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.
I can’t tell him I need him. I can’t need him, period – or really, we can’t need each other, because who knows how long either of us will last in this war?
Candor does not provide us with protection, sustenance, or technological innovation. Therefore you are expendable to us.
I wake wondering how I did not notice, every day I sat across from her at the breakfast table, that she was full to bursting with Dauntless energy. Was it because she hid it well? Or was it because I wasn’t looking?
Arrogance is one of the flaws in the Erudite heart – I know. It is often in mine.