A/N- I do not own the Divergent characters, they belong to Veronica Roth.

Thanks to BK2U for editing this chapter!


January 10th

The clock radio blares, disturbing us from slumber. "Good morning, Chicago! That song was requested by our lovely listener, Annie, who's leaving the city today!" The radio DJ speaks in a chirpy upbeat voice, much too happy for this time of the morning. Tobias, annoyed, mumbles something into his pillow, and I roll over onto my side, smiling when I look at him. His eyes are squeezed shut, and he buries his head further into the pillow as the DJ babbles on. "Annie, why in God's name would you want to leave Chicago? The other week our listeners took a poll, agreeing that relocating was one of the most stressful things you can go through in your life—alongside marriage and divorce." I run my hand over the bare skin of his back, trailing a finger lightly up his spine and over the planes of his shoulder blades, causing him to shudder. The voice on the radio seems to get even louder now.

"Tris, turn it off," Tobias says moodily, lifting his head up from the pillow and squinting at the morning light, his hair tousled and sticking up in the front.

"Jeez, alright," I grumble, reaching out my hand to slam the snooze button on the clock that sits on the nightstand next to him. He moves his arms out from where they were tucked under his pillow, and rolls onto his back instead. He stretches out and yawns, the sheet resting on his waist, just below the hairs that burn a trail down his abdomen. He props his hands behind his head and closes his eyes again. "Well, I guess what they say about waking up on the wrong side of the bed is true."

"Let me sleep," he says, batting my hand away when I press it against his cheek.

"What's bothering you?" I ask.

"Nothing," he says.

"Nothing. And let me guess— you're fine. Right?" I say, my tone sardonic.

He pulls the sheet up properly to cover our naked chests, tucking it so that it's just below his neck, settling down as if he's getting ready to go back to sleep. "Don't start this now," he mutters.

"I don't even know what it is I'm starting."

"Good," he smiles, mocking sweetness.

"You're an ass sometimes, you know that?" I huff out of frustration, clambering over him and 'accidentally' pressing all my weight down on his stomach, causing him to groan gutturally. When I stand up from the bed, I wrap the sheet around me and drag it away from him so that he lies there— cold and uncovered.

"Tris," he whines, arms wrapping around himself. His teeth chatter dramatically, and he cracks an eye open to look at me as if I'm the most evil thing on the planet.

"Staring at me like you're going to murder me isn't exactly going to win me over," I raise an eyebrow, grabbing my towel off the hook. "Did you bring shampoo? I left mine at your place and my mom's smells of strawberries," I scrunch my nose up.

"I did, but you can't use it," he rolls back onto his stomach and pulls my pillow against him, clutching it with one arm.

"Don't be an idiot," I pull on his ankles but he weighs a ton.

"I thought I was an ass, not an idiot?"

"Fine, I'd rather my hair stink of strawberries than smell like you anyway."

I stomp out of my bedroom and into the small bathroom, twisting the shower faucet on and waiting for the water to turn hot. It doesn't take long for the room to steam up, and I drop my towel and step in. I scrub up, allowing my soapy fingers to run over my body. Is this what Tobias feels? His hands are larger than mine, the skin not as soft. I bite my lip, going down further. But then, the shower curtain flies open and I nearly jump out of my skin. "Crap, you scared me," I say, breathless.

"This isn't a scene in 'Psycho'," he laughs, nudging me aside and stepping in. "Brought this," he says, opening the lid of his shampoo bottle. I wet my hair under the stream of water and he squirts it out onto his hand, foaming it up in his own hair before pouring more out and massaging it into mine. He clasps onto my shoulders and turns me around so that I face him, his hands running over my head as the water washes the suds down the drain. "Hey," he says, wiping the water out of my eyes. "I don't mean to be an ass." I lean up on my tiptoes and kiss him, careful not to slip. We finish up methodically, the running water turning tepid by the time we get out. Tobias dries off and slips on boxer shorts, I wrap a towel around my head and slip on boy shorts and a tee. He goes back into the bathroom, filling up the sink with water and wiping the steam away from the mirror. I walk in, propping myself up on the counter and pulling him to stand between my legs.

"What happened to your electric one?" I ask, picking up the plastic razor in my hand and wetting it in the water.

"It stopped working, but I've had it a while," he says, rubbing shaving cream over the hairs on his face.

"You should have told me, I would have gotten you one for Christmas." I cup the underneath of his neck with my hand, holding him still as I run the razor across the skin on his cheeks. When I go over the soft area of his throat, his breathing stills. "I'm not going to cut you," I smile.

"I know," he says, hands resting on my hips. I pat his face with a towel once he's finished, and kiss the newly uncovered skin, but he pulls away. "I need to put cream on."

"Here," I grab my tub of facial moisturiser from the side.

"I'm not putting that on," he frowns and roots through his toiletry bag for his own.

"You're such a boy," I say, prodding his side before hopping down off the counter.

"No, I'm a man," he smirks, lifting his arms and rubbing on deodorant. "I forgot to say, Lynn texted you before you got in the shower."

"Saying what?"

"I don't know. I don't read your texts, Tris."

"She probably just wants me to go over and visit her. I'll have to get dressed." Even though I was looking forward to spending a lazy day with Tobias.

"I need to see Zeke today anyway," he says.

"Can I kiss you now?"

He gives me a small smile, arms wrapping around me tightly, "maybe." He murmurs in my ear, hands dragging the towel away from my hair so he can kiss me and rest his chin on my head without restriction. Although things aren't always perfect between us, I can't really imagine wanting it better than this.

After getting dressed, I persuaded Tobias that he didn't need to drive me, that I wanted to walk to Lynn's house by myself. The temperature is freezing; winter cold. Walking down her road is familiar and safe. Except for the sound of bad rap music piercing through the slight fog. It's terrible 'I feel like I'm banging my head repeatedly against a brick wall' kind of music. It's the kind of music Lynn listens to, unfortunately.

I slam my fist against the white-painted wooden door, the broken brass knocker rattling every time as my knuckles burn with impact. Lynn answers the door after a short while, her hair wild and her makeup smudged around her drooping green eyes. She looks bedraggled, half asleep. Smiling like an idiot, she shuffles sideways and holds the door open wider so that I can walk past her.

"Lynn?" I say, raising a questioning eyebrow.

"Come in," she says, walking into the kitchen. Her voice sounds subdued and incredibly hard to hear over the loud music. I walk into the living room first, turning off the sound system so that I can hear myself think. My head clears when the house is silent, but then a crash resonates through the hallway from the kitchen.

"What's going on?" I shout, making my way over to Lynn. I dump my bag on the kitchen table, and gaze in astonishment at the state of the place. The kitchen is a war zone — splattered brown batter mix coating the white walls above the counter, cracked eggs and yolk dripping down from the counter onto the floor, flour coating the surfaces and the tiles. The air is clouded with smoke and I smell burning. I pick up the empty flour bag from where it was tossed on the floor, and make my way over to the stove. I turn the heat off on the oven and slip on a mitt, opening the door only to be choked by more heated grey air. I cough a little, wafting my hand in front of me. Inside the oven, sits a rectangular cake tin with some kind of charred black substance inside. "Great," I mutter, pulling out the tin and setting it on the side.

"I tried to bake you a cake," Lynn says from behind me. She has a small grin on her face, leaning heavily on the counter. "But I ended up getting baked instead." She begins to giggle hysterically, before I remove the oven mitts and throw them at her.

"You're an idiot, do you know that?" I say, poking the edge of the rectangular tin. Whatever it is, it's bubbling, the outline of it black and stiff as coal. "Please tell me you weren't trying to make pot brownies?"

Lynn smirks, "I wasn't trying to make pot brownies." She fiddles with the rings on her fingers — her tell. Something that she always does when she lies.

I drag a palm over my face, in an attempt to rid myself of the tension headache that's making its way over me. "And now you're high?" I knock something with my foot when I turn around, a glass bottle on the floor filled with brown alcohol, its burning substance spilling and forming a puddle on the floor. "Oh, and drunk, too." I sigh, picking up the bottle and dumping it onto the counter.

"I am not."

"Whatever, I don't care. But we need to clean this mess up before your parents or the parole officer visit."

"The parole officer already visited this morning," she hiccups, "and I don't care about my parents."

"But believe it or not, they care about you. Perhaps I should call them."

"Don't call them Tris," she collapses on the floor in a heap, her head rolling back and resting against the island counter. "They'd send me back, and I don't want that. I want to be free," she holds her arm out, her hand moving through the air in a swaying motion. I want Lynn to be free, too. I want her to be free like the birds scattered on my collarbone, ready to take flight. I want her to be free like the creative girl I was awe-struck by at the age of twelve. But Lynn has changed a lot since then. Even though she's not in prison, she isn't free. She's become her own prisoner, a prisoner of her thoughts and feelings and sadness. It's painful to see, and I must try and stop it.

"I have to," I say quietly, walking past her to retrieve the house phone. She mutters some form of disapproval, and then latches onto my hand and tugs it back with force. My foot slips on spilled egg yolk, my body falling backwards with the weight of Lynn's pull and the lack of a sturdy surface beneath me. My back slams against the hard tiles and I get the wind knocked out of me. I wheeze, unable to breathe.

Lynn giggles. "Oh no," she says. "Come on, get back up." When she pulls on my arms, it makes the pain in my chest and back worsen, my tail bone throbbing with killer pain from the fall. My breaths are shallow; my neck feels strangled. "I know, I'll call for help." She gets up from where she was crouched next to me, and starts to rummage through my bag on the kitchen table. I close my eyes, focusing on my breathing, trying not to panic because I know the sensation of being winded will eventually subside— it happened once before when I was a small child and attempted to perform a back flip on the trampoline in our backyard. My mother was there, she told me to curl into a ball to relax my muscles. "Who's Tobias Eaton?" Lynn asks, "he's on your speed dial."

"Four," I wheeze. "Call him."

I can hear the ringing as she holds the phone to her ear, with a wondrous look in her eyes. "Hello?" She says. "Oh, hello, Tobias Eaton. This is Lynn. Yes, she's here. But she had an accident. She fell. Yes, she's on the floor. Yes, she's awake…but I think she might be crying." Lynn holds the phone away from her ear, and walks over to crouch back onto the floor next to me. "Tris? Are you crying?"

"No, just tell him to get over here."

"Four? Tris said that you need to… Oh." Lynn looks at me, annoyed. "He hung up on me."

"Whatever, just help me sit up," I hold out my hands to her, but she can't lift me. Instead, she slips on the sticky substance and falls onto her ass. She laughs, clearly unfazed by the harsh contact with the tiles.

By the time I've managed to shuffle around and pull myself up to lean haphazardly against the cupboards, we hear a key turning in the lock of the front door. A couple of voices emerge, one clearly Tobias, the other feminine. "We're in here," Lynn shouts giddily.

"Oh shit," I hear a light voice curse, and look up from the floor to see Shauna standing in the doorway shaking her head. "Four, get in here."

Tobias rushes in, relief evident on his face when he sees me smiling sheepishly. He makes his way over to me, hooking his hands under my arms and lifting me from the slippery ground with ease. My feet slide a couple more times, the batter and yolk and milk mixing together under my sneakers. But he keeps a firm grip on me, walking me over to where the tiles aren't coated in goop. "Are you alright?" He asks, hands gripping onto the tops of my arms, his head bowed over and tilted so he can look into my eyes.

"I'm fine, now. But Lynn obviously isn't," I nod my head in her direction. She's lying on the floor now, her hair sticky as her arms slide around in the spilled batter. Shauna hovers over her, attempting to drag her up from the floor. Tobias pulls out a chair and helps me slowly sit down before walking over to Lynn and helping Shauna lift her up from the ground. She squirms, protesting profusely at the manhandling, hitting Tobias on the arm when his hands grip onto her kicking thigh.

"Keep still," Tobias spits at her harshly, his short temper showing.

"Don't get angry at her," I warn him. "She's practically out of her mind."

Shauna tries to coo calming things to her sister, her arms wrapped around her waist as they both lift her and plop her back down onto the brown leather beanbag by the bookshelf. Lynn kicks Shauna in the shin, her limbs flailing, and somehow manages to elbow Tobias where it hurts most. He crouches over in pain, biting his lip, his hands clasped together below his abdomen. "Fuck," he hisses.

"Lynn, you need to calm down, we're only trying to help you," Shauna says, gripping Lynn's wrists. "Did she hit your package?" Shauna smiles ruefully at Tobias, who throws her a pained glare.

Shauna tells us to leave, that she's already called their parents and they're on their way. I take one last look at Lynn, slouched in the beanbag, an incoherent mess. It takes me a while to get seated comfortably in the car, the bottom of my back still searing with pain. I end up leaning heavily on my thigh, sitting sideways. "Zeke and Shauna were at my apartment when Lynn called…I'm sorry if you didn't want her to come, but she wouldn't let up."

"I didn't at first, but I know that what Lynn needs is help, even if that means having to go back inside." He smiles at me, his hand clasping over mine. Walking into his apartment we are a sorry pair, both of us waddling and limping slightly in pain. I become irritated with the way that Tobias is fussing over me, assuring him that my back is fine and I don't need to get looked at. "You know, I can walk without you propping me up like a crutch," I say. "Perhaps you should stick a bag of peas on that," I nod my head to his nether regions, trying to banish the humorous smile on my face at the way that he's still hunched over. He mutters something under his breath, throwing his car keys onto the side table and slamming the door behind him. Zeke is still here, sitting at the dining table which has a bunch of papers strewn across it.

"Hey, Tris," he says with a smile, taking the pen that he was chewing on out of his mouth.

"Hey," I say, walking over to the table. I lean heavily on the back of the chair, sifting my hand through the papers. There are leaflets with pictures of pretty houses on the front, small maps and scribbled out notes consisting of numbers and what look like financial calculations. Tobias walks over, hurriedly, attempting to move me away from the table. "What are you doing?" I ask, a terrible feeling in my gut, like I just swallowed a huge stone and it's plummeting downwards.

"Just looking at places in Illinois and seeing if Four can afford them," Zeke says casually, writing something down inside one of the leaflets.

"What?" I exclaim, looking up at Tobias with wide eyes, searching his blue ones for answers. He begins to stammer, face slack, then he turns his head and shoots Zeke a death glare.

"You haven't told her?" Zeke asks worriedly, biting on the inside of his cheek and leaning backwards out of instinct, away from an angry looking Tobias.

"Haven't told me what?"

"Tris-"

"What is all this?" I push Tobias away from me with force. I pick up the leaflets— realtor leaflets. "Are these houses on the other side of Illinois?" I look at the addresses, then the newspapers that are spread open on the table. They've circled different houses in green and red pen.

My worst fears are laid out on the table, literally.

"You're leaving?" I ask breathlessly, turning around to look at Tobias. He just stares at the floor.


Sorry for the cliffy...

There's only two chapters left of Jaded after this one, so stay tuned!

My tumblr: yabooklover20

Thanks for the favs/follows and to those of you who left reviews, it's really encouraging, especially since these last few chapters have been an absolute killer to write...endings are the worst. Please continue your support :)