Disclaimer: I don't own Divergent.

Getting sick is no fun. Even just a little cold can put a damper on a person's whole day. The unshakable fatigue, that leaden feeling in your entire body, the protests from your muscles every time you try to rouse yourself from bed. For kids especially, it's hell.

But compared to the affliction causing chaos in his body, Eric thinks, a simple cold would be heaven. He'd gladly trade his high fever for a runny nose. He'd accept a case of the sniffles and a mild headache, if only God would take away the confusion and delirium and the intensified pain in his face.

Voices mutter at varying volumes all around his hospital bed. Eric keeps thinking one of them belongs to Jeanine, only when he listens closely, it doesn't. It's just another nurse wielding another unnamed metal tool. They seem interchangeable, a bunch of disembodied parts moving through space, not wholly real. At this stage of his illness Eric doesn't suppose he would even recognize Jeanine.

So when one nurse slides a needle into a vein in his arm, he barely looks up. There's a brief pinch, then someone declares that the drugs have been administered.

Which drugs? Eric might never know, because the world is already falling away.

The calendar on the wall says this is ten years ago. The decorations in the classroom are almost obscenely colorful, tailor-made for little kids. Built from scratch by Amity hands. Sure enough, the teaching assistant waving hello to the class is a perpetually smiling lady in red.

Eric was six years old here. No… six and a half, he thinks. This was his first day attending the regular school, one summer after leaving kindergarten. Maggie had reminded him in the car what his new teacher's name would be. "Ask for Ms. Matthews," she'd instructed.

That hadn't been necessary. He'd been pointed to the correct classroom right away. Initially he'd mistaken the smiley Amity assistant for his teacher. What a nice surprise it had been to discover that "Ms. Matthews" actually came from Erudite, just like him!

The woman who would later become the main mentor in his life sat by herself at her desk. She held a clipboard and meticulously checked off the names of the kids in attendance. She didn't look up once, not while the kids rushed to put their coats on the hangers, not when her friend in red happily announced that class had begun.

After a half hour of the children attempting to learn each other's names, class actually started and Eric's teacher seemed to come to life. She put the clipboard aside, rose from her chair, and began what would become hours of intense instruction. Eric instantly liked her. The other kids, particularly those from Abnegation and Amity, cowered in their seats whenever she asked them to solve an equation, or when she challenged them to read the words on the chalkboard. Not Eric. He'd always raise his hand and show her what he knew.

Eric wondered if his teacher was just as interested in him. Once she called on him to read a short passage in front of all his classmates. His cheeks turned scarlet, but he did as she asked, pretending he wasn't over the moon at having caught her eye. When class got out for the day, Eric hung back and volunteered to help his teacher tidy up the room. Something inside him lit up when she obliged.

He was straining to reach the blackboard, so he could wipe away the last traces of chalk, when all of a sudden he heard a small whimper. What came next was a sniff, then a loud blowing of the nose, probably to mask the sounds of crying. Eric's teacher was crying.

Could he believe it? Adults never cried at work, unless they came from Amity or Candor.

But it was true. His teacher's eyes were red and watery, her nose a dripping mess. She seemed completely unable to hold herself together. Maggie would've said she looked "unprofessional".

Despite this, Eric reserved every ounce of sympathy he had for his teacher. He would never tell a soul what he saw, nor would he judge her for breaking down in front of him. She wasn't at all like the Erudite professors from the upper grades, who'd cover every inch of your book report with critical comments, who'd silently pick apart your in-class presentation with only their eyes. No, she was one of a kind. She was kind.

So when Eric realized who was crying, he simply sidled up to her, laid a soft hand on her arm, and asked if she was okay.

His teacher rubbed at her eyes and blew her nose a final time. When again she could speak clearly, she told him that she was fine, thank you for asking. She had just gone through "unprecedented hardship" in her life.

Eric was too young to know what that phrase meant. But his teacher soon elaborated. She reached out with both hands and pulled him onto her lap, tousling his hair with her long fingers. She said that, a while back, she'd had a little boy of her own. A boy who would be Eric's age today, if he hadn't tragically "left this world".

Eric was not too young to know what that phrase meant.

His teacher went on. She whispered in Eric's ear that he reminded her so of her boy, that she couldn't help but love him best out of all her students. At that, Eric's heart beat faster and he pressed his face deeper into the fabric of her blouse. He breathed in her thick perfume, absorbed the love that radiated from her.

"You're my favorite child, Eric," she cooed at him, like a young mom speaking to her infant. "You'll always be my favorite. I'll always look out for you."

She made good on her promise. The next day, when Eric told her his math worksheet had gotten lost, her only reply was a little smile and a lifting of her finger to her lips.

Three years down the road, Eric heard something that, in hindsight, he had no business listening in on. He was waiting patiently outside Jeanine's door, a stack of not-yet-graded papers in his hands. An unfamiliar female voice wafted into the hall through the crack beneath the door. It sounded hard and angry.

"I have one question. Why did you do that?" it demanded. Eric imagined the woman's face meeting one of her palms. "What possessed you to do what you did?"

Jeanine spoke after a while. She was defending herself, but she sounded the tiniest bit uncertain. "It was just innocent fun. A friendly touch here and there, a peck on the lips. Nobody was hurt."

Jeanine's friend blew air through her teeth, the little noise communicating irritation and judgment. "You did much more than touch him! According to the headmistress, you squished his cheeks, kissed him on the lips, and called him your… 'precious little china doll'."

"So what if I did?" Jeanine argued. "He knows it's a term of endearment."

"A deeply offensive one!" her companion countered. "What will your students' parents think when word gets out about this?"

"I don't know," Jeanine said candidly. "But make no mistake, I will fight to clear my name. I never had nefarious intentions with Eric."

The use of his name made Eric go cold. He dug around inside his brain, trying to remember an instance when Jeanine had kissed him. He came up with nothing.

Good Lord, had Jeanine actually done it while he was asleep in his study corner? Did his beloved teacher finally go too far?

Her accuser answered that question. "Just the fact that you did those things while he was sleeping, without his knowledge, means your actions were wrong," the woman chided.

Eric's heart began to feel like a sledgehammer in his chest.

Then Jeanine spoke up again. "No, I wasn't in the wrong. Consider how absurd your words would sound if you said that about a mother and her son. You have a daughter, don't you? Do you sometimes catch yourself watching her while she sleeps, taking in every detail of her face while she's still young? Do you at times wish she were small again, so you could hold her in your arms and have room left over? Well, that's how I've always felt about my favorite student."

"It's still wrong. Astounding how you're just ignoring the real issue here."

"Which is?"

Their conversation then reached a lull. Eric, hungry for more, tiptoed over to the closed door. He positioned his ear right next to the keyhole and concentrated on listening.

"...making these harmful assumptions about me," he heard Jeanine say indignantly. "I didn't lie! I accepted the treatment. I took the medication. I feel fine now."

"Yes, and because you say so, we ought to believe you and not press the matter any further," the other woman responded sarcastically.

"I'm being completely serious. I've learned to adjust, though it took a long time. You can't expect someone grieving the death of a child to just… come out unscathed!"

Eric remembered Jeanine talking about her dead son. Something gripped at his heart like a vise, but he continued to listen.

"You can't justify this kind of obsessive behavior," Jeanine's companion said firmly. "Even if half your family died at once, you'd still be at fault. And yes, I seem extraordinarily cruel right now, but I just want you to listen to reason. I want you to make the choice to get better. Come on, Jeanine. Give the mental health program another try."

Eric's ear started to hurt from it staying pressed up against the door.

Jeanine broke her silence after a few seconds. "No," she snapped. "If you decide not to believe me when I say I'm fine, that's on you."

As Eric listened at the door, Jeanine got up and headed straight in his direction. He just barely dove out of the way in time. Hunkering down behind a trash can, he saw Jeanine's door fly open. Jeanine, too distracted by her need to get away, did not see him as she stomped past.

"Oh, okay, then!" her companion blasted her. "Keep being delusional! Don't change! But for the sake of all that's holy, stay far away from Eric!"

Jeanine made a sharp right and turned the corner, the sound of her departing heels the only evidence that she was there.

The sterile setting morphs into green grass and an open blue sky. Eric feels himself run forward, his sneakered foot hitting an inert soccer ball. A young Tobias pursues him, laughing.

They were ten years old on this day. Still trying to get comfortable with each other, even though they'd met months ago. It was Eric who'd suggested they play soccer, but Tobias who'd kicked the ball onto the field without warning, forcing Eric to chase it down.

Both boys got to talking within a minute or two. "Wanna know what happened the other day, when I didn't show up to class?" Eric asked breathlessly. Tobias nodded and stole the ball from him.

"Ms. Matthews let me go to the zoo with her!" Eric revealed to his friend. "She made up this story about me being sick, and my mom totally fell for it. Ms. Matthews let me see the hippos, the giraffes, even the crocodiles! It was the most awesome thing ever."

He glanced briefly at Tobias. It was strange, his friend seemed on edge. "Whoa, there. You sure Ms. Matthews did the right thing?"

"Course she did," Eric doubled down. The ball rolled off to one side, forgotten. "I mean, yeah, she could've just said the truth. But you don't know how much of a control freak my mom is."

"It's still suspicious," said Tobias. "Ms. Hamlin told us this, remember? She said any adult who does this is probably a groomer."

Eric took a while to respond. He knew Ms. Hamlin had been speaking from a place of concern. But did she know about the tragic loss of Jeanine's baby, her hurt and pain, her desire to have her son back through her favorite student? Did she know anything about the close bond between Eric and Jeanine?

No.

Eric figured Tobias wouldn't get it. As much as he liked his new friend, the boy grew up naturally suspicious of adults, thanks to his abusive father. He'd never have understood.

So Eric pretended to concede, pretended to quietly agree with Tobias when in real life, he made a silent promise to never again speak of himself and Jeanine. Not to his best friend, not to his parents, not to anyone. The council members themselves couldn't have tortured the confession out of him.

When he was twelve years old, Eric was hit with the worst news he'd ever heard thus far. It was shortly after the incident at school with Tobias and the motherboard. Damn, he'd been in so much trouble! He was lucky Tobias had stepped up, been the bigger person, and lied for him. That was when Eric realized he'd taken Tobias for granted. The boy was a truer friend than any other he'd had.

After he and Tobias made up, Eric decided to put that episode behind him. Unfortunately Maggie wasn't nearly as forgiving. It turned out she never believed Tobias' story that Eric broke the motherboard by accident, so a few days after it supposedly blew over, she told Eric she was sending him away to boarding school.

"Only for a short while," she explained calmly, "so you can learn some important lessons. Get away from the bad influences in your life. Spend time with older, wiser, better people."

Nothing could've gotten her to budge. No amount of pleading, threatening, rebelling, or attempting to bargain would have worked. So a month later, at precisely noon, Eric found himself sitting in the back of a black van, squeezed in along with all his possessions, trying not to make eye contact with the other "bad kids" from his home faction.

The van had only just roared away when a few tears spilled down Eric's cheeks. He wasn't sad, actually. He was angry. Yeah, he was pissed. He'd suddenly been forced to separate from his first real friend, as well as the one mother figure in his life, the woman whose name was not Maggie.

I wanna run away, Eric repeated silently to himself, keeping his face expressionless. I wanna go live with Ms. Matthews.

His master plan was derailed when, in the first days at his new school, he met a girl.

Eric's facing a group of five boys, all of them from Dauntless. One of the boys wears a black baseball cap and ripped jeans. He looks to be the oldest, probably the leader of the gang.

It's weird, but Eric doesn't sense any sort of threat from him. He's actually got a smile on his face. Then the memory hits Eric like a flying brick. He'd run into this Dauntless teenager and his friends in the hall. Not wanting to end up the target of their juvenile delinquency, he'd chosen to act cool in response to their nosy questions about his girlfriend.

The oldest kid, Damon, practically begged for more details on Claire. But the essentials, he didn't give a damn about. He never asked what her hobbies were, what her voice sounded like, or what type of music she listened to in her spare time. No, he wanted to know how much older she was than Eric. What the tips of her breasts looked like. If it was true she secretly wore lacy lingerie underneath her everyday clothes. What Claire smelled like.

That last question made Eric cringe. "No way, I ain't gonna tell you that."

Damon and his buddies persisted. They pushed hard. At last Eric let them know what went down behind Claire's closed door.

"So then she said, 'I'm so tired of my boring crusty life, doing all that charity work. A girl's gotta be selfish once in a while.' She locked the door and turned the lights down low. When she first got her hands on me…" Eric launched into a jaw-droppingly vivid description of all the ways Claire had touched him in bed. He felt a wave of pleasure seeing Damon and his friends get jealous.

He did omit one detail, though. He didn't mention to Damon the words that unintentionally came out of his mouth when Claire had initially pushed him onto the bed. No, because in that moment he didn't just go with the flow and let whatever would happen, happen. Nor did he react with excitement, not even to the sexy seventeen-year-old girl showing him the art of seduction.

No, what happened was, he choked out a timid, "Wait, stop," and mumbled something about not being "ready yet". In hindsight, why did he? Sex is supposed to be a fun ride, a roller coaster with a hundred loops, especially for an adolescent male. To feel discomfort doing it, to fear it, would be unnatural for him.

Even so, Eric felt a weight leave his shoulders when Damon and his friends stopped questioning him. The guys offered their congratulations and slapped hands with the younger Erudite boy. That didn't help Eric's heart to slow down, or prevent him from feeling filthier than ever since sleeping with Claire.

Well, it really couldn't have been that wrong. If he eventually came to forgive Jeanine for kissing him in his sleep, he'd do the same, and much more, for his beautiful girlfriend.

Months flew by uneventfully. Eric's first semester at boarding school came to an end. Then, unexpectedly, so did his one serious relationship.

Tobias heard this when Eric met him beside the fence surrounding his school - Claire had secretly had an abortion, been found out, and swiftly expelled from the academy. In a show of chivalry, Eric had proposed cutting class and leaving the school with her. But then Claire had turned on him.

"I dunno why, but she blames me for… for what she had to do," Eric said despondently. "I don't get it. Didn't she make the first move on me?"

He cried for what seemed like an hour. He vomited up his emotions, not caring that Tobias was seeing him in this state. Besides, Tobias is his best friend.

Eric decided then and there, he'd stop pining for Claire - and would appreciate Tobias' company instead.

The Abnegation boy patted Eric's hand and tried to give him a one-armed hug through the fence. "You don't gotta cry anymore," he told Eric. "If she doesn't want you, you don't gotta waste time on her. I'll stop saying her name now, if that's what you want."

Eric's tears dried up quickly after that. A few weeks passed and he was finally allowed to leave boarding school. He never did think of his demonic ex-girlfriend again, not even once.

The scenery changes for a final time. The warm breeze outside becomes a jet of cold air from an AC unit. Eric's in Jeanine's brand-new, stylishly furnished office, located at the heart of Erudite headquarters. His former teacher's reached middle age, but her grace, charm, and charisma remain. She meets Eric's eyes, smiles, and warmly shakes his hand.

This wasn't that long ago, actually. How old was I here?

He was sixteen. Not even a year before he ended up transferring to Dauntless. Jeanine had asked to speak to him without an audience. She'd provided him with directions to her new office. As he sat on the other side of her desk, he studied her, unable to figure out whether he was in trouble with Erudite authorities.

In fact, the flip side was true. Jeanine went on and on about how enamored the leaders of Erudite were with him. "A family legacy, I think," she told him with a smile. "They say you have much in common with your mother, one of the most successful women I know. You'd be a natural working where she works now."

In an excited, almost feverish buzz, she drew up all her plans for Eric. He would, without question, stay in Erudite on the day of his Choosing. Right after finalizing his choice and leaving the stage, he would go stand at the head of the pack of blue-clothed youths. Then he would be shuffled into one of the many highly regarded universities in Erudite, whichever one Jeanine or Maggie deemed the best fit. From then on Jeanine would simply wait until Eric earned all of his credits and graduated on time.

What she did not count on was Eric having other ideas. Once she finished talking, he leaned forward slightly in his chair, a spark igniting in his eyes. "Thanks a lot, Ms. Matthews," he said with genuine kindness, "but I've made up my mind. That's not what I want to do with the rest of my life."

Jeanine just stared at him for several heartbeats. Then she whispered, "You… you plan to transfer?"

Eric nodded, smiling confidently.

Oh, he hadn't yet known which of the other four factions he would choose. But he'd get that taken care of on a later date.

Jeanine pushed and prodded him with her words, a fruitless attempt to get him to change his mind. She even handed out a few warnings along the lines of, "You'll be screwed up for life if you do this," but he wasn't having any of it. He would not be goaded into giving his time, money, and energy to the Erudite elite.

Several appeals later, Jeanine finally chose to leave him alone. If she wasn't going to sway him, she'd let him see for himself the results of his recklessness. She wished him the best of luck in finding his new faction, then she held the office door wide open for him.

He stepped over the threshold feeling like a captured animal leaving a cage. For once he'd taken a stand and not let someone older shut him down. He was free, and freedom was oh so sweet, so worthy of defending with his life, that even the leaders of Erudite would find themselves handling a dead body if they ever tried to drag him back to prison.

Walking out of Erudite, Eric now realizes, was the smartest decision he ever made. And he'll never return to that cold, inhospitable environment if he can help it. He'll never willingly go back to his so-called family, who didn't care for him that much anyway.

He's drifting through an empty but peaceful dreamland, anticipating waking up back in the room he shares with the other transfers. It's been a long dream, but he doesn't mind. This one ended happily, and it's even more satisfying to know that real life mirrored it.

Then, all of a sudden, Eric's fragile peace is broken, as though it were a tiny twig underneath someone's boot.

He starts to hear a mechanical beeping, the noise so close despite not being that loud, that it's migraine-inducing. It seems to ripple through every nerve in Eric's body, threatening to bring back the throbbing pain.

That's right - he's not in the dormitory, he's in the hospital. He was in terrible pain before this, but now, thank God, most of the agony has faded. But that doesn't mean he's completely recovered.

No. Because he's still too weak to get up and walk, or even pull himself upright. Just forcing his eyes open would be a chore. And he hates feeling like this, hates being this vulnerable and helpless. Right when he thought he could go on with his new life as a tough Dauntless, he gets tossed back to square one.

The least tolerable part of it all? Eric can't even express his anger over his situation without wasting the energy he has left.

He resorts to just lying there, letting his frustration slowly brew inside of him. Then something mundane but damn near miraculous occurs.

Somebody's hand reaches out and gently but reassuringly squeezes his. The hand belongs to a friend, Eric knows, and that's confirmed when the visitor finally speaks.

"Hey, you okay, man? You can hear me, right?"

It's Tobias. Not a Dauntless nurse, physician, or orderly.

Eric guesses his friend will expect answers to his questions. So he calls up every bit of strength inside of him and manages to get his voice box to work, to move his numb lips.

"Yeah," he groans, exhausted but relieved. "Yeah, I can."

He can hear his friend just fine. And though he's not exactly in tip-top shape, he'll make himself get back to that state. The sickness knocking him out was a brief setback, but the Dauntless haven't seen the last of him.

AN: Well, things took a dark turn there. I warned you the rating would change in this chapter. The original plan was to skip ahead to the chapter that's up next, but then I decided to add this in. We previously got a chapter flashing back to Tobias' childhood, so I thought, why not do the same only from Eric's perspective? Only this time, instead of focusing on his relationship with Tobias, it focuses on his relationship with Jeanine.

The girlfriend's name was taken from a certain Netflix series, one that ALSO had a teenage character named Eric.