Reawakening

Chapter Seven

Uriah

It's while I'm looking for Marlene, hoping she will hang out with me tonight, that I check the training room and see Tris sitting against a wall.  She's curled up in a ball, her arms around her shins and her head resting on her knees.

"Tris?" I sit down right next to her and wrap an arm around her hunched shoulders.  "What's wrong?  Did something happen with Four?"  She shakes her head but doesn't look up for a moment.  She turns her head to face me, one cheek still resting on her knees.

"I screwed something up, I think," she says.  "I tried to get Eric not to hang Christina over the chasm yesterday.  Stood up for her.  Now... now I think maybe... it seems like he's... interested in me."  Oh, gross.  I'd be upset if I were in her shoes, too.  "And I just feel like I'm messing up all the things that are supposed to happen, and what if Four never falls in love with me now?"

Four not falling for Tris seems impossible to me, but ... she isn't the same as she was when they fell in love before.  Back then, she was a little girl from Abnegation just beginning to come out of her shell.  This time, she's been through so much.  She has ranked first in initiation, almost died a good half dozen times, fought a war, been tortured and experimented on by Jeanine Matthews, and watched her parents die.  She has killed people and learned to live with it, been betrayed by her own brother and still forgiven and died for him.  And she is in love with Four.  Even just that would make a difference.

No, she isn't the little girl from Abnegation that he fell in love with before.  Tris is truly Dauntless now.

What about me?  Am I the same person I was when Marlene and I fell in love before?  Probably not.  Like Tris, I've been through too much.  I have been through a war, I have killed, I have fallen in love... I've lost the girl I love and my two best friends.  I've even been outside the wall, and I have looked down at the world from high above it, like the birds.  You can't go through all that and not come out changed.

I sigh.  "What did we do the first time?" I ask.  "What were we like then?  Maybe that's how we need to be now.  The old Uriah and Tris, not the ones we are now."

"And then what?" she asks.  "That feels like tricking them.  I can't have him fall in love with me pretending to be someone else, then suddenly become who I am now one day.  That isn't fair to him.  Same goes for you and Marlene."  Tris lets out a deep sigh and rubs her face with both hands, then looks up at me again.  "Do you think it's too late to back off from our friendship some?  It seems like maybe people think we are a thing.  What if Four and Marlene think that?"  I nod.  It's going to be hard going through all this without talking to Tris about all of it all the time.  She's one of my best friends and the only one that understands what this is like.

"We can still be friends though, right?  Just not look like we're as close as we have been?" I ask.  She smiles and nods.  "Okay, that's settled.  Now what are we going to do about Eric?"

Tris shakes her head, then leans it against my shoulder.  "I really don't know."

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Marlene

It's been two days since my talk with Shauna.  Both yesterday and today, I have had to fight during training; I lost the first fight, which was against a boy named Ryker who is much bigger than me and put me in the infirmary for several hours with a minor concussion.  In the second fight, which was this morning, I beat Rita, so I am feeling pretty good today.  I've worked up the courage... I think, at least... to talk to Uriah.

That is, until I check the training room in my search for him.  I look through the small pane of glass near the top of the door and there he is.  Uriah is sitting against the wall with his arm around that Stiff, Tris.  Her head is resting on his shoulder.  My stomach twists as I back away from the door and every ounce of that courage I told myself I had worked up has suddenly disappeared.  I just need to go somewhere... away from here. I need to sit and think.  Alone.