DIVERGENT DAUGHTER

Disclaimer: I do not own the Divergent Trilogy in any way. They are property of Veronica Roth

I was sitting in Shannon's office in a plush velvet loveseat, running my hands nervously over the material as I looked at my maternal grandmother making me some herbal tea while she fixed herself a drink of spirits that she called a "shot." She turned and faced me, the lines on her face more pronounced than ever.

It occurred to me that the oldest Dauntless I'd ever seen was Max, but Shannon had to be at least eight to ten years older than him. She had to be good to survive all these years in the trenches, but she didn't look strong, she looked vulnerable, like me, like my mother.

"Beatrice," she began awkwardly, as if my name were something foreign on her tongue. "Has Natalie ever spoken about her life here?"

She looked so desperate that I wanted to say that her daughter remembered her, and the family she left behind, but I couldn't find it in me to lie to her. She didn't look like the type of woman who took lying in stride.

"No, I think she took the motto 'faction before blood' seriously," I said. "But, she obviously cared enough to name me after her sister. Maybe it was too painful for her to talk about. Max mentioned that your Beatrice died."

Shannon ran a hand through her curly golden mane and sighed. It was much more than an expulsion of air; it sounded as if years of burden, worry, and guilt were bursting forth from her mouth leaving her looking five years older and dejected.

"I supposed that could be the truth. Natalie was very close to her sister, particularly after their father died. I worked ten times harder to improve the situation in Dauntless, make our initiates tougher, more ruthless, so they would never have to worry about losing a loved one as I did." She said quietly "I am responsible for the brutal, almost cruel initiation process we have now."

Her admission made the heat rise in my face. Eric's sadistic ways started with this woman, all for revenge against whatever had taken a loved one from her.

"Why? Why would you become sadistic and cold?" I demanded "I know my mother, it would've destroyed her to lose him and instead of giving her love and compassion, you killed her spirit. No wonder she left!"

Shannon just stared at me for a moment, and then she got up and went to her desk. She picked up a picture out of her desk drawer and handed it to me. It was a photo of two girls. One I immediately recognized my mother by her beautiful blue grey eyes, but the rest of her was unrecognizable. She wore tight black clothes and had kohl framed eyes as well as a nose ring, and, despite the look of sadness in her eyes, she looked free; nothing like the restrained woman, I'd known my whole life in Abnegation.

The girl beside her knocked all the breath out of me when I saw her. She was me, I was her. She wore tight leather pants and a cropped black tank top, and her blonde hair looked like it had been meticulously straightened to get rid of the girlish waves that often plagued my hair. Her make-up was elaborate and I knew that she was trying to make herself look more sophisticated, but what struck me most about her was the rage in her eyes. She was fierce where my mother looked beaten.

"Natalie and Beatrice's father was murdered in a factionless riot," Said Shannon with a tight voice. "He was the leader of the security force there, and a leader of Dauntless. He shouldn't have been fighting, he should've been commanding them from the outpost but he always prided himself in fighting among his people and it cost him his life."

"And Beatrice blamed the factionless for his death." I finished for her knowing she couldn't even bear to say it. Shannon nodded, tears streaming down her face at the memory.

"Beatrice didn't just blame the factionless, she hated them." She said "She wanted nothing more than to become a member of Dauntless so she could make them pay. Natalie pitied them. She said they only revolted because they were hungry, that they wanted the same opportunities for their children as ours had. It was the only thing I could ever remember them disagreeing on. They had just finished fighting in this picture; it was taken on Beatrice's choosing day."

I stared into the hard, steely eyes of my aunt and cringed slightly. She didn't join Dauntless because she wanted to become brave; she joined so she could get revenge. She knew nothing about ordinary acts of bravery like my grandfather did. From what Shannon had told me, he embodied what the original Dauntless manifesto required from its members, total self-sacrifice in spite of fear, doing what is right no matter how afraid you might be.

"How did she do in initiation?" I asked. Shannon sighed, took the picture back, and laid it in the drawer where it had been.

"She was in the top slot of the first stage," she said her gaze still far off in her memories. "She beat every opponent she was put against, male or female, with an aggressiveness I've never seen. She damaged one girls arm so badly that she dropped out of the initiation process."

"Then she didn't do so well in the second stage. She was overwhelmed by her fears, and it took her at best fifteen minutes to get out of the simulation. She came in at the tenth overall spot, just one peg above being factionless, but then she worked and worked and worked until she could get through her fear landscape with a good time. She was able to work through them in an astonishing seven minutes. It bumped her up to the overall spot of third."

Therefore, my aunt clearly wasn't Divergent like me if the simulations were difficult for her to deal with, but she still found a way to deal with her fear landscape. The visions of me going through Lauren's and losing my mind made my cheeks burn red with shame. How did she do it?

"When she passed initiation, she chose to work in the control room as a security guard; if a fight broke out amongst the dauntless, she broke it up. She knew every soldier was needed, and they shouldn't fight each other. She even worked at a bouncer at the bar on her nights off." Shannon's voice was proud now "She lived and breathed Dauntless. This faction was her world."

"Until her death," I reminded her. "What happened to her?"

"She was searching for Natalie, and a friend of hers who'd gone missing," said Shannon, anger creeping into her voice. "The two going off on their own wouldn't have been a problem except that her friend was a man named Daniel who worked in our control room. We thought he was going to sell our faction's secrets to the Factionless and take Natalie as an unwitting hostage."

"So she went to find him to save her sister?" I asked thinking that perhaps she had found hope and healing in her faction until Shannon shook her head sadly.

"Honestly, I think saving Natalie was just a coincidence at first. She wanted to stop him from getting to the factionless; she didn't want them to have an advantage in our war against them." Shannon put her head in her hands as she continued "Beatrice caught them in Abnegation, crossing into the factionless slums. She confronted Daniel, informed him that he was under arrest, and charged with treason. She and Natalie started fighting and Daniel managed to get ahold of Natalie and hold a gun to her head. He told her that he was going to escape with the secrets and that Natalie was coming with him. She managed to convince him to let her sister go, that a little girl who had no standing in our faction would be worth less than one of their security guards, one of their promising new additions, and so she and Natalie were traded right as we arrived. No one was willing to shoot him while he had a gun to Beatrice's head, but in the only act of self-sacrifice I ever saw her commit, she managed to slightly wrestle the gun from his grip and shoot herself in the stomach to give our soldiers a clear shot at him. In the time it took us to shoot him and run to secure the scene, Beatrice was dead. Natalie was screaming, Abnegation members poured out of their homes and took her away from the scene and we started cleaning up."

"After that I knew my whole world was gone. I watched my older daughter burn on a funeral pyre just like her father's a year before, and my younger daughter was so unhinged by the violence she witnessed that I told her to transfer to any other faction, as long as she didn't stay in Dauntless. I knew the only way to save her was to give her up. She left for Abnegation and I was left to put Dauntless back together. I think I've done relatively well all things considered."

My mind reeled at the information she had given me. My mother had witnessed her sister's death; most likely felt responsible for it. No wonder she became part of Abnegation, she wanted to atone for her sins.

"Shannon-"I started but was interrupted by a grunt at the door. Eric stood there with his arms crossed, nonchalantly leaning against the doorframe. I wanted to punch him for interrupting us, for intruding on my grandmother's pain. My grandmother; the words sounded strange to me. I'd never had a grandmother. My father's mother died before I was born. In Dauntless however, Shannon was the only family I had.

"Sorry to interrupt," He said with a smirk that said he was anything but, "The Erudites have the results of the tests. They ran everything through a giant computer and 'ding!' out came the results in about an hour. They're going to reveal them in the cafeteria."

Shannon rose and in an instant, the sad, grieving mother I had seen for the past couple of hours were gone, and in her place was a Dauntless soldier.

"Very well, come along, Beatrice," she said putting a firm grip on my shoulder to guide me out the door. We walked in silence, but I wished someone would speak. Never had silence seemed so loud to me.

I found Christina in the crowd and after taking one look at my face, she wrapped her arms around me and I slumped against her. I just wanted today to be over. I had learned too much, and it had made me tired.

I rested my head on Christina's shoulder and let her support me as Max droned on about the importance of this experiment to our faction. I didn't hear one word of it. I closed my eyes and went off into a dreamlike state until Christina violently shook me awake. I looked to where her finger was pointing. On the screen that was apparently announcing who was to be paired with whom; my face was on one side of it. I stared dumbly at it and then followed her finger to the other person on the screen. I found myself chanting to myself as I raised my eyes to my new mate.

Please let it be Four, please let it be Four, please let it be Four…

It wasn't. The person, who was staring back at me on the screen and on the stage with the other Dauntless leaders, was Eric.