AN: Hi, it's me again. I'm still cleaning out my drafts and publishing what's worthwhile. This one was almost complete, so I will be editing and completing this story. I'll commit to weekly updates for now, and once it's in better shape will promise to update more frequently. Please let me know what you think.
The light from the hallway filters in through the blinds, waking her before her alarm is set to go off. She curses quietly, angry for once again forgetting to buy some curtains to block the fluorescent lights that were recently installed in the hallways of the faction. A safety feature, they were told, but in reality it was to more easily watch the coming and going of the members of their faction, especially in the wake of the war their city was slowly recovering from.
She grabs her phone off of the nightstand to turn off her alarm, and she scrolls through the various updates from the last shift in the control room. When she transferred from Abnegation almost three years ago, she wasn't sure if she would even make it in the warrior faction, and she certainly didn't expect to finish a respectable sixteenth place out of what started as a group of over fifty total initiates. She'd heard rumors that there were several stages of cuts during Dauntless initiation, and she was surprised to learn they had suspended some of the cuts beginning with her training class. They were told it was due to an influx of jobs within the faction, however they later learned it was because Jeanine Matthews needed more mindless soldiers to carry out her plans or overthrow the government of the city of Chicago.
They weren't people to her, they were just drones.
After seeing nothing of real importance from her coworkers, she finally extracts herself from her warm and comfortable bed, and pads into her kitchen to start the coffee pot. Her overnight shift in the control room would start in an hour, and she needed time to shower and drink enough caffeine to prepare her for the evening ahead of her.
She bundles up for the trip to the basement to start her shift, knowing that the underground part of their old building was known to be so much colder than the rest of the compound. It needed to be, in order to prevent all of the servers and technical equipment stored in the central security hub from overheating.
"Hey Tris," Uriah grins from his desk as she enters the control room.
"Hey Uri," She returns his smile as she begins to settle in at her desk.
Uriah Pedrad had become one of her closest friends during their initiation class, and that friendship continued to this day. The Dauntless born was a wealth of information during initiation, provided to him by his older brother Ezekiel who had successfully passed his own initiation class two years prior to theirs. Tris was intimated when she first arrived at Dauntless, but she soon learned that while the Dauntless born initiates may have been cocky, they were also willing to give her a chance.
The first hour of their shift is spent going over the checklist left by the previous team. They run diagnostics to ensure no feeds or cameras or down, do a quick sweep for activity by camera and do a temperature check on their server room.
Tris yawns again, wrapping her blanket around her shoulders as she watches the cycled feed on her monitors.
"You seem awfully tired, does this mean you and Four finally made up, Miss Trissy?" Uriah asks from his spot beside her.
"Not a chance," Tris chuckles nervously, then picks up the radio to check in with the interns. Her relationship with Four had been non-existent at best since the war. Before the war, he was her trainer and she was one of the weaker initiates in his latest class. Tris was drawn to him from the start, not knowing he was also a former Abnegation who had transferred to the warrior faction. The first stage of initiation was mental, and during their second day in the faction they were put under a simulation designed to show them one of their trainer's fears. She had randomly gotten assigned a fear of Lauren's that simulated a kidnapping, and when Four watched her manifest a knife during the simulation he realized that Tris had the ability to manipulate the sim. She was divergent, just like he was, and he decided to help her.
Somehow during her initiation, she began to have feelings for her trainer, and she later learned those feelings were reciprocated. She and Four had quietly begun to date, as much as two inexperienced former Abnegation dependents could without catching the eye of anyone, especially the youngest leader Eric Coulter, who had been assigned to oversee the initiation process for both the Dauntless born and transfer initiates. Eric was somewhat of an enigma to Tris, she was intimidated by his cold nature and the way he could cut you with just a look or words. However, there were other times when she was in the training room practicing during off hours that he would help her. He was critical of her form, and her lack of muscle tone, and he offered help to correct both, and he would often demonstrate the best methods to build more muscle mass.
They weren't friends, but they at minimum peacefully coexisted, however during training hours he was back to the normal hard assed instructor he always was. Tris respected him for it.
The first time she mentioned to Four that Eric had offered her some suggestions to help her build muscle mass, he was almost irate. He explained to Tris that Eric was one of the leaders who was a plant of Erudite, and his sole purpose in being involved with initiation was to report anyone who exhibited signs of being divergent to Erudite's leadership. He shared with his girlfriend what he knew so far – that Erudite spent a lot of time in their faction, meeting specifically with leadership, and also they had begun to deliver a serum he had never seen before.
At this point, Four also worked full time in the Dauntless security center, and he had the same type of access to the systems that Tris has now. He used his access to begin hacking into their head leader's personal computer, and his communication devices, and through that he learned that a war was being planned to overthrow Abnegation. Four wasn't sure what Jeanine Matthews, Erudite's head leader's obsession with divergents had to do with the overthrow plans, but it seemed that the two initiatives went hand in hand.
A war was definitely waged, and when their faction mates were turned into mind controlled drones, Four and Tris played along. They were able to team up with a group of divergents, including Uriah, to bring Jeanine down, but not before losing many of their friends and loved ones along the way. Tris had gotten captured during the chaos, and she was being held in a cell along with other divergents that Jeanine's team had captured in an effort to open a box that had a message that was purported to be from beyond the city walls. Ultimately, it was Tris who opened that box and it was then exposed to be nothing magical, it was simply a time capsule with a complicated puzzle combination that contained items from the city's history.
When Four and Tris had become separated, he had teamed up with Tori Wu to help bring Jeanine down. To everyone's surprise, locked deep within the faction in a singular cell near Jeanine's office was none other than Eric Coulter.
No one could understand why Jeanine had imprisoned Eric, and he wasn't willing to answer anyone's questions once he was found. Four immediately had him arrested, and during his trial under truth serum it was revealed that Eric was not a willing participant in Jeanine's war, or of her plans to overthrow Abnegation. The only thing he'd ever agreed with was to support Erudite's request for Abnegation to give all of the factions an equal say in how their city was run. However, at some point along the way he realized that Jeanine had no intention of a peaceful negotiation with Abnegation, nor was she actually planning on sharing the government leadership with all of the factions. She wanted sole power, and he wanted no part of that. Once Jeanine realized Eric was working against her, she had him locked up, and that's where Four's team eventually found him.
Eric was found not guilty of war crimes, however when Jack Kang released him to return to his faction the new Dauntless leadership team consisting of Four, Tori and Harrison revoked his leadership and then kicked him out of the faction to live factionless.
Four had led the charge to have Eric removed from the faction, knowing that his own mother Evelyn, who had faked her own death to get away from her marriage, would eventually have Eric destroyed once he was out amongst her people. No one other than Tris and Four knew that his estranged mother was alive, and no one besides Four knew that she actually had her own factionless compound that was comparable in size to Candor. With Tori and Harrison's help, he had convinced the faction that Eric was not trustworthy, and they had no one challenge their decision to throw him out of the faction.
When Tris finally learned of Four's decision and push to remove Eric from the faction, she strongly opposed, and she let him know he was making his decision personal. She wasn't a fan of Eric, she wasn't his friend and she was barely an acquaintance, but she also believed in being fair and she knew his decision was anything but fair. Eric may have been an asshole, and he may have at least in the very early stages of Jeanine's planning had been willing to help her, but he never did anything wrong. At minimum, he was guilty of betraying his faction by consorting with another faction, but there were also arguments against that since he was a leader working with another leader. It wasn't their first argument since the war ended, and likely wouldn't be their last, but at least the frequency of their arguing was much lower since she had moved into her own apartment and sought out her own space from her boyfriend almost three months ago.
Four wanted her in his home, and under his thumb and Tris had finally realized that he didn't necessarily love her, he wanted to control her. He had become a stranger to her, but to their faction Four was the hero they needed. He was who was credited with ending the war, and he took his place on their pedestal without ever exposing that his supposedly dead mother is who helped him all along.
"So this break up between you two is real?" Uriah asks.
"Yes, and I don't know why people assume that it's not." She replies coldly.
"Hey, I didn't mean to piss you off. I just care about you, I wanted to make sure you were okay." He says sincerely.
"I'm sorry Uri, I'm just on edge. I guess there's just this part of me that wants to be known as just Tris, not Four's ex, not the war shit, just me you know? We all just got to move on. Abnegation was destroyed, we've spent the last year rebuilding it, and even though it's right in front of our faces that our faction caused this."
"We didn't cause this, Jeanine and her people did-"
"Does it make it any better? We were forced to kill people, and even if you didn't pull the trigger yourself you saw everything. Not once has our new leadership team offered any of us mental health counseling for what we went through. Our new leaders wiped all traces of our former leadership team from the faction and just took over like nothing happened, and my ex boyfriend just became a complete fucking stranger. He's awful now."
"Tris, did Four do something to you?" Uriah asks quietly when she pauses. She trails her teary hazel eyes up at him, "Did he hurt you?"
"He hurts everyone. We all needed help after what we went through, none of us got any. He's made decisions that the person I once loved never would have-"
"He's been forced to, Tris. Tori, Harrison, Four, they've all been forced into a position none of them previously wanted and are literally and figuratively cleaning up a war none of them caused. What do you expect from him?" Uriah asks.
"To just be fair. To realize that we don't need fear mongering right now, and we don't need to be told that Dauntless is just about picking themselves up and moving on, to treat us as humans, to show compassion." She sighs.
"Our faction hasn't had compassion in a long time, Tris. For what it's worth, I agree with you, but I also realize that if I need compassion I'm never going to find it here."
She smiles briefly at him before turning back to her work. She watches the monitors, swapping between them just like she does every single night, looking for anything unusual. She's brought out of her thoughts by movement on one of the monitors, which isn't unusual since the factionless seem to be more mobile at night. She sees a figure on one of the screens, walking alone, which is highly unusual. She zooms in and the shock of what she's seeing causes her to take a sharp intake of breath.
She would know those tattoos anywhere – the bars leading up the column of his neck – it's Eric.
In the almost fourteen months since he's been extracted from the faction, no one has ever reported seeing him on the cameras. She glances over to Uriah, but notices he is scrolling through his own assigned feeds and paying no attention to her. She turns her full attention back to her monitor and follows his movements. She can tell he is hyper aware of his surroundings, and one of his arms is limply hanging to his side while he tries to stabilize it with his opposite hand.
He looks directly into a camera and stops. She knows he can see the red light that indicates he is being watched on a live feed, but he doesn't seem to care. He looks haggard, much thinner than he was when she last saw him, and ultimately defeated. His grey eyes have a vacancy she's never seen, but he looks back and forth quickly before he finally focuses on the camera again.
She's about to activate the two way video when something startles him and he runs away. She turns the camera back and forth and sees nothing, and the creak of Uriah's chair makes her turn the camera off briefly. She checks over her shoulder and finds Uriah still engrossed in his monitors and she turns every feed surrounding the camera she spotted Eric on and sees nothing.
It's almost as if he vanished.