"Don't!"
Jeanine shakes her head, and sighs. "It's not up to you, little one. It's up to him."
"I'm not a little girl!"
Jeanine shrugs. It doesn't matter to her one way or the other.
Andrew Prior glances up, and his eyes somehow pierce through the one-way glass to stare directly into Beatrice's. Or at least that's what it feels like. She squirms, and looks down, at the swirly patterns on the carpet, at her dirty, ripped-apart shoes. She can't look at her father, not now, not after he knows.
She starts to shiver, it gets harder to breathe.
"Run it again," Jeanine repeats, calmly.
"No!"
Jeanine ignores her. Beatrice watches helplessly through the glass as her father begins to sweat, to shake, to scream and thrash against the tight straps keeping him tied to the chair, to fight against invisible threats Beatrice doesn't have to see because she knows them, in her heart, in the deepest parts of her brain, all the secrets she worked so hard to hide spilling out in front of her eyes. Because the fear landscape Jeanine is using to break her father is hers. And he must hate her now; now that he knows the truth.
She glances back, to the young Erudite controlling the simulation. He can see it too, connected to it all through the wires and screens beneath his fingertips, and when it ends, he calmly removes the headband that connects him to the dreamscape illusions. He glances up at Beatrice, emotionless and unshaken. She holds her breath, waiting for a reaction, but none comes.
"How can you do this?" she asks sharply, all venom and fire. But her voice trembles, because couldn't he ask her the same thing? "Caleb, please."
Her brother holds her gaze, and gives her that same damned disapproving look he always used at the dinner table, or on the bus. The one that says she should know better. He's barely a year older than she is, but she'd always been more afraid of disappointing him than their parents. Only now...
"Mom's dead, Caleb!" She draws in a shaky breath, pushing away the memories that threaten to drag her under. They hover close, scratching at the weakened barrier inside her mind. She focuses on her anger, pushing outward, so they can't reach her. "Mom's dead!" she screams, as Jeanine watches, having turned away from Andrew Prior to focus on his children, the little-girl Divergent who is so close to breaking. And the boy who has already submitted to her will. "She killed her!"
Why won't he see? How can he be on her side?
"She did not."
Caleb doesn't say anything else, but the finality of his silence and the way he looks at her is enough to make Beatrice swallow hard. She can't look at him either, because he's seen her landscape, and he knows... her fingers wrapped tightly around the gun, slick with blood, as their mother moaned and screamed and thrashed in pain I love you no matter what. And the blast of a gunshot, echoing back, repeating, until the silence when the sound finally dies, when she finally dies, is worse.
"Beatrice, look at it logically."
"No!"
She explodes, catching all the bottled-up rage and wrongness that has haunted her all through her life in Abnegation. She hurls herself at her brother and lets her fists crash into him. She hits and kicks and doesn't think at all, just pummels him, raining down blows until she can't anymore.
When she slows, Caleb holds her arm, but not with any force. She could pull out of his grasp easily, if she wanted to. But she lets him hold onto her. She inhales huge gulping mouthfuls of air, and stares at him. Blood pours from his nose. As she watches, he holds it to stop the bleeding, but he says nothing.
"I hate you!" she screams.
He winces, or she thinks he does, but he still doesn't move, or say anything. And he may be responding to the pain instead of her words anyway. He is still bleeding. Beatrice frowns and stares at him and tries to feel bad about it, but can't. She thinks, in fact, that she's only getting angrier. She crosses her arms over her chest and listens to her thundering heartbeat. "Caleb..." she finally whispers.
She doesn't know what she's asking. Maybe, just for a minute, for things to be how they were before: when their mother was alive, before they were enemies. If, in fact, that is what they are.
Tears sting her eyes and she bites down hard on her lower lip before they can fall. She cannot afford to look any weaker than she already does in front of the Erudite. But she cannot look at this logically.
She steels herself and pushes against the heavy door that connects the watching-room to the tiny chamber where Andrew Prior is strapped to a familiar chair. He turns toward the sound of her entrance, struggles to pull himself up. Beatrice hurries toward him and unties the bindings and shakes and tries to breathe, but can't, because her apologies are all tangled up in her throat, and she can't talk her way out of this anyway.
The look in her father's eyes is haunted, and Beatrice flinches as he reaches out for her. But he only draws her to him, holds her close against his chest. She closes her eyes and breathes him in and starts crying again, she can't help it.
He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and lifts her chin gently so that she is looking directly into his eyes. She stands there, frozen, as her stomach clenches because this kind of direct eye contact hurts. She doesn't want him to see her, the truth of all the worst things she's done and let happen. She breaks away and looks down, at the trailing wires that coil into tangled loops at the base of the chair. Her father's hand slips to her shoulder, solid and warm the way she remembers it. But he can't stop its shaking.
"Beatrice," he whispers. "Listen to her words."
I love you. No matter what.
"I don't deserve it," she demands.
His hug, his grip on her, is so tight that it chokes her, until she relaxes into it, and lets him support her. "I thought I taught you better than that," he says simply.
"Let the guilt teach you how to be better," she repeats, dully. His words, his admonitions, over and over again, until she learned to nod and make promises that she knew she could never keep, before she crawled into bed to punch her pillow (as hard as she'd just punched Caleb). Over and over, until her stomach stopped hurting. Until she could breathe, until she fell asleep without crying. Until she wasn't selfish anymore.
She repeats back the lie, because isn't that what he wants? She doesn't want to hurt him anymore.
Her father sighs. "Beatrice, listen to me. It wasn't your fault. You didn't kill her." She just shakes her head, because doesn't everything he's just seen prove that she did? "You know, when you chose Abnegation, I was so glad. So selfishly glad, that I wouldn't lose you. But still, I was sure you'd made the wrong choice."
More guilt squirms inside her stomach, more questions she's afraid to ask. The Erudite all already know the truth about her, that she's Divergent, but does her father? Does he know that everything Jeanine is doing to him is because of her?
"I was wrong though," he insists. Her eyes flicker up to meet his before she can stop herself. Curiosity and need overpower guilt and fear, for just this brief moment, however long it will last. "Beatrice, the thing you fear more than anything else is other people hurting. Me. And your mother. Even Caleb. And Tobias Eaton, too."
Tobias Eaton. Images flash through her mind, through her body, pain and fear and helplessness, that impossible, unfightable calm. Her father worked with Marcus, every day for almost twenty years.
"Did you -?"
"No," Andrew replies, picking up on the question with surprising speed, before she even needs to ask it. "I promise you that if I had, it would not have continued." More guilt. She should've told, she should've trusted her father, she shouldn't have let...
Her father leans in close and presses his forehead to hers, his body blocking the ever-present watchers from seeing the movement of his lips. "They think that's how they'll win," he whispers. "But there is so much more to us than the things we are afraid of."
Beatrice's breath catches in her throat as more pictures float up into her mind; her mother, bleeding, dying... and the Dauntless tattoo marking her skin.
Her father squeezes her shoulder gently. "There are so many things I kept from you," he admits softly. "I shouldn't have. There is so much you need to know, so much I should have told you."
Panic rises before she can understand why, clawing at her before she realizes, with perfect clarity, that this is why they didn't stop her from coming in here. They are still watching, through the glass. They are still listening. "Don't," she demands fiercely, pushing her father away. "Don't give them what they want."
Andrew blinks, shakes his head slowly. He takes a careful breath, and nods, before relaxing against the chair again.
"No matter what," he promises.
