rid from our system.

But I can't tell that to Uriah. I can't tell him that that's going to be all that is left of Marlene and Lynn. Just an empty void or two, when the day is done. It makes no sense - because it is human nature to hold onto memories like this, but yet it does, and it is how cruel the truth is, whether inside the gates or out.

All I can really offer him now is my presence as a friend. I watch him with sympathy, while he watches me with weary, moist eyes. He continues to take sharp breaths in, too many in fact, but doesn't seem to have time to breathe back out. "W-What's going to h-happen to us?" asks Uriah, pressing out another tear as he blinks his eyes. I notice the use of 'us' instead of 'me', and my heart plummets from its rightful place, to my stomach. I know I haven't gotten over any of them yet, much less the guilt that consumes me by the passing minute. My gaze drops and I look away. I am supposed to be strong here, for him, not someone who will break down over the simple use of a plural word.

I inhale, and press my palm to the area above his cheekbone to wipe away his tears. "I... don't exactly know, Uriah. I guess we're just going to have to get our minds off them, make ourselves so busy and exhausted until it's time to sleep." My hand travels to his forehead, carrying a sheen of perspiration, and knotting my fingers in his hair - it has grown longer. My eyes barely slide over his perplexed features before they permanently watch over my fingers. "And if you're too tired to think, you'll be dreamless. And if you're not, you just have to... try to hold it in until it lets you go..."

Will it ever, is my question.

We stay like that, in silence, in grieving, and in question, until I hear his sobs decline into gentle, steady breaths. Calm, and my best guess is that the concussion from the butt of the gun got the best of him, and he's tired. I wonder if he dreams, because his features are so flawlessly serene that it just might be possible that he isn't. I hope so, because dreaming is bad. It's dark, and it's possessive. It keeps me screaming at an intensity that my voice cannot accommodate, and I wake with a hoarse voice and a severely sore throat on the mornings of such nights.

I untangle my fingers from his hair and almost start towards Christina - Am I, in any way, avoiding Tobias? - when Zeke chuckles his way up to me. "Uri must have been talking all about cake, wasn't he? That little sucker and his fudge." He says, and nudges me in the arm.

"Well, that little sucker wasn't talking about cake. He was talking about Lynn and Marlene." I say.

His face contorts. "Aren't they, like... Gone?" He asks, and I stare at him pointedly with a stare that threatened to cut. Parts of me question if he is really that insensitive, and maybe he should learn a thing or two from Tobias. Not that they are any different. Tobias just one-ups him with his Abnegation properties. "O-Oh." Zeke frowns now, looking back at the unconscious Uriah from time to time.

"I should correct myself. He was more of sobbing about it. And giggling, then crying harder. It's painful to see Uriah in this state of grief. He was really upset about Marlene and Lynn. They were close."

"I can't imagine how devastating it must feel. My poor baby brother. Can't imagine what he's going through. I guess he's lucky that there's you, Tris, not that it's a good thing, of course." He says, heaving a sigh of weariness.

"You've never lost anyone close before?"

"What can I say? Things happen, and the people you know, bleed. I know it must be an act of selfishness to the Abnegation, but when I was in initiation, I made sure to distance myself far enough to be unaffected, never trusted enough. My strength, my weakness."

I nod. It's spectacular to know that we are even allowed to do this, to stray away from being hurt over and over, and over. I want to try it, but then, at the same time, I don't want to lose out.

Zeke then clears his throat and says my name. "Can I... Ask you a personal question?"

"Okay..." I say. I wonder what personal questions there can actually be.

"Uriah told me about your first night in Candor. He saw you throw that chair off the open ledge, then stand there." I feel bile rising up into my throat, making me feel constricted with no words at all. "You kept looking down. You wanted to kill yourself."

"Time, and guilt, and grief, and thinking and believing that you could have done something to save them but you didn't, it really does this to you. Make you a complete train wreck hurtling at full speed towards self destruction." And a lot more that can consume and spit you back out, for all of it to happen again. "But it will go away." I reply, and stare at him as if my eyes are peeling him layer by layer, trying on my own to get to his point.

He drops his voice lower. "Will that happen to Uriah too? I don't want the closest person I have to family to go around with a gun in his hand saying he wants to die. I can't lose my baby brother..."

"Maybe. But him and Marlene, and Lynn, were close. Will, Al and me, barely. It's the guilt that lives inside you that wrecks you, and Uriah's is huge. I do suggest you watch over him for a while. It has really been a frantic few months. I have a feeling that half of Dauntless have already lost." The half that is alive. The other half of Dauntless, I know, are the souls that are buried under concrete or soil somewhere, or being incinerated in a furnace to be let free of their bodies and ride with the wind. All too dead to be alive.

"And... You never told him?" By him, he must mean Tobias, since Zeke's eyes subconsciously move to glance at him. Somewhere in me, it squeezes, with guilt, and disgust - at myself - and something else that I cannot explain. It feels like submission, to the truth that I lie to Tobias half the time that we spend together, but also fear, because I can hear the strangle of his sobs from behind that Erudite door on the day I was going to die.

If he knows that I tried to kill myself - even if it was many weeks ago - I can't imagine how heartbroken he will be. I fear his look of complete repugnance towards my foolish idiocy - his slightly creased forehead, the darker shadows cast over his dark, shielded eyes, narrowed, the little crinkle on his left nostril, and his minimally parted lips, as if wanting to ask me why, but hesitating to speak. It will be a look that can strangle me and have everyone else to leave me be until I cease to breathe.

Yet, I feel pity, too. If I don't tell him, then all his weeks wondering why I have always been doing this and risking that will continue that way, in a state of illusion, delusion, and falsity. Inconsistency, inconclusive, unanswered, always in question. If I was him, I wouldn't want to be a part of that, let alone have my other half lie to me about something that serious. But I am not Tobias, with a threatening past spent with his abusive father, faith in his supposedly dead mother lost in the process of her betrayal towards her own son, all because of something so subtle as to who gets the governor's chair and hand picks the parliament party.

Also, I can't possibly walk up to him, look him right in his dark, mystic blue eyes and tell him that I want to die. I can't cry to him over spilt milk, as if he can put it back into the carton and make it seem as if nothing had ever happened. It did, and if it implicates me, I won't ever let it implicate anyone else whose problems are far more destructive – even if not by death or suicide – as it will just be selfish.

I am his lying other half, lying about something he can very well take to heart and never let go, and it will add to the burden he already carries. I don't want to be the one who will put extra weights on his shoulder just to see his legs buckle under him, immobilized and impaired from the heaviness. I will destroy him and become the worst person he will ever meet.

"No." I say as I exhale, so much air in it that it is reduced into a whisper. "He already has so much on his plate. Letting him know is like packing more to what he already has, something he doesn't need and can't take anymore, but will still stomach it down even if it hurts."

Zeke replies me with a fairly strong guttural sound created at the back of his throat. "Yeah. He barely speaks much to me anymore..." I know that Zeke says a couple more words after that, but my ears ring and render me deaf and unbalanced for a moment.

Just exhaustion. This is just exhaustion. Or that damn poison they gassed you with outside Jeanine's lab, says the part of me that has learned to make such sense of things. Being in Dauntless, seeing spots and having a ringing in the ears, lightheadedness and walking in a horrible squiggly line are obvious signs of an injury - or probably if you're just plain drunk, but I have never gotten myself that wasted before. Still, I am stronger than this. I believe I am. Coupled with insane Dauntless routines and the recent running around, if I can handle a bullet in my shoulder, I can handle a little bit of unidentifiable gas...

Or not.

I walk on, steadying one foot in front of the other. My arms are folded around my abdomen and my fingers start to claw in at my lower ribs - an attempt to hold myself up from the falling sensation in my nerves. Nonetheless, my vision blurs out and back in over intervals and the ground rocks me, like I'm standing on my two feet in a boat balancing unstably on water. I feel like I am straddling an earthquake that is pulling the ground beneath me apart in two very opposite directions, so I bow my head. My consciousness drifts apart in halves, one that has a steady hold on reality, and the ground beneath my feet, while the other feels like gravity pulling me to the floor.

The feeling is weird, to experience firsthand the effects of this phenomenon of such dual consciousness, that are as much different as they are alike. I succumb to one in exhaustion. The last thing I hear is the yells - my name - and the last thing I see is the road ahead of me, tilted, before the light in my eyes flicker out. I hear Tobias, his agile and nearly silent footsteps thudding hurriedly in the soil that my cheek rests on. He calls my name, once, twice, after an hour of silence.

Sometimes, it's just that comforting to hear his voice while in a distant moment like this. Even if I can't see the world in front of me, or understand what is happening to me now, I know I am safe. Even if I'm not.

TBC.

reviews would be more than lovely! :)