AN: Hello again! Appreciate the love this story is getting so far. Today we'll get a better look inside of Eric's head. I plan on keeping the same Tues/Thurs/Sat update schedule since I am pretty far into writing this story. I hope you enjoy.

I can't sleep. I've been in prison long enough to get used to the shitty sleeping conditions, and but tonight it completely eludes me.

They sent her.

Almost five years ago, they had sent another shrink to work with me. I can't even remember his name, but I remember he was nervous and sweaty when he was sitting across from me. He kept looking at his file, and just reading off my charges and various blemishes since being locked up. It felt like he was just reading a story about my life, and it was all of the lowlights.

I've been moved around a lot, mostly because of my own behavior issues, but other times it seemed that maybe they were trying to ditch responsibility for a prisoner with my kind of notierity. When I was first locked up in Chicago, the guards gave me hell, and I really didn't give them much reason not to. I've always had a temper, and at that point in my life I didn't care if I lived or died, so I dared them to do their worst.

They did.

Almost all of the war criminals were here, because every single person including Jeanine herself had appellate lawyers working for them in an effort to save their lives. Since the prison is segregated by gender, I never crossed paths with Jeanine or Chaney, however I saw Harrison, Max, Peter and so many of the other men who followed her. I had a target on my back and I knew it; it wouldn't have mattered if I had of walked out of Candor or walked into these walls, I was a dead man walking.

I knew I was going to die, so I may as well have my fun on my way out.

I thought for sure that the day they put me in a cell alone with Peter Hayes that one of us would die. He almost got me, the surgical repair to my neck was an easy target and he opened me back up with his bare hands. I don't remember much after that, except waking up in the infirmary several days later.

While I was recovering in the infirmary, I found an unattended pair of scissors and I decided just to do the job myself. They had me in a plaster neck brace that I couldn't cut through, so I slit my wrists instead. The cuts were deep, but they found me before I could actually bleed out, so once again I was patched up by the prison docs and when I was well enough they dropped me into solitary, naked and cuffed so I couldn't hurt myself.

I was only allowed out of my cuffs to eat, and even that was supervised and I was given ten minutes to finish.

Chicago got rid of me as quickly as they could, and everywhere I went there was at least one person who knew who I was and wanted their notoriety for being the one who finally ended me. Prison has been pretty brutal, but it's all I really know.

Tonight, everything is heavy on my mind, because seeing Tris for the first time in almost ten years has thrown me for a loop, to put it mildly. The first time I was locked up here, she came here to visit me every day, and each time she did I refused her. I was angry, and if I'm being honest I was hurt.

It's no big secret that mommy dearest fucked me up, I don't need a head shrink to tell me that. Jeanine was an awful parent, and if someone was trying to create a checklist of what to do to completely fuck their kid up they could have written a whole book on that woman. Cold didn't even begin to describe her demeanor. I can't even remember a single time in my life that Jeanine ever said she loved me, or hugged me, or even touched me for that matter. All of the nurturing I had growing up came from my nanny, a woman named Lainie who loved me like I was her own.

Jeanine also resented Lainie. It was an odd situation, because Jeanine had no interest in being my parent, but she also wanted my undivided attention and love. I desperately wanted to know who my father was, but she claimed it wasn't important because she had several different partners, all selected due to their high IQ, and whoever it was provided me with genes she deemed suitable.

I was nothing more than one of her experiments.

I don't know how long Jeanine had been planning her hostile takeover of the government, but the years I've had in prison have given me time to reflect on it. At first, it felt like Jeanine was grooming me to take over for her in Erudite one day, but somewhere along the line her plans shifted, and she needed me in Dauntless, even if I didn't want to be there myself. She had one of their leaders start training me, and suddenly I was taken from the studious Erudite life I knew and thrown into a pseudo Dauntless training program. Harrison was strong, and completely loyal to Jeanine's vision, and he seemed to actually enjoy training me. He taught me about the faction itself, and then he taught me how to be a soldier. We practiced hand to hand combat, knives, guns, target practice and even psychological warfare. He made me into an unstoppable force, and when I finally spilled my blood over those hot coals I was more than ready to compete.

I breezed through initiation, until the fear sims, where the fucking Dauntless prodigy now known as Four for his record low four fears knocked me out of first place. The stupid fucking Stiff, and the only Stiff that anyone could remember defecting to Dauntless, until her.

Over the years the issues between Four and me had come to a head. Even though I was chosen for leadership, Four was Max's first choice. I proved my worth over and over, but at least once a week Max forced me to ask Four if he would reconsider his offer to join leadership. Max seemed to think that just because Four and I had gone through initiation together that we would be friends. He was wrong.

Four's holier than thou attitude, along with him watching me obsessively and reporting anything he found unusual to Max drove an even bigger wedge between us. I had no desire to be his friend, but Max's insistence in recruiting Four forced me to at least speak to him occasionally. When Four was selected to be the trainer for the transfers, Max tasked me with assisting him, thinking it would help to foster a better relationship between the two of us.

We did talk more, but mostly about initiation. That first year of us working together was tense, but nothing had prepared either of us for a second Stiff to transfer the following year. A Stiff that I was strangely drawn to, and one so defiant it was hard to believe she had spent sixteen years suffocating in Abnegation.

She was pretty when she transferred, but when she started to spread her own wings a bit and start to become Dauntless she became beautiful. She drove me absolutely crazy with her smart mouth and her argumentative ways, but there was something about her that captivated me. Our biggest argument that led to our first kiss caught me off guard, not only because I was fighting an attraction to an initiate, but because as an adult I had not been able to initiate contact with a female. I had a former babysitter who did sexual shit to me, and made me do sexual shit to her for a period of almost a year, and when I tried to tell Jeanine about it I had been told to just man up. I buried it, somewhere deep inside, but it manifested in ways that were embarrassing for a person of my age to deal with. I'd had a girlfriend during initiation that assumed I was gay since I couldn't find any sort of sexual attraction to her, or initiate any contact at all. I knew that I wasn't, but I let her believe that I was because it was so much easier than letting someone in.

How do you tell a woman you may never be able to get it up because someone ruined you as a kid?

Tris was something different. I found myself watching her, and it became more than just a physical attraction. Even though we were both strong willed, I admired the fact that she didn't back down from me. She didn't argue just for the sake of being right, she was thoughtful with her words and actions, and she genuinely cared about the friendships she was building.

I needed time to process the kiss after it happened, and apparently I took too long because when I finally reached out to her for a conversation she began to pull further away herself. I watched her even more, and found out she had started seeing Four.

I wouldn't call it heartbreaking because I didn't even know myself what I felt, and when I had asked her to come see me so we could talk, it was to have the expected 'I'm a leader, you're an initiate' talk. However, I wanted to ask her if she felt anything. I couldn't pursue her, it was against the rules, and I was in so deep with Jeanine and Max that I couldn't balance a forbidden relationship on top of it.

Max did seem to pick up on the inappropriate relationship between Four and Tris, and he asked me to investigate. I did, and what I found was just a simple relationship where they may have been a stolen kiss, or holding hands, but there was no evidence of anything physical between the two. I lied to Max, told him there was absolutely nothing inappropriate going on to ensure that Tris didn't leave the faction.

I had made up my mind that I would keep her safe from afar, and once I could get myself out of the shitstorm that Jeanine was trying to stir up, I'd try to figure this thing with Tris out.

I never got the chance. What I was led by my own mother to believe was happening was a challenge to the government, following the letter of the laws of our faction. What she really wanted was full control of the government so she could continue her experiments on divergents, until she could find one that was strong enough to open a box that she knew was being hidden in the Abnegation faction. Jeanine was planning an all-out war, including an invasion of Abnegation. I put the scattered pieces together too late, but I had enough suspicions based on what I did know to confront her. She denied everything, and later that same night she activated her mind control serum a full two days early because she feared I was too close to the truth.

At that point, I was stuck in Erudite where she could keep an eye on me. I was assigned a living quarters, and I immediately started to plan my escape. I knew this shit was going to go sideways, and I needed to get the hell out of the faction and get some help to stop her.

Jeanine was always a step ahead of me. She never involved me in her experiments or lab work, but she purposely called me into the lab one day so she could force me to watch them torture Lainie to death. She made me watch the only mother figure I'd ever had die for Jeanine's stupid fucking box.

I was done.

I broke into her office, looked through all of her research and found who they were holding that had the highest percentage of divergence: Beatrice Prior.

She'd had Tris in custody for weeks and I had no idea. I was frantic at this point, and I needed to find a way to get Tris to my apartment so we could use the duct system I had tunneled into to get the fuck out of Erudite.

Getting Drew and Peter to cooperate was easy – my plan was to simply tell them I wanted to have some fun with Tris, but without the cameras so that Jeanine couldn't see. They were all for it, but only agreed to cut the cameras if I let them in on the action too. They agreed that they would leave the camera on until they saw us in action, then would erase all evidence of Tris being with me, and loop the feed so Jeanine wouldn't suspect anything.

I could tell that Tris was terrified when they brought to her to my apartment. I didn't have time to properly talk to her and go over a plan, but in the mere seconds where I whispered a plan and explained I wouldn't dare hurt her, she trusted me.

She had no reason not to. I may have been able to kiss her before, and my body may have strangely began to react when we did kiss, there's no way I'd be able to do anything more than just simulate the sex. I'd tried it before with Sky, my body shut down.

Except with Tris.

I don't know what made her so different, but that day in Erudite something changed between her and me. My body reacted to her, physically, and I wasn't lost in a haze of fear and confusion with her. I wanted her. I wanted to kiss her, and it was like a switch had flipped in my brain. When Tris changed her angle and lifted her hips, I entered her in one hard thrust, and I could feel her innocence tear away.

She screamed, and the fucking camera finally turned off.

I told her we could stop, even though no part of me wanted to, and her sincere encouragement was all I needed. She felt incredible under me, the way she pulled me closer to her with her legs wrapped around me, our desperate kisses and the grip of her hands with mine were taking me to a place I never thought I could be. I didn't overthink it then, I went with what I was feeling, which may have been fueled by the adrenaline, and desire coursing through our bodies. Or maybe it was the nagging fear of not making it out of the faction alive, whatever it was we went with it and it was good.

When we finished, all I could do was kiss her. I hated to think about that moment ending, but the loud knock on the door and pleas from Peter and Drew to have their turn broke us out of the bubble we were lost in. I kissed her one more time, and hoped she understood that what had just happened between us was so much more than just sex for me.

I'd been through these ducts many times in my efforts to fully map out a safe route out of Erudite, but for some reason having Tris with me made me more nervous than I have ever been in my entire life. I refused to let her see how scared I was, instead I led her through the twists and turns I had been through before, until I knew we were at one of the main exhaust grates on the outside of the building. Once I determined the coast was clear, we ran.

Tris was incredibly fast, and I struggled to keep up with her but we made it to the train and onto one of the cars that only had one connector. I quickly cleared both cars, and once we were truly alone Tris finally let go.

I pulled her to me, and told her she could have five minutes to get it all out, and she laid her head on my chest and bawled. I pressed my lips to her head, and then rested my chin on top of her. Holding her like this felt so right, and my only goal was to get us both to Amity alive. My hope was once we made it there, Tris and I could finally have that conversation about our relationship. I hoped that she chose me.

I never even heard the factionless when they jumped into the car until it was too late. They grabbed me, two of them wrestling me to the ground before I could reach for my weapon, and the third pressed a knife to my neck.

I screamed for her to run, but she was frozen. I watched as she reached for her own weapon instinctively but came up empty. I should have armed her, in that split second I realized that was going to be my fatal mistake. I yelled at her again, and this time I could feel them dragging the blade across my neck. It was so sharp, and so clean.

The last thing I remember were her teary eyes meeting mine before she finally jumped off the train.

I saw them run after her from where they had left me crumpled on the floor, but then everything went black. The next thing I remember was waking up in a sterile white room in Erudite, with guards outside my door, and the hum of machines. I was hooked up to an IV, and one arm was cuffed to the bed.

I had no idea if Tris had made it to Amity, or what was going on outside of the room I was being kept in. No one would tell me anything, and everyone treated me like the criminal they assumed I was. Once I was deemed stable, I was transported to Candor to await my trial.

It was in Candor that my mother first reached out to me. The same person who didn't seem to give a shit about me at all suddenly was worried. Jeanine knew I was divergent, and she finally wanted to put that to use – she wanted me to lie under the truth serum to clear her name.

She also somehow made sure Harrison was housed close to me in Candor, and he applied the same type of pressure to me. I should sacrifice myself for the greater good, so that Jeanine and company could carry out their plans.

I wanted no part of it.

That's when Harrison and Jeanine decided to exploit my soft spot – Tris Prior. Suddenly, I was getting all of the updates I wanted on her, and none of them were what I expected. Tris was alive, she had made it to Amity safely, and then she had married Four. That news hit me hard, and everyone who was a part of Jeanine's regime that were currently incarcerated and awaiting trial made sure to rub it in my face at every opportunity.

They kept telling me "The girl you threw everything away for married someone else!"

I kept hearing "The girl you actually trusted, and possibly love married someone else."

I was eighteen years old, thrust into a war I wanted nothing to do with, who had found someone I thought I could build a life with. It was all ripped away from me, in an instant. I wasn't a monster then, but forced into a corner with no one on my side, I was destined to become one.