I hear footsteps and laughter at the end of the hallway, and we break apart just as Gabriel, Lynn and Joseph return with their haul.
Fatigue, a weight behind my eyes, creeps up on me suddenly and Eric appears seething, his jaw tightens and he towers over me, resting a hand on my shoulder with his thumb against my jaw and his fingers along the side of my neck.
The gesture is threatening and possessive, though I think it not intended to appear as such to them but a warning to me.
"Have you thought over what I've given you?" He asks with business formality. I nod. He lowers his head to speak into my ear. "Then after your appointment, we need to talk." He says, his lips brushing my skin briefly at the end. "We have a lot to accomplish and little time."
I nod without conviction this time. There is little less than a month before aptitude tests and the choosing ceremony and I believe that is the time frame he speaks of.
He tilts his head down and presses his lips to mine once more, sending a dull repulsive ache through my body that stops in my throat.
"Heeeeeey Eric!" Gabriel greets almost as if they've become better acquainted. "Did you come for the partaaaaay? Or just for the pu-"
I give him a pointed look and he smirks deviously.
Lynn snorts and Joseph gives me an almost reprimanding look, shaking his head as they renter my apartment without a vocal word to either of us.
"Neither." Eric answers with a complacent shrug. "Just dropping this off."
"No way man, you got it?" He asks and I'm aware of the awe in his voice. I look to Eric questioningly as he pulls a neatly wrapped bottle from behind his back.
"Lemonade." Eric says. "Only available from Erudite." He tosses it to Gabriel who manages to catch it though his hands are full. "You should try it Gene, acquire a taste for it…Now."
"Have you been experiencing any pain, dizziness, insomnia, loss of appetite-" Garrett reads down a list of symptoms and I answer yes to them all though it's been less than a 24 hour period.
He assures me that my symptoms are from the drugs and not any infection.
The table is cold. Frigid, seeping through my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, For all the bodies that have lain motionless before on this very surface.
The light above me is bright and I can see nothing else as I stare into it. I can see it blindingly even behind my eyelids when I blink and I focus mainly on the tugging of stitches and the prodding of cold metal tools.
"It is hard to tell with how healing will progress and scarring as it looks to me like-" He tilts his head up and looks below his glasses with furrowed brows, he 'tsks' as though displeased. He drones about the work they put in resuscitating me, emptying my stomach and lungs.
"Strenuous activity is ill advised, Genesis, really, internal bleeding could occur, your body is already working too hard, should you continue to stress it too-"
"I'm aware." I state, interrupting him. I push myself up and begin pulling my sweater back down. He sits back and places his clamp and sutures to the side and removes his glasses.
"About the information you requested… It'll be difficult to obtain, if there is anything left on him… One of his requests was that his data, upon transfer, be expunged." Garret's explains. He avoids eye contact and I watch his nervous movements. "He wanted to sever his connections to Erudite."
I nod slowly.
He already told me what he could, which was that, the Coulters. Mrs. And Mr. Are alive and well, currently holding prestigious teaching positions and that Eric is not their biological son.
The coincidence is much too strong and his interest in Falen, I believe could also be the product of those events that led to their becoming orphans.
His motives and suspicions against Falen borne of something more, revenge maybe?
"I doubt Jeanine would destroy information." I say, rolling my sleeves to expose my wrists.
Normally upon transfer any information, medical records, that sort, would expire and not carry over anyway, unless at the behest of the receiving factions leader and Dauntless above all would not request such.
Why would Dauntless care what they leave behind?
Asking Garrett is the alternative I chose to asking Eric directly, but, I'm unsure if I can keep myself from doing so.
I have an unreasonable need to know, an appetite for that information, however meaningless.
"Yes well, hence the reason I said it would be difficult… Not impossible." Garrett replies. Worried lines and creases form across his forehead under his wiry hair.
"Tomorrow." I say firmly. Not as a question or request. He doesn't respond at first, just chews on the inside of his lip and examines the spotless lenses of his glasses before placing them back on his nose.
"Yes, well, about tomorrow…" He trails off. "You may want to consider finding an excuse not to come… I can tell you that the visit will not be very pleasant, at least not for you."
I scoff and it comes tiredly. "When has it ever been?"
"It's good right?" Gabriel asks with a sly smile. I nod my head and pour the drink down my throat. The alcohol mixed with the sour but sweetness of lemons in the lemonade dampens the feeling of excessive compulsive energy.
I've no way to expend it as most of it is violent. Once recognized, it is hard to ignore.
"Damn Gene, save some for the rest of us!" Lynn laughs and she pulls the cup from my hand, spilling a bit of the liquid across the armrest of the couch.
"Should you even be drinking if you're on antibiotics now too?" Jade asks, she tilts her head with a frown and her hands on her hips.
"Drinking is medicine!" Uriah bellows from his perch on the backrest of the couch. "The more, the better!"
"Dauntfest." I add with a shrug and her frown deepens but the others roar and the room explodes into excited cheers and laughter.
I find myself another cup and make my way back outside into the hall, fully intending on locating Eric.
"Gene?" Amar's voice reverberates down the passage, and I hear the sound of rapidly descending boots upon me. I turn and his hand seizes around the thick fabric collar of my sweater, pulling my face close to his. "Do you even know what time it is?"
His expression is fierce, brows furrowed under his disheveled black hair. The alcohol on his breath, heavy and acrid. His eyes rimmed with the same sleepless bluish purple and his jacket buttoned unevenly, leaving the last without a pairing.
I bring my arm to level, the action pulls my sleeve down, and I glance at my bare wrist. I had expected my watch to be there actually.
My reaction to his question causes a brief smile at the firm corner of his lips but when he searches my face, devoid of the accompanying humor, his brows turn up and his expression softens.
"You look like hell." He says.
He places his hands on the sides of my head, running his thumbs under my eyes as if trying to smooth the bluish hue out.
I find that I actually prefer Eric's touch because I know he has ill intent, sometimes to harm. I remember when he had said so himself. I do prefer it.
"So I've been told." I answer, curling my finger around my sweater to readjust the collar against my throat before taking another sip to wash the lump down. He eyes the cup with disdain.
"Oh you've been told huh? Well you know who told me you were back?" He asks incredulously. "Of all the people, Four! Why did he know before me? You've been back from the dead a whole day and you didn't think to-"
"I wasn't aware that I had to report to you." I reply with verve, my voice comes out condescendingly.
His reaction is immediate and his expression becomes one of hurt, like I've slapped him.
"You're right, you don't have to… You're not a child anymore and I…" His face changes into a forced grin that looks like a grimace. "Forget how much of fucking jerk you are! I was worried sick about your dumbass!"
He curls his arm around my neck and crushes me against his chest.
I hear his heartbeat a steady thump against my ear and he smells like sweat, fresh air and something pleasant.
I can't trace where the sudden swell of desperation comes from but with it I wrap my free arm around him, pressing one hand between his shoulder blades and dropping my cup to curl the other one around the back of his neck, cleaving to him with ferocity.
The cup clatters along the ground.
His other arm bands around my waist and crushes me against his frame, I feel his hand stroke the back of my head, holding it there and I close my eyes.
I can feel his breaths against my shoulder, and his body expanding and contracting beneath my palms. It begins quietly, with the pounding of a heart.
I am not sure, at first, whose heartbeat I'm hearing, because it's far too loud to be my own. But then I realize that it is my own pounding in my ears.
It is like the surface of my mind is frozen, a layer of thick impenetrable ice, and I knew there were things moving beneath that hard layer.
Powerful emotions that may cloud my judgment, and possibly drive me mad like it did to the twins. Fatalistic thoughts, feelings of hopelessness and discord, losing control.
But I can't see or hear them. Only the knowledge that they are there, pacing along the edges, waiting for an opening. I take a deep breath and it turned rotten in my chest.
it was Eric who made me aware of these things, within me. Pointed at the potential causes.
"Hey, you're alright." He assures, walking backward, pulling me with him.
I don't raise my head or open my eyes even when he stops and my grip never loosens. I know what he must think of me, comforting me, coddling me.
Deceits favorite role is playing the victim, and a victim I am not. I am the predator. The one who takes, and destroys with the belief that I am doing it for them.
Forcing them to make a sacrifice for the 'greater good' That I make the cruel decisions for them so they won't have to. So they wouldn't have to live with it.
That I do it to protect them. So they can keep living the carefree lives they do without fear or burden of the dangers hidden in the shadows.
Eric could not have been more accurate.
I try to make it painless but it'll never be painless. I want to hand it over to someone else, let it be the burden of some other.
But it's not just what we do, but also what we do not do for which we are held accountable but I don't know what is right because now, everything feels wrong and I'm furious. At everything. At everyone.
"What do I do?" I ask through gritted teeth.
"I don't know Gene, I really don't." He murmurs. "But somehow, you just do it, and then the next day you find a way to do it again."
That wasn't the answer I expected. I feel him press his cheek to mine and with it a wetness and my fingers clutch the fabric of his jacket tighter. It's silent with no accompanied tremble, no audible sob, just his tears.
Like a secret, I'm not supposed to hear.
My first thought is of when the leader Reid had told me, that crying defies scientific explanation.
Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes and there is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion.
But I don't accept that thought, the logic, even though that's just like me to think of it.
I may not weep as they've wept, or bleed as they've bled, so much for their carefree lives.
But then, that may be my punishment.
"Gene, you're crushing me." Amar complains and I hear the smile break in his voice.
"You've been drinking." Eric states flatly, tapping his fingers-from left to right-against his cheek with an arm crossed over his chest.
His eyes travel over me seemingly displeased.
"Hardly." I admonish. "I-" That is all I get out before his mouth collides with mine and I am pulled around him, into his apartment behind a slammed door.
I stumble through the inky blackness and hold my hands out to catch myself, on what I predict is his table. In the dark the wood is smooth and cold beneath my palms and I turn to confront him.
"There is a matter I need to -" His hands circle my face with his thumbs below my jaw to tilt it up and to him, as his lips cover mine and his tongue delves between them, tasting I believe, the lemony mixture.
"Give in, Gene." His voice says soothingly and I feel him stroke beneath my eyes, too similar to the way Amar did. "I know you want to..."
Whatever I was about to say gets lost in my head, and I press my mouth back to his.
He is insistent and rough, I touch his cheek to slow his kiss down, holding his mouth on mine and I can feel every place where our lips, teeth and tongue touch and every place where they pull away.
I breathe the thick air we share in the second afterward and the slip of his nose across mine.
I wrap an arm around him, pulling him against me. My fingers find the hem of his T-shirt, and slide beneath it, spreading wide over the small of his back as he presses me there, caught and trapped between the table and his body.
He kisses his way from my lips to my neck, where he licks at bruised flesh and slides his hand under my thighs beneath my butt, lifting my leg up around his waist, placing me onto the table.
Two notions fight for control, both violent in nature.
I use my mouth to caress the tattooed skin of his neck to his collarbone, the graze of my teeth, a threat. I could bite down and break the skin of his jugular. I could tear him asunder.
A loud sharp knock at the door interrupts us and his groan is audibly disappointed.
He pulls away from me and I focus on the mechanics of my breathing, imagining air filling every part of my lungs as I inhale, then remembering as I exhale how all my blood, oxygenated and unoxygenated, travels to and from the same heart.
Reattach mind to body. Air in, air out. Blood pushed all the way to my extremities- my heart, I can feel it bashing against my ribs and pounding in my throat.
The light is switched on and Eric returns to me, my composure wrought back into place with glaring difficulty.
He himself betrays nothing from just moments ago. His expression now hard, and stoic. His eyes narrow and guarded. Just the blossomed redness of his lips from the friction of use, evidence it ever happened.
"We've been summoned."
"We propose to expand the radius of patrols, or well, to focus patrols around the Abnegation sector where faction-less seem to be the most active." Falen says. "Our objective is to keep the faction-less population within their own area and also to oversee any contact with them and Abnegation individuals from here on."
"Abnegation won't just accepted that." I state with a raised brow. My surprise is genuine I hadn't been out that long and this is reaching. "The faction that controls the government abiding by Dauntless enforced restrictions, to what effect ?"
"They won't have a choice." Eric say with a sly smile, he leans forward in his chair. "After all the faction-less incidents, we have jurisdiction, and if they don't accept that, well, it really calls into question if the Abnegation leaders really care about the safety of their citizens. Doesn't it?"
"Abnegation has some really compelling rumors surrounding them." Max explains next. "As you well know, some of them are true, what's to say the rest of them aren't?"
I nod my head slowly, and I can imagine how they would present it at the conference tomorrow, backing Marcus into a corner in front of all the other factions.
"Abnegation is abusing their power, which means they shouldn't be in charge of the government, another faction like-"
"Erudite." I interrupt my voice comes sharper like an accusation.
"I was going to say Dauntless" Eric counters, his eyes narrow at me but lose none of its amused glint. "Wouldn't it be more…Fitting, for the faction tasked with the protection of all, also be in charge of them?"
"The other Leadership candidates have no objections." Max says pointedly, he rests his cheek on a fist and I'm not oblivious to the flat stare he gives me, as though disappointed. "Would you prefer Erudite in charge?"
I scoff and Falen raises his brow at me as though that is indeed what I would prefer.
Of course premature assumptions of my aptitude would lead to a question of my loyalty to Dauntless right after they consider me to have proven it.
Time and time again.
I consider it for a quick moment, about how Falen was the one who made it appear as if I had, I know that he must've covered it up.
And then I also remember Eric had said they were more attached to me than they'd care to admit.
"Well, actually, by all means Erudite would be suited."
Max's brows twitch and Falen's expression flattens as he leans against the closed door with his arms crossed. His gaze is critical, calculating but interested in the raise of his brow.
"Our society needs Erudite to function. They are essential. Without them, there would be inefficient farming, insufficient medical treatments, and no technological advancement." I explain things they already know. "Why shouldn't the faction already so dedicated to the rest, not be in charge? The faction with the knowledge of what's best for each, with the ability to make calculated and educated choices for the ultimate betterment of said society?"
Though my words are true, and I believe them, a sour taste starts to fill my mouth and I try not to swallow while they stare at me. I know my aptitude.
Falen clears his throat.
"I know, that you have been under a lot of stress of late, Genesis," He says quietly, "And you have done a great service to your faction, to all the factions. But, I think your current condition may be compromising your ability to be objective."
"Excuse me?" I ask, my brows furrow. Even though I am speaking under half a pretense, I find it hard to appreciate being undermined.
"You are on drugs, and you've started drinking." Eric admonishes, he leans back in his chair but his expression is still amused, more so. "Maybe you need more rest?"
I tuck a lock of hair behind my ear and try to appear more adamant than disgruntled about what I said.
"Maybe you need a reminder." Max turns to Falen. "Aren't you making a trip to the wall eventually?"
"I am." Falen confirms but his expression shows that he knows he is about to be greatly inconvenienced.
"You should take Gene, and the candidates with you." Max says. "They could all use a lesson."
"We'll see. Genesis you're dismissed." Falen says with a nod. "Eric will be along shortly."
I move towards the door, impartial to the look Eric gives me. When I'm about to leave Paul and Candace, the other candidates are just approaching.
Instead of going to my apartment, I head in the opposite direction. The hallways in the compound are empty except for a few stragglers.
I assume they are just finishing their night shifts because the few that greet me do so tiredly. I put my hands in my pockets and follow the path through the pit and up towards the leadership offices.
I've no more care for surveillance. I'm sure it will be covered up. I suspect by Lauren at the behest of Eric or even Falen himself for that matter, whoever has the strings.
I came expecting it to be locked and made little work to get the door open. But I am suddenly unsure where to start or what to look for.
He is not careless.
Everything is disorganized. Stacks of papers and folders lean haphazardly off his desk. File cabinets are open with the contents either stuffed or spilling out. His computer plugged in and facing an odd angle.
They just moved offices but even this is not the product of a simple move. I would suspect anything moved or shifted could cause a collapse of the paper towers.
I remove my boots at the door and move carefully, placing my feet in stratagetic angles on the carpeted ground between papers littered about.
No doubt a boot print would be imprinted onto any of them, even a crumple might be noticed.
Behind his desk there is nowhere to step. I lean over a large stack and press my palm against the corner of the surface.
On a folder in thick black lettering is my name Genesis. Read Me. He knew I'd come.
I shove a tower over and step on the papers, tearing several of them apart. I run my fingers through my hair before clutching at the collar of my jacket tightly.
Had I not anticipated this?
I take a seat behind the desk and shift the papers around till I find the folder with my name on it again. Opening it I find a letter and I know right away that it's the note Eric claims Katherine left.
I skim it over before folding it and tucking it into my pocket to read later.
The rest of the folders contents are the munition logs, orders and scheduled wall replenishments. That I had completed and gave him previously. There is a sticky note with the password to his computer.
D123 - Such an unexpectedly easy password to guess.
I turn on his monitor and wait for it to start up, clicking through menus to get to his official entries.
But his entries have been altered minutely, so much so that only Eric or I, the one who prepared them would be able to notice or draw conclusions from.
On another sheet is a separate schedule with red markings circling dates, some of which are coming up.
The past dates that are circled were dates of the faction-less disturbances. The ones they intend to use to put Abnegation in their vice.
Is this possibly predictions of future attacks? Or plans for them.
There are also several reports of missing people-suspected Divergent individuals, some from different factions, some of their names have red circles around them and the others have their names crossed out.
I recognize the ones crossed out, I find Katherine's among them. He's giving me evidence against him or at least bait. For Eric. He knows.
Falen must have some kind of plan, my curiosity and awe are piqued. His strategy is unplaceable.
I take the tablet I had stored in my room long ago out of my pocket and spread the munitions documents that I prepared out, scanning each of them including the Divergent reports, everything except for the very last faction-less calendar of upcoming dates.
I memorize that for myself. Wondering just how far his underground operation extends.
The information must be just enough to not be too obvious of an intentional supplant and not substantial enough for Eric to bring to light as an accusation against Falen.
Not yet.
Not until I am able to uncover Falens true motives myself, and to what end, his ultimate goal is. Who he is working with and what my part is in his grand design.
My appetite for curiosity had never been so ravenously piqued.
I plug the tablet into his computer next and download his read only munitions files. I shred everything in his shredder afterwards and log off.
I focus intently on the path of the broom, keeping my eyes on the dust that collects between glass fragments, cups, and cards.
My hand moves to my abdomen, it doesn't hurt but I can feel it more than before and lean on the couch for support.
I have nothing to expel and I have half the mind to stop using the drugs. To end the symptoms.
A hand touches my shoulder, and I twitch away from it. "Are you alright?" Jade asks, her voice high and indistinct. She rubs her eyes as if just waking up.
"I'm fine." I say. Too sharply. "Just tired."
"I think you're lying." She says pointedly, followed by a yawn.
I shrug complacently and lean the broom against the couch, sliding my hand into my pocket to give her the note I took from Falen's office.
Some of it was written to her. I had merely skimmed it to make sure it was not faked and held nothing incriminating.
"You know you can talk to me right?" She says. "I mean, it's easy to just pick up your shit and run from your problems, and not talk to or confide to your friends and keep everything inside like your friends don't even matter-" I raise my brow at her, taken aback at her sudden outburst, her eyes become hard and her fists become clenched.
I'm not oblivious to the hurt and hate in her voice, I think I know the sounds well.
My hand releases the note and I leave it in my pocket.
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before smiling, and I take up the broom once more to have something in my hands.
"Sorry… It's just, couldn't she have said something? I just can't-" Jade kicks at the couch to the side. "I'll-I'll see you at dinner." She says and her voice is gravelly, her gaze downcast.
I nod my head once and she leaves the apartment, slamming the door behind her.
She feels abandoned. I grit my teeth and force my hands into submission, threatening to snap the broom in half.