CHAPTER 21

"So, Beatrice, what was your childhood like?"

Dr. Marshall stares me down from across the office, her knobby hands clasped on her wooden desk like they always are, making me feel safer and less threatened. I lie across the chair, my legs strewn over the arm and one hand in my hair, the other brushing the carpet below me. I am drowsy. Not tired exactly. Just...out of it. It is after lunch, and I just took my daily medication, which always makes me feel strange.

"Uh, it was fine, I guess. A bit boring. We never got to have much fun. It was to selfish," I sneer, making a bitter face at the ceiling light. I now realize that Abnegation wasn't the homey place I had always imagined it as. Though it was always very peaceful and calming, it is nothing compared to the hectic screams of the Dauntless. My family. My real family.

"Did you have any friends?"

I scoff. I feel like I have already answered these questions before. "No. I barely ever got out of the house unless my parents were forcing me to volunteer. I rarely even talked to my brother or my neighbors." An ache in my chest reminds me of Caleb, the old Caleb, when we were just siblings living in Abnegation. I miss him. He was the only one I could ever turn to, give my trust. But now that trust is broken, as well as our family ties.

"Were you ever mistreated as a child?"

I sit up, my head immediately spinning at the question, the image of Tobias being beaten by his father in his fear landscape materializing in my mind. I wonder if he has been asked this question. If he was brave enough to answer truthfully, or cowered away behind a shaking voice and tense muscles. I wish I could be with him instead of thoughts of him, comfort him with words and gentle touches instead of prying glances. But of course, that just can't happen. Not now, not ever.

"No, my parents cared for me greatly. The only thing of any question that they did was deprive me of my childhood."

"But you just said that there was no problem with you childhood." She tilts her head to the side, her eyebrows creasing in intrigue.

"Well, living in a society like that, there wasn't much room for recreation, especially in Abnegation," I reply, twisting my tangled hair around my fingers.

"So, you did not enjoy your childhood?"

"No," I say, irritated. "I just said that. Life in that city was shitty, if you can even manage to comprehend the things that went on there. Just ask my mother. She knows how corrupt things got." I glare at her across the desk, where she is scribbling down notes on her papers, the scratching of the pen like nails on a chalk board in my ears. Her hand stops, her eyes, blue like an ocean storm, flicking up to meet mine over her glasses.

"Beatrice-"

"My name is Tris."

"Beatrice." Her tone becomes sharper, her angled eyebrows tilting downward. More creases form around her mouth and eyes as she frowns deeply. "I understand what you went through. I know that your upbringing wasn't under the best circumstances, but I was wondering if any specific events equated to how you are today."

"But I thought that you said that the Divergent gene caused me to be like this," I retort, crossing my arms over my chest, my eyes not straying from hers.

"Yes, but it can also make you more susceptible to outside influences and extreme emotional trauma."

"I didn't have any emotional trauma in Abnegation. I didn't even have any emotions until I transferred to Dauntless."

"Well, did anything happen in Dauntless? Was it the change in setting? Was it being taken away from my family?" She leans over her desk, as if anticipating my answer.

"I wasn't taken away from my family. I chose to leave," I snap, but my eyes drop to the floor. I unconsciously curl into myself, my arms clamping around myself like a vise, my legs pulling themselves up to my chest. "Dauntless wasn't like I hoped it would be."

"When did you feel the first signs of the symptoms setting in?"

I close my mouth before I can answer. I had never really thought of the gene effecting me in my life before now. But now that I that I think about it, I can pinpoint many moments that signified that there was something bad happening in my head. "It's hard to say exactly. Dauntless wasn't the most joyful place. It was full of death and darkness and bad people."

"What happened to you specifically?" Dr. Marshall seems to be eating this stuff up. She is frantically writing my every word down in her notes, glancing up to acknowledge me every so often with a bright look in her eyes.

I take a shaking breath, my eyes darting around the room and resting on any object but her. I don't want to tell her. I don't want anyone to know the things that happened to me. I don't want anyone to know the thoughts that went through my head, even then. I feel like my tragedies are the only thing that I have left of my own. With all of the truth serum confessions and therapy sessions, I feel like my brain is scraped clean of all sentiments. All I have left are my secrets, too close to let go, too wretched to be formed into words and released from my lips like black ravens, only to fly away from my grasp and be gone forever.

But maybe I want them gone. Maybe if I am free of my burdens of hidden calamities, I can fly away like raven words, and be forever gone in peace.

"I-I..." I take a gasping breath as my throat closes up, pushing down the sob of remembrance that wants to force itself from my mouth. "I didn't do well in the beginning of initiation. I was bullied by the other initiates because of my original faction, because I was too small, because I was ugly. I tried to ignore them, but sometimes it j-just got to me.

"I did the best in the second stage. Some others were jealous, and they tried t-to kill me," I whisper hoarsely. Tears stream down my face, my cheeks warming up. "One of the boys touched m-me."

My eyes are glued to the floor, my blurry vision barreling toward the brown carpet. I barely register the pain as I wring my hands around my wrists. "One of them was my friend."

Pen scratches.

"He killed himself a few days later." A light switches on in my mind, a wave of dread washing over my body, a sob springing from my lips as I lurch forward, gripping my stomach as the realization hits me like a brick wall. Al must have had the Divergent gene. It must have taken him over faster than the rest of us. He wasn't strong enough to stick through until the truth came out. And I am part of the reason why he is gone. He is a causality of this war against the darkness.

"Tob-Tobias helped me through everything." I take a quivering breath to try and stop my voice from squeaking. "He was there for me for a while, but he had it much worse. It wasn't long until it took him too."

"Oh, Tobias? The one with one arm?"

My head snaps up, anger cutting through the tears at her insensitive remark. "Yes," I growl through my teeth.

"What is your relationship with him?" she inquires, shifting her papers around on her desk.

"Um, we were together, but after the war and the depression, we...uh...drifted apart," I mumble, scrubbing at my wet cheeks with my sleeves.

"And why is that exactly? I know there has to be more," she states, leaning back in her chair with a light sigh.

"How do you if I am telling the truth?" I sneer, clenching my fists defensively.

"Because you are a terrible liar. I can tell that there was more to your relationship by the way you talk about him. No one just talks about a past lover with that much resentment and remorse in their voice." The sides of her mouth turn up in a satisfied smirk, as if she had just solved the mystery of an unidentified serial killer.

I sit in astonishment for a moment, unable to form the right words to say. I feel like it is getting continually harder to breath with each confession. I don't like this. I am spilling my guts to someone that I have only known for a few days, and is a psychiatrist. I am spelling out my reasons for ending up here, some of the words new to my lips after being buried deep down in a box sealed with a broken lock, tumbling from my security and into this unknown world where they don't belong. Personal things should be kept personal. I feel like the air around me is becoming tinged with darkness as my raven words transform into demons, exposing themselves, grinning wickedly at the freedom from my box of a broken mind.

"He couldn't take it. He broke one day, and he went off on me."

"He abused you?"

"Yes," I choke out.

Pen scratches.

"Well, that could be explained by the fact that he has bipolar disorder."

"What?" I question, leaning forward in my chair, my hands gripping the arms.

"Bipolar disorder. It is characterized by unusual shifts in mood and energy levels and sleeping and eating patterns. It can cause difficulty in carrying out day to day tasks, problems in relationships, and even suicide. Usually, people with this disorder have severe and erratic changes in behavior in a period of a days or weeks. They can have manic episodes, where they are unusually joyful and full of energy, and then have a depressive episode, where they extremely moody and morose, and can even be explosive and irritable at times. It is a very severe disorder. Tobias is one of the most concerning patients here. I have never seen a case so extreme."

Everything makes sense now. This is why Tobias lashed out at me. This is why he goes from wanting to win me back to wanting himself dead. This is why he doesn't eat or sleep. This is why he goes from loving me to hating me in a moments notice.

"Wait, why is his case so extreme?"

"Well," she pulls out a white folder, opening it and skimming through the pages. "In his file, it says that yesterday, at his therapy session, he was perfectly fine one moment, just talking about his relationship with you, and then suddenly he was up and knocking everything off of the doctor's desk and then proceeded to throw his chair across the room." She looks up from the folder, grinning over her glasses. "Quite a feat for a guy with only one arm."

I scoff, wishing I could tell her off for teasing Tobias like that.

"He was threatening the doctor, so they had to call in security to pin him down and sedate him."

I swallow hard, my hands trembling. "Wait, isn't this information confidential?"

Dr. Marshall presses her lips together, closing the folder with a snap. "Yes..." she sighs, "But I thought that you might want to know, since you know how he is and what not..."

"Why do you even have his file?"

"Oh, well, we had to assign him a new therapist, so I volunteered for the job," she replies warmly.

One person is going to know all of our deepest secrets. One person is going to have access to all of weaknesses and faults. I doubt that Dr. Marshall would ever use any of it against us, but the thought still unsettles me.

"So, how did breaking apart from Tobias effect you?" she asks, suddenly changing the subject. I sigh and slump back into the chair, wishing that this session was over already. I feel like I have been wrung out, and there is nothing left for me to tell. But there is still so much more that I am sure that she is going to scrape out of me.

"It messed me up, okay? I was already mixed up from the war, and the new world and whatever, but I just got worse. I was alone. Nobody understood. Nobody else was... like me." The fabric of the chair is soft against my fingers, but I barely feel anything at all. My mind is spinning, connecting memories with the knowledge of the Divergent gene and seeing how everything fits together like a puzzle. "I felt numb and empty. I just wanted to feel again. And being in Dauntless made me comfortable around knives, able to withstand pain. I felt like it was the only solution." My fingers trace the raised lines on my wrists thoughtfully, almost as if they are a pleasant memory.

I continue. "But that wasn't what effected me most. I think it was the simulation attack that set me off. Seeing all my friends turn into murderers against their will scarred me. I lost both of my parents in one day to evil forces that I could not stop. My whole world, my whole existence was uprooted as the factions came crumbling down. Jeanine wanted us dead, because she thought that we were a threat to other citizens, even though she had conducted the war that killed so many of our own people. We were singled out, discriminated against, distrusted, tested on like lab rats. I think that it was the fact that I didn't know why any of this was happening to us that killed me. I was misunderstood for reasons unknown and I felt like everything was my fault."

I pause for a moment, staring down into my lap, surprisingly calm.

"I contemplated killing myself. In Candor, after we were taken captive and tested with truth serum, I climbed up on a window ledge. I was going to jump, but I didn't. This whole time, I have been trying to decide if that was the right choice or not."

Pen scratches.

Hello again. Just another super depressing chapter for you. It got a bit poetic in there. Sorry, but I can't help it. I just love poetry.

You may have noticed that I changed the picture for this story. It is something I drew, based off the cover of a book I have read recently, called The Program. The story is a bit similar to this one, with depression and mental hospitals in all, but I am not plagiarizing anything. I read the book after I came up with this story line, but I do like to get inspiration form the book. I just drew Tris and Tobias on the cover in this story, instead of the characters from the actual book.

Also, I have suddenly fallen ill. Not like anything serious. Just a bit of a cold. But I have been trying to cope with it by lying on the couch all day, eating chips and salsa while binge watching Daredevil, which is a show I highly recommend, on Netflix.

DON'T FORGET TO REVVVVVVIIIIIIEEEEEEWEWWWWWWWW!