The rest of Miles' Christmas break from school went well, after the serious conversation we had on the holiday itself, we settled in to watch Christmas themed old movies together on the couch in the small room. The daily visits with the two of them made me happier than I could have ever imagined, and we were really starting to feel like a true family. It excites me, and scares me at the same time, because all of my teams are confident I'll get out of prison soon, while the pessimistic part of me thinks they'll find some loophole to keep me here when I'm finally ready to be free.
The scrapbook that Tris made for me as a Christmas gift sits open on my shelf, showing a picture of Tris and Miles together. It's a candid shot, taken of the two of them as they're both laughing at something, and seeing it each morning when I wake up keeps me motivated to work towards getting out.
Yesterday was our normal Sunday family visit, and I helped Miles with a project that is due after the holidays while Tris rested on the couch. She's been working a lot lately, and the past few days she's been a lot more sluggish. I've been concerned, but in usual Tris fashion she's assured me it's nothing.
I can tell it's something as soon as I'm left in the room for our appointment. She's wrapped in her own coat, shivering at the table and she's extremely pale with red cheeks.
I press my hand to her forehead, "Tris, you should have cancelled. You definitely have a fever."
"I'll be fine. I'll probably go to the clinic after our appointment," Her voice is scratchy and I watch as a cold chill passes through her.
I pull my own jacket off and slip it over her shoulders, "Not probably Tris, you definitely need to go see a doctor."
"Thank you." She replies and I watch as she snuggles in to my jacket.
"I knew you weren't feeling well yesterday when you dozed off on the couch. Is Miles feeling ok?"
She nods, "Yeah, but I did have Pedro take him to school today, and he mentioned keeping him there with them until I'm feeling better. I don't want to pass whatever this is to him. Enough about me though. Bacon, egg, cheese on an everything bagel." She passes me food and an elastic to pull my hair up with.
I watch her as I eat, but she's just picking at her own food, "Tris, I want you here, but if you need time off to rest I promise you I will talk to Johanna."
"I must really look bad for you to be willing to cooperate with someone else," She smirks at me and I smile.
"You always look beautiful. I can just tell that you're sick," I reply.
We talk about happier times, memories I have spending time with Lainie at the forefront of our conversation.
"Lainie took good care of you," She smiles at me and I return it.
"Yeah, she was very much grandmother-like. I can imagine it's a similar situation as Johanna and Pedro are to Miles. She was someone who stepped in when she didn't have to. Did you know that she tried to take me away from Jeanine?"
She nods, "I saw that in your records as well. Would you have wanted her to succeed?"
That feels like a loaded question to me, and I need a moment to gather my thoughts. Growing up, Jeanine was the queen of the guilt trip, so if there was ever a moment of doubt in her mind about where my loyalties may lie she would lay the mothering and love act on thick. When Lainie had filed her petition to get custody of me, I was more than ready to leave Jeanine and my life with her behind.
Jeanine would have none of that. I was her only child, and the only person she thought she would be able to manipulate to follow her every order.
"As an adult, I can look back and say I should have wanted that, but as a kid I didn't. I loved Jeanine, you know that unconditional love that a kid feels for their parent, and all I wanted was to have the relationship that I had with Lainie with my mother. I even wished that maybe one day my father would swoop in and we'd be a family. I remember as a kid some official looking people interviewing me under the child dosage of truth serum about my relationship with my mother and I lied to them... I think that was the first time I figured out I could lie under truth serum…" I can tell by the way she's looking at me that she already knows this, "You've seen them, haven't you?"
She nods, "I have," She croaks out in a hoarse voice.
I was heavily coerced to lie under the serum, but at that time Jeanine had no idea I was capable of such. Instead, she laid the mothering act on as thick as possible, and had long conversations about how everything she did in her life was an act of love for me. She wanted me to believe her lies, therefore being able to answer the questions I would be asked with my own sense of honesty.
I had her fooled back then too.
"I was a fucked up kid." I murmur.
"No, you were a good kid, being influenced by fucked up adults." She argues.
"You really believe that?"
"I do, and I am hopeful that one day you will believe it too." She replies.
"Can we talk about something else?" I ask, desperate to change the subject.
"I'd not seen you the entire time I was in Erudite until that day in your apartment, what were you doing?" She asks.
"Building a tunnel. Mapping an escape route." I grin at her.
"You'd mentioned before it was your way of escaping if things went wrong," She prods.
"That was definitely why I started it. I'd planned my own escape. I wanted out, and I wanted to bring Jeanine down for whatever she had planned. But, I also wanted as much information as I could get. My own mother didn't trust me, she even brought a factionless in to live with her and watch me. I was so pissed when I found that shit out Tris."
"Could you tell me why you were so angry?" She asks.
"She all of a sudden seemed to give a shit about someone other than herself. She gave him a room in her own apartment, food, clothes, he had a keycard to get all over the compound. She treated him like he was her own kid, and she just shit on me all the time."
"Did it make you mad that Edgar knew more than you did?" She asks.
She knows who he is. He had to be one of her patients, "How'd you know his name, Tris?"
"Trial transcripts," She replies vaguely.
"Do not lie to me," I growl.
"Do not talk to me like that. You're not my leader anymore, you're my boyfriend," She bites back.
She obviously didn't mean to say that. I can't hide my shock, "Interesting," I murmur.
"Eric." She emphasizes my name. I scoot towards her and she panics and tries to move away. I gesture towards the corner.
"Baby, relax. The camera is gone," I whisper to her and gesture towards where the camera should be, instead there's just a hole with wires sticking out, "Audio only."
I move closer to her and she begins leaning towards me, "You're going to get sick," She says lamely before moving away.
I sigh, but continue eating my breakfast. She still isn't eating, and the tension between us feels suffocating.
"You need to eat," I say quietly, and she nods, "I'm sorry for getting angry. Was he one of your cases? I know he got approved for parole."
"You know I can't talk about my other cases, Eric," She meets my eyes and I can see so much in them that she's trying to convey outside of the canned response she just gave me.
"His hands were dirtier than mine, but I get why he did the things he did. Being hungry and scared must be awful. Back when I was a leader, Johanna frustrated me with her inability to turn anyone away. I looked at everything as being so black and white, almost like Candor did with the law. I felt like people were factionless for a reason and they didn't deserve basic human decency. I was a fucked up person."
"Past tense," She says before coughing hard. I put my arm around her and pull her close against me, and I feel her snuggling against my chest.
"Was I stupid for always believing my father would magically show up one day and actually want me?" I ask.
"No. You were a child who desperately wanted to know his father."
"Just like Miles." I murmur.
"Just like Miles. You're giving him the life you weren't able to have, you know? You should think of it that way."
"Do you miss your parents, Tris? I know that was a stupid question. Your dad was a great man. He was smart, fair, and a genuinely kind person." I rest my chin on her head and can feel her sigh below me.
"Why didn't you ever try to warn him about the war?" She asks. I don't know what to say to this, and when I don't answer, she presses, "Why, Eric? You had figured out what she was going to do, she testified that you had tried talking her out of it several days before she kicked off the program. Why?" She pulls away from me, "Tell me the truth. I deserve to know."
"I did find out she planned on invading Abnegation, but there was no logical plan in my mind for how she was going to do it. I had no idea the serum was a mind controlling one, I was told they were trackers in case our soldiers were ever in a dire situation and needed backup. That explanation made perfect sense to me Tris, Dauntless had been working with Erudite to develop that type of device well before I had even made it into leadership. Chaney and I were even on the project team for that, we worked with Erudite to develop and test it. When I confronted Jeanine about the invasion plans, she explained it in a way that made sense to me. She didn't believe that one faction should control the government the way they did, and she told me she planned on forcing their hand a bit, and that the invasion plans were just a backup," I trail off.
"Forcing their hand how?" She asks.
"A vote, if all of Dauntless voted with her and she could swing Candor, it would force a review of the structure of the government. I knew Dauntless was a shoe in, and of course Erudite, and she convinced me that Jack's team was on board as well. It wasn't a coup, she told me it was going to be a fair process."
"You believed her? Even though you had found her invasion plans, you still believed her?"
"She said that was only the backup plan, and since logically there was absolutely no way she could have accomplished an invasion, I believed her," I say quietly.
I was an idiot.
She starts coughing again, but this time when I reach for her she pushes me away and begins pacing around the room, "You had this inside knowledge, that there was absolutely a backup plan in place to force cooperation if a peaceful solution couldn't be arranged, and you sat on it?"
"I never thought she could pull something like that off. How in the world was she going to get our entire faction to cooperate?" I ask.
"With the fucking serums you helped administer! You are one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, and you're going to tell me you never once put two and two together, Eric? You knew she had a backup plan to invade another faction if she didn't get her way and you didn't think that was important enough information to take to someone? To Jack? To my father?" She tries to shout, but her voice is almost gone.
"Marcus was on her side, I'd seen him in the building enough to know they were working together. She insinuated that Jack and she were in negotiations too, he was a brand new young leader back then so I thought it was plausible. I had no idea who was working with her Tris. What would have happened if I went to someone like Marcus, believing he would want to stop any efforts of a coup attempt on his faction, and he went back to her?"
"You protected yourself but you couldn't protect the actual faction who was the target of Jeanine's ire?"
"I had already made enough ripples that she started the fucking program early!" I shout. Dalton comes through the door and looks at Tris.
"We're fine," She says. He glances at me before leaving the room.
"Tris, I have replayed those few days over and over repeatedly ever since everything happened. I've thought of every scenario, and beat myself up for years. I didn't know who, if anyone, I could trust. It wasn't a matter of protecting myself, I also wanted to protect my faction. I was eighteen years old, trying to talk my own mother out of becoming a monster. I did begin to see her crack, I knew she had the backup plan, and I did suspect she was going to do something incredibly drastic to get what she wanted. I put two and two together when it was entirely too late."
"My parents died… they died because their own son worked against them, and because there were so many others in that faction who decided that power was more important than people, and so many others who just shut up and did whatever they were told," She's crying hard and I stand up and pull her back to the table, wrapping her in my arms, "These sessions are for you, I need to…" She sobs.
"You need to let it out. These sessions are for both of us. I'm sorry I didn't figure it out sooner…"
"No, I shouldn't have accused you..." She begins, but I cut her off.
"I wasn't a good man back then. I wasn't even a man. I was a kid, trying way too hard to be a respected adult, and looking to the wrong people for approval. I would make completely different decisions now. I should have said something, but I just did whatever I was told."
"Tobias and I had the same issue. He had hacked into the leadership server and pieced together information from those same plans. Neither of us could figure out any way she could have pulled off an invasion using Dauntless. There's no way in hell our people would have done that, willingly. I shouldn't have gotten angry at you for not going to my father or Jack, because we didn't either. We saw a serum delivery one day and it clicked, but it was already too late." She admits.
"He's a lot smarter than I give him credit for, I wish he and I could have been on the same team back then."
"You have a chance to be on the same one now, if you wanted that." She says quietly.
"I don't know how any of that will work. Besides, it's a decision we will need to make together."
"Eric, I don't need to be involved..."
"Yes, you absolutely do need to be involved. You are the mother of my son, and you are also part of any decision I make moving forward, Tris. The history you have with him has a definite bearing on any relationship I may try to build with him, or any relationship he has with our son."
"No, I shouldn't be a part of this. The relationship you build with him should be separate from me, I don't want to hold you back." She begins coughing again and I just hold her until it subsides.
"I'm holding me back, Tris. You and Miles are what's important in my life, not him. We will talk about it once you're feeling better, and make the decision together."
I continue to hold her, and when Mike looks in on us he just turns away. He and Hector know the true relationship between Tris and me, and they both give us our space as long as we don't break any prison rules. She falls asleep, her breathing is labored and when Mike glances in the window again I gesture with my head for him to come in.
"Can you please call Johanna Reyes, ask that she come here to pick her up. She's sick, burning up with fever." I whisper.
"You got it." Mike says before leaving the room.
I move her slightly and now she's resting in the crook of my neck. I push her hair back and lean my head against hers. She's absolutely burning up, but I can't bear to move her.
The door opens quietly and Mike steps in, "Johanna Reyes is on her way. We can take her to the infirmary if you want."
"No," I shake my head and it rouses Tris.
"What's going on?" She rasps.
"I had him call Johanna, she's on her way to pick you up," I reply.
"Thank you, I'm so sorry," She tries to move away, but she sways and I pull her back towards me.
"It's ok Miss Prior, you can stay here until Mrs. Reyes gets here. He can stay with you," Mike says with a smile before leaving the room.
"I've got you Tris, you can rest now, you're not alone anymore, I'll be here, always," I say before pressing my lips to the top of her head.
I can feel her body relax against mine, and after just a few minutes I can tell she's sleeping again. "I love you," I whisper, "I can't remember a time in my adult life where I haven't loved you."
I don't realize I've also fallen asleep until the creak of the door startles me awake. I see Mike leading Johanna into the room, and her expression immediately turns to one of concern.
"Tris, honey, I'm here to take you to the clinic." Johanna says as she gently shakes Tris' arm.
Mike simply stands by as Johanna and I help a groggy Tris get into her outdoor gear, and she thanks him directly once she's feeling up to the walk out of the room. She turns to face me and I tuck a stand of her hair under her hat and let my hand linger on her face for a moment.
"I'm sorry…" She begins but I cut her off.
"There's no reason to be sorry, focus on getting better, and we'll finish our conversation the next time you're here." I reply softly and she nods.
I watch as Johanna leads her out of the room and then I stand patiently while Mike chains me back up.
"She'll be okay, Eric." He says once we're walking back to my cell.
"I shouldn't be here. I should be taking care of her, or watching Miles so she can get the rest she needs to recover." I reply angrily.
"Channel that anger into focus. Use it to make sure you get out of here and never return." Mike says evenly and I nod my head.
"I will."