Disclaimer: I don't own Divergent.
Tobias, Year 2143
"The game is Dare."
The other initiation instructor, Lauren, is holding on to the handle on the side of the train car, but she keeps swaying so she almost topples out. Then she giggles, and pulls herself back in. Like the train isn't suspended two stories above the street, like she wouldn't break her neck if she fell out.
In her free hand, she holds a silver flask. That explains a lot.
She tilts her head, mischief in her eyes. "Here's what you gotta do. First person picks someone and dares them to do something. Then that person has a drink, does the dare, and gets a chance to dare someone else to do something. And when everyone's done their dare - or died trying - we get a little drunk and stumble home."
"Hey, how do you win?" one of the Dauntless calls out, from the other side of the car. He's a boy who's sitting slouched against Amar, like they're old friends, or blood brothers.
I'm not the only initiate in the car, fortunately. Sitting casually across from me is Zeke, the first jumper, and one of the kids on my Capture the Flag team. He's the guy who snatched the other team's flag, I remember. Squished up against him is a girl, lean but athletic. She's good-looking, with dark hair in corkscrew curls, and warm, tawny skin.
The others in the car are older, all of them Dauntless members. They've got this ease with one another, leaning into one another, punching one another's arms, tousling one another's hair. It's Dauntless camaraderie and friendship and flirtation, and I haven't gotten to try it out with the members, yet. I will myself to relax, bending my arms around my knees.
I really am a Stiff, without Eric by my side.
"You win by not being a little pansycake," Lauren says, smoothly. "And hey, new rule, you also win by not asking dumb questions."
She looks at Amar. "I'm gonna go first, as the keeper of the alcohol. Amar, I dare you to go into the Erudite library while all the Noses are studying, and scream something obscene."
She screws the cap on the flask and tosses it to him. Everyone cheers as Amar removes the cap and takes a swig of whatever liquor is inside.
"Just tell me when we get to the right stop!" he shouts, over the cheering.
Zeke waves a hand at me. "Hey, you're a transfer, right? Weren't you on my team, in Capture the Flag?"
"Yeah," I remind him. "Nice first jump."
I realize, too late, that it might be a sore spot for him - his moment of triumph, stolen by a misstep and loss of balance. But he just laughs, thankfully.
"Yeah, not my finest moment," he says, good-humoredly.
"Well, it's not like anyone else stepped up," the girl at his side points out. "I'm Shauna, by the way. Isn't your name Thomas?"
"It is," I say. I still won't let anyone know I'm Marcus' son.
"Okay. It's nice to meet you, Thomas." Her eyebrows suddenly go up. "Wait, is it true you hit the bulls-eye every time, in knife throwing?"
"You got that right. Been practicing a long time," I tell her.
"Wow." Shauna looks dazzled, which makes me sit up straighter. "Guess you were made for Dauntless." Then the corners of her mouth turn down, like she's feeling glum about something. I don't ask what it is.
"How are your fights going?" Zeke asks, conversationally.
"All right." I motion to my cut and bruised face. "As you can clearly tell."
"Check it out." Zeke turns his head, showing me a large bruise flowering on his jaw. "That's thanks to this girl over here." He indicates Shauna with his thumb.
"He beat me," Shauna admits. "But I got a good shot in, for once. I keep losing."
"It doesn't bother you that he hit you?" I ask, squinting at her.
"Why would it?"
"I don't know," I say. "Because… you're a girl?" I remember Eric's timidity in the arena, when he was up against Amy. And my own unwillingness to hit her. And how I eventually gave Mia the win.
Shauna looks amazed, and a little peeved. "What, you think I can't take it just like every other initiate, just 'cause I have girl parts?" She points to her chest, and I catch myself staring for a second, before I quickly look away, my face flushing.
"Sorry. I wasn't trying to offend you," I say, tripping over my words. "I'm, uh, still getting used to this. All of it."
"Oh, sure," she says, and there's no anger in her voice. "You and the other transfers, you're going through, like, the biggest change in your life. But I'll say this about Dauntless - girl, guy, whatever, it doesn't matter here. What matters is what you got in your gut."
Across the train car, Amar rises. He puts his hands on his hips in a dramatic stance, and marches toward the open doorway. The train dips down and Amar doesn't even hold on to anything, he just shifts and sways with the car's movement. Everyone gets up, following his lead, and Amar is the first one to jump, launching himself into the night. The others stream out behind him, and I let the people behind me carry me toward the opening. I'm not afraid of the speed of the train, and right now it's close to the ground, so when I jump, I do it without fear. I land on two feet, stumbling for a few steps before I stop.
"Look at you, getting your train legs," Amar says, elbowing me good-naturedly. "Here, have a sip. You look like you need it." He passes the flask to me.
Since that night, when I got caught drinking behind the school with Eric, I've been hesitant to consume alcohol of any kind. But I know how comfortable it can be, and I want to show Amar that I'm not wrapped up in skin that's too tight, so I don't miss a beat - I take the flask and drink.
The liquor is like heat in my throat, and it tastes like medicine. But it goes down fast, leaving me warm.
"Good job, Stiff," Amar praises me, and he moves on to Zeke, hooking his arm around the kid's neck and dragging him along, by his head. "I see you've met my young friend, Ezekiel."
"Just 'cause my mom calls me that doesn't mean you have to," Zeke retorts, throwing Amar off. He gives me a secretive look. "Amar's grandparents, they were friends with my parents."
"Were?"
"Well, my dad's dead, and so are the grandparents," Zeke specifies.
"What about your parents?" I ask Amar, unable to rein in my curiosity.
He shrugs. "Died when I was young. Train accident." He sounds oddly nonchalant. "And my grandparents took the jump after I became an official member of Dauntless." Now he makes a careening gesture with his hand, suggesting a dive.
"The jump?" I might be right, about what he's going to say. I've certainly heard the rumors.
"Oh, don't tell him while I'm here," Zeke whispers fiercely, shaking his head. "I don't want to see the look on his face."
Amar isn't paying attention. "The old folks in Dauntless, they sometimes take a flying leap into the chasm when they hit a certain age. It's that, or be factionless. And my grandpa was really sick. Cancer. Grandma didn't care to go on without him."
He tilts his head up to the sky, and his eyes reflect the moonlight. For a moment, I feel like he's showing me a secret version of himself, one carefully hidden beneath all the layers of Dauntless charm, and humor, and bravado. It kind of scares me, since that secret self is hard and cold and sad.
"I'm - sorry," I stammer.
"At least this way, I got to say my goodbyes," Amar says, forlornly. "Most of the time, death just comes whether you've said goodbye or not."
His secret self vanishes with the flash of a smile, and he jogs toward the rest of the group, flask in hand. I stay back with Zeke. He lopes along, somehow clumsy and graceful at once, like a wild dog.
"What about you?" Zeke questions me. "You have parents?"
"One," I say. "My mom died a long time ago."
I remember the funeral, all the Abnegation filling our house with quiet chatter, staying with us in our grief. They carried us meals on metal trays, and cleaned our kitchen, and boxed up all my mother's clothes for us, so there were no traces of her left. I remember them saying that she died from pregnancy complications. There was something… off about that. I had a memory of her, a few months before her death, standing in front of her dresser and buttoning up her shirt. Her stomach was flat.
I brush it off. Banish the image. She's dead. It's a child's memory, unreliable.
"And your dad, is he okay with your choice?" Zeke asks. "Visiting Day's coming up, you know."
"No," I say distantly. "He's not okay with it. At all."
My father's not going to come on Visiting Day. I'm completely sure of that. He'll never speak to, or even look at me again.
The Erudite sector's the cleanest part of the city by far. As usual, every crack in the street's been shored up with tar. Every scrap of trash or rubble, cleared from the pavement. I feel like I need to step with caution, rather than mar the sidewalk with my sneakers. The other Dauntless skip along carelessly, the soles of their shoes making slapping sounds, like pattering rain.
Here, each building that makes up Erudite headquarters is like a pillar of light. The windows we walk past feature the smooth-haired, bright-eyed, glasses-wearing Erudite, their noses turned downward, to their books or screens. I feel a little pinch of nostalgia. It seems like only yesterday that Eric was one of them. My Erudite friend. And I was his Abnegation friend. Erudite is a haven I might've chosen. Instead, I chose the one that laughs at them through the windows, that sends Amar into their lobby to stir up trouble.
Amar reaches the doors of the central Erudite building, and pushes right through them. We watch from just outside, snickering. I peer through the doors at the portrait of Jeanine Matthews, which hangs on the opposite wall. Her yellow hair's been pulled back tight from her face, her blue jacket buttoned beneath her throat.
Her face looks sharp, crisp, as usual. But does she also look a little afraid? I recall the panic in her eyes, when I told her about Eric's predicament. Of course, she feels fear. She's human.
My eyes go to Amar. He charges into the lobby, ignoring the protests of the Erudite at the front desk, and hollers, "Hey, Noses! Check this out!"
All the Erudite in the lobby look up from their books or screens, and the Dauntless explode into laughter as Amar turns, mooning them. The Erudite behind the desk run around it to catch him, but Amar pulls up his pants and speeds off, toward us. We all sprint away from the doors.
I can't help it, I'm laughing too. My stomach aches with it. Zeke runs at my shoulder, and we go toward the train tracks because there's nowhere else to run. The Erudite chasing us give up after a block, and we all gather in an alley, leaning against the brick to catch our breath.
Amar joins us last, his hands raised in a fake gesture of surrender, and we all cheer for him. He holds up the flask like it's a trophy and points at Shauna.
"Young one," he challenges. "I dare you to scale the sculpture in front of the Upper Levels building." Shauna catches the flask when he throws it, and takes a big sip.
"You got it," she says, grinning.
By the time they get to me, almost everyone is drunk, lurching with each footstep and cracking up at every joke, no matter how stupid it is. I feel pretty warm, despite the chill in the air, and my mind's still sharp, taking in everything about the night. The rich smell of the marsh and the sound of bubbling laughter, the blue-black of the sky and the silhouette of each building against it. My legs are sore from running and walking and climbing, and still I haven't done a dare.
I look around, and see that we're close to Dauntless headquarters. The buildings surrounding it seem to sag where they stand.
"Who's left?" Lauren calls out, her bleary eyes skipping over each face, until she reaches mine. "Ah, the Stiff. Thomas, is it?"
"Yeah," I say.
"A Stiff? What's he doing with us?" The boy who sat so comfortably beside Amar looks at me, his words jumbled together. He's the one holding the flask, the one determining the next dare. So far, I've watched people scale tall structures, I've watched them jump into dark holes and wander into empty buildings to retrieve a small piece of furniture, I've watched them run naked down alleyways and stick needles through their earlobes without numbing them first. If someone asked me to think up a dare, I wouldn't be able to. Good thing I'm the last to go.
I feel my nerves acting up. What's the kid gonna tell me to do?
"Okay, then. Stiff… I bet you're super uptight," the boy says, like it's a fact that all the Abnegation are like that. "So, to prove you're a member of our pack, I dare you to get a tattoo."
Here we go again. This is the exact thing Eric told me to do, that I didn't follow through on. I see the Dauntless members' ink, creeping over their wrists and arms and shoulders and throats. The metal studs, sticking through their ears, noses, lips, and eyebrows. My skin's blank, healed, whole. But it doesn't match who I am - I should be scarred, the way they are, marked with the memories of the pain I've survived.
I look the Dauntless boy in the eye. "Fine," I say casually.
He tosses me the flask, and I drain it, though the alcohol stings my throat and lips, and tastes as bitter as poison. Then we start toward the Pire. I find I'm actually excited to carry out this dare.
Tori's wearing a pair of men's underwear and a T-shirt when she answers the door, her hair partly covering her face. She raises an eyebrow at me. We clearly just woke her from a sound sleep, but she doesn't seem pissed off, just a little grouchy.
"Please?" Amar practically begs. "It's for a game of Dare."
He gestures to me. I'm standing right next to him, my Dauntless-flame painting tucked under my arm. I already know what my tattoo will be of, and where I'll ask Tori to put it.
My favorite painting of all time, is one I first saw when I was really young. It was painted by an artist from two centuries ago, a woman named Frida Kahlo, who came from a country called Mexico. Like me, she was well acquainted with pain and suffering. In her teens, she was in a horrible accident, and was bedridden for three months because of her injuries.
Her painting, The Broken Column, instantly stood out to me, because of the way it portrayed her pain. In it, she's completely alone, and standing in front of a fissured, barren landscape. There's no clothing on her torso, just a rigid-looking metal corset, that allows part of her chest to show. And her chest has seemingly been ripped open, to reveal a cracked pillar in place of her spine.
In that painting, she's clearly in agony - tears dot her face, and dozens of nails pierce her skin. Yet, she stands tall, her posture firmly held, her gaze resolute. I could sense a toughness and resilience in her, a very Dauntless-like strength. In fact, when I saw the work for the first time, I actually thought it depicted a Dauntless woman, showing off her tattoo of a broken column, that she got right on her chest.
Something in my spirit changed when I saw the piece. I'd previously believed, that art of any kind had to be just beautiful, and free of the kind of ugliness I was witnessing. Seeing Frida Kahlo's self-portrait made me realize, I could paint something like that. I could make a work of art representing my experience, without feeling like a complete fraud.
This is what my tattoo's going to be - my Broken Column. And it seems fitting that it should document the worst memories of pain that I have.
Tori turns to me. "You sure you want a sleep-deprived woman to tattoo your skin, Thomas? This ink doesn't wash off," she warns.
"I trust you," I say. I won't wiggle out of the dare, not after watching everyone else do theirs, and promising Eric I'd get the tattoo.
"Right." Tori yawns. "The things I do for Dauntless tradition. I'll be right back. I'm going to put on pants." She closes the door behind her.
A few seconds later, she emerges wearing a pair of black pants, her feet still bare. "If I get in trouble for turning on lights at this hour, I'm gonna claim it was vandals and name names."
"Got it," I say.
"There's a back way. Come on," Tori tells us, beckoning with one hand. We traipse after her, through her dark living room, which is tidy except for the sheets of paper spread over her coffee table. Each one is marked with a different drawing. Some of them are harsh and simple, and others are more intricate, detailed. Tori's the closest thing to a true artist, in Dauntless.
I pause by the table. I have to - anything aesthetic automatically draws me in. One of the images depicts all the faction symbols, without the circles that usually bind them. The Amity tree's at the bottom, forming a kind of root system for the Erudite eye, and the Candor scales. Above them, the Abnegation hands seem to cradle the Dauntless flames. It's like the symbols have grown together.
The others have moved past me. I run to catch up, passing through Tori's kitchen - it's also immaculate, though the appliances are all outdated. The back door is open and leads into a short, dank hallway, that opens up to the tattoo parlor.
The room's walls are covered in pictures. The wall by the door is entirely dedicated to Dauntless symbols, some black and simple, others colorful and barely recognizable. Tori turns on the light over one of the chairs, and arranges her tattoo needles on a nearby tray. The other Dauntless gather on the surrounding benches and chairs, like they're getting ready to see a performance of some kind.
"Basic principles of tattooing," Tori explains. "The less cushioning under the skin, or the bonier you are in an area, the more painful the tattoo. For your first one, it's probably best to get it done on an arm, or -"
"Your butt cheek," Zeke cuts in, to several snorts of laughter.
Tori smirks. "Yeah. You would know."
I ignore the two of them, and look at the boy who dared me. I know what he's imagining, that I'm too nervous to pick a bolder design, that I'll get something small and easily hidden, on an arm or a leg. I study his face as I wave a hand over my painting, telling Tori that I want the flames on my skin, in all their flickering glory.
"Whatever you want," Tori says, smiling. "You have a location in mind?"
I rest a hand on my rib cage, remembering all the times Marcus gave me bruises there, and the time I was stuck in that hospital bed, fearing for my own life, in the aftermath of Dr. Knightley's surgery. "Here."
"You sure? That's maybe the most painful place possible."
"Good," I say, and I lean back in the chair.
The crowd of Dauntless shout and whoop, and start passing around another flask, this one bigger than the last. It's bronze, instead of silver.
"So we got a masochist in the chair tonight. Lovely." Tori plants herself on the stool next to me and pulls on a pair of rubber gloves. I sit forward, lifting up the hem of my shirt, and she soaks a cotton ball in rubbing alcohol, and covers my ribs with it. She's about to move away when she frowns, and tugs at my skin with her fingertips. The alcohol bites into the skin of my back, which is still healing from Marcus' most recent assault, and I wince.
"How did this happen, Thomas?" Tori asks.
I look up and notice that Amar's staring at me, his brows knitted.
"He's an initiate," Amar clarifies. "They're all cut and bruised at this point. You should see them all limping around together. It's pretty sad."
"I got a giant bruise on my knee," volunteers Zeke. "It's the sickest blue color -"
He rolls up his pant leg to show off his injury, and the other Dauntless all start showing their own bruises, their own scars. "Got this when you dropped me after the zip line." "Well, I got a stab wound from your grip slipping during knife throwing, so I guess we're even." Tori eyes me for a few seconds, and I'm sure she doesn't fully accept Amar's explanation, for the scars on my back. But she doesn't ask again. She turns on the needle, filling the air with the sound of buzzing, and Amar hands me the flask.
The alcohol's still scalding my throat when the tattoo needle touches my ribs, and I grimace, but somehow I don't mind the pain. I revel in it.
AN: Hope I did justice to the description of Frida Kahlo's self portrait. I couldn't not mention it as one of Tobias' inspirations. Next up, a fresh new perspective. See you around guys.
Also if you happen to spot an example of bad writing, in any of the chapters, please do not hesitate to call it out in the reviews. Broken was a HOT MESS before I edited it.