TOBIAS POV
Today has been inherently ugly.
First, I woke up in the middle of the night because of a nightmare that left my heart pounding and my mind wandering. I drifted in and out of sleep until early morning. My inability to relax even kept Tris up, but she was lucky enough to stay home today and sleep as much as she wanted.
Because of my exhaustion, I stumbled around the compound with no coordination. So then I walked into a stone wall on accident and bruised my face on the way to get breakfast. Yeah.
And I thought I was finished with everything leadership-related until I was called in for one last meeting in which I had to confront my father, who I try to avoid at all costs. I was bored out of my mind until late afternoon, and then when I was finally about to leave, I was bombarded with questions by my father-in-law concerning Tris's wellbeing.
Now, heading home to the apartment, I want nothing more than to collapse and stay immobile for the next twelve hours. I have already had dinner, so nothing is stopping me from resting.
But that plan is done away with, because when I walk in and dump my jacket and boots by the door, Tris is there to talk to me. And as tired as I am, nothing would make me happier in this moment than to spend time with her.
"Hey," she greets with a bright smile that doesn't show any signs of losing energy any time soon. Lucky.
I grunt in response and accept her kiss gratefully.
"You look really tired," she comments as we sit on the couch. Well, I sag more than actually sit.
"I am," I confirm, closing my eyes.
She curls up into my side and says, "Tell me about your day."
It starts out as a boring run-through of today's events, but then it progresses into a rant about every possible thing I could have found annoying in one day. She listens and pipes up every once in a while to offer support.
As we talk—well, mostly me—Tris runs her hand through my hair, since my head is lowered against the back of the couch. The gesture reminds me of the old days between us, since it was once a habit of hers, though we aren't far from that place now. It soothes me until the point where I am no longer high-strung, and eventually it ends my one-sided bantering completely.
"I should go visit him soon," she says randomly. "My dad, I mean."
"Yeah. He seems pretty eager to see you since you got the memory treatment." Trust me.
It seems inane to think that just a week ago she was given the reverse memory serum. Since then, so much has changed, and not just with her memory, but with our relationship too. Out of nowhere she will say things like, "Remember when we climbed the Ferris wheel during my initiation?" or, "Remember when Uriah and Zeke threw cake at each other at our wedding?" And I will laugh or smile each time, though I hide how much joy each statement really brings me, because what I actually feel when I hear those things makes me want to pick her up and spin her around, which is out of character for me.
Tris has become much more comfortable around me also. She tells me nearly everything she thinks about—or so I believe. We have shared glances that only we understood in public, and casual but meaningful touches. There has been a lot of kissing between us. A lot. She even changed in front of me the other day without warning, but hey, I wasn't complaining.
I said I believed that one day we would both be in love again. That day will be here any moment, I think.
"Your bandage is a mess," she points out, interrupting my thoughts.
I follow her gaze to my partial pinkie finger, which is still wrapped in a dirty, recently torn bandage that I haven't bothered to remove—or haven't had the guts to.
"Yeah," I reply. "It got caught in a train handle today. I had to rip it free."
She purses her lips as she stares at it. "Tobias?"
"Hmm?"
We both turn to look at each other. Her eyes, while not exactly pitiful, do show sympathy that does not give off the feeling that she thinks any less of me.
"It's time."
The unspoken meaning behind those words rings through my ears; she means, of course, that it is time to remove the bandage that I have hidden my deformed finger behind for too long. And I know she is right, but I'm still self-conscious enough about it that I would rather stand on the tallest building in Chicago right now than expose it.
I sigh and agree, "I know."
To make it easier, she offers, "I can take it off for you, if you'd like."
I nod in compliance. Maybe it won't be as uncomfortable if she does it. After all, she always gives me the strength I need.
Tris reaches for the shredded edge of the bandage that isn't doing much to keep it all wrapped together. With deft fingers, she unwinds the soft material from around my palm and my pinkie finger. I keep my eyes trained on the wall in front of me the entire time, clenching my jaw. As much as I know this has to be done, I'm still not happy about it.
When air hits my finger for the first time in a while, she says, "I think it looks great."
I scoff because after being coerced into something I was loathing, I'm upset. "Tris, half my finger is gone, and that's somehow going to convince me that it's okay? Like I'm going to be pleasantly surprised and people aren't going to stare?"
"I didn't say that," she corrects me. "I'm saying it healed pretty well, and it's seriously not as bad as you probably thought."
It gets me to take a glance. My plan is to peek and look away immediately, but then I am sucked into examining it because how can a person not stare at a place where a body part is missing?
My partial finger is strange, of course, but it is not repulsive like I believed it would be. It doesn't look much different than if I would have folded over my finger, except there are red marks at the top where the stitches that held it together used to be. Soon they will fade into white scars, so at least I have that going for me.
Curiously, I move it up and down to see if the action looks similar to how it is supposed to look. It still moves normally, though a little robotically because I don't know what to do with it.
"See? I told you," Tris laughs.
"You don't think it's that noticeable?" I ask hopefully, still wiggling my half-finger around.
She shakes her head. "Not really at all. Though I do think it's cool."
"Cool?" Is she serious?
"Yeah. It reminds me that you gave it up to save me, and I see it as a mark of bravery."
I never thought of it that way before. And I don't tend to think of myself or the things I have done in war as brave, but I do have to admit that losing my finger to protect her was courageous.
She reaches over and presses her palm to the top of my hand, her fingers sliding in between mine. My partial finger doesn't make a difference in our hand-holding.
"It makes you unique, it's a part of you," she continues. "And if anything I love that you are missing most of your finger because I love you."
My heart stops. My eyes fly up to meet hers. We almost hit heads because of my carelessness.
Suddenly, my finger is unimportant. The world is unimportant. She just said what I have been silently pleading for her to say since she came home and there was little to no hope for us.
"You...you love me?" I ask softly.
She wraps her arms around my neck and whispers in my ear, "I love you," before planting a kiss on my cheek.
My pulse jumpstarts again. With my forehead pressed to hers, I lean in and close that tiny gap in between our mouths. I don't know what to say, and kissing her seems like the only way I can communicate my emotions.
"Hey...are you crying?" Tris murmurs after she backs off enough to see. It takes me a second to figure out that I actually am because I see my tears on her face. She laughs quietly and wipes them off my own face. "It's okay."
"Yeah," I agree. "It is. Everything is okay."
And with that, I am framing her face with my hands and kissing her again. She shifts so that she is sitting in my lap, not once breaking the kiss. The air becomes heated, so I reach for the hem of my shirt and pull it off. I regret it for a second because I don't know if this just went too far, but then she follows my lead and takes off her shirt. And then I'm sitting there speechless because it has been a year or so, and she doesn't completely remember everything, and I don't want to push her but I want her...
But I tell myself that we don't have to go there, and I doubt she is even thinking about that. So we continue kissing. It all becomes too much though, with our mouths open and her hand in my hair that I can barely breathe.
It is when I am kissing her neck and nudging her bra strap out of the way so I can do the same to her shoulder that she breathes out, "Bedroom?"
I nearly swallow my tongue when I look up at her. "Wha—are you sure, Tris?"
"Positive." She closes her eyes and kisses me softly, making the tension between us dissolve into something with more meaning. "Wouldn't be the first time, anyway."
With a grin, I pick her up and carry her into the other room, where I was going to crash right when I got home. But hey, I like going to my bed for this reason so much better.
xXxXx
TRIS POV
Tobias sleeps silently, oblivious to the sunrise that is slowly but surely lighting up the room with an orange glow. His face is the most peaceful I have ever seen it, with his eyelashes gently touching his cheekbones and a faint smile on his lips. I press my fingertips against his stubble and bury my face in the crook of his neck, where his tattoo ends.
But relaxing back into sleeping in doesn't come easily. Guilt settles in, and then I can't lie there without feeling dirty. So I roll out of bed after pressing a kiss to his forehead and head towards the bathroom.
Twisting the handle inside the shower, I shiver and try to ignore the frigid tiles underneath my feet. After checking to make sure that the water is warm multiple times, I find that the heat is suitable and step in. The spray hits my shoulders, causing me to sigh in relief, until my thoughts start to creep in:
I told Tobias that I loved him last night, and we even made love, and I can't even tell him the truth about his own daughter.
Despite the warm water beating down on me, I shudder. It makes me sick to my stomach. For some reason it feels like I used him without telling him every detail of my life that he missed too.
Of course, I don't regret last night at all. I just wish I hadn't let my attraction to him cloud my judgement before I told him what I needed to. Now, I feel farther away from him, notwithstanding our actions of the previous night. This feels like betrayal.
Bowing my head underneath the steady stream of water, I try to summon positive thoughts. Like how I did actually manage to tell him that I love him again.
But the thing is, I don't believe that I ever stopped. All along I felt a certain emotion whenever memories of Tobias appeared, and I couldn't determine what it was. Now I know that it was similar to love—though is there even a characteristic for that feeling?—so I have finally realized that I was still in love with him. I just had to magnify the emotion.
My stomach sinks once again. How can I be standing here, thinking about how much I love him? I can't claim that. I have avoided telling him the truth that he deserves to know. How is that love?
The shower door opens behind me, but I don't turn around. A gust of cool air hits me and is then replaced by a pair of strong arms that wrap around my waist.
"Good morning," Tobias hums into the side of my neck. He seems more awake than he would normally be at this time of day.
"Morning," I reply, pushing down the corners of my mouth. I can't smile in this moment.
He loosens his hold so I can turn around and face him. Automatically able to tell that something is wrong, he furrows his eyebrows without losing his grin and asks, "You okay?"
"Fine."
He worries his lip. "This isn't about last night, is it?"
"God, no," I deny. "I was just thinking about something...upsetting. I don't want to talk about it." It isn't a lie; he won't be able to sense my deception.
Thankfully, he lets it drop. "Okay," he murmurs, bending his neck down so I can reach his lips.
We kiss, and I can't act past the guilt clawing at my insides. I have to stop him with a hand on his tan chest because I can't continue to lead him on when I haven't been fair to him.
"Tris..." He nudges at my cheek with his nose.
Gulping, I mutter, "I'm not okay." Finally, at least that's a start for telling him the truth.
"Tell me what's wrong."
With my lower lip wobbling, I tell him, "I haven't told you everything that happened outside the fence, and you need to know."
He shakes his head solemnly. "No, I don't. I told you that you could take as much time as you needed to tell me," he reminds me.
"There is something that isn't war-related though, and it's not right of me to keep it from you."
"Tris, if this is too much for you, then I don't want you to—"
"God, Tobias." I let out a wet laugh and press a hand to my forehead. "Can you just let me get this out, please?"
When he isn't trying to stop me anymore, I say, "I need to tell you about our baby."
His breath hitches in his throat. I keep my gaze solely focused on his collarbone, where water droplets are trickling down a few at a time.
"I told you I had a miscarriage, but I never told you that it was my fault."
He scoffs, "That's insane, Tris. You—"
"Stop," I growl as my vision becomes blurry. His interruptions are starting to become irritating. "I disregarded the signs that my body was hinting at. I was so stupid. I could have saved her if I knew she existed—"
"She?"
Cutting myself short, I look up into the deep blue eyes that have quickly begun tearing up. His Adam's apple bobs as his mouth stays slightly open so he can suck in enough air to breathe.
"It was a girl," I choke out. Saying it out loud makes the fact so much more fragile. "We had a daughter. Rose."
Tobias squeezes his eyes shut, like he can't bear to see the world around him when he is in this much pain. Mixed tears and water from the shower run down his face until I can't keep track of which is which.
His agony is contagious. I begin sobbing into his chest, and he presses an insistent hand to the back of my head to keep me there. And together we mourn the child we both lost.
Previously, I thought that the worst of the grieving was over. I have had over a year to wrap it around my head that I had a miscarriage, that I lost Rose, and I figured that the stabbing pain that kept me up the night it happened would be the height of it all.
No, I take it back. This, watching Tobias cry over her, is unimaginable suffering. My chest physically aches, and the steam that hinders my breathing doesn't exactly help my case.
As our crying gradually slows, he tells me, "It just wasn't her time. She didn't deserve to be born into a cruel, war torn world like this one."
I come out from hiding in his chest, shaking my head. "No," I say. "She deserved much better. But that doesn't mean she didn't deserve a chance at life." But I understand that he is trying to take the weight off of us both.
"I know." He kisses my forehead. "And don't blame yourself again, okay? I don't want to hear it. Besides, she was clearly affected by the plane crash, not your own actions."
I try to swallow his explanation. Maybe one day I will see it that way. The healing process starts now.
"Okay," I whisper.