I am selfish. I am brave.
And is it selfish of me to crave victory, or is it brave?
What’s worse: to be idle while someone dies, or to be exiled and empty-handed?
Why do people want to pretend that death is sleep? It isn’t. It isn’t.
If Eric thinks I did something right, I must have done it wrong.
Sometimes I see him as just another person, and sometimes I feel the sight of him in my gut, like a deep ache.
Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again.
I feel like someone breathed new air into my lungs. I am not Abnegation. I am not Dauntless. I am Divergent.
I look up, and stop breathing. Eyes glitter in the darkness. Dark shapes sit in the car, more numerous than we are. The factionless.
How is it I know this little about the boy who says he loves me – the boy whose real name is powerful enough to keep us alive in a train car full of enemies?
He holds my face in both hands and kisses me back. I press into the distance between us until it is gone, crushing the secrets we have kept and the suspicions we have harbored-for good, I hope.
We don’t need you as an ally. We’re Dauntless. -Tori.
The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature – or at least what it has become.
He seems designed specifically for speed and deadly accuracy. But not strength, not particularly-he is smart, but not strong. Only strong enough to carry me.
I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it hurts, in every part of my body.
I know that I am birdlike, made narrow and small as if for taking flight, built straight-waisted and fragile. But when he touches me like he can’t bear to take his hand away, I don’t wish I was any different.
I do know who you are. I just needed to be reminded.
I laugh, mirthless, a mad laugh. I savor the scowl on her face, the hate in her eyes. She was like a machine; she was cold and emotionless, bound by logic alone. And I broke her.
No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can’t even fathom it. I imagine only chaos and isolation.
I do trust you, is what I want to say. But it isn’t true – I didn’t trust him to love me despite the terrible things I had done. I don’t trust anyone to do that, but that isn’t his problem; it’s mine.