Peter
Tris is taking care of more personal business somewhere, poking and prodding all the dials in the dashboard or burying more garbage out in the woods. It's hard to give a fuck about what she does when I'm not around. It's always been funny to me that the one luxury Stiffs really soak in is privacy - closed-off little houses, shapeless clothes, nobody asking them how they're feeling or what they're thinking. It was funny enough seeing one of them scramble to adjust to Dauntless' oh-so-lovely wide open spaces. What happens to Abnegation who figure they'd really rather be Candor? There aren't any.
There's no point in sticking around here any longer if we're not actually stocking up on resources or confirming anything about the lay of the land, but none of the others seem eager to pile back in our halfassed ride and keep on rolling toward impending doom. I'd welcome that, if it meant a change from all the busywork.
"Nice work back there," Four says. I'm still wiping the blood and grease off my hands, and he's watching the deer meat dry out over the fire, turning it over from time to time with the blade of his knife. The oil-smoke rising from the grease-splattered coals is a little more familiar than I'm comfortable with. This style of preparation can't possibly work that well, but far be it from me to question his mighty survivor logic; maybe Abnegation know stuff about this kind of thing that we don't. They didn't get to eat the meat, but maybe they prepared it anyway.
This is the most approval he's shown me this whole trip.
"Thanks," I mutter. "Not like you were a shitload of help or anything."
"Did you and Tris have a nice talk?" There's a faint curve of amusement at the corner of his lip. Something twists in my guts at the sight of it.
"Yeah, she shook me down about contributing to the group. So this is me contributing."
Tris is picking apples with her brother. They'd hear any screams, but there wouldn't necessarily be any, and I don't think either of them would come running. Four is bigger than I am, heavier. And there's no one else around for a thousand miles. We're all alone here, him and I. I know what I'd do, if I were him.
Fortunately for both of us, Four isn't me. His big dark-ringed eyes dig in like the dull impact of a bullet. "There's a grave site, in the woods. I don't know how Tris missed it. Big enough for three or four people, I'd think. Somebody piled up stones to mark it."
"So why are you telling me this? Want to go dig them up?"
He pauses heavily, and it couldn't be clearer he's unimpressed with me. "It'd be easy to lose track of a body out here." Another turn of the knife. The blade catches the light, sending a warped reflection in dappled white scattering across the leaves. For a moment, it shines in my eyes. Shit, this has to be the most roundabout way possible of conveying menaces - so what do I care?
"Wow, you're threatening me. You're not a very subtle person."
"I don't need to be. As long as you ride with us, you will show the appropriate respect. Is that understood?"
The instructor in him is coming out again - like he's just stating facts about where things stand in the chain of command. Clearly I'm at the bottom. But his eyes slip from me to a sideways glance at Caleb. If you thought he was disgusted by me, you should have seen the way he eyeballed his little girlfriend's traitor brother. He hates him, and he resents having to take him with. Maybe even more than he hates having me in the party, though he seriously needs the manpower. I wonder if he's supposed to be Divergent too - if that's what his tattoos unsubtly stand in for, and if that's why he guards Tris so closely, from the fear of being the only freak left if she dies. No matter what the founders' intentions were, Divergents are still freaks. A beneficial mutation is still a mutation.
(On the far side of the clearing, Caleb sits in the shade with a notebook open in his lap, drawing the leaves on the trees. What an idiot. As if anybody cares what trees grow out here. He's even more useless than I am. What an idiot. What an asshole.)
I already feel dirty under my own skin, I feel the itch to swipe back and say something perverse. But I think of how easy it'd be to hide a bunch of wrecked bones out in the countryside, and keep my eyes lowered.
"Yeah, understood." He'd better not go telling his girlfriend about any tragic mass graves or she'll freak.
There's a lot of rebuilding to do - out here and back in the city alike. Tris might be perfectly content playing happy homemaker out here; the two of them could wrestle bears and raise a half-dozen light brown babies together, while the likes of me would wither and die. If we don't keep going foward I might as well just off myself here. I'm not cut out for work.
The fire's just a heap of ashes now, and after last night's chill the noonday sun is like a slap in the face. Everything's fucked up out here, even the weather - one second it's clear skies, then it's passing showers, or it's cold, or it's suddenly scorching even in the shade.
Tris has one of the maps on her lap. She's working out the turns ahead of us in neat pencilled columns, and sometimes she'll ask Four about some hypothetical, some washed-out bridge we might run into or an alternate route if there's roadblocks or too much damage to just roll over.
Four is going through the process of carefully rearranging cut-up meat for storage. He sits at her knee, and you can smell the stink of blood from here. Every couple minutes she'll put out a hand to rub his back, just in between his shoulder blades; he won't turn his head or look up, but he must like it, because he hasn't told her to stop.
This is private. I shouldn't be seeing this. No one has ever touched me like that, and I don't think they ever will.
Each stroke of my knife brings away a thick blond peel of bark; I sit back with a branch parked between my knees, slowly stripping it down and bringing it to a sharp point. I don't even know what I'll use these for - if we were really roughing it for long, I'd build a trap, and they might come in handy if we have to put together an extremely low-tech ambush of our own. But for now it's just something for my hands to do, and I like seeing the sharp point emerge from the wood. Just a handle with an edge. A tool.
My hands are shaking, and I doubt it's from hunger. Forcing them steady is the best I can do.
"Anybody else have a headache?" Caleb has his metal canteen pressed against his cheek and temple like an ice pack; it's so cold that it's sweating condensation.
"Must be all the fresh air and sunshine." I can't keep the smirk out of my voice, but I'm feeling it too - a little needle of pain behind each eye, digging in. Overall I'm not at the top of my game out here. There's nothing to hide behind that's familiar, and too much that's still unrecognizable.
"Hey, it's a serious question. The water tastes different out here, even after it's boiled."
"It did between the sectors in the city, too. Water in Erudite tastes the best, they actually filter out half the shit that gets recycled through. Then Candor, then Dauntless, then whatever you all drink in Abnegation, probably."
"And Amity's is probably all drugged to hell and back, like everything else there. It makes me queasy just thinking about that, people eating and not knowing." Like him and his sweet sister, for one.
"What makes you think they didn't know? For somebody with your big brain it'd be like a paid vacation. People don't actually enjoy being responsible for their own actions."
"If you say so." His mouth turns down at the corners, like his sister's, even positioned neutrally at rest - I can't remember their parents' faces, so it's hard to weigh in on whether it's an inherited characteristic.
Tris makes a face. Her shorn scalp bristles as she raises her head. "Peter, enough. Caleb, if you need a painkiller, I've got some in my bag - it's probably just pressure changes. We're higher up here than when we started out."
She flicks a sachet of pills to her brother without even getting up, and her aim must be excellent, because she gets him right in the center of his chest. Not much stopping power in a couple of headache pills, but it stops him in the middle of his train of thought. Caleb won't push it.
Tris
"Ready to break camp?" Four asks it more like a declaration, not that late in the second day there. He and Caleb have set to the task of reloading everything back in the truck, leaving me with Peter to pack up and obliterate our traces - Peter's acting tame as a housecat, but I catch Tobias looking our way, keeping an eye on him and on me. I haven't told him about our conversation earlier, out of concern not to escalate things; as grudging as I am to take Peter at his word that he's doing all this out of compliance, Four is even less likely to buy it. I wonder if he ever taught him firsthand back in Dauntless, or if Eric handled the entirety of that. His caring tutelage would explain a lot, though Peter lacks his analytical nature.
On the fringes of our camp I spot a couple of wild dogs. Stray dogs in the city didn't stick around for long - the few animals that escaped destruction ended up as working animals - but there's something familiar in these animals and their restless loitering. They nose around at the heap of guts Caleb had interred in the bushes after the boys' foray into becoming amateur butchers. Woe to them if this little pack should scratch up the haphazardly-dug latrine pit; they're likely to find that a lot less appetizing.
I approach one of the strays with hands raised. She raises her yellowish-brown head, fixing me with her enormous brown eyes; her lips flare to bare teeth as a growl escapes her. A little shiver of recognition runs through me - this scene has played out somewhere before, in a simulation or in a dream, the feral animal about to show its teeth and me, foolishly trying to negotiate - something. Am I supposed to shoo them away? They haven't touched any of the meat we've tried to keep, and the presence of smaller scavengers might keep bigger ones at bay.
"Fine," I say, feeling profoundly stupid. "You can have them."
Her ragged ears prick up, like she's not sure what to make of me, but she's not about to spring. I almost wish I could take her with us - scarred, battle-worn, but free. Free is the only way she'll survive out here. No one else is about to take her in.
We've discussed what we all missed most about the city - real beds, or running water, the way the sun shines on glass. I find myself missing real vegetables, of all things - we're surrounded by greenery but I don't even know what I'd pick without making myself ill. Four misses his apartment, with its Fear God Alone inscription. Peter is pining away for a change of clothes and an actual shower. The list of who we miss most is conspicuously absent, but it'd just be a list of the dead anyway. Our radio hasn't sounded besides the occasional empty chirp, and the metallic pellet crusted into my upper arm does precisely nothing to relay back to me what's happened to Cara and company, or who's doing the monitoring now.
We've discussed the names of cities we'll pass along our way. Most of them are given a wide berth, just in case, but the names sound like a litany of impossible things - it's almost beyond imagining that there were once so many people in the world to warrant this many towns. And not even a fence to be seen. No heavily-armed ramparts, no electrified wire, nothing. No one protected them.
I'm behind the wheel for the late-afternoon shift; in the passenger seat beside me, Caleb's fast asleep. Tobias is supposed to be the one on watch in the backseat, but the rear view mirror shows his eyes are closed. His eyelashes cast funny shadows across his cheeks, except I'm not laughing. Like this, he could still be a child - tattoos or no tattoos. Yellow light from the diminished sun cutting through the windows - we could be in the car going anywhere and instead we're going nowhere.
Peter is awake. I can't say I've ever longed for his company, let alone his idea of conversation, but part of me is terrified I'll fall asleep at the wheel or imagine things that aren't there - and another part on a deeper level has come to hate the silence, with the expectation that whatever breaks it next will be trying to kill us. Or at least seriously inconvenience us.
"Did he ever talk about me?"
"Not like you were his sister, no. He was selling you out."
More than anything else, this is what I fear when it comes to my brother - that he knew what he was doing. He'd always been the one who did it right, the one who succeeded at completely extinguishing any selfishness or any pride - and then when the chance came to make something of himself, and to rise in the ranks instead of stagnating forever in a position of service, he took it. Caleb knowingly supported the regime that killed our mother and father - he'd have killed to uphold it. Maybe he already had.
"Don't hold it against him. He regrets it."
"Not enough."
"Four scares the shit out of him."
"You say that like Four doesn't scare the shit out of you."
"I'm not scared. I'm reasonably cautious."
"What are you afraid of? In the fear simulations, you got the one for public humiliation, didn't you?"
"I did. Not- not because it was one of my fears to start with, but because it was the instructor's. You remember her. Lauren, or whoever."
How bizarre it is, to sit around and chatter like an Amity with my own would-be rapist. Everything that's happened since then only compounds the strangeness of our first acquaintance - enemy, then ally, then enemy again, then ally. Never friend; I think we're both fine with that. But I can't help but press him about some things; my curiosity gets the better of me.
"What was it like? I'd figure having people tell you how lousy you are in public places must be commonplace to you." I thought of my interrogation, standing there in the middle of everyone struggling to keep my mouth from moving even when the serum did its best to burn the truth out of me. Nobody had to tell me how bad I was for what I'd done. I was more than ready to tell them all myself. Peter doesn't laugh, but in the rear-view mirror I can see his eyes crease.
"It was a lot like that, yeah. Being in the middle of everybody and not being able to lie any more, standing around naked while people said stuff to you, and did stuff, and asked you how you liked it, and if you said no they'd say you were lying anyway."
"Sounds involved."
"No shit. I threw up afterward. I found some quiet little place and I threw up. I hope it wasn't some Erudite transfer's secret reading nook - or maybe I hope it was, I don't know." He cracks a smile but it isn't very lively; even the memory has left him bloodless pale, like a ghost in the narrow strip of rear-facing mirror.
My own mouth twitches into a tighter line. "Oh, I can only imagine."
It doesn't make me feel better, knowing he got a taste of his own medicine, even if it was only in a simulation. If I'd been more heartless, maybe, it would have - if I'd been more capable, or more cruel, I could have made sure he got paid back in kind at the hands of someone at least as much bigger than him as he was than me. But I hadn't even wanted to.
I can't judge with simulations. For me they'd never really seemed real to begin with - I only know what they're supposed to feel like from secondhand accounts, not even Four can tell me that - but that didn't mean they didn't terrify me. Like a hallucination, the fear of what they signified, on top of it all. Just like what it'd signify if I relished the thought of another sixteen-year-old kid getting manhandled and scared to death, even in what was hardly more than a dream. Peter's worst fear is that other people will treat him like he treated me; why am I not surprised?
Peter keeps his eyes fixed on the seat in front of him. "Yeah. Yeah. Next question, please."
"Did you ever get burned alive in yours?"
"Oh, yeah. Burning alive's easy - you just have to let yourself melt into a puddle."
"What kind of problem solving is that?"
"The sneaky kind."
Author's note: The history of assault perpetrated by Peter is something I really wanted to broach, if I was going to be writing the grimdark road trip of my dreams - Peter shows such flashes of interesting promise in other contexts (especially, I'll admit, movie!Peter who has much more snark and much less sexual violence) but that's not an aspect of him that can be treated like "just" bullying. Him and Tris gradually develop something of a very limping, cautious working relationship in this fic, which is good enough for my purposes.
Re. Peter's snide comments about the skin color of Four and Tris' hypothetical offspring - I figure overt racism is one of the things that died off or was at least seriously sublimated in the transition to experiment-cities like Chicago, so this is just Peter being a special kind of asshole about Four and Tris looking different from one another. He clearly doesn't seem to stint from personal remarks about appearances, but it's not tethered to a direct sense of why some people look one way and some another. Given how a lot of the appearance stuff in the series is either tied to family resemblances (esp. among the Priors, which I've totally biffed since I last double-checked canon and will hopefully get to revise once this is all posted) or comparisons between characters (since Tris and co. don't have the shorthand of identifying people by racial or ethnic background rather than faction) I hope this is semi-excusable from a writerly perspective, but he's still being a dong.]