Rekindling

Chapter 6: Tris - Life Journey

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has continued to support this story! It has been extremely hard to carve out time to write lately, so I have deeply appreciated your reviews - they have motivated me and cheered me up and generally made life better. :-) Thank you also to the wonderful BarbaraK2U, who has been beta reading for me and has helped me to avoid repeating some phrases that I've gotten a little too used to using...

Chapter 6: Tris – Life Journey

Tris remembers all too clearly how her parents felt about Tobias eleven years ago. Their fathers worked together even then, so Andrew's first inclination was to like his coworker's son. But that only lasted until Marcus began dropping hints that Tobias was unstable. That losing his mother had damaged him and caused him to become unpredictable. Violent. Prone to making things up, and blaming Marcus for things beyond his control.

Once Tris learned the truth about that father/son relationship, it made her sick to hear Marcus' lies. There were so many times when she was tempted to just spit out the facts for everyone to hear. She wanted to see the shock on Marcus' face when he had to defend himself – and to see her parents accept the man she loved.

But she never did, and ten years later, it's proving to be far more difficult to say those words than she ever expected. She's only gotten as far as telling Christina, and that conversation was enough to make her not want to repeat it anytime soon.

It's not that her best friend didn't believe her; it's that she went back and questioned everything she knew from high school, and from the intervening years. She asked question after question about why Tobias didn't report his father, and why Tris stayed silent, too, and whether it was too late to do anything now. By the time she was done, Tris was a quivering mass of anxiety and justifications and doubt, wondering just how badly she had failed the wounded seventeen-year-old who had trusted her with his most guarded secret.

Tobias had always said that it would be his word against his father's and that Marcus was an extremely good liar. But even then, Tris didn't entirely believe that was true. There was certainly plenty of physical evidence, given all the scars criss-crossing her boyfriend's back, and surely that would have added weight to Tobias' testimony? But he had adamantly refused to go there, and she had respected his wishes.

Now, that feels like a betrayal – one that haunts her all the more because it's why he left Chicago in the first place. If she had said something, would he have stayed? Would Marcus have been forced to pay for his son's tuition from prison? Or would things have fallen apart even worse, with Tobias struggling between court dates and foster care and rumors until he was dumped on the street at the age of eighteen?

She knows it's a moot point, because she never did anything, but she ponders the thought anyway over their weeks of slow, careful dating. It is, she realizes ruefully, just part of the minefield of issues that seem to separate them.

But despite all of that, she finds herself drawn more and more toward the person Tobias is now. He's more mature these days – strong and self-assured and independent in a way that's extraordinarily appealing. Yet at his core, he's still the same person she loved so much a decade ago.

And they still have the same connection between them: the fiery spark and magnetic draw that she's never felt with anyone else. It scares her more than she wants to admit, and she finds herself being very careful about how much contact she allows between them in an attempt to limit the effect. Given her dreams, she knows that the approach can't work for long, but she hangs onto it, for now anyway. It's the only defense mechanism she has left.