AN: Hope you all are still out there and enjoying this so far. See you again soon.
Zeke had found me passed out in the living room when he'd gotten home, and apparently his initial worry was that I'd tried to kill myself again. When I woke up I was in the infirmary, where I'd had my stomach pumped to rule out any overdose of other substances, and the first person I saw was Myron.
"You gave your friends quite a scare." He'd said gently.
"Where's Zeke?" I asked in a slurred voice.
"We sent him home. He could barely keep his eyes open. Your friends Christina, Marlene and Uriah were here, but once you started to wake they left. They wanted to give us time to talk."
"I didn't want to die." I stammer and Myron leans back in his too small chair and frowns, "I did something stupid, and I'm sorry, but I didn't want to die, I swear."
"What did you expect to happen after drinking an entire bottle of rum by yourself?" He asks.
"Sleep. I'm having trouble sleeping without him." I admit, "I get it's only been a couple of nights, but I miss him so much."
"He misses you too, even if he doesn't understand why." Myron shares.
"Who's with him now?" I ask.
"The leadership team. They're discussing what Eric knew about Jeanine's plans."
My eyebrows raise to my hairline, "He's cooperating?"
He nods, "He is. It was his idea to call them."
"Good." I sigh as I rub my eyes. My head is pounding and I hear the rustling of ice in a cup as Myron offers it to me.
I begin to cry.
"Tris?" My name is a question, but I cry harder. This is like Eric, waiting for me with a cup of ice water after I'd been sedated.
"It'll pass." I choke out, taking the water from his hand, and sipping it slowly between tears.
My friends eventually join us, and for a little while it's exactly how it was the evening after my fight with Peter during training, where they'd all come to check on me when I'd been knocked out.
"Is Peter still in the faction?" I asked out of the blue, and Christina couldn't hide the surprised look on her face.
"Yeah." She replies, "He's wanted to see you, but he's been giving you space. He works a lot too, he's got a job down in the armory."
"I guess he finally figured out how to handle his weapons." I quip and Christina chortles, confusing Marlene and Uriah even more.
We explain the incident on the roof early in our training, where a sleepy and overconfident Peter wasn't showing the weapon the respect he should, and a stressed Tobias pointed his own loaded weapon at Peter's head while chastising him.
"I thought he was going to pee his pants." Christina says and Uriah howls in laughter.
I'm laughing so hard I'm practically crying, and I happen to catch Myron's amused expression. He nods his head at me once, a completely unspoken agreement that I would be okay.
For once, I believed him.
When I was finally discharged from the infirmary, I was escorted home by Christina, Marlene and Uriah. When we passed the waiting room I met a familiar pair of silver eyes, and I didn't miss the relieved look that passed over his face before he averted his eyes from me to stare at the floor.
"Other than his meeting with leadership, he's been out here the whole time." Christina whispers to me and the knot in my stomach loosens slightly, knowing that the Eric I love is still in there somewhere behind all of the confusion and anger.
The next day, I had started working with Zeke, and through him I began to truly understand what it had been like in Dauntless during my two months away. Our friend group was shell-shocked, and everyone had handled their pain differently. While everyone had rallied around Uriah, and had desperately hoped for his recovery, the individuals were all struggling.
Zeke himself thought he had lost his best friend when Four didn't return, and once he learned that Shauna had been in love with Four his heart broke a little more. He'd grown up with her, always close friends, but also on the cusp of something more. She'd been his first everything, and when she was hesitant to ever define their relationship he'd had no idea it was because she was also carrying on a physical relationship with a transfer in their same class.
That also explained why Shauna was so stand-offish to me when we were back in Dauntless after the war.
Lynn, who had been a good friend to me during training, had supported her sister; although we'd talked through things since I returned a little over a week ago.
Tori and I were great, but we couldn't spend nearly enough time together with what was going on with Evelyn and the factionless. Through her, I knew that Eric was fully cooperative, and was instrumental in helping to expose the plans and Evelyn. While the woman herself remained elusive, Jack Kang was still fully committed to having her arrested and brought to justice.
Their city deserved peace.
Christina has been my rock through everything, and without her support the days would certainly feel darker. I hated feeling like a burden to Zeke, or to any of my friends, especially with everything that was still going on to protect our city, but they never wavered in their support and care for me. I may have broken into a million shattered pieces, but they were putting me together, piece by piece.
I've continued my therapy with Myron, and even though he was a bit more forthcoming with Eric's progress, he still couldn't say much more than what I already knew - which is Eric is willingly playing an instrumental part of the city's plan to stop Evelyn.
"You okay over there?" Zeke asks from his station when I've been quiet for too long.
"Yeah, just been thinking about how grateful I am to you, and everyone else for welcoming me back and being there for me the way you all have."
His lopsided grin warms my heart and I return it earnestly, "We're all glad you're here."
"Ditto." I lob back and I see movement on my monitor, "Zeke, what's going on?" I point to my monitor, where I can see a large group of Dauntless, including Four and Eric.
"It's just the normal patrols, Jack has them out looking for Evelyn." He says and I zoom in to see Eric, who looks every bit like the formidable leader he once was, "Eric has inside knowledge of all the places Jeanine had to hide out in. He's going to be okay, Tris. He trained his entire time here for this."
Their group soon disappeared from my view, and Zeke and I continued to follow them through our feeds. He'd been in contact with Four, and even with their tension due to Shauna, he kept it professional and provided his usual calm and precise surveillance. I, on the other hand, couldn't stop worrying. Zeke continued to keep me level-headed, but when I saw a group of factionless gathering close to where one of our team was, I immediately alerted Tobias.
It was too late.
We watched in horror as what seemed like hundreds of factionless infiltrated, and our team fought back against an ambush. I audibly screamed when all our feeds suddenly went black. Zeke and I jumped into action, alerting all of the leadership and the other ground teams. I went to work with our other teammates in the control room to try to restore our cameras, and even though we got everything back up and running within minutes we couldn't see anyone once we had a visual due to whatever they had done to our fields cameras. We put the communication on speaker and listened to our teams frantically calling out orders. I focused on my training, and my job, and blocked out the fear that was bubbling in my throat, until I heard the announcement that they were stabilizing the injured to bring them back here. I listened as Zeke took the communication off speaker and confirmed who was coming back and what kind of injuries to prepare our small hospital for, and when his light brown eyes met mine, I already knew.
"Is he alive?" I asked him in a shaky voice.
"Remi, can you stay and cover Tris? She needs to go to the infirmary." He asks and the woman nods.
"Absolutely."
"Zeke?" I ask.
"They're bringing him in now. He's seriously injured, they've done what they can in the field. You should be there when he gets here." He replies and I barely hear the last words before I dash from the room.
I'm pacing at the closest loading dock to the infirmary when the first jeep rolls in, and I watch as a stretcher is lifted. Tobias is doing CPR on a bloody body, as one of the field medics is pressing with all their weight into a chest wound.
"Eric…." I cry as they rush him past me. I run behind them and as they burst through the doors of our hospital, I hear them calling commands to take him directly to surgery.
I wait outside of those doors, sobbing as I watch them round the corner on their way to one of the operating rooms. I don't know how long I'm there before I see Tobias coming out, his bloody uniform traded out for a set of scrubs and his arms are immediately around me.
"He's in good hands." He murmurs and I cry harder, "They're going to do everything they can. We have teams searching for Evelyn, and they are also disassembling her troops. We have teams inside of their headquarters, and the weapons caches are all secured. Eric did it, Tris, he led us to all of it. This is almost over because of him."
"He's not a monster." I croak.
"I know. I was wrong about him back then." He replies.
I let him lead me into a small waiting room, and he keeps me close. When Shauna bursts into the room, he lets me go long enough to go to her, and I watch as he holds her closely and murmurs that he's okay, and that he loves her. When they break apart, she looks at me, and for a moment she's the same girl I met over a year ago when I transferred here, and the discomfort I thought I would feel never happened.
"I'm sorry." She says softly, and it feels like it encompasses so much.
"Me too." I reply and she hugs me.
"Where's Myron? He should be here." Shauna asks and Tobias shakes his head.
"He was called away to Milwaukee for an emergency. We've left a message with his office and they're trying to get us in touch. It's too dangerous for him to come back." He explains.
The three of us huddle together waiting for any updates on Eric. Minutes turn into hours, and our small group turns into a large one when our entire circle of friends file in one by one. Tori and Lynn huddle together, holding hands, as do Zeke and Christina. Uriah and Marlene surround me, each grasping onto one of my hands, and I watch as Tobias uses his status as head leader to demand an update on Eric's status. A nurse comes out to tell us that Eric made it through the first surgery, and that the surgeon was closing up and she would come out to speak to us soon. An hour and forty-five minutes later we met the surgeon, a fifty something woman with sleeves of tattoos and kind eyes. I listen as she explains his injuries, and the precarious state they've left him in. The next several days will be imperative to his survival chances, and it will depend on how his body reacts to the trauma he's suffered, and the large volume of blood he lost. They can't even begin to fix the broken leg that also needs surgery until he is out of the woods from the first one.
"His next of kin is deceased, so we have defaulted it to you Leader Eaton." She says, looking at Tobias.
"Who was it before?" He asks and the surgeon sighs.
"He had a brother, Samuel Coulter, who is unfortunately listed as deceased due to the war." She replies, "I can take you back to see him, we are limiting his visitors to only one, we need to ensure we protect him from infection."
"It's her," Tobias pushes me forward, "She's his visitor, and his next of kin. Any decisions you would ask of me should be hers."
"I'm Tris Prior." I say in a watery voice, and she smiles.
"Oh Tris. We thought he was saying 'Trish'. He called your name many times while sedated. You can come with me." She says and I mouth 'thank you' to Tobias before I follow her through the hall to Eric's room.
