Peter Hayes Imagines

Us Against the World

Despite your best intentions, your highest hopes, and your lowest standards, you think Dauntless initiation might be getting to you after all. You have been doing so well, yet despite your superb ranking, you can practically feel yourself crumbling away to nothing as the days pass by. Your brittle bones can only take so much, and right now, you're nearing your limit at record speed.

You had been alright during the first phase of initiation. The fights and target practice had been right up your alley. Thinking with your fists only bolstered your cunning schemes, and although your rapid success made you a fair number of enemies, it also earned you some well-placed friends.

More than that, it found you someone to love. You didn't come to Dauntless for the sole purpose of finding a boy that could make your heart skip a beat, far from it. You left your home because it no longer suited you, because you had no idea who you were nor who you wanted to be. You figured that dashing your blood into the vessel of someone else's faction might teach you to be someone else, someone better, and so you did just that.

As it turns out, that's exactly what Peter Hayes did as well. You could see him fairly well as a Candor, his voice has that acidic burn of truth learned from someone who always wielded their words as a weapon, but he makes a solid Dauntless. More than that, he makes a tricky Dauntless, and the worst Dauntless of all aren't the meatheads or heavy lifters but the ones who can both outthink and outpunch you. Peter's the best of them by far.

You expected to see him as a rival, if not an outright enemy, competing for the same rankings as you. However, as time went on and your names started switching ranks back and forth like flickering fluorescent bulbs, you didn't hate Peter, nor did he hate you. Far from it.

In fact, Peter was the one who first fell in love with you. It wasn't supposed to happen, both of you can admit that freely, but it did anyway. He started noticing that he paid more attention to making you laugh with his sarcastic one-liners than how to properly throw his punches. You started realizing that you rather liked the way Peter looked at you, as if you were the only thing in this entire sunless city that could possibly matter.

It took the two of you progressing halfway through Phase One of Dauntless initiation for moves to finally be made. One day, you and Peter had finished a lengthy run far faster than the other initiates, so you were both alone for the greater part of thirty seconds. You had grinned over at him, breathless from the exertion of running so far outside, and Peter had grinned back at you.

The moment had been perfect, the two of you alone together, and when it seemed like it might end, Peter had done everything he could to stop it. You had started to turn away from him, perhaps to get a drink of water or just head into a shadier part of the course, and Peter had called something after you.

It was quiet, what he said, barely audible to the both of you, but you had heard it nonetheless:

"I love you."

You don't know who was more surprised to hear it, you or Peter, but the ending is the same regardless of who's telling the story. You had repeated the same words back to Peter, and just like that, the two of you were the most dangerous couple that Dauntless initiation had ever known.

It should have been perfect after that. The two of you were set for the best jobs coming out of initiation, even before entering the second phase of training. You had Peter to rely on in times of trouble, and he had you. Nobody was going to mess with you.

Nobody was going to mess with you, that is, unless they figured out something about you that put a target on your back so large that even the worst-ranked initiates could manage to hit it. You're not just some transfer, after all, you're Divergent, and being Divergent is going to get you killed.